Eric Knopf

You are a Christian. You love God, you love people, and you want people to be equally protected under the law. You have friends who are gay and they feel accepted by you. You completely expected the eventual legalization of gay marriage in all states.

Yet, when the ruling came, you felt an unexplained letdown.

While everyone else was celebrating and painting their social media with rainbow colors, you couldn’t help feel a strange sinking feeling.

Worse yet, the absence of your rainbow avatar suggests you might be one of the religious nuts that unfortunately has access to a keyboard and internet and no hobbies.

How do you explain this collective disappointment felt in many Christians who largely seek equality and acceptance for all?

A long time ago, a wise friend pointed out something life changing when I was dealing with a major disappointment in my life:

Disappointment exposes misplaced hope.

Could it be that Christians had put their hope into things that were never capable of fulfilling their expectations?

I suggest the unexplained letdown many Christians are feeling is not related to issues of equality, sin or even homosexuality. It’s the sting that their hope was misplaced.  The Supreme Court decision just exposed the misplaced hope of many Christians.

What are those places of misplaced hope?

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#1 Christians put hope into the belief that America was a Christian Nation

America’s founders were deeply religious. Many of the principles found in Christianity can be found in the founding documents of this country. It was a natural conclusion for Christians to view America as a Christian nation. This is not the case and the Supreme Court ruling threw a fresh bucket of cold water on that notion.

We must not forget that our country was founded by seeking religious and political freedom. The founders sought to ensure that the country would never have a state sponsored religion – even Christianity.

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#2 Christians put hope into regulating morality through law

I wonder how many Christians fear that by legalizing gay marriage they have legalized sin. It was highly convenient for Christians to have many American laws be so similar to many judeo-christain principles.

No longer do Christians get the assistance of some laws to regulate their favorite sins. (Yes, I do mean favorite as we have no laws regulating the others sins such as gossip, slander, adultery and drunkenness).

Fewer and fewer laws coincide with Christian ideals. We have to accept our world less restrictive when it comes to morality and that makes Christians uncomfortable.

The truth is, people are going to choose the live their own life however they choose – yet it seems Christians had put hope into helping regulate America’s sin through law.  People will have to choose to live out Christian morality apart from the rule of law.  

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#3 Christians put hope into the belief that laws encourage Christianity

Jesus seemed pretty convinced the best way to transform people was through hearts, not laws. Perhaps Christians believed that making sin illegal would assist sinners in learning about God. I don’t know.

To Jesus, it was pointless if people had right behavior without the right heart. Jesus aims for the heart of people, not their behavior. He rebuked Pharisees who strived to live perfectly, yet embraced every imperfect person who sought relationship.

This is an important reminder that not a single law will ever draw people to Christ. Laws will not encourage Christianity. No one’s salvation will be swayed in either direction because of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Christians must remember the Bible says that people are drawn to God by demonstrations of love not the creation of laws.

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#4 Christians put hope in remaining comfortable

If you are a Christian today, you have no shortage of likeminded people and are largely uncontested in the exercise of faith – and hopefully that continues.

However, if you were a Christian during the times of the New Testament, you were part of a radical minority of outcasts. The Bible describes Christians in culture as aliens and strangers, and as foreign citizens not of this world. You would be hard-pressed to look at the average American Christian and draw that similarity today.

Being a Christian didn’t really make you stand out too much in America – especially with several concepts of Christian morality conveniently coinciding with various laws.

As those laws evolve and society pushes boundaries of previously defined morality, Christians will have to stand on their own.  Christians will have to demonstrate what they are for instead of what they are against.

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Certainly there are bad Christians whose reactions are extreme, hurtful and entirely unbiblical. But for others (and I believe many Christians), there is an inward letdown that can be misinterpreted as not loving everyone and not supporting equality.

This letdown has nothing to do with homosexuality or even love. It has everything to do with the realization that we as Christians have put our hope and trust into things that never deserved it. It can be disheartening to realize you placed so much into something that just came crashing down.  

I knew before the Supreme Court ruling that nothing would change how I live and how I see people. But what has changed is recognizing other places of misplaced hope into institutions, people, nations and even myself.

Right now, there is a local pastor who has decided to do something crazy: live on the streets until he raises enough money for the homeless. Right now, he is the local celebrity as news stations, newspapers and social media is abuzz about his outrageous campaign that is raising tens of thousands of dollars every day. It’s taking off and now famous rockstars and prominent businessmen are joining him and taking part.

I’m thankful to have our software powering the tech side of this campaign, but more so, I am thankful that I had the privilege of being in the room while Pastor Rick Cole dialoged the potential of the idea.

If you are following the updates, Rick Cole details what it’s like living in shelters, on the streets and even panhandling. Its eye-opening to say the least. It sounds incredibly difficult for most people to comprehend (as most of us are currently in an air conditioned rooms with 8+ hours of sleep likely reading this from your new iphone).

But people miss the most difficult part of what Rick Cole has done. The hardest part was not planning to go homeless, losing the comforts of your home, being away from family or even the difficulties of physically sleeping on a street. The hardest part was what he did in order to commit 100% to the idea.

It’s easy to celebrate the idea now that it’s raising tens of thousands of dollars and is featured on the news frequently. What people don’t realize is what a huge chance this was. This was either going to be a homerun or a humiliating strikeout. There was an unspoken uneasiness among those who knew this was being considered.

Having a pastor of one of the largest churches become a homeless man had a very high chance of coming across insensitive and degrading to those who are permanently homeless. The entire campaign likely could have been resoundingly rejected as being in poor taste.

Pastor Rick Cole had a lot to lose: The support of thousands of his own congregants; a viral firestorm of criticism on social media; rebuke from organizations supporting the homeless near and far; and public humiliation that would mar his entire career in the local and faith communities. One thing was for sure… if this was a failure, Rick Cole would lose his reputation in the city forever.

All that weighed on his heart and mind as he courageously stepped forward and committed to it. His commitment was headfirst and all-in. This was like game 7 of the world series with two outs and Rick decided that it was not enough to get on base. He wanted a game winning homerun.

It occurred to me that the motions of a championship winning homerun and a humiliating strikeout are both the same. One will enshrine you in the hall of fame forever, while the other will cause you to be scorn of millions. The motions of each are identical.

That’s one reason that success is so incredible -- the very same effort could have resulted in utter failure. But even that is not enough. There was something even more that Rick Cole did that required an incredible amount of guts* to do this _(*I would prefer to use a more crass term, but my mom might be reading). _

In committing to this audacious dream, Rick Cole had to abandon fear of public criticism.

It’s not the fear of failure that stops people from doing great things, it’s the fear of criticism should the great idea become a failure. The courage to face the consequences of a bad idea is foundational to someone who changes the world.

The difference between whether or not you will do something great is determined by how much you fear the criticism of people.

I am reminded of a great quote by Bill Johnson: “If you don’t live according to the praise of men, you will not die by their criticism.”

This is actually in line with one of my favorite scriptures, Galatians 1:10 – “If you are trying to please men, you are not a servant of Christ.”

Put another way, you cannot serve Jesus if you are first trying to please people.

I most admire Rick Cole not for the money that he raised nor the huge spotlight that has been shown on this issue. I admire Rick Cole because he publicly demonstrated what it means to be a servant of Christ while rejecting the immense pressure to please people.

It’s one thing to do something outrageous when you have zero audience. You’ll be lucky to have anyone remember your failure. Rick on the other hand, had an entire city watching -- and they would remember this for a lifetime no matter the outcome.

Today's lesson is brought to you by Rackspace -- who used to be one of my favorite hosting companies. That all changed today. 

I am in IT. Servers need patches, fixes, reboots and updates. No issues there. When we need to do this, we schedule it far in advance, let our key customers know it will be happening, tell them exactly how long it should impact them and finally, run the maintenance at lowest traffic times. 

Rackspace discovered a major security issue affecting cloud storage customers. They needed to fix it. What they did next is unfathomable. As of this writing, we have been down 3 hours -- just 4 hours into our largest local fundraising campaign ever to raise $300k for the homeless. 

Someone at Rackspace needs to be drug out into the street and beaten with a wet noodle for the asinine strategy. Here is what they did and how you too can treat your customers like garbage. 

#1) Send a maintenance notice when no one will read it. We got a notice that RackSpace needed to update their system ... at 9:22pm on a Friday. Maybe next time they can send a notice Christmas morning during present time. 

#2) Make sure there is no recourse or alternative option. Had we gotten notice on a monday, we could have switched servers or companies altogether. Hard to do that on a weekend with short notice. 

#3) Be sure to NOT use the word downtime. Disguise the issue as a likely small inconvenience. In this case, Rackspace said "we anticipate a reboot will be necessary." Oh, that sounds harmless. Good thing they didn't say anything about availability or downtime or I would have paid attention more. Even on their official statement about the reboot, you will not find the words interruption, downtime or outage. There was not even a hint of, "this maintenance will aim nuclear weapons at your site's availability." Awesome.

#4) Give Zero Expectations of Impact. Oh just a reboot huh? How long could that take? A few minutes? No problem. Not exactly. Rackspace knew this was going to have major impact on service. They could have said, "this may result in downtime ranging from 1 hour to 1.7 trillion hours" -- but then customers would have canceled and adjusted (see items 1&2). 

#5) Put details in riddle format. The official email said, "Maintenance window (all times CDT, UTC-5)." Whew! That cleared it up. It probably would have worried me had the email accurately said, "we are going to do this right in the middle of your day so as to create the biggest inconvenience ever."

#6) Pull the Plug at 2pm. Our own customers are valuable enough to us for us to lose sleep for them. We do maintenance at or around midnight when our usage is at weekly lows. The Rackspace maintenance window was 6am - 6pm. Hmmm, thats odd.. thats exactly peak time. Sounds perfect. 

#7) Spin lack of information as "protection." Their email literally says, "While we believe in transparent communication, there are times when we must withold certain details in order to protect you, our customers." Certain details? Like estimated impact? Progress estimates? 

#8) To pacify frustrated customers, just lie. I called into support 50 minutes into the outage and was told the migration was 85% complete. That pacified me enough to get off the phone. Then two more hours passed. 

#9 **Bonus Tip**) Direct customers to remedies that dont work. My support gal was empathetic but at best, offered me the option to create a ticket so I would be heard by those who care. Lets forget how impersonal that is for a moment. I got to the ticket system and create my ticket only to hit submit and find out it's broken and does not work. Genius!

So if you want to really make your customers feel like they got a big middle finger, just follow the above steps and you will succeed. 

I have understanding in how difficult IT issues are. I do. But to do something like this DURING FREAKING PEAK TIMES is just stupid.

But to not tell your customers there is an expectation of significant downtime is outright cruel. It actually was intentional. Rackspace knew this was going to be several hours of impact and intentionally kept that information from its customers. For that reason, I can no longer trust Rackspace and neither can you.  

###UPDATE###

1) Make People Care About The Cause. Every day there are thousands of opportunities looking for donations from people like me. But the best organizations find a way to make me care about the cause. There is a difference between knowing about a cause and caring about a cause. It is your job to make people care about the cause. I didn't really care about the SPCA until I started seeing their commercials with dogs shaking in cages. I had never considered sponsoring a child in another country until I learned about their extreme poverty. The best organizations don't simply say, "donate to our cause" --- they make an emotional connection to their cause and they make me care about something I hadn't thought of twice. Many organizations do a terrible job of communicating why someone should be concerned about an issue. Here are some tips in this area: 

Seeing is believing: A short 45 second video will have a greater impact than 5 pages of text. The more you can visually tell the story the better. People experience emotion best from seeing instead of reading.. 

Personalize it: Show real life pictures of people who are being impacted by the cause. Make a real connection between your cause and lives being changed.

Educate The Ignorant: Most people don't know what they don't know. Use statistics, charts and figures to demonstrate the size and scope of the problem. People will not care as long as they are ignorant to the facts.

2) Build A Sense Of Urgency: Organizations who succeed in step 1 sometimes will fail at step 2. There are tens of thousands of organizations that provide food and care to the needy. However, the best organizations let you know that waiting until tomorrow is too late. A donor can care about the cause, but if they don't feel any urgency they will likely never donate. If they feel that time does not matter, then they will never get around to donating. Immediately after a donor is emotionally engaged with the cause is the time to communicate urgency. Here are some tips

Show The Relationship Between Time and The Problem: People need to clearly understand how time is affecting the problem. For example, you could say, "Every 20 seconds, A child is born without a father" or "Every day, nearly 4,000 people die of water related illnesses." The metric of time as it relates to the problem is critical.

Communicate How Quickly A Donation Will Help: A donor needs to know they are not simply funding a blackhole budget that will eventually be used for good things. Communicate how soon their donation will impact the cause and how.

Share The Consequence Of Inaction: People are afraid of being bad news bearers and don't want to guilt people into donating. But time should matter to your organization and it's important to communicate what will happen each day the need goes unfunded. 

3) Prove That Your Organization Is Effective In The Cause: Many times an organization will engage people on a cause and do a great job communicating urgency, but they fail to demonstrate how the organization specifically is being effective in serving the cause. It is not uncommon for an organization to engage an individual on a issue who then goes and donates to a different organization serving the same issue. This is because a person's heart became invested but their mind questioned whether or not your organization was the best solution to solve it. Here are some tips.

Clearly Show Why Your Organization Is Best: Each organization should be able to articulate why they are the best at a particular cause or issue. Do you have a localized infrastructure or inside angle? Perhaps you are just quicker and more efficient. Maybe your approach is just different. Whatever it is, toot that horn.

Show Results: Don't be like most organizations who cast the vision without showing the results. Show what your organization has specifically done.

Explain The Model: Don't leave it up to the imagination for how each dollar helps the cause. Explain how the process, methodology, approach and result of your efforts meet the need.

Demonstrate Credibility and Authority: Avoid things that make you look small, inexperienced and unprofessional. If you are using a paypal donate button as your sole donation option, you are giving a very small impression to donors. 

4) Show How Each Dollar Is Linked To Change: Organizations leave a lot of money on the table by not communicating the scope of impact each dollar has. If possible, break down the impact of each dollar to a life changed. How far does $100 go? Does it impact one person or 100? How many lives are touched for $1000? When people are considering how much to give, they subconsciously consider how many lives are impacted by their contribution. 

Give People Suggested Donation Amounts: Don't just have an blank amount box to let a donor decide how much they should give. Create metrics for lives impacted and give suggested amounts with an "other" if someone wants to go big. 

Consider How One Impacted Person Impacts Others: Don't limit the impact of your cause to a single person or instance. Consider and count what happens to a community, family or area by your cause being served. Does a ripple effect occur? If so, share and cast a larger vision.

5) Provide A Clear and Immediate Call To Action: Once people are engaged, they feel the issue is urgent, they believe your organization is best suited for the challenge AND they see the relationship of change per dollar donated, it's time to make the rest super simple. Get people to the donation page in a single click. It should be obvious to the donor that donating will be easy and painless. Donors by this time have already spent considerable time consuming your message. Make this last part easy as pie. Here are some tips.

Dont Re-Explain Your Mission On the Donation Page: People already get what you do. You don't need to take up needless space. 

Keep It Super Simple: Dont explain all the ways people can donate (bank draft, wire transfer, snail mail check). Choose a maximum of two payment options (usually credit card and check). 

Dont Force Them To Create an Account: Who needs another password? Seriously. If you need the best and simplest donation tool, check ours out. 

6) Don't Forget To Followup: The best organizations always make sure you know the impact of your donation. Very few organizations ever show donors what happened to their donation. The best organizations cant wait to share the stories about your impact. Organizations mistakenly believe that in order to build their donation support that they need to get NEW donors.In reality, it's easier to get existing donors to increase their support and share it with others if they feel and see the results. A few tips.

Dont Forget To Followup! Seriously... you say you wont forget, but you probably will. As soon as you can show the results, send followup reports.

Share Success Stories: Brag about the impact your organization is having in the world. Keep people updated on all the ways you are kicking butt and changing the world.

Re-Ask: Don't be afraid to re-ask donors to commit on new projects or increase their existing commitments.If you did all the steps right, your past donors will love to continue new adventures with you.

1) Upload a picture of a positive pregnancy test.

2) Add Osama Bin Laden as an Uncle.

3) Change their occupation to "Conspiracy Theorist."

4) Tag a picture of a Porta Potty with as many friends as possible.

5) If they are single, change their status to engaged to a random friend. If they are in a relationship, change their status to single.

6) Search for all the fan pages for zombies you can and like all of them. 

7) Block all their listed family members.

8) Create an event called "I am coming out" and invite all their friends.

9) Go through their newsfeed and at every post from a friend, comment "That's what she said."

Hi Roger! Thats a great question. I think each person needs to answer this for themselves. For me, this is how I handle it.

First, understand the context of each social network. For example, think of Twitter as a large convention of people you would like to meet (but dont know personally yet). On the otherhand, Facebook is a place where you already know most people on some personal level. Because of this, I share my faith and faith perspective on Facebook because I know most of my network there is believers and people interested in what I have to say about faith. They engagement with what I say about faith and its easier to engage in this medium without the 140 character limit.

Twitter is a place that puts you into conversation with millions of potential people and are short bursts of communication with people from all over the world. This is why I prefer twitter for my professional thoughts. For me being an entrepreneur in several ventures, most people find me on twitter because of my business pursuits. So I keep my twitter mostly about business. If you were to visit my Facebook, it's mostly faith and family. I use BOTH twitter and facebook to share my passions (adrenaline, coffee, etc) as it adds an interesting human angle from otherwise generic posts.

It is my belief that most people will want to follow you on Twitter for a particular emphasis. I think that can be anything you really want, but it cant be too spreadout or you will have a hodgepodge following. Twitter is powerful if all your followers follow you for a particular reason. 

Last, I use my blog (here) to give people the buffet of what they want. Since they have to come and visit my site (instead of my viewpoints appearing in their feed), I give them a choice for what to read on. My blog is totally about me and how I see the world. While the social networks are contextual based on how I want people to engage with me there. 

1) Popeye Left Arm: Since you carry your baby in your left arm to keep your right hand available, you have slowly developed the world's strongest left arm. Your left arm is so much stronger, can't even hold your baby in your right arm anymore. 

2) Pacifier Homing Beacon: You have the supernatural ability to identify the location of any lost pacifier. At 2am with one eye closed, your homing beacon guides you underneath the lazy boy chair in the corner. 

3) Prophetic Microwaving: Strangely, you know the exact micro second for how long any liquid needs to be microwaved in order to reach the perfect temperature. Its never 15 or 30 seconds anymore. You would heat things to fractions of seconds if you could. 

4) Wall Penetrating Hearing: Even when your baby is across the house, you can supernaturally hear when a pacifier is lost, the first squeaks of your baby waking or even which toiletry accessory has been placed in your baby's mouth.  

5) Diaper Detection Pat Down - with the slightest pat on the baby's bum, you can know the life expectancy of the diaper being used and how much time is remaining. 

6) One Handed Dexterity: From opening bottles to dressing yourself, you've become so used to only having one available hand, you wouldn't feel that disabled if you lost the other. 

7) Index Finger Scoop: The moment that piece of cheese or graham cracker becomes too much for baby, your index finger can swoop right in and instantly retrieve the food before it becomes a problem.  

8) Poo Perception - you have seen and experienced so much poo, you know exactly when something is off. You know every gross detail of what constitutes as "normal" when it comes to your child's movements. 

9) Perfect Pouring: Amazingly, you could pour 8 ounces of any liquid blindfolded perfectly. 

The single greatest time waster in my day is email. I cant seem to get away from enormous volumes of email. The worst part is being further annoyed by things people do when they email you. Here are my top 10 most annoying behaviors when it comes to people who email me. 

10) "Consider The Environment Before You Print This Email." Seriously? Who receives an email and then thinks, "Hey, I want to turn this digital message into a piece of snail mail by printing it." I often want to reply back and attach a picture of me lighting the printed email on fire. 

9) Re-Forwarding Already Sent Emails: When you send people information they need later (logins, passwords, files), they rarely will save it in a place for them to find easily later when they need. Instead of looking through their inbox, they send you an email to resend it to them... and then again in 2 weeks... and then again in a month...and (you get the idea).

Here are 20 rules about life I have learned from my daughter Scarlett:

1) The optimal time to take a marathon nap is right before one of mommy and daddy's important time commitments. Otherwise stick with 30-40 minute naps or no napping at all.

2) Laptops make a fun noise when they hit the ground. 

3) The dog is the favorite family member. 

4) The best way to get your point across is to go completely limp. 

About three months ago, our neighbors moved out of the house they were renting. We absolutely loved having them next to us and they were like family to us. We were very sad to see them go. Meanwhile, their former house has sat vacant for months awaiting to be sold by the investment company that owns it... until yesterday. 

As a child, I grew up loving to stay up late and sleep in. I recall the Saturday mornings of sleeping in until 10 or 11 in the morning. In college, it just got worse to where it was not uncommon to sleep into until noon or even 1pm some weekends. It's not that I loved staying up late as much as I simply hated mornings. Sleeping in was really about avoiding the most dreadful part of the day -- morning.

Over the years, I have learned the art of mastering mornings. I now typically wake up between 6 and 6:30am every morning -- even on weekends -- long before the rest of the family is up. The reason? The start of your day can determine if you have a good day or bad day. I started having better, more productive, enjoyable days as I learned to how to look forward to waking up. 

1) How to setup a business... (yeah, really)

After going through several business courses, the topic of actually forming a business never came up. Sure, we covered basic corporate structures (LLCs, S-Corps, etc) but never learned about how to set one up and the various requirements of opening and running your business. Things like insurance, payroll, taxes and compliance were headaches awaiting me.

2) How to bootstrap your business

Every scenario used in college when referencing your own business either implied you raised millions of dollars through investors or were independently wealthy. Full time academic professors who have never been in business for themselves have little to contribute about how to fund your business outside of these two paradigms. They take for granted how hard it is to fund your own business without banks or investors and offered no teaching or theory on how to self fund your business with little or no available cash. 

3) How to ignore your business plan

If you want your business to fail, simply write a business plan and try and do exactly what is written. Business plans are wild guesses that merely get you started but will never reflect how your business will develop in reality. Most business plans need to be ignored and forgotten as they will keep you chasing fairy tale ideas.

4) How to adapt, iterate and change on the fly

Since your business plan is useless 5 seconds after you go into business, you need to get used to nothing ever going to plan. Business and Entrepreneurship is about staying nimble and agile and being able to change course quickly. Business schools typically teach “build it and they will come” mentality that everything works according to plan. Hundreds of changes, iterations and tweaks are needed to get your business viable and stable. 

5) How to Build a Team

When you are building a business, the personalities and past histories of the people you choose matter a lot. Your company may live and die and by who work with. There are painful lessons to be learned in selecting the wrong people to join you and work with.

6) How To Make Money

As ironic as it seems, I don’t recall a single lesson regarding making a profit. Too much of what is taught today is focusing around getting lots of momentum and worrying about profit later. Other alternatives to making a profit include selling your business to a billion dollar company. Selling a business through an acquisition should never be the primary strategy to make money. Every business should be able to support itself and actually produce a profit..

7) How to take on a competitor

Rarely were competitors and entrenched market leaders ever discussed in college. Collegiate entrepreneurship puts a great emphasis on creating something that doesn’t exist when the most viable opportunities are to create alternatives to existing solutions and to face a fierce competitor. Understanding how to take on a competitor and how to out maneuver, out perform and out price a competitor has been one of the most important things I have learned on my own.

8) How to know when to quit

People are taught that ideas always work, when in reality, they are difficult to make work even when doing all the right things. Sometimes an idea, business or opportunity needs to be abandoned and people need to move on. This is especially hard because people become so emotionally involved in their business. Sometimes it’s just time to turn a page.

9) How to think beyond textbooks

Collegiate curriculum is lopsided with outdated text books and anecdotes for business that predate the internet. Everything in business has been redefined by the internet. If your business books don’t mention Facebook or Google, you are wasting your time. It is also impossible for any book to provide solutions to all of your business problems. People need to learn how to think critically for themselves without having to rely on academia or a text book for direction.

10) How to seek advice and direction

Every business and every business owner needs help and a fresh set of eyes once in a while. You won’t be able to see every opportunity and spot every threat. You need people who have been there and done that and can give perspective beyond yours. However, you need to right people with the right abilities with the right relationship with you.

11) How to Hire (and fire)

There are certainly right ways and wrong ways to hire and fire people. Making mistakes hiring people will likely lead to you firing them. There is an art to finding people and also placing them in your business at the right time. I never was taught either.

12) How to do bookkeeping

One of the most useless courses I took was accounting. Sure it taught me for 5 minutes how to understand a balance sheet and I spent a week learning how to create a balance sheet, but the rest of the accounting principles I learned had little to do with running a business. Instead I stumbled through teaching myself quickbooks and repeatedly messed up my books because I had no knowledge about bookkeeping. (My bookkeeping software produces a balance sheet with 2 clicks by the way.)

13) How to manage customers

When you are learning about business in college, keeping and maintaining customers is completely taken for granted. Keeping and maintaining customers is foundational as your business model. If you are not careful, you will lose your customers faster than you got them. Getting a customer is often the easy part. Keeping them is difficult.

14) How to optimize your efforts

Each day when you go into your office, there are a million things you could and should work on. Knowing what is most important, what can wait and knowing how to not waste your time has been critical for me. Left to myself, I literally could spend 8 hours a day answering emails and never accomplish anything significant. Personal time management and development of business-critical priorities has been a life saver.

15) How to lead people

Effectively leading people and developing leadership qualities are rarely mentioned when talking about business in college. People don’t want to be managed, they want to be led. Your business growth relies just as much on how you lead people as your business model.

16) How to manage projects

One of the most difficult challenges in running your business is taking a huge endeavor and breaking into bite sized pieces. Combine that challenge of continual adaptation and you have a combination that can kill your business simply through mismanagement.

17) How to Establish a Work / Life Balance

Business can easily become an all consuming obsession that devours your marriage, friendships and family. Young professionals going into business need to learn the principles and practices of a work life balance in order not to become a slave to their business. Your personal life can infiltrate your business and people need to establish a healthy balance.

18) How to stop thinking and start doing

College teaches you to over think and over analyze. Sometimes the most important decision one can make is making a quick decision. It has become all too common to see a paralysis by analysis and mismanage your business through inaction.

19) How to expand or contract your business

In theory, getting an office, buying more inventory and hiring more employees always goes smoothly. In reality it rarely does. Also, I have never learned about how to downsize and scale back. Priorities, cashflow and timing are all critically important in these areas.

20) How to write