As of this month, I’ve been my own boss for 10 years. TEN YEARS! I deserve a promotion. It wasn’t my original plan. I was laid off during the recession, and ended up landing freelance clients. In order to start a business bank account, I had to form an LLC, and thus Pressler Collaborative was born. I hate working from home, so I rented an office. (Fun fact: I was […]
When I was in high school, a large portion of the focus of the funding was on sports. Our teams always had new uniforms and the best equipment, we had pretty big pep rallies, and there was always money for trips, etc. The English Department was another story entirely. We had books that were reused year after year, very few actual trips, and even fewer actual supplies, so as a […]
Sydney, Australia, 1989. So here I was… making it in the super-competitive business world. I was: heir apparent in a major multi-national ad firm, marketing writer, national new-business director, just voted in the top 10 across the country, blah blah. An ‘80’s Mad Man. And then we had a third child, unexpectedly. I came home one night late (as usual) from the office and my wife asked me to […]
Part of growing our interpersonal aptitude is recognizing our interpersonal differences. From the increasing demand for Soft Skills in technical workers, to the growth in Net Promotor Score, Account Based Marketing, and other affinity-driven marketing models, relationships are everywhere in business buzz. As they should be! Little gets done in the business world without alignment and agreement. We need clients to hire us, bosses to authorize projects, loyal customers to […]
Girl Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Success, Sanity and Happiness for the Female Entrepreneur Cara Alwill Leyba Portfolio/ Penguin Random House, 2015, 2017 The Idea If you are a male entrepreneur, you may want to skip this month’s book review. This month, it’s all about the women, as Cara Alwill Leyba shares her coaching philosophies in the cloak of bright shininess and luxe living. This book evolved from her blog, […]
Most companies are living in a fantasy world, thinking that their “loyalty programs” are actually delivering customer loyalty. But these are not actually doing anything of the sort. They’re merely rewarding repetitive purchase behaviour. That’s not loyalty. It’s bribery. And it’s vulnerable to a better reward scheme from a competitor. Genuine loyalty comes from the heart, not the head, and it opens the wallet. Look at Apple, which (according […]
Who among us hasn’t felt—in a moment of heartache or sorrow or rage or any other or so-called “negative” emotion—that if we just could change X about ourselves (or someone else) we could achieve Y, Z, or maybe the entire rest of the alphabet? The allure of this sort of magical thinking compells me to write frequently about the perils of positive psychology and for good reason: the more obsessed […]
Over the years I’ve done a lot of work with people who work in the self-improvement business and many of them encounter a similar problem when it comes to getting people to refer business to them. In many cases, a referral feels natural and exciting to the other person you are talking to when you, for example, refer a restaurant that has great food or offer to help connect someone […]
Retrospection is well-established as a critical business tool. Whether we’re comparing this year’s sales results to last year’s, providing employee feedback, or analyzing a project’s success, we all agree on the value of looking backward in time, to see what it can teach us. However, when it comes to the personal, we often discourage each other from too much looking back. We have a library of cliches and platitudes. “Don’t […]
Sure, yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. But did you know Saturday was World Labyrinth Day? Neither did I, nor did I see the point of labyrinths. Which is why I knew I had to try one. Ever the adventurer, I’m endlessly curious about ways the external world can heighten insights on our inner truths. I also know that the things I resist can be my best teachers. And I just happened to […]