Starting a business is like becoming a parent for the first time. It’s exciting and you are overjoyed, but you also don’t really know what you’re doing.

When it comes to business, one of the purest moments of joy is when you hire your first employee. Your business is growing! That’s great!

But, it’s also kind of scary.

You are responsible for this person you are going to hire and their performance. If they turn out not to be the right fit, it’s you, your business and any investors you have who suffer. …

I know you hate algebra, but if you want to increase conversions on your landing page, you have to solve for X.

X is the real problem your potential customers and clients have that your product or service solves and that problem is almost always rooted in a feeling or emotion that you can tap into with your copy.

Let’s look at some examples.

One of my clients makes a glove that helps stabilize the hands of people with essential tremors (basically uncontrollable shaking of the hands or other body parts).

Their landing page was full of highly technical information…

Here’s a piece of United States war trivia I bet you didn’t know; sliced bread was briefly banned in the US.

On January 18, 1943 the Secretary of Agriculture put a ban on sliced bread to help conserve resources like waxed paper and steel so they could instead be put toward the war effort in Europe. (There was a little skirmish going on over there at the time.)

But, by that point US citizens were so enamoured with sliced bread that there was an outcry from the general population and the ban was rescinded on March 8, 1943, not even…

Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to save money in their businesses and make their workplaces safer. An increasing number of them are also looking for ways to help the environment more, cut down on waste and decrease their carbon footprint.

Fortunately, there is one (relatively) easy step a business can take to do all of those things at once; stop using paper receipts.

They take huge amounts of energy and resources to make and they generate a lot of waste.

I learned recently from the Green America Skip the Slip, Environmental & Human Health Impacts of Paper Receipts report…

So, you’ve decided to start a company. Good for you. It’s a challenge, but you’re up to the task. The first decision you’ll have to make as an entrepreneur is what type of business you want to start:

1. Lifestyle
2. Buildup

While not the only type of companies that people start, these are the two main types of independent company new entrepreneurs start. (But, you may also want to look into franchising, which many new entrepreneurs also get into.)

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each type of business and see which one is best suited to…

Let’s talk about death.

It’s an uncomfortable subject for some, but for someone who is morbid like me, it’s not that big a deal to talk about it.

The kind of death I wanna talk about, though, is what happens when a key person in your business kicks the proverbial bucket suddenly or is incapacitated for a long time.

Maybe that key person is you?

It could be the CEO, it could be the president or a developer who is coming up with exclusive software for your business. …

Unfortunately, it is always timely to talk about mass shootings in the United States. Whether it’s terrorism, hate crimes, a student lashing out in the worst possible way or a disgruntled ex-employee taking some kind of twisted revenge on their former employer, mass shootings are heartbreakingly common.

According to The Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan gun violence research group based in Washington DC, there were 337 mass shooting incidents in the US in 2018, which is up from the already far too high number of 269 in 2014, the first year the group has records for. …

If there is a food item that defines the closing decade, it has to be the humble avocado. It has gone from the fringes of the produce aisle to one of the two main ingredients in the generation-defining recipe that is avocado toast.

In honour of this little fruit (which is technically a berry), let’s take a look at what we can learn from the precipitous rise of the avocado.

1. The power of influencers is undeniable.

In areas where avocados originated from like Mexico, mashing up the fruit and pairing it with a kind of bread or flatbread is natural. While it made its way into…