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A few months ago I had the pleasure of working with Germania Insurance at their annual sales conference. The night before, at dinner, I was fortunate to sit at the table with Matt Sodolak. I use the word “fortunate” because I was about to witness what I would best describe as TRUE PASSION for your profession.

Here’s Why You’re Likely To Be Wasting Time And Money On False Marketing Metrics

John Wanamaker is famous for saying, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half!”  With an ever-growing number of sophisticated online tracking tools, you’d think that wasting advertising dollars would be a thing of the past.

As of last April, mobile-friendly web sites were given a big leg up on competitors.  Known as “responsive” web sites, these sites instantly adapt to whatever device you are viewing them on.

As users were turning to smartphones and other mobile devices to surf the web, Google realized that most sites didn’t display well on mobile devices.

You know the standard approach – first, identify your company’s weakness and then do everything you can to fix it. Practice at it relentlessly, feed your team (and yourself) with constant affirmations, do anything you can to dive deep into your weakness and fix it once and for all.

If your company is not fully compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards, you could be at risk of a serious tangle with fines and lawsuits.  Technically, PCI guidelines are not a hard-and-fast set of laws.  However, merchants can still face hefty liabilities for not meeting them.

In a December 2014 survey by the National Small Business Association, 61% of small businesses reported being victims of cybercrime within the past 12 months.  The average cost to recover from a cyber-attack skyrocketed from $8,699 per attack in 2013 to $20,752 per attack in 2014. And 68% of the businesses targeted, said they’d been hacked more than once.

You regularly back up your computers (or at least you should), but do you do the same with your smartphone? Given the massive amounts of contact information, photos, videos and other data we all carry around on smartphones, it’s critical to back them up or risk losing all that data forever.

It’s probably true that most people who work with us will never care as deeply as we do about building our business. If they did, they’d probably be working for themselves! Yet there’s a great deal we can do to raise the commitment level and inspire them to peak performance.

In 2002, McDonald’s decided to implement a system to provide their corporate executives with a bird’s-eye view of their 30,000 stores, to track, measure and monitor everything from profitability to cooking-oil quality. The project, named “Innovate,” was a massive five-year project with a billion-dollar budget.