Is your interview process identifying the best candidate, or are you just filling seats and hoping for the best? For many small-business owners, the hiring process is complicated, stressful, and exhausting. You make countless important decisions every day, but no decision has the potential to impact your business as much as hiring.It is our natural disposition to move quickly to get things done. But when it comes to hiring, it is the absolute worst thing you can do. If you rush filling a position, odds are you will soon be doing it again. Hiring the right person starts with asking the right questions as part of an effective interview process.By adopting a structured and comprehensive hiring process, you are taking the first step in positioning your business for success by attracting the right talent. Now that you have hired your rock star, that is only the first step. Equally as important is how quickly you can successfully integrate a new employee into your business and its culture...

Having spent most of my life consulting to privately held businesses, strategy development and planning has always been important to me in trying to help and engage a business. When I later became a CEO myself, it was also a process that I applied to my own organization and tried to extract as much value from as possible. After a virtual lifetime of experience with just about every sort of business planning possible, and somewhat of a fascination with the idea of strategy, it still seems confusing to me whether a company's planning process actually results in a viable business strategy. But shouldn't a plan produce a strategy for the business? And if the business has a good strategy, shouldn't that business produce superior performance? The answer to both of these questions should be yes, yet the results of many company planning exercises would imply otherwise. Over time, the concept of "planning" somehow became disconnected from "strategy." In turn, this has hurt the efforts of man...

Company founders and successors often dedicate their lives to building their businesses. Having poured so much of their energies into developing a growing concern, you would think that virtually all owners of privately held businesses would have a detailed plan in place to provide for a continuity of the business. Yet, those of us who consult in succession planning are often surprised at how often the subject is ignored, or no plan exists for the transition of a business' ownership and management.Perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, planning for succession is a task that lends itself almost perfectly to indefinite procrastination. Consider that succession planning requires a business owner to:For many owners, this short list and other related issues provide all the incentive necessary for them to think "I know I should do something on this, but it's difficult, so I'll do it next year." And the years, of course, move along.All businesses have a life span. For the private bu...