management

Working ON Your Business vs Working IN Your Business

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Working IN your business means being a revenue-producing, product-fulfilling member of the team. Working ON your business means designing, planning, refining your business, but not directly producing revenue. Independent consultants typically work IN their business. When you’re a lone independent consultant or contractor, it’s easy to fall into the trap of spending all your time working IN your business. You find one or two good clients, and they’re willing to buy as much of your time as they can get. You work for them long hours, maybe 40-60 hours per week. Then one of them changes tacks, and doesn’t want…
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Building a Company Is Like Multi-Player Katamari Damacy

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In the video game Katamari Damacy, you roll a ball through the world, slowly picking up objects by running over them. You can’t pick up big objects right away – you can only pick up objects smaller than you. As your pile grows, your capabilities grow. Here’s a video of someone playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwhFH75OCDs When you’re starting a company by yourself, you start all alone with limited capabilities. You only have so many hours per day, and there’s a lot of skills you haven’t acquired yet. You tackle a lot of small tasks manually, doing them over and over again,…
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How to React When Company Ownership Changes

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Scott Curtis is a Managing Director at Consilio and was previously at Huron Legal, a division of Huron Consulting that was just acquired by Consilio. Huron Legal has been a client of mine, but more importantly, Scott is a friend of mine, and we were talking about the challenges involved with company ownership changes. Scott asked if we could co-author a post about the topic, and I jumped at the opportunity. I’ll let him introduce himself first: Scott Curtis Writes: Have you ever found yourself caught in an acquisition, “realignment,” workforce reduction or other organizational change to your day job?…
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a 1986 Ferrari 328 GTS, a 1964 Porsche 356, a 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback, and more.

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