Two heads are better than one but it takes intention and patience to work in partnership successfully.

Whether your business partnership means co-owning your brand, working with multiple vendors, or both, all of these require regular maintenance to keep them high functioning, valuable, and gratifying.

But what about when you’re in a partnership that’s headed in the wrong direction? What do you do about it then?

There’s so much more to planning than time management... but I’m pretty sure you know this!

You juggle finances to buy inventory or raw materials. You shift around items on your to-do list to meet your most urgent deadlines. You put off making personal appointments because there are competing deadlines tied to the urgency of seasonal selling.

You juggle like a pro!

But… are you planning so you can get ahead of the game or are you scrambling to keep up?

When I started consulting over six years ago, one of the most popular types of business questions I’d get asked was about marketing. It’s remains one of the top five questions I’m asked about every year.

Marketing, as a critical business function, is just as broad a practice as it is deep — meaning, there are many important moving parts. Luckily, for the both of us, there are also plenty of valuable resources for small and medium sized businesses.

Yet despite the tips, tricks, and tactics available at our fingertips, Merchants continue to struggle with marketing their businesses for one main reason — marketing is NOT merchandising.

I remember my first manager-level role — one with employees to train, develop, and retrain should performance fall below expectations. I loved it when my team and I were like a well-oiled machine and never thought about how I would feel if we weren’t.

So I was unprepared when my own manager asked me to have a difficult conversation with an employee whom she suspected was stealing from the business. Whether or not I was prepared, it was a conversation I had to have.

The question I get asked time and time again is — “What should I charge for my products because I need to make more money?”

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you need to know that making more money does NOT start with pricing.