Business

Our local Refresh group in Oklahoma City asked me to speak last night and I choose to share 5 lessons I’ve learned on the roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship the last 2 years after starting iThemes. Dave Miller from Back40Design is a master cartoonist and was in attendance and drew this awesome cartoon summary that…

This post headline (but personal and business value) really resonated with me today as I reflected on an experience we had eating at a great, new Thai restuarant we found. We were finishing up our lunch and the sweet lady who took our order came over to give us our credit card receipts. When she…

I’m really blessed to have such a great team at iThemes and WebDesign.com that likes to laugh and who actually enjoys being around each other (hey, we spend most of our lives together, so we had better like each other!). One thing James and Matt in particular have taught me is to not take myself…

A good friend of mine (and client) forwarded me this article about the New York Times looking at charging for its content and it spurred these thoughts about premium content … Here they are: I can’t wait to see what happens with the New York Times as it’ll define the newspaper industry somewhat as the…

As part of our WebDesign.com Strategic Plan for 2010, I shared these underlying values that define and guide me as leader of our team. These are ingrained into my personal DNA and what I want instilled in our team. I detailed these so that our team would understand why and how I lead our business…

Kevin Hendricks of Monkey Outta Nowhere who writes for WebDesign.com sent us a great Christmas present — although I thought it was a bomb! What a great gift idea! And it had a great story about how Kevin got started. Rock on! Here’s a video Matt Danner aka Danger getting some fun out of it…

This morning, reading my Twitter follow feed and email in bed with my iPhone (typical early morning ritual before I actually get out of bed), I saw something that just pushed me over the edge and thought this (OK, I tweeted something like it too): Business is hard enough without the copycats and leeches, who…

This week we had an extended conference call with our team to discuss our upcoming projects and ventures and near the end we took some time to look back at how different projects (themes in particular) have influenced later feature innovations in our business. It was fun to review the last year or so and…

I recently reflected on all the numerous benefits I’ve received as a result of starting my first blog and wrote a post on WebDesign.com about it titled Taking the Risk of Blogging. I’ve often thought that there are many more talented and more skilled people than me in my field and business. But I think…

I have a problem as a leader: I’m a firefigher. When someone comes to me with a problem, I want to put out their fire at that very instant for them. My first instinct is to offer solutions, remedies, and fixes. It’s a tendency and habit I’ve had my whole career (even before running my…