General

Some people dream big. They’re long on dreams but short on action. Some people never dream. They’re more pragmatic. But unless you dream, and act on your dreams, you can’t make a difference!

A key to a great experience at a business luncheon is for everyone to feel comfortable. But we’ve all been at a luncheon where the opposite was true, either for us or someone else. Here are three tips for you to feel more comfortable, enabling the others around you to feel comfortable as well.

Back in February of 2014, I saw something during an episode of Downton Abbey that caught my eye – formal conversation rules during dinner. Little did I know, two years later, I would have the opportunity to dine with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and find myself practicing those rules.

A huge percentage of small businesses fail. That’s heartbreaking for me, as my business has been so significant and life-changing for me and my family. I’m not sure what goes wrong with all those businesses, but I think too many people get stuck planning.

I started a graphic design and screen printing business in my garage while in medical school and have grown it to a business that produced just over 6.5 million dollars in revenue in 2017. But my story started long before that.

In 2015, my wife, Holly, was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer. Like everything else in my life, both personal and working, there were lessons to be learned from that experience. First, life is too short and cancer doesn’t discriminate. You see, at the time, Holly was a two-time Ironman Finisher training for her third. I was the complete opposite. It was the jolt I needed to take care of myself.

I often refer to myself as a recovering CFO. I was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and lived in multiple countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, and Sudan. I spent most of childhood in Tucson, Arizona, where I attended the University of Arizona to study accounting and finance.

As a PR firm that works with political candidates, nonprofits, global corporations, and others, we often get asked what companies should be doing to improve their digital footprint. There’s an old journalism expression that says, “Today’s newspaper wraps tomorrow’s fish.” It means that whatever story appeared in the newspaper today would be forgotten tomorrow and simply used to wrap fish at the fish market.

Let’s be honest: there are a lot of entrepreneurs who don’t start out with the intention of becoming business owners. Life circumstances change; opportunity knocks, and people who went to college to study an industry so they can work in that industry suddenly find themselves launching a business.

Recently I’ve done a deep dive into what it means to be a learner in this day and age. The problem is most of what we learn is wasted. In general, we learn things to…