Tim McMahon's Page

I was once asked “What is the greatest responsibility of management?” To me, the answer was simple: Hiring Great People.  Bottom line, no company can be more successful than the people it hires no matter how good the products or services it offers. And so the next question logically was “How do I hire great people?” There’s no failsafe answer but there are a number of “Success Characteristics” every employer should be looking for in every applicant interviewed…

Value Proposition ... one of the most painfully overused (and poorly understood) terms in business today. Simply put, your Value Proposition is the reason someone will buy from you instead of someone else - and it's precisely what you should be "selling" in your marketing materials, website, and face-to-face.

So do you really know your value proposition? Are you using the right one? Is it truly compelling to your potential customers?

A "good"…

This ought to be the mantra of every business and especially small biz and startups. It's a painfully obvious statement but also one that is too often ignored. In fact, most business successes and failures can be tracked directly to this simple phrase.

In the real world, "mousetrap theory" doesn't work - you know, the one that goes "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door". You can't succeed by having a "killer product" (with website) and assuming…

"Encore Career" ... it's a wonderful term I came across somewhere recently that really spoke to me.

An "Encore"  - an extra performance at the end of a long one ...

It describes so many of us today. Maybe you've had a long and successful career and one day you found that things changed. Maybe you were laid off or a disability caused you not to be able to continue. Maybe jobs in your field are scarce or just "went…