by Jen Hickey. Breaking up is hard to do. But, as in life, some business relationships aren’t meant to last. For a small business, especially a new one, each customer has a measurable impact on the bottom line. You try to make every customer happy by offering top quality products or services, but there’s always a few that never seem pleased. The more time and effort devoted to those “high-maintenance” customers, the less there is for the rest. You must decide early on whether such customers are...

In his great book The E-Myth, Michael Gerber says that many small business owners spend too much time working in their business and not enough time working on their business. Why is working on our business so important? Because clients and customers leave. They leave for all sorts of reasons – maybe they don’t need you anymore, or they found what you do somewhere else that is more convenient or cheaper, or they moved, or whatever. Working on your business means it is not a crisis when a...