I saw a lemonade stand today, something I haven’t seen in a long time. Warm childhood memories came rushing back as I watched the two kids playfully wait for their next sale. Naturally I had to buy a glass, and it was delicious.

It dawned on me that these two kids were probably netting a larger profit than most of the local businesses in the area, and that made me laugh! Because of their youth, inexperience, lack of formal education and outside influences, these kids were doing something simple and pure. They were focusing on one thing and doing it well.

They were selling lemonade. One flavor, one size and one price. There were no up sells or discounts, no additional employees and no complicated point of sale systems. “This is a cash only establishment,” the young girl firmly told me.

As we grow older and “wiser,” we tend to complicate things, in life and business. More is better we’re taught. More features, more products and more options. It’s taken me twelve years to realize this uncomplicated fact: Simplicity is key. A three word phrase that holds more power than any business book or publication.

37signals.com, Google, Facebook, In-n-out, Ipods, Flip cameras, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, Plentyoffish.com and Subway. What do these businesses have in common? They are simple and focused.

When developing your new business concept, never be afraid to embrace that lemonade stand simplicity. Focus on the key objective of your business. If you’re developing a website, watch out for feature creep. If you’re opening a restaurant, keep the menu simple and stress quality over quantity of items.

As a thought experiment, I imagined what would have happened if I took over that lemonade stand for a week and let my little entrepreneurial devil go unchecked. First I’d buy a cash register, there’s no way I can trust these little kids to handle the money properly. I’d implement credit cards using my trusty Iphone credit card swiper, which means I’d also have to open a bank and merchant account. One flavor is boring, we need at least three. And while we’re at it, we should offer small and large sizes. While word of mouth advertising is good, I think we should make some discount coupons and hand them out around the neighborhood. Did you apply for your resell number yet? We’re going to need that if we plan on expanding throughout the rest of the neighborhood. Did you do a cost analysis on the lemonade yet? What do you mean you’re only 9, that’s business 101 kid! Better add a little more water to that mix so we maximize profit. This isn’t fun anymore? Stop complaining. Who said business is supposed to fun!? Give me a few years and I’ll turn you into Gordon Gekko.

See what I mean. It’s easy to complicate things. But don’t! Simplicity is key. Repeat that out loud until you’re blue in the face, and then repeat it some more!

And now it’s time for me to go back and get another lemonade..

I have to admit, I feel lost. More lost than I’ve ever felt before. But while I sit here, drinking a glass of scotch and enjoying the ambiance of rolling stones, my thoughts have become lucid enough to write and share.

I have lived my life out of the box, as I encourage everyone around me to do. And I’m proud of that. But at the end of the day, I don’t feel I should be proud. The truth is, while I have been living out of the box, I have been chasing other people’s dreams. I have never truly gone after my own.

Who feels like they are not performing to their fullest potential? Go ahead…raise your hand. Who else feels as though the world is just passing them by? Go ahead…stand up. Well, I’m standing up and raising my hand, so that tells you how I feel.

What makes it worse is that I know what I want and I know how to get it. But because of the current state of affairs I have fallen into, I can not do what I believe I was put here to do. I have a special gift. I know that. But my greatest fear is that the decisions I’ve made in my recent past may prevent me from sharing my gift.

I feel like packing up…running away…and starting over. But of course, I can’t do that either.

I had a great conversation with my Grandpa yesterday about life, business and stress. He told me to follow my true passion, follow my heart. Stop stressing about the things I dislike doing and start stressing about the things I love to do. That makes all the difference. Such simple advice from one of life’s true old salts. He reminded me how easy it is to simply shift gears and change one’s perspective if we just…do it! Don’t feel sorry for yourself, forget about pity and most certainly don’t stop fighting. That sums up how I was raised. And after writing this…my gears are about to shift.

I’ve often heard the term “born leader” or “natural leader” and those terms make most think of leadership as a god given talent. I, on the other hand, think it is a mind set. To be a good leader, or perceived as a good leader, confidence is crucial.

To be a good leader, one does not have to be out spoken or aggressive. I’ve met many people I consider leaders that are soft spoken and passive, but their actions and words reflect confidence in themselves.

Confidence in the way you speak and even walk, as well as your mannerisms is important in controlling how others perceive you. Leaders tend to keep their heads held up, their shoulders rolled back and they maintain eye contact. When you shake a person’s hand, shake it firmly. When you walk into a room, walk in thinking like you own it.

Silence can also be an important characteristic. Great leaders listen. Sometimes they pose questions or offer suggestions and allow others to fill in the blanks, gently nudging them in the right direction. People are smarter than you think. Often they don’t need to be directed, just given a soft kick in the rear end.

To me, a great leader isn’t someone who tells people what to do. A great leader is someone who can empower others to figure out problems for themselves, to improvise and adapt on their own. The rewards for everyone are much greater that way.

I may have gone to USC business school, but my real schooling came from what you see above. This was the first major business I began. This is where a boy became a man, where the young Michael Mulhall was replaced with the harder, wiser and stronger Mike Mulhall. I may not have fought in any wars, but I waged a great many battles while running this establishment.

I exited the business about 5 years ago, but the mark it left on me will last forever. I experienced more owning and operating this business than most would experience in two life times. The business itself was based on a faulty plan which I relied on my ex-partner in the venture to develop. Unfortunately, I was very young and very naive. I wish I knew then what I know now.

While I had many positive experiences, it’s the negative ones that I learned the most from. I lost some money, but more importantly, I lost family and a piece of myself. It’s those losses that put tears in my eyes. Fear, confusion and guilt are an entrepreneur’s worst enemies, and they must be conquered and controlled to attain success. Here is what I learned from these experiences:

• Hope and excitement can seriously cloud your decision making ability. Learn to recognize that.
• NEVER have family involved in your business. But always heed their advice, especially your father. He knows a thing or two about life. Trust me.
• Perception is reality. But as an entrepreneur, it’s unhealthy to hold everything inside.
• Always trust your gut…no matter what.
• Always let life and love come before business. We’re not here that long, so enjoy it.
• Don’t waste time hoping for the best. Just plan for the worst. And if the best occurs…celebrate.
• Bad things happen, whether it’s your fault or not. Don’t dwell on it. Just keep moving forward and I promise things will get better.
• If you don’t have a real, no bullshit business plan, you don’t have a business. You have simply placed a bet.
• Lastly, it’s ok to fail. Anyone who has succeeded or done anything great has also tasted the bitter flavor of failure. That is normal and should be expected.

Here is my old business as I walked by it today. This is what inspired me to write this post. After I stepped away from the business some years ago, it declined rapidly and closed soon thereafter. Now they’re ripping it down to build a WalGreens. Standing in the parking lot, watching the bulldozer rip apart everything I built, I felt numb. I felt strong. But I also felt sad. A piece of me was being buried in that rubble.

As the dozer’s arm turned, I saw the main wall and caught a glance of the last remnants of the business I built. I had scrolled our motto, “A New Beginning,” across the walls in large letters to remind my members that we can always start over. As I saw that phrase for the last time, I smiled as I whispered it to myself. I had forgotten the importance those three words hold.

Rework by Jason Fried and David Hansson

In the words of Seth Godin, this book will make you very uncomfortable and that is a good thing.

I love this book!

It’s an out of the box view of how to start and run a modern business. With chapter titles such as Meetings are Toxic, Your Estimates Suck, Drug Dealers get it Right and Resumes are Ridiculous,  Jason and David have turned the business world on its head.

In the spirit of this book, I’m keeping this review short and simple. This book is easy to read, straight forward, honest and cutting edge. Buy it, borrow it, read it.

(I used to feel like this dude ever day!)

For a long time, I was plagued with constant headaches. They weren’t as painful as migraines, but they occurred every day, all day. I tried everything to cure them. That included banging my head against the wall and popping tylenol capsules like tic-tacs. Unfortunately, nothing worked!

After speaking to a few friends who had the same headaches, stress levels and hectic schedule I did, I came to the realization that these headaches were simply a symptom of our busy lifestyles. Stress is the number one cause of these types of headaches. I finally found a cure, and it didn’t come in the form of a pill.

Put simply, I had to learn how to “chill.” Here is a few things I did to rid myself of this problem:

1. Stop taking pills and start drinking more water. For all those people taking pain relievers and chasing them down with massive amounts of coffee (you know who you are!), stop! Tylenol doesn’t help and caffeine can actually spur on these types of headaches.
2. Go Rag Doll at least 3 times a day. This works! At least 3 times a day, you need to find a quiet place, completely relax your body, take deep breathes and work on clearing your mind. Do this for no less than 5 minutes. When I say rag doll, I really mean it. After doing this enough, you’ll learn how to relax every muscle in your body, which can relieve headaches, stress and anxiety. When you become “stressed”, a process in your body referred to as a “cascade of cortisols” begins. This process basically puts your body into a flight or flee mode thereby creating anxiety. The rag doll exercise relieves this.
3. Workout! Whether it be calisthenics in your living room or a brief jog down the street. Physical exercise is crucial to living a healthy lifestyle and it will help relieve that nasty tension causing those headaches.
4. Make sure the A/C is working. A warm work environment doesn’t help and can actually be counter productive.
5. Most importantly, take a step back. Whenever I got a headache, my first instinct was to power through it and continue working. Just ignore the pain. Right?? Wrong! Your productivity falls more than you think. These headaches are your body’s way of telling you something is wrong. Your body is saying “Hello?! Are you there? I need attention and if I don’t get it, I’m gonna kick your ass!” So try to lighten your workload and spend a little more time on you. Don’t worry, the work isn’t going anywhere!

These are the steps I took to decrease my anxiety and headaches, and I’m confident they can help you. These are things I learned from personal experience, not from google searches. There are no magic pills or quick cures.

I’d love to hear some of your remedies as well. Feel free to send them to me and I will post them for the rest of the readers!

Rome was not built in a day. Yea I know…so cliché, but so true. No matter what kind of business you plan on starting, the beginning is not going to go smooth. It never does and it never will.

Whether it is a restaurant or a dotcom, things just pop up and cause headaches. The only thing one needs to remember when this occurs is to stay calm and find solutions.

We unveiled our new menu tonight at my restaurant and it was chaos! It reminded me of our grand opening two years ago. Food was flying in all directions in the kitchen, customer wait times were exceeding 40 mins (yikes!), employees were getting into fights with each other and numerous other problems occurred. But as a seasoned entrepreneur, all I did was observe and learn.

Don’t try to fix all the problems at once. You’ll have a heart attack or your head will explode (seriously). Begin fixing problems or as I like to call them “inefficiencies” one at a time.

A clipboard and a calm demeanor can do wonders when observing your business (that not so well oiled machine) in action. I’ve noticed time and time again that many business owners get caught up in quickly “band-aiding” the problem instead of trying to understand why the problem occurred in the first place. That’s a total rookie move, and it took me 10 years to figure that out.

So when the sh%# hits the fan, just step aside, plug your nose and endure. If you keep a cool head and fix the cause of  the problems, everything will be just fine.

There are no one way streets in a successful social marketing campaign. Remember that.

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of businesses trying to harness the power of social media. They register their Twitter accounts, start fan pages on Facebook and maybe even create their very own blog. That’s definitely a step in the right direction. However, that’s only the beginning.

Many businesses think this is enough and simply start blasting away with ads and bulls%@$, as they did “back in the day” through more traditional channels. A TV commercial is a one way street, as are most radio ads or billboards. Marketing via social media is not.

All one has to do is look at the phrase “social media,” social being the keyword here. It’s all about interacting with your customers. Not by simply posting events, alerts and ads (dare I say spam) on social media sites, but by seeking out and responding to customer feedback. Empower the customer, give them a sense of belonging and they will love you.

If a user comments on your Facebook fan page, respond to it. If someone new begins following you on Twitter, acknowledge and thank them. It can be that simple.

For anyone that still can’t grasp the idea of social media marketing, here it is in a nutshell: Interaction with customers, or perhaps we should now call them fans or friends, on a two way street, where communication flows back and forth.

That’s it! Now go forth and start building a fan base.

-Mike Mulhall

One of my idols is General George S. Patton. Not just because he was a great general, but because he was a very capable man faced with a vexing dilemma. He felt strongly that if he did not seize his destiny by force, it would pass him by. And that kept him up at night. I can relate to his worries.

He was a brilliant, strong, hard headed, cursing, bible reading son of a bitch (those are his own words). I wish I could have met him.

His motto was “Always take the offensive…never dig in.” Now THAT is a motto all entrepreneurs should live by.

I have spent a lot of time reading and studying war strategy as it relates to business. Patton, along with Von Clausewitz, believed that the general most willing to dispense with all things not related to war and just attack, with no thought of stopping, was the general who always prevailed. This type of strategy can also be applied to business and life. Patton lived by that rule.

If you are further interested in this kind of stuff, check out these books:

• War As I Knew It – By George S. Patton
• On War – By Carl Von Clausewitz     (Very heavy reading, but a great book)
• Art of War – By Sun Tzu    (Everyone knows this one)

It seems like the new buzz word these days is visualization. In the books, magazines and blogs I read, everyone is talking about the power of visualizing your success.

One book in particular said that visualizing your goals in your mind is one thing, but creating a tangible visual aid is even more powerful.

I always tell colleagues that one of my ultimate goals is to be on the cover of Wired magazine. I think about that every day. So I made the above picture last night and taped it to my wall. I stare at it constantly, and deep down, I can see it happening! It’s a great feeling.

I used Adobe Photoshop, but I found some great sites that will help anyone get on a magazine cover. Let’s face it, if you make it onto on the cover of your industry’s magazine, you’re doing well. The sites are:

• http://www.magmypic.com/
• http://graphics.imagetemplate.net/magazines/

And it doesn’t have to be a magazine cover. Get creative and try having fun with it. Maybe your goal is to buy a new car or a house in the near future. Follow my examples and see what happens.