Blog Archives
How to Succeed in Your Professional Service Business
Larry Easto’s How to Succeed in Your Professional Service Business is a practical and reflective guide for self-employed professionals who are skilled at serving clients but less comfortable with the business of finding them. Moving from mindset to marketing, Easto argues that sustainable success begins with the professional’s inner life: passion, purpose, beliefs, values, calm decision-making, and authenticity. From there, he turns toward the visible work of building relationships, clarifying an ideal client, developing a personal brand, networking, creating compelling offers, using online tools, and sustaining trust through credible authority and continuous improvement.
What I appreciated most is the book’s insistence that marketing professional services doesn’t have to feel like a costume. Easto’s best idea is that the provider and the business are deeply intertwined, which makes authenticity not a decorative virtue, but a practical necessity. I found that especially persuasive in moments like his story of setting up a law office around a pine dining table rather than an intimidating desk. That image stayed with me. It quietly expresses the whole book’s philosophy: clients are not abstractions to be captured, but people to be met with clarity, usefulness, and care. The recurring “Life Lessons” also give the book warmth. Marg’s second thought before buying a troubled business, Ben’s shift from financial planning to life coaching, and Eva’s discovery of purpose through music and seniors’ care all make the advice feel lived rather than merely assembled.
The writing has an easy, mentoring cadence. Easto can be conversational, even folksy, and that makes the material accessible without draining it of seriousness. I liked the way he folds in memorable images, from the Field of Dreams opening to the lodgepole pine after a wildfire, because those metaphors give the business advice an emotional weight. I found the stronger current to be pragmatic. Easto keeps returning to action: SWOT analysis, relationship-building, a 30-, 60-, and 90-day plan, added value, communication, and trust. The ideas are at their best when they join hope to responsibility.
I came away from the book feeling that Easto is less interested in teaching professionals how to sell themselves than in helping them become more fully themselves in the marketplace. This is a thoughtful guide for consultants, coaches, advisors, trainers, solo practitioners, and small professional service providers who want practical marketing direction without sacrificing their integrity, personality, or sense of purpose. It would be especially useful for professionals in transition, people who know they’re good at their work but need a steadier, more authentic way to invite the right clients toward it.
Pages: 262 | ASIN : B0DGNK4PXC
The Doubt Loop: Turning Founder Doubt Into a Competitive Advantage
The Doubt Loop is Adam Crawshaw’s candid, founder-minded guide to turning self-doubt from an inner saboteur into a working discipline. Built around the simple rhythm of noticing fear, naming it, and converting it into action, the book moves from pre-launch soul-searching to early-stage experiments and, finally, to the stranger anxieties of success. Crawshaw threads his own story through the advice, from childhood moments of exposed vulnerability to the brutal polish of finance and investing, then to Assembly’s $1.4 billion outcome, which, tellingly, doesn’t cure him of doubt at all. The result is part memoir, part operating manual, and part emotional x-ray of entrepreneurship.
The book is most compelling when Crawshaw lets the polished founder mask slip. The scene where he expects the sale of Assembly to taste like arrival, only for the champagne moment to curdle into “battery acid,” stayed with me because it captures something business books often sand down: achievement can be loud outside and eerily hollow inside. His recollection of drinking milk instead of coffee during an all-nighter, or nursing the embarrassment of a basketball game gone wrong, gives the book a lived-in tenderness beneath its swagger. The writing is energetic, metaphor-happy, and sometimes deliberately rowdy, but its best passages have an honest pulse. Crawshaw knows how to make a framework feel less like a laminated consultant tool and more like something scribbled in a notebook after a very bad night.
The ideas themselves are strongest when they refuse easy comfort. I appreciated the bluntness of the motive matrix, especially the insistence that Wealth, Control, Passion, and Ego cannot all sit serenely at the head of the table. That’s not just useful advice, it’s emotionally clarifying. The belief ladder, the tide framework, the “I don’t mean to sh*t on your baby” anecdote, and the later ROSE test all work because they translate vague anxiety into sharper questions. The book’s density of metaphors and founder examples can feel almost over-stuffed. Still, I’d rather have a book with too much nerve than one with too little. Crawshaw’s voice has texture, bite, and a genuine ache behind the jokes.
By the end, what moved me most was that The Doubt Loop doesn’t pretend confidence is the destination. It suggests something wiser and more durable: that doubt can become a form of care, a way of checking the math, protecting the mission, reading the room, and remembering to savor the moments that actually matter. I closed the book feeling that Crawshaw had written not a victory lap, but a field report from someone who’s still listening to the uneasy voice in his head and has learned, imperfectly but seriously, how to answer it. I’d recommend this book to founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, operators, and ambitious professionals who are tired of being told to silence doubt and would rather learn how to put it to work.
Pages: 283 | ASIN : B0GTSJVLN3
Triumphs and Tragedies
In War of the Words, you share your family’s experience building the company that shaped the modern office and the crushing blow that came with the Information Age. Why was this an important book for you to write?
It’s an untold story—that of the early days of tech innovation, before Silicon Valley. The earliest implementers of tech were secretaries who had to convert from typewriters to word processors. Ultimately, these women became the ones who transformed their offices into full-blown automated offices. Office automation elevated everyone. The crushing blow came to companies such as ours that couldn’t compete with Microsoft’s power and money. Few small companies and even some tech giants could.
I appreciate the candor with which you tell your family’s story. What was the most difficult thing for you to write about?
My memoir has twists and turns, triumphs and tragedies. My mother’s devastating illness, my father’s allegiance to a “new Age Cult,” and my brother’s alcoholism all contribute to the arc the story takes. The rise and fall of a most unusual company that was instrumental in the dawn of the Information Age.
What advice would you give someone who is considering writing a memoir? Why are you writing it?
To inspire, to heal? Give yourself time to reflect, to pause, as you write. Memoirs bring up emotions that have to be dealt with, and some can stop your progress. Allow time to heal as you write, for writing a memoir is a healing process. By sharing your story, perhaps others can heal or be inspired.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your family’s experiences?
Take chances. Live a full and exciting life. Make a difference. Try something new. Be daring.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Despite its clunky name, MASS-11 was a powerhouse–loaded with features, lightning-fast in performance, and trusted by a Who’s Who of the Fortune 500. Scientists, engineers, and office workers alike used it to document pivotal developments, including the Patriot Missile, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Alaska Pipeline, the first HIV test, and major pharmaceuticals like Zoloft, Zithromycin, and Prozac.
The Karels brothers, through their company MEC, saw the untapped potential of the VAX computer before DEC itself realized its impact on office automation. The author, a nurse by profession who joined the family startup from the beginning, offers an insider’s view of an industry undergoing rapid and radical change–an industry that would ultimately reshape society.
She reflects on the grueling world of office work before digital transformation, where secretaries typed on IBM Selectrics from nine to five, only to retype entire documents the next day for even minor corrections. With vivid detail, she captures a rarely told slice of history: the monochrome, repetitive rhythm of office life before the rise of word processors, email, fax machines, and the Internet changed everything.
