Every business has it trade secrets, and they can take many forms. Your trade secret might be your customer list. It may be your business plan. It might be a process of how your product is made. Regardless of the forms your trade secrets take, they are assets of your company that must be protected.

I’m not a salesperson. I never have been. I was one of those people who thought of snake oil when I thought of sales (though after working with Craig Wortmann long enough, I have been disabused of those notions). Nonetheless, when I read Daniel Pink’s book To Sell Is Human about a year ago, I was struck by the insight that “we’re all in sales” every day, in many ways.

Consolidate and codify sounds technical, but it’s actually a fairly simple idea. The consolidation step means taking everything you’ve done throughout your marketing strategy and combining it into a single, more effective piece of learning. The second half is to codify your learning, which means to arrange what you’ve learned into a way that makes sense. In this instance, that means a way that leads to action.

Unless you have good processes in place for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you could very well be spending your marketing dollars ineffectively.

In the Wall Street Journal this week, Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman discusses the ways in which passion can get in the way of entrepreneurial success. This goes against the grain since passion is often identified as something critical for entrepreneurs to possess.

Starting a company and remaining an active member of your family is no easy task. In some ways, a startup becomes the newborn of a family–whiny and constantly craving attention. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for other people to enjoy your company, and as many middle children know, this can leave others feeling left out and abandoned.