Wonder what it looks like when a business fails? After all, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the failure rate of small businesses is well over 50% within the first five years. I personally disagree with that failure rate, but that is a blog post for another day. Today, I want to help you take a look at one of those failures that I personally can take credit for helping push over the edge.  Click to Listen*NOTE: If you are reading this in email, you will need to go to Itunes or my blog to get access to this show. But, perhaps more importantly, I want to share with you some of the common mistakes I made and some tips about how you can avoid these same mistakes in your ventures. What's Up with MeI am about to close the 2013 year of speaking engagements. So far in 2013 I have logged over 17 official speaking engagements not including my normal teaching and volunteer teaching. I will end it this year in one of my favorite cities, Nashville. I will be speaking to the Nashville Project Management Institute on December 3rd. If you are in the area, come join us![reminder] What's up with you? If you have an announcement of something you are doing to promote your authority or business venture, post in the comment section. [/reminder] Works for Me: Tools and Tips for Productivity and ProfitI am constantly taking notes of things to do. Some are on paper, some in audio form using a voice recorder I keep with me. But at the end of the day (or week) as I go through my GTD review and cleaning out all my inboxes, I have noticed I have way too many inboxes:emailpaper on my deskvoice recordingsEvernote notesOne of the biggest issues is the voice notes I do when driving. (I must be really productive in the car, because I end up with tons of these notes.) So recently I have decided to make full use of Evernote!Now when I have a voice memo, I use Evernote instead of a voice recorder. I open Evernote, create a new note in my inbox, and then record the note with my iPhone. The voice recognition translates to text and I am done. Now, no more listening back to my notes and translating them by hand into Evernote! One less device to carry and multiple tasks killed. Simple. And I hope highly effective.Now my GTD end of week process involved cleaning out my Evernote inbox, email, and paper. Soon it will just be Evernote inbox.[reminder] What tips can you add to the list? [/reminder]Topic of the Week: Anatomy of a Business FailureSome time ago a former client of mine drug me into his new startup business. It was not what I really wanted to do, but because the funding depended on me and one other person being part of the team, I played along. I was the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the new startup. The venture capitalist (VC) friend of mine became the CEO, and the founder became the Chief Technical Officer (CTO).We were a wireless company. Our new CTO was ambitious and was setting up a platform to provide wireless service to most of the business parts of the city. While my gut told me we should start smaller, I felt he knew the business better than I did so I went along. Our CEO went to work trying to connect us with more cash while the rest of us built a network around the city.What happened next is that I found myself in 2 to 3 meetings daily taking to potential partners. It was exhausting work. The only people being paid were the three of us: CEO, COO, and CTO. Yet, we were burring up over $20,000 per month plus on just salaries. Again, I thought this did not make sense, but failed to trust my gut. I was just along to help operationally after all.After a few months, the CEO bailed out to go after other adventures and the chairman (one of the investors) called me and ask that I take over as CEO. I reluctantly agreed, but felt behind the ball the entire time.I quickly realized that I was now in charge,