Connie Barrientos-Carey, SHRM-CP

If you’re the only one who can do it right, you don’t have a business — you have a bottleneck. Hoarding information is not leadership. It’s a power play , and one of the fastest ways to kill growth. When everything depends on you — every approval, every decision, every piece of knowledge — you become the problem. You’re not the hero of your company; you’re the bottleneck  that’s holding it hostage. A good organization can function without its main decision-makers . That’s not

You can’t scale if your people keep leaving. It’s unbelievable how many businesses still think it’s easy to find people. Sure, you can hire a random person off the street — but highly skilled people with the right attitude and soft skills? That’s something else. It’s almost a punishment like that of Prometheus — except instead of a vulture, you get never-ending turnover. Here’s the reality: there’s a massive skill shortage right now in the Philippines — especially in Cebu — a

You don’t need a pitch deck. You need a paying customer. Business schools and startup circles glorify the pitch deck — that perfect set of slides meant to “wow” investors.  But here’s the truth: you can’t pitch your way out of a bad business model. You don’t need to raise capital to look successful. You need to solve a problem so well that people are willing to pay you for it. And here’s a simple trick: start with your own problem.  Because if it frustrates you, chances are o

They’ll teach you how to pitch to investors — but not how to tell your staff you can’t pay salaries on time. Let’s be real: even the most “prestigious” business schools are heavy on theory and light on reality. Some of them, ironically, made their own teachers redundant — go check TikTok for the tea. They’ll teach you valuation models, scaling frameworks, and case studies about billion-dollar exits. But they won’t teach you what to do when a client delays payment and payday i