Mel Robbins created the premise for one of the most powerful TED Talks of all time when she couldn’t get out of bed.

Mel is a Human Behavior Specialist and entrepreneur, and created the Five-Second Rule while her and her husband were going through a difficult time in their professionals lives. Today, the video of her TED Talk has clocked more than 7,000,000 views.

Choosing a bank is one of the most important decisions when starting a small business.

It’s as important as choosing where you’ll set up a brick-and-mortar store, developing a business strategy or deciding who you’ll partner with.

Choosing a bank should be the start of a long and fruitful business relationship.

What can Einstein tell us about pricing accountancy services? In his words, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Those two concepts needn’t be mutually exclusive, but his words provide a useful insight into where you should focus your pricing strategy – value.

Technology has been a huge boon for accountants, automating many of the mundane tasks that once bogged us down.

With the help of new tools, we’re finally starting to combat the issue of accountants being held hostage to the glorified data-entry role. Thanks to automation, those things that we could do with our eyes closed no longer require hours and hours, and there’s a resulting time and cost saving which all of us have felt the benefit of.

Are timesheets dead? Probably not yet. But more and more companies are discovering the advantages of a value pricing fee structure. And there’s much we can learn from them – not least the fact that ditching timesheets allows you to be paid what you’re truly worth, not what the clock tells you.

There is no inherent value in time, and what value there exists is becoming harder to judge, thanks to technology. If you care about your profits, you need to start looking beyond the timesheet.

The accelerating pace of technology means small businesses must learn to adapt faster or risk falling behind. To do that, entrepreneurs need to look at how new platforms fit into their operations. That’s the key takeaway from Xero Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, Andy Lark’s Xerocon keynote in San Francisco today.

For bookkeepers, The Olympics provides a lesson in data mastery. Everyone from Canadian canoeists to British boxers are employing analytics to guide their Rio 2016 training. And Rio has earmarked 20% of its initial $2.25bn budget to spend on IT and telecoms.

According to world-class athlete and Olympian Sally Gunnell, as well as adapting to change,sustaining excellence in a new business is one of the hardest parts of the journey. In both business and sport, people ask and expect you to consistently perform at a massively high level with challenging deadlines. Sally’s advice in this regard is to stay focused on your goals and remember that they can of course be tweaked when they’ve been achieved or part achieved.

A lot of the technological conveniences we enjoy today were but mere glimmers in the eyes of their creators in the late 90s. In 1997, the majority of people were still on dial-up Internet, Amazon was still basically an online bookstore, Netflix had just begun developing a mail-order DVD rental service and we were a decade away from being introduced to our first iPhone.