While sourcing my July feature for Comstock’s about the career journey of umpires, I learned just how much they give up and how many hours they put in away from home to reach the pinnacle of their profession.

I am a new hire at a Fortune 100 tech company. It’s a sales position, and just days into the job I landed my first sale — a big one. I am about to close my second sale and was excited until I was told that because my compensation package had not yet been signed and finalized, I would not be receiving nearly $5,000 in commission for these deals. I’m angry, and I don’t know what to do to get paid and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

So-called expert consultants abound, but Alan Weiss’ Million Dollar Consulting: A Professional Guide To Building A Practice offers what many other how-tos don’t: modern, actionable tools for building a highly profitable enterprise.

Every service business has had one: the dreaded problem client. These clients seem to bring more trouble than their business is worth, and dealing with them can quickly become a time sink. When dealing with a problem child, you need to implement solutions and be prepared to sever the relationship if those solutions don’t pan out. Here’s how:

From your customer service representatives to your sales team, your staff’s day-to-day decisions on the job quite literally make or break your brand experience. Which means, at the end of the day, your brand is only as strong as the crew you’re letting run the ship. So how do you hire a cultural fit? 

A calm and graceful response to any negative publicity is the best way to maintain control over your own narrative.

Scenario: You open the refrigerator to find a near-empty milk carton. What would you tell your partner or roommate? Whether you would say, “Get milk when you go out,” or something more like, “Hey, we’re out of milk,” can tell you a lot about your communication style.

We live in a world of tribes. On a macro level, we discover that every organization is a tribe, a cadre of people involved in formal and informal levels of engagement. The existence of these tribes has major implications for today’s leaders in their quest to create world-class teams, businesses and companies that make a difference.

My supervisor assigned to me major new responsibilities at work. When I asked to discuss my compensation, he said it could only be addressed as part of my annual review. Now, my compensation will be discussed only after HR signs off on the raise he already proposed. How should I proceed if the pay increase feels too low or if back pay isn’t included?

In March of last year, we highlighted 12 rising leaders in our inaugural  young professionals feature  (“Command and Deliver,” by Russell Nichols, March 2014). Here’s what a few of them have done since: