Blame it on Wall Street. Blame it on evolution. Popularity. Blame it on whatever you want. Sooner or later every search engine stops being a search engine and becomes a portal. And then it dies. Remember when Yahoo was THE search engine on the internet? No longer. Remember Infoseek? Gone. Could the same thing happen … Read more
The power of the human fight-or-flight instinct is a good way to understand how immediate challenges dominate our actions. As a business, your immediate challengers are the competition in your industry. The people that do what you do. But there’s a bigger picture as well. Ultimately, you’re competing with every other business on the face … Read more
The absolute measure of what something is worth is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. The lower the price of anything, the more people you’ll find willing to buy it. It makes sense then that pro forma costing needs to start with the market price. The price that customers are willing to pay. … Read more
Business is a competitive sport. Sometimes it can get bloody. Sometimes it should. So it’s no wonder that quotes from great works such as Sun Tzu’s the Art of War are often worked into insightful business ideologies. The movie 300 carries many great lessons that can be applied to business. Especially in the area of … Read more
Smart people make money when times are good. Rich people make money when times are bad. The housing market has been doing great for the last few years. When it starts going down (as all things that go up eventually do), two kinds of people will emerge; those that have sold and moved on to … Read more
Business is simply buying and selling. That’s all it is. Whether it’s retail, manufacturing or servicing, everything to do with conducting business can be categorized as either buying or selling. Expenses or revenue. From this perspective, there are three things that you can focus on to build a successful business: Create value Adjust the ratio … Read more
The expense of business software can add up. And up. And up. Today, you can get pretty much everything you need to run a business from open sources. Sometimes the success of a new business is dependant on it’s ability to bootstrap (keep costs way down). Not all the software listed here is open source. … Read more
I had the good fortune to meet the COO of Larabar last week. The more I learned about Larabar, the more I realized what a truly amazing company it is. Larabar has all the ingredients necessary for rapid success. The first Larabar’s hit store shelves in April 2003. All 500 bars were made in Lara’s … Read more
If you follow today’s world of slash-and-burn politics, you probably know the site Crooks and Liars. Well, the real crooks and liars website is White Collar Fraud and it’s a great read. White Collar Fraud is the blog of Sam E. Antar. Sammy was the CFO for Crazy Eddie, a consumer electronics chain from the … Read more
The rule is this: Great packaging will not necessarily help your sales but bad packaging will hurt you. So you need great packaging just to have a fighting chance. Everyone is fighting to get noticed on the shelf. A lot of times people don’t see the product. They can’t touch it, taste it, or use … Read more