Welcome to Fall 2016 and a NEW SCHOOL YEAR! The beginning of a new school year always excites me as much as it saddens me: the end of summer, especially this summer (currently titled “BEST SUMMER EVER” – not far from the truth) always brings with it an excitement about re-engaging with work, with learning […]
I devour Fortune Small Business magazine monthly; my favorite section is “Start-up: Taking Ownership” by Jay Goltz a very savy man who is the author of “The Street-Smart Entrepreneur”. I’ll read that this summer over a beer on the beach. The June column is entitled “Seven Deadly Sins” in which he defines the ‘business-killing traps […]
At first I was mildly interested and spent a couple weeks researching home performance contracting for a Benchmark column in Remodeling Magazine. Then I became fascinated and read 3 dense issues of Home Energy magazine and googled ‘super insulated houses’. Now I’m hooked! I had lunch with a 4 advocates of HPC (home performance contracting) […]
“Every business owner needs to be his or her own CFO!” So says Jay Goltz in the May 2009 issue of Fortune Small Business, page 17. I couldn’t agree more! “Delegating that task to a bookkeeper or an outside accounting firm means putting your life into their hands. They generally don’t know the ins and […]
Warren Buffet in the May 5th, 2009 New York Times Business section said: “Leverage is what causes people real trouble in this world. You don’t want to be in a position where someone can pull the rug out from you or, emotionally, where you pull it out from under yourself.” Hummm …
You might not think the phrase “Ponzi Scheme” applies to your remodeling company – think again! The March 23rd issue of the New Yorker magazine has an interesting article about Ponzi schemes entitled “Madoff and his Models” in which the author discusses 2 historic schemers who turned up client’s up-front money into personal cash. Towards […]
I’m always looking for “Just 1 Number” – that single metric which shows immediately how the company is doing across all departments. I thought I’d found it and wrote my first Benchmark column on the subject in September 2005. I called it the SNIPPY which represents an index relating customer satisfaction to net profit. I’m […]
Technique is to process as X is to Y The words system and process have been thrown around nearly indiscriminately for the past 10 years as the panacea for all sorts of problems. Got a problem with production? Get everybody in the same room, brainstorm the issue, then write a process map, develop a system, […]
Simon Critchely, author of “The Book of Dead Philosophers”, wrote in the NY Times on 4/2/2009 that “perhaps this recession will make cynics of us all.” He explains this logic by stating that “cynicism is a moral protest against hypocrisy and cant in politics and excess and thoughtless self-indulgence in the conduct of life.” The […]
Maureen Dowd in the NY Times today said that we are currently struggling to get over our “affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as ‘a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.’” […]