“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 …
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, […]
The old definition – a path or a roadway over which something runs – has been updated for the times to mean: the length of time your company has until it runs out of cash. Jason Calacanis, a successful geek entrepreneur (and I use that word with all due respect) said the following: “You need […]
I’ve been speculating for the past few months — not with stocks or bonds, not with gold or guns but with a projection for the remodeling industry. Make that “my remodeling industry”. There are many remodelers who fly ‘under the radar’ and with whom I have little or no contact – they don’t join the […]
Over the weekend I watched The Last Waltz, the Martin Sorcese documentary on the last concert given by The Band, a fixture in music during the late 60s into the mid 70s. The Band worked with Bob Dylan during a brief period in Woodstock, NY where they produced Music from Big Pink as well as […]
As I survey the landscape of clients, colleagues and friends in the remodeling industry, I look for patterns of success as well as patterns of failure. These patterns, I’ve discovered, are not black and white, but shades of gray. That’s one of the beauties of growing older (of which there are many to my mind) […]
There’s an interesting article in the NY Times Business Section today entitled “Is it Time to Retrain Business Schools?” which says, in part: “Some employers and recruiters also question the value of an M.B.A., and are telling young people they can get better training on the job than in business school. A growing number are […]
I recently returned from facilitating a Remodelers Advantage peer group review – a good meeting with good people. There was lots of conversation about what to do next and how to accomplish all that needed doing gracefully and with forethought. Compassion, gracefully and focused were words used many times over those 3 days. Many good […]
A new ‘must read’ is the article in the March 2009 Harvard Business Review entitled “In a Downturn Provoke your Customers”. I put off reading it until I had ABSOLUTELY nothing else to read (which happened to be yesterday) and found it fascinating. The point is abbreviated in the following “Idea in Brief”: “Selling in […]