DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, likes big challenges. They don’t want to touch projects that are merely hard, or just really difficult. They only want to take on those that are so hard, so seemingly impossible, that no one else could solve them, no one else would ever invest in them. Challenges that…
On the SBBuzz chat this week, we talked about managing multiple businesses. Some great points came out. I was reminded of this old, old business card I found. It lists more businesses than you can make sense out of! This guy is buying and selling and trading, and running a restaurant, motel and club…. How…
Another great source for business intelligence: the Retail Owners Institute offers industry benchmark data on six key financial ratios. In a section called Store Benchmarks, they break down industry averages into 51 different retail lines. They give five years of data for these six financial ratios: Current Ratio Gross Margin Percentage Return on Assets Percentage…
by Deb Brown What is a bio Start with short overview Use professional picture Short detailing of what you do Fuller accounting of what you do Contact Info Let’s first determine what a bio is. It’s certainly not a resume. A resume follows a structured format of Education and Professional Experience and is usually in…
In a Father Brown detective story, a man is dead. It is clear that he has been killed. There were two guards at the door who knew the man was inside. No one entered, no one left. Father Brown, a priest with detective instincts, keeps asking Finally, the guards acknowledge that the postman had come,…
Your library is hiding some surprising business intelligence, or at least, I was surprised. At the Michigan Small Town Conference, I sat in on the session on economic gardening. The librarians presenting the session talked about all the cool databases of information they have access to, that the general public does not. And how useful…
Here’s another illustration of the consultants’ ongoing issue of where to draw the line between free and paid. A company approached me about doing a consulting job in social media. I was one of several they were talking to, they told me. We talked by phone. They told me how they needed help to get…
We’re 15 days from 2010. It’s time to give your small business a jump start. That means planning, record keeping, and goal setting. I have four suggestions for you. 1. Draw up a Simplified Business Plan. I know you don’t want to do a big, five pound business plan, like you would do to apply…
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