You are currently browsing the MrBizPlan.com weblog archives for September, 2008.
- Mr BizPlan Says (44)
- December 31, 2008: It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times
- December 24, 2008: A 2008 Christmas Poem
- November 23, 2008: The Next Great Depression...In High Definition
- October 7, 2008: How the Credit Crisis Affects Small Business
- September 26, 2008: Is Your Brand Awesome? Should it be?
- September 17, 2008: What's going on? From Wall Street to Main Street.
- September 2, 2008: The Universe of Opportunities
- August 7, 2008: Rags to Riches...Anecdotally Speaking
- June 30, 2008: Building Quality Financial Projections
- June 16, 2008: "The Only Thing We Have To Fear..."
Archive for September 2008
Is Your Brand Awesome? Should it be?
September 26, 2008 by mrbizplan.
Recently at a small business conference in Chicago I attended a few different seminars on marketing, promotion and branding. Being a self proclaimed finance geek, I find it is helpful to step outside of my natural habitat to broaden my knowledge base, and the best place for me to do that is by exploring marketing concepts.
You see, marketing & promotion is my Achille’s heal as a business consultant. Despite attending dozens of seminars, attending trade shows, reading books (actually I prefer audio books) on the subject and even listening to a few Zig Ziglar tapes I found at a garage sale…I still am not confident in giving advice on marketing.
I think the problem is that finance is finite and marketing is…well, subjective. Numbers never lie. Certainly people can lie by changing the numbers to misrepresent the actual condition of a company. But, anybody with an undergraduate level education in accounting knows that the practice, at best, is an estimate.
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What’s going on? From Wall Street to Main Street.
September 17, 2008 by mrbizplan.
There is blood in the streets of America’s businesses both small and large. On Wall Street, the collapse of financial institutions, the bailouts of Freddie, Fannie, Bear Sterns and now AIG. 500 point daily drops in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with investors fleeing to cash and US treasuries. Sure there has been the rapid decline of the price of a barrel of oil, but that has been the effect of sinking worldwide demand (and strengthening the US dollar), which are ripples from the US economy swelling to tsunamis world wide.
Sound familiar? Unless you have been under a rock it has been hard to miss. Even The Daily Show’s John Stewart is taking a break from beating up Sarah Palin to focus on the economic forces playing out in front of our very eyes.
On Main Street, here in the Red River Valley, community leaders and spending scads of time and money trying to convince citizens that all is well. And, for the most part, they are right:
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The Universe of Opportunities
September 2, 2008 by mrbizplan.
About a year ago, I co-funded the start-up of a pizza restaurant, in a city near my own, with a friend I’ve known since high school. At the end of this month that restaurant will no longer be mine. Despite breaking even, we have decided that it is time to move on to better things.
The end, as it turns out, will come one of two ways. We have courted offers from several people who would like to take a crack at the biz and see what they can do with it. Alternately, barring the transfer of ownership in the next 60 days, we will liquidate the equipment through local channels and on eBay (God help us with shipping the nearly 2 ton pizza oven).
In any event, these options got me thinking about the “Universe of Investment Opportunities” that are available to all of us. The long term objective for most business and/or property owners is the building of wealth. The return on my original investment in the restaurant, be it the original amount or somewhat less (depending on the outcome), will need to be put to work.
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