This is partly true. Examples are suppressed here to protect the rest of us from becoming accidental readers. Continue Reading »
Tim Edgar, an Akron Beacon Journal regional sales trainer, explained the science of recruiting new newspaper customers to me. He told me how newspapers aren’t done being vital to Americans yet. Sure, people get their information off the Internet these days. And many social media players are convinced that this tendency is the reason we know newsprint is doomed.
Thing is, it’s not. Continue Reading »
I see six things we have to understand about ourselves before we can effectively market ourselves. These answers define us; they also define our relationships with our customers. And they are more fundamental even than the celebrated Four Ps of Marketing, because they are based on a self-knowledge that even MIT assumes we have, when many of us, well, don’t.
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I’ve got a delinquent customer. And the reasons are just what you’d expect: the economy is bad, work’s not coming in, pay you as soon as we can, etc. etc. Thing is, this customer is a friend of mine; I’d like to stay friends, but each day it gets harder and harder.
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To me, this is the most valuable thing a small business can have.
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My first job out of college, on my first day of work, I arrived to a desk empty save for a foot-high stack of manuals and a note from the man who was to be my mentor, saying he would be on vacation the next two weeks, and that I was to try to familiarize myself with the material in the manuals. I guess you’d say I was a bit put out, given how green I was – but I wasn’t going to complain, no sirree. I was there to do the job. And I was afraid of complaining. LOL Continue Reading »
I’ve been watching the Facebook Like for months now, trying to get a handle on exactly what it means, because it’s not very good at being a one-size-fits-all. In short, there’s a whole bunch of ways to interpret the “like.” Continue Reading »



















