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Business Insights from Andrea Hill

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What a Trade Show Can Teach Us About Good Marketing

Trade shows function like temporary cities, bringing buyers, sellers, education, marketing, and operations into one shared space. When they work, alignment is visible. When they don’t, misalignment is just as clear. This article uses trade shows as an analogy for B2B marketing, exploring what happens when organizations lose focus on their primary customer, how drift happens quietly, and what it takes to restore clarity and long-term value.

First Things First: There's an Order to Profitability

The building blocks of profitability are clear and they even have a required sequence to them. But without knowledge of the building blocks - or awareness that these building blocks even exist! - your marketing can underperform for years (or decades).

Principles of Graphic Design

Most small business owners are doing a lot of graphic designs themselves. But without understanding graphic design principles what you save in time and fees will cost you in results. This 36-minute video will help you understand the basic principles of graphic design. Whether you are doing your own graphics or working with a graphic designer understanding these concepts will most certainly improve your marketing efforts.

Radical Inclusiveness - the Competitive Edge

In a business climate where competitiveness and innovation are everything equality and diversity in the workforce are important keys to success.

Outstanding Customer Service is a Culture Thing

The question of how to deliver the outstanding customer service consumers expect is easy to answer but harder to implement.

    Ethics
    While a healthy ego is essential to any business success, it is the ability to balance ego and humility that leads to the most influential leaders.
    Merchandising
    Want to do a better job of pricing? Understand how Value Proposition relates to pricing strategy, and how you can get more bang for your pricing buck.
    Marketing
    There are several business skills you must cultivate to ensure the survival and profitability of your company.
    Retail
    Designers throw their life savings and energy into creating jewelry lines. Custom jewelers are asked to copy it. How do we avoid knock off designer jewelry?
    Branding
    Here's an example of what happens when even one detail of your operations, sales, or marketing fails to be consistent with the brand you have created.

    Management
    This failure to make connections is not isolated to the medical community. Business owners regularly fail to make the connections necessary to ensure the health of their businesses.
    Management
    Most folks don't think. We react, daydream, deny, endorse, commiserate, argue, wish, and even wonder. But being a thinker is different.

    Tell Better Stories

    It's not enough to sell a product or a service any more. You must also be able to tell the story. The Pip Storytelling Deck is a tool we use at the Werx Brands to construct and tell better stories. You can be a master story-teller too!

    Management
    The job of leadership is a big one – whether it is leading a country or leading a department.
    Management
    Making time to plan is the most important thing you can do.
    Management
    If you want a quick insight injection on how to take goal setting and self-assessment to the next level, let this be your 5-minute primer.
    Management
    When I consult for entrepreneurs I invariably encounter some version of this problem. The entrepreneurs who have hired me like the idea of enhanced planning and communication, but they always balk when they realize that they, too, must use the systems that are being put in place.
    Management
    When faced with difficult options, all one can do is analyze it to the best of his or her ability, try to challenge all assumptions, then make a decision.
    Management
    The right action of which I speak is the right management, right planning and right leadership action necessary to run a profitable business that will fund the rest of our altruistic notions.
    Management
    The larger a business grows, the more difficult it is to manage communication among all of its constituents. Some policies are unavoidable, but it is desirable for an environment to operate on sound principles rather than rules and policies to the greatest extent possible.
    Management
    Though being a good leader is hard work, the components are simply common-sense.
    Management
    Conflict has value. Any alliance without an occasional clash of diverging ideas will be as satisfying as a diet of chicken broth or a dip in a tepid bath.
    Management
    The bottom line is that the jewelry industry is going to be fine. But retailers and small manufacturers need to ask of themselves a few vital questions.

    Video

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    I sometimes wonder what our country would be like today if Christians had thrown themselves into eradicating poverty or inequality with the same energy they invested in fighting abortion.

    Hmm . . . my favorite new term-of-the-week: Ratlicker
    "A person who refuses to wear a mask, or take any of the basic precautions to help society prevent an air born illness during an epidemic. ( In reference to the bubonic plague being spread by rats. )"
    "Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
    William James

    Well, Catholics pray to saints," I mutter to myself as I begin my nightly prayer to RBG.

    Don't get FOMO over unicorns in the news. It's not usually the first person with the idea who makes the money, or even the first person who invests the cash. The person who invests the discipline is always the one to bet on.

    At the end of the day, we all have to fight our demons alone. And I think that's the source of loneliness. If you spend your whole life insisting there are no demons to fight or hiding your demons or determined to fight them in private, you end up existentially alone.