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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
    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?
    Merchandising
    It’s no longer enough to just have a website. You must have a website that looks and feels current, and offers more than just a few pretty pictures.
    Marketing
    Remember - you don't need all the customers, you need the right customers. And genuine innovation is one sure way to reach an audience that is currently not being well-served.
    Retail
    You already know being in business for yourself is hard work. But working this hard for no money? Differentiate.
    Branding
    Unlike a dream, your brand story has a destination - an ending that's clear to you from the beginning. Everything you do must be part of your brand story.

    Leadership
    Apparently we need to start saying crazy things like "God doesn't want children to go hungry and without health care!!", "God doesn't want us to cut education and give that money to billion dollar oil companies who will be profitable either way!!" "God gets to decide who is worthy enough to go to heaven!"
    Management
    We may be in the grip of a virulent form of mass business codependence.
    Management
    A business living on auto-pilot ultimately dies of its own apathy. In business, every time is a time for change, and change is the only way to grow.

    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
    Had I stopped to think deeply about it, I would have realized much sooner that profit and a higher purpose are not mutually exclusive.
    Management
    It’s no longer enough to just have a website. You must have a website that looks and feels current, and offers more than just a few pretty pictures.
    Management
    Why business diversity? Because when a business embraces many different perspectives, thought processes, and world views, it fires up the collective brain.
    Management
    Millennials are changing everything we know about luxury. Here are 5 key areas your luxury business must master to stay relevant.
    Management
    What we really need now are a few good intentions.
    Management
    Management
    If you have been looking for a way to help your organization move faster, get ahead of your competition, and produce higher quality, a team-based structure could be the approach you’ve been searching for.
    Management
    If the dangerous belief that mediocrity is acceptable, or that experts and intellectuals represent some vague threat, has wormed its way into your psyche, you have reason to be concerned.
    Management
    When female leaders are tough, they make the gossip sheet. When male leaders are tough, they call it news. But women are better leaders, and shouldn't emulate male leaders to fit in.
    Management
    If business is about continuous improvement, then people must be continuously improving too. Giving better feedback will help your business improve.

    Video

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    Maybe the reason its so hard to remain in quarantine is that it's hard to outrun sadness when you're forced to be still.

    It's surprising how many people are not aware of their reasons for doing things. They think they know, but when asked to reflect upon it, they don't. Why are you in business? Why are you pursuing this role? Why are you frustrated, lonely, anxious, doubting? Why are you making this decision? Why aren't you asking for help? If you ask why before deciding what, who, how, or when, you will come up with a stronger answer every time. In business, why is the essence of strategy. In life, why is the essence of progress.

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

    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.

    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.

    Perfectionism is a luxury for (starving) artists, or artists with benefactors. The rest of us must learn the difference between being in love with our own ideas and being in love with progress.