Skip to main content

Business Insights from Andrea Hill

Most Popular Article

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
    An integrity-infused business is all-or-nothing. You’re either feeling it or you’re not, and if you’re not feeling it, it will bite you in the bottom line.
    Merchandising
    Don't just use digital design to do your old work faster. Use it to transform your business.
    Marketing
    How you market determines how your customers respond to you. That's definitely not something to leave to chance.
    Retail
    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.
    Branding
    This business made its values and strategy so transparent that we as customers can see what matters to them and why they matter to us. That's branding.

    Leadership
    Have you ever told someone you didn’t have time to go to dinner with them, or didn’t have time to stop and play in the yard? It probably didn’t feel like you were lying, but it was a lie. In fact, every time I have said to my children “I don’t have time to run you to the mall right now, ” what I have really been saying is “running you to the mall isn’t as important as something else I am doing.”
    Management
    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 business will suffer.
    Management
    You've created a business strategy, minimum viable product or service, and a business plan. Now you need goals, measurable objectives, and a method of monitoring and managing results; in other words, a Management Framework. This article compares and explains your options.

    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
    If business is about continuous improvement, then people must be continuously improving too. Giving better feedback will help your business improve.
    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
    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
    The question of how to create and sustain accountability for behavior is one that comes up regularly in business. The answer to this question is clear, but it’s not easy.
    Management
    If you follow a logical, tested, practical strategic process, you can implement all the strategic building blocks your company needs to be competitive and successful.
    Management
    If you find yourself assembling virtual teams of home-based contract workers, you will need to develop new skills and sensitivities to motivate, manage, and assess them.
    Management
    Managing a business through recession is all about cash flow. Keep in mind the entire system when you try to figure out who is sitting on your cash.
    Management
    Tips on how to make meetings more powerful, to develop strong facilitators, and to become more effective as a management team.
    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.

    Video

    Check Out Our Youtube Channel!

    Go to our Youtube channel and pound that SUBSCRIBE button!

    We post a lot of videos: business educational, inspirational, motivational, and even lots of software/technical. You don't want to miss it, so subscribe to our Youtube channel today, and get alerts when we post new content.



    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

    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.

    "The tricky thing about hope is to not confuse it with optimism." Rebecca Solnit

    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.

    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.