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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
    Hire a consultant wisely. The best consultants are hands-down experts in their fields, able to guide you through risks and take you to the next level. Don't settle for less.
    Merchandising
    Somebody always makes money during a recession. Might as well be you.
    Marketing
    At some point we all end up either writing our own marketing or working with someone who is writing our marketing. Here are some tricks for putting what we want on paper.
    Retail
    Consumers - female and male - buy based on emotion, not logic. No matter how many facts and statistics they cite, they ultimately buy based on how you made them feel.
    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.

    Leadership
    Don't let someone else's bad behavior reduce your faith in your relationships or humankind. Put it in perspective.
    Management
    Strong leaders are integral to healthy business behavior. To influence the behavior of your organization, define a business culture and cultural norms.
    Management
    There are two distinct styles of collaborative management. One is preferable to the other for a few reasons.

    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
    Getting a management team engaged is both financially and personally rewarding. The concepts described here will help get you started.
    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
    Making time to plan is the most important thing you can do.
    Management
    Twitch your nose all you want, but then you should probably get down to the grown-up work of evaluating, making informed decisions, being patient, accepting current reality, and creating incremental change.
    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
    If business is about continuous improvement, then people must be continuously improving too. Giving better feedback will help your business improve.
    Management
    Why business diversity? Because when a business embraces many different perspectives, thought processes, and world views, it fires up the collective brain.
    Management
    To be a better leader, be a student of business. This article gives advice on what areas to study and where to go to find that information.
    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.

    Video

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    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. )"

    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.

    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.

    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.

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