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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
    Had I stopped to think deeply about it, I would have realized much sooner that profit and a higher purpose are not mutually exclusive.
    Merchandising
    Every product category must evolve to stay relevant. Great merchants are masters of product evolution.
    Marketing
    Selling is hard, but once you understand these facts about the sales cycle, your confidence will increase and so will your selling success.
    Retail
    The jewelry industry continues to take polarized positions on lab-grown diamonds.
    Branding
    Two new studies tell us the new consumer is different and the luxury market is changing, but they don't tell you what to do about it. Here are some ideas.

    Leadership
    Sometimes you have to get creative when dealing with the elements.
    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
    Many companies will conduct their annual employee reviews at the beginning of the new calendar year. Here are the key elements for ensuring a good review process.

    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 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
    We may be in the grip of a virulent form of mass business codependence.
    Management
    Leadership requires a lot of consistency and discipline and is one of the biggest challenges facing small business owners.
    Management
    The truth is, nearly every manager demonstrates a little FETCH once in a while.
    Management
    Too often, rationalizing is an unhappy accident that leads to loss of market share, loss of profit margin, loss of jobs, and loss of a business. Unintended consequences are expensive.
    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.
    Management
    An entity worthy of allegiance, clearly defined challenges that require significant effort to achieve, and strong leadership. That’s the recipe for creating pride in a workplace.
    Management
    I don’t think companies can afford to continue to operate in the old hierarchical ways. Those structures will be the dinosaur bones in the dirt within this century.
    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.

    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.

    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

    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.