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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
    Purse strings mean a lot in our society, and that simple truth plays out in the most basic of our interactions. How we treat one another should be based on something far more valuable than that.
    Merchandising
    Part 1 of the series. Each industry, community, and business must manifest this concept in different ways.
    Marketing
    Going with your gut is inadvisable when determining the safety of an electronics device. But it's an essential part of the toolbox when working with motivation and relationships.
    Retail
    You already know being in business for yourself is hard work. But working this hard for no money? Differentiate.
    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
    Forgiveness in non-religious terms. How to live a life of forgiveness, which is really just a life of acceptance and gentleness.
    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.

    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
    Millennials are changing everything we know about luxury. Here are 5 key areas your luxury business must master to stay relevant.
    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
    If business is about continuous improvement, then people must be continuously improving too. Giving better feedback will help your business improve.
    Management
    We all owe ourselves and all our present and future employees something very important – a commitment to excellence and continuing knowledge development in our chosen fields of endeavor.
    Management
    An annual employee review process can be a powerful driver for business growth and innovation. Unfortunately, in most companies it's not used for that at all. Here's how to improve.
    Management
    First in a series of 8 articles on becoming a better leader. How do you balance patience with people against impatience with progress?
    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
    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.

    Video

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

    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.

    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.

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

    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. )"