I sat down for breakfast this week with a friend and really fine appraiser who recently started his own business. A lot of his work is in the commercial mortgage sector, which is pretty typical for a fledgling practice. I don't do a lot of mortgage work, so I was surprised to hear of the [...]
I inspected an industrial property the other day, one location in dozens (maybe hundreds?) of locations owned by this company. The company has got to be one of the most vertically integrated businesses in the world. They design, the manufacture, they distribute, they print point of service signs. They print one million labels a day. On [...]
Answer Yes or No to the following: Is the work you do every day repetitive? Do you know the answer before you start? Can someone be trained to do what you do in a month or less? Is what you do something that any healthy adult can do? Does your work involve forms of any [...]
This past Saturday was my 56th birthday. Not a particularly special birthday, but I had a lot of fun training to volunteer for the upcoming President's Cup at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City. It was a golf nerd's dream. During the course of the day, my Inbox swelled with well-wishes from well-wishers, which [...]
All virtues have a vice flip side. Thrift can turn to greed. Self respect can turn to pride. Righteous anger can turn to wrath. And so it is with marketing. Marketing is meant influence behavior, to change people. Through empathy, generosity and vulnerability, trust in the marketer grows and the student-customers can be influenced to [...]
According to an article on the website Futurism, an incinerator in Switzerland was recently fitted with a carbon capture plant that is reportedly 1,000 times more efficient than plant photosynthesis. Filters capture the CO2 over several hours. The filters are then heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit (no great feat, your teakettle does the same thing and [...]
Here are some software and web-based services that I find really helpful: ToDoIst This web-based To Do list software runs beautifully on all platforms: Windows, Apple, Android, even Google Chrome. You can set up an infinite number of To Do lists for your business and personal life, and your ToDoIst lists can be shared with [...]
Wind and solar power are getting more efficient and cheaper all the time. Which is great, as long as the wind blows and the sun shines. The Holy Grail of research in Clean Energy field has been storage. We need bigger, more efficient and cheaper batteries. Well, this is about to happen. According to a [...]
We purchased a new washer and a new dryer several months ago. The washer has a setting called Fan Fresh. When the wash cycle finishes, the machine breathes in fresh air and occasionally tumbles the clothes to keep wrinkles at bay. The Fan Fresh cycle lasts up to 12 hours. When we wash a load [...]
Yesterday on my way to get lunch I passed two restaurants and one retail store in a nearby strip center. All three businesses had Help Wanted signs in the windows. This is admittedly a small sample, but we have seen some solid economic growth in the past several months and both legal and illegal immigration are way [...]
