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A Thinker’s View of Health Insurance
Hold your horses. I am going to talk about health insurance.
However, I am going to avoid waxing too political... primarily because I am tired of the politics surrounding a financial decision. I am tired of the Democrats accusing the Republicans of being partisan and vice versa.
I think that if people understood that health insurance is a financial decision and not a decision based on “caring” or “compassion” then we would probably come to a solution to our problem.
The premise of this post is that the problem with the health care debate is the assumption that health care insurance actually costs less than just paying for the service.
So, follow me on a couple of key concepts. continue reading...
Don’t Oversell It… It Will Just Be Spam.
You have the picture in your mind of the stereotypical salesman.
Pure CHEESE!
Just because we apply this vision of a sales person to car salesmen, you see people like this all the time.
It’s the multi-level marketer that always want to talk to you about “a once in a lifetime business opportunity.
It’s the real estate broker that is always pitching how much he can sell your house.
It’s the person that always is trying to convince you that what you are doing can be done better if you just try the latest and greatest.
When someone is overbearing, we know it.
When we are overbearing, no one tells us. continue reading...
What are you willing to change?
Yeah, I get it. It is a rough economy. Businesses are failing. People are out of work. Making it through the tough economy is just plain tough.
Blah, Blah, Blah.
Forgive me if I sound insensitive… or don’t forgive me, I don’t care.
Times change (the people voted for change, didn’t they). Situations change.
The real question is, “Are you willing to change?”
Are you willing to change your life style? Are you willing to change the amount of money you make? Are you willing to change your approach to the way you run your business? continue reading...
Combined Experience is Meaningless
I see companies all the time try to put their experience in terms that seems to make them look better than they are.
The way they often will do that is say they have so many years of “combined” experience.
I, personally, think this is a bunch of bull and you need to watch out for companies that do it.
Let me give you a scenario.
Let’s say you deal with a company that says they have over 25 years of combined experience.
Now, ask yourself, what does that mean? Are there 3 employees with an average of 8.33 years each? Are there 10 employees with 2.5 years each? Are there 25 employees with 1 year each?
See the problem?
But way, there’s more! continue reading...
You Can't Win Them All
As an ethical business owner, you try to provide the best product and service you can to all your clients and potential clients.
If you are a sales person (a good one) you'll do the same.
Every day, I have to remind myself that sometimes that is just not possible.
The key to success, in my opinion, to any business is appropriately understanding when to be willing to lose. You have to be willing to understand that you can't (and shouldn't) win them all.
Two and a half years ago, before I started Tribute Media, I wrote a simple blog post on the concept that if you try to be everything to everyone you'll end up being nothing to no one (I know the grammar problem... but you can read the post here.)
The challenge for a business owner with everything on the line (the same goes for a salesman trying to make a commission) is to remember that it is okay to say no. It is okay to lose a deal once in a while.
I am not suggesting that you go out of your way to lose a deal. What I am saying is if the deal doesn't work for your company, you need to be willing to walk away.
As a simple example... continue reading...
Snagit for the Mac - NOW HERE!
I am giddy as a school girl... well, maybe not that giddy, but I am pleased.
I moved to a Mac about 4 months ago (best decision I ever made). There was one piece of software that I missed above all. That was Snagit. I use screen capture all the time to communicate with my team and Snagit, by far, is the best tool out there.
I found a number of other tools that approximate what Snagit can do, but none are as good. continue reading...
Business Growth and Walt Minnick
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I know, it has been a long time since I have written on this blog.
In fact, it has been just over nine months.
I have written a bit on my personal blog, but not here.
But, I have a good excuse.
Business has been good. Tribute Media has more than doubled in revenue and we have increased from four employees to ten in the last 12 months.
I have a picture of Walt Minnick to the left because I attended a town hall meeting with him today. He came to speak where the Tribute Media offices are at VengaWorks. He spoke with small business owners and I had the opportunity to speak to the same audience about my business a little. I decided that rather than plugging my business, I spoke for just a few minutes on business growth. What I tried to accomplish was to give other business owners a hope that their businesses can grow an they can be successful in 2010. continue reading...
New Drupal 6 Theme
The Drupal community has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. I think it is a testament to good system design, an advanced feature set that puts most other systems to shame and strong community involvement. I think that one thing that really helps this is the fact that Drupal is built as an open source platform.
As we built our company over the last year and a half, I have been a little disappointed with the lack of spectacular theme options available in the community. Oh, there are a few, but most aren’t something to write home about.
We have been building themes for sometime. We have built a lot of themes. We finally decided to contribute back to the community. continue reading...
Is 2 Trillion Really a Big Number?
I tend to think the main reason why congress is so willing to spend our money is that they forget what big numbers really are. The attitude is, “well it is only $20 million… so what’s the big deal.”
“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.” (Senator Everett Dirkson)
I think that the reason why the populous doesn’t scream more at the spending of money is two fold. First, people in general don’t have any idea how much money we are talking about and second, people in general don’t realize that it is their money.
The 2 Trillion from the title is from my last post on how much new debt we are incurring via the bailouts in just the last year. And they have added even more since that post. In reality… it is significantly more… not just a little more.
So, how much money are we really talking about? continue reading...
The politics of pots and kettles
Earlier this week, there was a summit of governor’s called by President Obama. The most interesting to me was one news report indicating they were going to talk about “fiscal responsibility.”
The fact that elected elite vote to spend yours and money today and put this country into such significant deficit that our children’s children will be still struggling to see the end of debt tells me that our elected officials are too entrenched in the attitude of “spend what I want” that this level of hypocrisy is laughable.
These are the people that are spending over $23,000 of every tax payers money in less than 1 year just in a bunch of “stimulus” bills.
The last people that can claim any level of fiscal responsibility are those that so freely spend your money and mine without thought of the reality they are causing.
But, what does this really mean? Is this something we should worry about? continue reading...
