Columns
A lot of content is built around inspiring you to start something. The challenge is that we often don’t know when to quit. The best time to quit something destined to be unsuccessful is before you begin. This little book is all about determining what to launch and what to stop.
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An escrow company in northern California was forced to close its doors and lay off its entire staff when cybercriminals nabbed $1.5 million from its bank account. After penetrating the network and finding a way into the firm’s bank account, the hackers wired $432,215 from the firm’s bank to an account in Moscow. That was followed by two more transfers totaling $1.1 million, this time to banks in Heilongjiang Province in China, near the Russian border.
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There is an old Wall Street expression about market timing that says, “It’s not about timing the market. It’s about time in the market.” People think a lot about price in markets but don’t think much about time. For example, think of the Coronavirus crash of March 2020. Stocks dropped 35 percent (which would rank it among the top great bear markets in history), but they only stayed down for a couple of months. I’m sure most people do not consider it one of the great bear markets in history. It happened so fast that nobody sold, and then everyone was bailed out. It ended up being a hiccup in the context of a great bull market.
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Recently, I spoke with a group of executives from our local Chamber of Commerce. Imagine a roomful of executives in their suits and ties, laptops out, ready to learn. I enter the room and simply ask, “How will you grow your company this year? By a show of hands, how many of you believe you will grow through “more sales,” of course?” The hands eagerly raise into the air. It just makes sense, right? If I want to grow my business, I need to sell more.
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Our most precious commodity is time—we only have so much each day, week, month, etc. Because it is such a precious and limited resource, we must fully understand that every minute you spend with the wrong person, you cheat the right person out of!
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Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tools available. It’s a direct way to reach your target audience and cultivate leads and, ultimately, sales. Let’s discuss the basics of email marketing: how it works, why it’s effective, and what you need to know before emailing your customers. I’ll also explain whether or not you should buy an email list and, finally, some email marketing platforms to get you started.
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“What if this could be easy?” When I read that line, I realized Greg McKeown was writing to an audience I was not part of. After all, “What if this could be easy?” isn’t a viable question for the work I am doing. Still, his book Essentialism had impacted me as I shared here, so I trudged forward through my unbelief as I continued to read Effortless, Then I ran face-first into this question he penned: “What is the simplest way to achieve this result?”
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I recently met with a prospect considering firing his IT Managed Services Provider. Often, this is due to a recurring service delivery failure of some sort, but more frequently, the reason is a breakdown in communication. In those cases, it is usually a problem between the business owner and the MSP’s management. In previous columns, I have advocated for frequent and regular meetings between the client and the service provider to avoid such misunderstandings.
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Tax collection data is now available for the City of Edmond’s Fiscal Year 2021-2022. Financial reports released by the City focus specifically on the two percent of collections that go directly into the General Fund, the primary operating fund for City services. In FY 21-22, sales tax collections totaled $43,700,141. This equals a year-to-date change of 8.41% over the $40,309,186 collected in FY 20-21. The largest single-month year-to-date change occurred in April 2022, when collections increased 19.21% over the same month in 2021.
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Volatility and uncertainty are not uncommon in the stock market and the economy. But that is even more so now. Inflation is running hot, wages aren’t keeping up, tech earnings are slowing down, and rates are creeping higher. Those are the things we know, and because the equity markets are forward-looking, it makes sense that these things are largely already priced into stocks. And yet we’re still waking up to sharp volatility and ugly down days. Welcome to my world.
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