Category Archives: Business

Honey, Do You Want to Starve?

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According to this article it seems that the owner of a small painting company is at risk of losing a $5,000 contract with a school system because he fired a woman and was honest (or dumb) enough to leave a voice mail saying he was firing her because she’s a woman, not for any legitimate work-based cause.  It gets better.

In the message the guy said that his wife found out he had some "girls" working for him and wouldn’t stand for that.  Seems she’s the jealous type.  So, he said, to avoid conflict at home he decided to fire the women.

Oh, there are so many things I could write here.  I’ll just limit it to these:

  1. Dude, I admire your honesty but what were you thinking?  It can’t be a surprise that your wife is jealous, so why put yourself in that position?  It sounds like you are probably an honorable person so I’d recommend keeping the employees since they didn’t do anything wrong (i.e. they held up their side of the bargain) and dealing with your issues at home.
  2. Maam, do you think in this day and age your husband will be able to do his job without encountering any women?  Are you going to fly into a jealous rage every time he talks to a female customer?  Do you want him to not hire the best available worker just because she’s a woman?  Do you want to eat and have a roof over your head?
  3. Have either one of you heard of marriage counseling?  I think you might need it.

So You Wanna Be an Entrepreneur

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Do you think you want to be an entrepreneur?  Then you should take this personality evaluation before you get going.  It’s free and I think it’s probably pretty accurate.

I used to be very skeptical of things like this (Myers Briggs comes to mind), but after being subjected to a bunch of them and finding the results to be accurate, and exceptionally predictive, I guess you could say I’ve learned to accept them.

Source of link: Harry Joiner’s Blog

Acronymania – Or How My ADD Works

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Many times in my life I’ve wondered if my short attention span is a positive or a negative.  The answer, of course, is that it depends.  Take this morning.

I was catching up on my blog reading when I came across this post on Steve Rubel’s excellent PR-related blog, Micropersuasion.  It’s about how Major League Baseball is partnering with Six Apart, the company that provides Typepad the service I use for this blog, to enable baseball fans to create their own blogs for a cool $50 a year (okay, $49.95).  The site is called MLBlogs.

Now the reason I was doing my blog reading in the first place is that it was taking one of my applications more than, oh, three seconds to load.  So I thought I’d multi-task and check out the old blog reader.  There I saw Steve’s post, read the words "baseball" and "blog" in the same sentence and decided I had to read about it. 

I’m halfway through the post when I realize that Steve’s description of what his PR firm is advising its clients to do with blogs (Find, Listen, Engage, Enable) has an ironic acronym, FLEE.  I mean, what PR firm wants the message to its clients to say FLEE, even subliminally?  So I write a quick comment pointing out the ironic acronym and not five minutes later Steve replies.

So thanks to my ADD I’ve written a comment on one of the world’s uber-blogs (Steve is quite influential in blog, PR and media circles) and got a reply comment from the uberblogger himself!  This has to be a good thing, right?

Then I look at my watch and once again I’m behind schedule.  There you have it.

Back to 1999

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A new service called Insider Pages takes the concept of a  referral network, i.e. asking your friends for the number of the contractor they used for their addition last year, and then lets you add your own recommendations. 

Basically it’s just a referral network that you can build for yourself, invite your friends to contribute, and then add your own ratings, comments, etc.  In other words it is highly dependant on its users building it up to what some call "critical mass."  I tried searching for a plumber in my area (North Carolina) and it came up with two sponsored listings in CA, along with this note: "We are working on getting reviews
for Plumbing Contractors.
Please add a recommendation to help get us started."

Feels like 1999 all of the sudden.  I’m pulling every dime I can out of NASDAQ…well I would if I had any dimes in it.

Inc’s Best Places

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This month’s issue of Inc. magazine has a list of the best places for doing business in America.  The list contains 274 cities and ranks them using a formula that measures job growth.  To measure growth they looked at current-year growth, average annual growth over three years and growth over the first and second halves of the 10 years ending September, 2004.

Unfortunately for the NC Triad (Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point) it ranked 234, down from 147 last year.  It really isn’t a surprise given the hammering that the prominent industries around here (textiles, furniture) have taken.  It will be interesting to see what effect the new Dell plant being built here will have on next year’s ranking.

Me being a glass-half-full kind of guy I look at the Triad as a great entrepreneurial opportunity.  Why?  Lower costs (rent is cheap, labor is abundant, and wages are lower due to low cost of living), good infrastructure, good local universities, and great quality of life.  You also have easy access to other metro areas (1 hour to Charlotte, 1 1/2 hours to Raleigh-Durham, 45 minute flight to DC and Atlanta), so you get the benefit of their business without the traffic. So if you’re an entrepreneur come on in, the water’s great.

Speaking of DC: My old stomping ground, Northern Virginia, leapt from 54 last year to 11
this year.  The magazine attributes it to all the war spending, and
interestingly separates Northern Virginia from DC (28, up from 29) and
the Maryland Suburbs (29, down from 25).

Intelligence Analsyis 05

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My current "big" work project is marketing and managing the exhibit hall for the 2005 International Conference on Intelligence Analysis.  This is definitely an interesting gig, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m dealing with a lot of people involved with the government intelligence community rather than the private sector competitive intelligence people I normally deal with.

The conference is in two weeks, and it ought to be pretty interesting. Will update later.