When I’m on the road and talking to small business owners, one of the biggest problems they seem to face is a lack of time. Throughout history, the invention of time-saving devices usually ends up creating more work for us. When the time required to complete one task is shortened by a new invention, another […]
Olive Garden has been in the news a lot recently. The chain offered a $100 “pasta pass” to 1,000 customers that allows pass holders to chow down on unlimited pasta for seven weeks. That marketing ploy got a lot of coverage in the press, but more important to the restaurant in the long run is […]
How cozy are you with your local planning commission, city council or county officials? If you want to preserve existing small businesses and the look of a local business district that has evolved over many years, those are the decision makers you need on your side. While it’s popular to blame national big-box retailers for […]
Pornography in the workplace is a problem in more ways than you might imagine. Here are two examples: In a case that got a lot of publicity, a high-ranking official at the Environmental Protection Agency downloaded more than 7,000 porn files and spent as much as six hours of his work day viewing them. A […]
Some years ago a friend of mine had an idea for a new cross-country ski binding that he thought would be an improvement on what was available then. He made a simple drawing and took it to a local fabricator to get an estimate for a prototype. The cost was so high, he abandoned the […]