Build a great company on a powerful foundation!
THERE IS A POPULAR PHRASE, 
“You are what you eat.” If you’re unfamiliar with it, the idea is that you should be careful about what you put in your body – because it is the foundation for what your body becomes.
This is a powerful concept that can be applied to other domains as well.
A number of years ago, I started noticing that my state of mind reflected what I was watching, listening to, and reading at the time. Read the rest of this entry »
MY FATHER DIED in 1994 after a six month battle with cancer. It wasn’t an easy time, but the help given us by Hospice was a godsend. It made all the difference in the world, and saved our relationships.
I had the opportunity this week to speak with Deanna Cochran, founder of Quality of Life Care in Austin, Texas. Her specialty is as an End of Life Doula, a field I’d never heard of before.
A-MAIZE’N KETTLE CORN is a family-owned company that started up just this February by Ed and Jan Frumes.
After extensive backgrounds in the financial services industry, they decided to make a change and do something that was smaller, more fun, and would help the community.
They’ve ended up with a great family run business which sells a popular product, and is easily integrated into fundraising and charitable benefits.
NOBODY 
CAN SUCCEED by themselves. Well, at least not with any significant venture that we’re talking about in the business world.
There are several ways to get support from others:
I hope you see why these methods become more powerful as you go down the list.
THIS IS THE CRAZY SEASON 
for consumers and the companies which serve them. We’re less than a month away from Christmas, and in the US we just had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a time for family and brotherly love.
Then, OMG, we totally obliterate that goodwill with the worst bout of consumerism this planet has ever seen. It’s getting worse every year.
ACOUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I talked about expanding the way you look at employee satisfaction. 
It turns out that similar concepts can be applied to your relationship with your customers and competition.
You can really get wrapped up in worrying about your competition. You sell hamburgers, I sell hamburgers, there’s five other places down the street who sell hamburgers. There’s only a limited number of people who want to BUY hamburgers on any particular day, so your mission is to steal those customers away from the competition.
I propose that this is the wrong way to look at it.
UNITE FOR LITERACY 
is a great organization that makes books available to children in the United States and around the globe. They provide no-cost reading material to emergent readers – both young kids and those learning a second or third language.
A great concept for a charitable non-profit, right? Sure. But these folks have a unique for-profit business model that’s part of an emerging trend in companies which do good while making money.
I had a chance to talk this week with Unite for Literacy’s CEO, Michael McGuffee. He, Mark Condon and Kurt Hoeven started this company a couple of years ago, based on 20 years of powerful experience working with families who live on Native American reservations. They saw firsthand what happens when kids lack a connection to written language, whether English or their mother tongue.
YOU 
ONLY HAVE a limited amount of money to pay your employees, I understand that. As a result, you’re probably going to pay people differently, spending the most money where you think it will give you the greatest benefit. Primarily, you’ll pay your most valuable people more than the others.
There’s other factors too, yes, but the effect is the same. Most likely you have some workers who feel adequately rewarded, while others feel slighted. Even if you try to be cagey about pay levels – especially if you do – people will pick up on the fact that they’re paid less.
This is one of the biggest quandaries about running a business. Given that you only have limited resources, how on earth can you pay everyone what you’d like to?
BRENDA AND RICHARD LUCIO own the 
Blue Agave Grill in Fort Collins, the fourth restaurant they’ve started in northern Colorado.
I was introduced to Brenda and the company a few weeks ago, and was particularly struck by the relationship she has with employees. So I sat down with her this week to discover the secrets behind this.
As you may know, the restaurant industry is infamous for its levels of turnover. Companies often pay below minimum wage, attracting youngsters who have little loyalty and given minimal training.
After all, why bother with extensive training when the employee’s going to leave in just a few months?
BILL TRACK 50 
is a great little company focused on helping people to be better integrated with what’s going on in our government.
It’s a straightforward idea: There’s loads of public information about what’s going on in legislative action, and people need to have a simple way to track it, pull information together, and use it for their own decision making.
Wait a sec: All this information is publicly available, right? Why would anybody pay to get it?
That’s a darned good question.
The Values-Based Business 