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The Spreadsheet That Almost Killed a Marketing Budget That Was Working
A Casablanca skincare brand we work with tried to cut its marketing budget 40% during a slow month because leadership read it as overhead, not investment. We pulled the actual payback numbers,…
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The Best Savings Account Is the One That Fits How You Manage Money
People focus on the savings account with the highest APY. It makes sense. The rate is easy to compare, and earning more interest sounds like the smart decision. The issue is that…
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Your Business Is Running Exactly as It Was Built
The team is busy. Customers are coming in. Revenue may even be growing. Yet somehow the owner is answering the same questions every day, solving the same problems every week, and putting…
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As the trade war deepens, Trump renames Lake Ontario
Amidst a burgeoning trade war with border neighbor and largest trading partner, President Donald Trump has issued yet another executive order to remain a large body of water. This time, its Lake…
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What Trading Taught Me About Small Business Cash Flow
I have spent more than 25 years trading stocks, options, and futures, and about half of that also running a business. The two look nothing alike from the outside. Internally they run…
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The Quiet Repricing of the European Market
In late 2024, thousands of sellers who had been shipping into Europe for years opened their marketplace accounts to find listings suspended and a request for documentation naming something called an EU…
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Most Campaigns Do Not Fail at Launch. They Fail in Week Two.
Across client campaigns, the pattern that separates the ones that produced results from the ones that quietly disappeared was almost never the creative. It was whether anybody had a plan for the…
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Trump slams NYC ‘pied-a-terre’ tax, but can do little to stop it
President Donald Trump made another bold proclamation that has left many protesting, yet again, that he is attempting to overreach the authority of the federal government, this time aimed at his hometown.…
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The Advertising Metric Small Businesses Get Wrong — and the One That Actually Pays
Most small businesses judge their advertising by the wrong number. They watch cost per click or cost per lead, celebrate when it drops, and quietly go out of pocket anyway. The metric…
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A Quiet Transformation Is a Failing Transformation
I have learned to be more concerned when a transformation becomes too quiet than when it is openly contested. Resistance is inconvenient, but it tells leadership where the doubts are. Quiet compliance…
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Your Company Does Not Have a Communication Problem. It Has an Ownership Problem.
Every leadership team I talk to describes the same symptom. Things move slowly. Decisions take weeks. Work gets handed between functions and loses fidelity at every pass. The diagnosis is almost always…
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Why Oil and Gas Leadership Must Extend Beyond the Business
Oil and gas have been the driving force behind global development for more than a hundred years. The two have not only facilitated growth in different sectors but also contributed to the…
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U.S debt trips $40 T mark—yes, that’s a T, for trillion
In a dubious milestone, the national debt of the United States tipped the $40 trillion mark last week, capping a decade-length spending spree that has brought the ire of not only fiscal…
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The Three Numbers That Decide Whether Your Marketing Budget Works
Ask a small business owner what a lead costs them right now and watch what happens. Most cannot answer. They can tell you what they spend per month, they can tell you…
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Rubio social media post draws ire
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently taken to social media, broadly proclaiming “American citizenship is not for sale”, though his claim has been taken to task in lieu of a recent…
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The Quarter We Stopped Hiding Our Founder
When we audited where our best customers actually came from last quarter, the answer was uncomfortable. It was not the paid ads. It was not the polished company account. Almost every closed…
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Planning to sign an SBA loan personal guarantee? Here’s what you should know.
Many entrepreneurs believe that forming an LLC or shifting it to a C-corporation builds an impenetrable wall between their business and their personal finances. That belief often falls apart the moment a…
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A Paradigm Shift for Teams in the Age of AI: Re-Architecting Work
For a long time, we’ve designed teams around task execution. Someone owns the process. Someone owns the reporting. Someone owns the approval. Someone owns the follow-up. It’s a model built for repeatability,…
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Beyond Grand Legacies: Why the Smallest Acts of Leadership Often Leave a Long Shadow
A legacy is often understood as a grand accomplishment that echoes through generations. But I’ve come to see it differently. Taking inspiration from Pericles of Athens — “What you leave behind is…
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Bond markets hit their highest mark in decades, as inflation and rate hikes loom
Long-term borrowing costs are ballooning on a global scale, making relief for potential home buyers unlikely, and businesses struggling to navigate a changing landscape not only challenged by rising prices and inflation,…
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Barriers to a Great Hiring Cipher: The Specificity Problem
Most hiring mistakes don’t happen in the interview room. They happened weeks earlier, when someone sat down to define the role and decided that “strong leadership skills” and “drives results” were specific enough…
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Getting Recommended By AI Isn’t The Win. Surviving The Next Five Seconds Is.
Everyone in marketing right now is chasing the same trophy: getting recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. Agencies are selling “AI visibility” packages. Founders are asking me if their business “shows up”…
