Category: Entreprenuers

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Picking and Dickering: America’s New Hobby

antiquesOwning a piece of the past has universal appeal. According to philosopher and antique dealer Leon Rosenstein, it’s the value, uniqueness, and beauty of older items that attracts us, along with their historical and cultural associations. For some, buying and selling tangible pieces of history is a business – for others, it is a calling. Mike Wolfe, one of the stars of the television show “American Pickers,” says that discovering and restoring old relics from the past to their former glory is akin to saving America’s history, one piece at a time.
 
While lots of people are familiar with antique collecting, many are unaware of the growing market for other collectibles, from cars, to toys, to comic books, to folk art. According to the U.S. Economic Census of 2012, the industry accounts for more than $13 billion in revenues for almost 20,000 businesses, from one-man shops to giant online auction firms such as eBay and Heritage Auctions.
 
Everyone, it seems, has a touch of nostalgia from time to time, a sentimental yearning to return to days of past happiness. Antiques and collectibles are tangible evidence of history, monuments of a slower, simpler age when the future was bright and obstacles seemed easy to overcome.
 
Unlike most retail experiences, acquiring pieces of the past requires diligent searching followed by old-time price negotiation – “dickering” – between buyer and seller. Value is in the minds of the two parties, rather than any objective analysis, since many items are one-of-a kind. As a consequence, a successful acquisition requires a discerning eye and disciplined negotiations. For many, the opportunity to joust over price, pitting one’s wits against another’s, is as rewarding as acquiring the items themselves.

The Appeal of Picking

Finding old treasures can be both financially and emotionally rewarding. While the majority of pickers buy older pieces for their artistic or nostalgic appeal, many have found searching flea markets, garage sales, and old barns and houses to be exceptionally profitable. For example:
 
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How to Create & Host a Webinar

webinar1As the Internet becomes more and more ubiquitous in the workplace, webinars – or what some refer to as “online seminars” – have become increasingly popular. Educators and marketers have embraced webinars as a forum for spreading their message; sponsors find their effectiveness and long shelf-life appealing; and attendees are learning to take advantage of their low cost and convenience.
 
If you haven’t introduced webinars into your marketing, customer service, or employee training efforts – whether you’re running a Fortune 500 company or a one-person operation – you may be missing out on a significant opportunity.

Understanding Webinars

Simply stated, a webinar is a multicast, interactive audio-video seminar over the web that offers the opportunity to give, receive, and discuss information. According to an ON24 survey, the average webinar in 2013 attracted 433 registrants. Almost one-half of sponsors participating (49%) in a 2013 poll by MarketingSherpa ranked webinars and webcasts as the most effective marketing tool they used, well above mobile apps (35%), blogs (27%), press releases (21%), and social media marketing (18%).
 
Webinars first appeared around 1994 and have become increasingly popular as costs of production have dropped and technology for communication with broad audiences has improved. More than 80% of the webinars in the ON24 study had in excess of 200 attendees, while 15.2% had more than 1,000 attendees.

It’s important to understand the distinction between webinars and other Internet-based forums, such as online meetings and podcasts:

Online Meetings

Also called web meetings, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and virtual conferencing. In online meetings, a range of 2 to 30 participants are simultaneously involved in the discussion, which can be a corporate board meeting or project team discussion. Companies typically use online meetings for brainstorming, where participants familiar with a subject can provide input and discussion on the topic at hand.

Podcasts

Sometimes called webcasts, these are usually broadcast without interactivity. The word “podcast” is a combination of “broadcast” and Apple’s then-revolutionary “iPod,” which could play digital video and audio files. The availability of low-cost, high-quality cameras, as well as video and audio recording software, enables businesses of all sizes to advertise their products and services cost-effectively via this platform.

Benefits of a Webinar to Sponsor and Participants

Webinars allow sponsors to communicate a message to hundreds of participants in real-time. As a consequence, they are equally popular with educators and students, marketing professionals and potential customers, and business trainers and employees.
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Their advantages include the following:
 
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How to Prepare to Sell Your Business

sellbiz1New job applicants get haircuts, shine their shoes, and practice their interview skills while preparing to hopefully land a position. Those seeking to sell a home often repaint inside and out, primp the landscaping, and clean from top to bottom before hosting an open house.
 
And a business owner who hopes to receive a fair price for his or her company would be wise to engage in such “dressing up” activities as well. While it may go without saying, putting your best foot forward is always the best strategy to maximize the value of any sale.

The Importance of Seller Objectivity

Achieving a sale at the price you want means that you should look at your company as objectively as possible, problems and all. This prepares you to counter any buyer’s objections or degradation of your company’s value, and allows you to maximize assets and minimize (or at least be prepared to handle) flaws.
 
Recognize that it is easy to get an inflated sense of importance, especially when a stranger comes calling with an interest in buying your company. After all, starting and running a successful company is not an accident, nor a matter of luck. Long-term business success requires a combination of intelligence, guts, and hard work.
 
As a consequence, many owners assume interested buyers understand the business opportunity and profit potential of their company. They presume that an acceptable offer will be forthcoming, only to be surprised when the would-be buyer tells the owner that their baby – the company – is ugly.
 
Getting the highest price for your business requires a thorough understanding of the opportunities and threats facing your business. Potential buyers focus on the future of a business, not its past. Accordingly, why would any potential buyer be interested in your company? Does it offer unique products or services? Does it dominate its geographic and industry markets? Does it have capabilities and capacity that are difficult or expensive to replicate?
 
Buyers are most interested in those companies whose products and services are in growing markets with unrestricted pricing flexibility or obvious expense reduction possibilities. They seek under-utilized – but valuable – assets that can be exploited, especially by the potential purchaser. Similarly, any threat to the business must be identified, quantified, and strategized.
 
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Understanding Economic Subsidies & Incentives for Relocation

walmart1-ken-wolterThe taxpayers of America are unknowing victims of corporate extortion, effectively subsidizing big companies at the rate of billions of dollars each year for corporate relocations. The subsidies are often in the form of tax benefits, but may even be cash payments to companies threatening to move from their existing location—or to companies willing to move if the bribe is sufficient.
 
Consider moves from California and Texas alone. According to an April 2014 editorial in the Dallas Morning News, more than 250 companies have relocated from California to Texas in recent years. Corporate and Texas officials claim that the moves are motivated by Texas’ almost nonexistent regulatory environment, low wage costs, and lack of a state personal income tax. Not surprisingly, officials rarely mention what the news refers to as “a handsome dowry”, including outright cash payments, subsidization of relocation costs, and years of property tax abatements.
 
It is not just Texas and California where a battle for incentives occur, and the companies with their hands out include the largest, most profitable corporations in the world. Since the 1970s, there have been more than 240 mega-deals across the continental United States, each with subsidies of $75 million or more. According to the Walmart Subsidy Watch, Walmart – the largest company in America, with earnings in excess of $16.5 billion in 2014 – has benefited from more than $1.2 billion in “tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing, and outright grants from state and local governments.”
 
In an era of state and local government budget shortfalls, requiring cut-backs in education and infrastructure spending, academic studies report that state and local governments offer more than $50 billion annually in incentives either trying to keep businesses or to lure them from other U.S. locations. According to University of Iowa Professors Alan Peters and Peter Fisher, after decades of policy experimentation and hundreds of scholarly studies, there is little evidence that incentives work.
 
Thomas Peterson of the Goldwater Institute is more blunt, saying, “They just don’t work…You have average citizens and taxpayers subsidizing wealthy corporations.” Some critics note that relocations are a zero-sum game since, according to CityLab, few new jobs are created, but are simply moved from one locale to another.
 
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