Everyone knows Amazon has been on a tear lately. Here is their stock performance over the last 5 years as compared to the broader S&P 500. Wow! A big part of that success has been the Prime subscription program. Amazon customers who subscribe to Prime to receive the following benefits: Priority shipping. It varies […]
I bet the grocers that had a bad day when Walmart got into groceries about fifteen years ago are having a really bad week now that Amazon has announced their intention to buy Whole Foods. The innovations Amazon is going to bring to grocery buying go well beyond low price and internal operational tweaks. Amazon […]
A flat tire on my boat trailer on Interstate 95 ranks high on my list of things that suck most in life. Of course, it has to be on the traffic side of the trailer to really suck. It sucked on Saturday morning at 8:50 when I heard the blowout and looked in the driver’s […]
In 1985, Marc Knopfler, the front man for the band Dire Straits, overheard a guy in an appliance store grudgingly admiring the MTV rockers performing on the store display TVs. Knopfler memorialized the reflections he overheard in the grammy winning, number one hit song “Money for Nothing” later that year. The song opens with the […]
It is fortunate for the utility companies that they are protected by high walls of regulation that prevent new entrants from competing with them. I had to call customer service at Duke Power yesterday because I need to change the service at a location where I am now the personal representative of the owner. I […]
Just over ten years ago, Apple announced the iPhone. Blackberry was the smartphone king with a great keyboard and wheel/ball for email power users. Now Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and Blackberry is out of the smartphone market. More applications and a better user interface won the day by a landslide. […]
These words of wisdom were imparted by Reese Bobby to his son Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (clip and clip). Winners get more than their fair share, and a loser is just a loser. No one cares about second place. In our fast moving world, the winners often take […]
If you ask equipment manufacturers (metal benders), they will claim that your customers are technically their customers. What’s changing now is that they want to have their customers pay them for maintenance and repair services instead of you. I am, of course, speaking about how manufacturers are increasingly embracing the service business as the […]
In The Digital Wrap Book, Chapter 14 was titled the Digital Wrap Formula for Maximizing the Value of Your Business. The chapter covered the technical, financial calculus that can be used to determine the amount a financial buyer might pay for a service contracting business (read the related blog post). It also offered a good […]
