Are your services significant?
Significant objects are worth more than regular objects. At least that is the conclusion arrived upon by the significant objects project and its team of researchers. Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, a writer and a journalist respectively, set out to prove that stories can increase the value of objects. While it is tempting to view […]
Amazon Prime Lessons for Service Contractors
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 […]
Whole Foods Whole World
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 […]
Real Deal Customer Service Saves the Day After a Flat on I-95
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 […]
Money for Nothing
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 […]
Lessons in Customer Service from the Utility Company – NOT
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 […]
The Metal Benders Will Steal Your Customers
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 […]
What’s your company worth?
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 […]
3rd Annual ServiceTrade Fishing Tournament – Charleston, SC – October 19, 2016
We are counting down the days to the Digital Wrap Conference in Isle of Palms, SC, and I am happy to announce that the fishing tournament format is all set. As many of you know, we have quite a reputation to uphold based upon previous success with our tournaments on the Outer Banks of NC. […]
Stop Selling Parts and Labor! Sell the Program!
In the first chapter of my book, The Digital Wrap, I quoted Marc Andreessen: “Software is eating the world.” It is not exactly a quote, but rather a reference to the editorial that Marc wrote for the Wall Street Journal back in 2011. Marc is like the godfather of the Internet as he was the […]