Mark Watson is the founder of Aquila Capital Partners. I had the pleasure of listening to one of his interviews and an audience member asked him, in Q2 where he would invest $1 million. It’s the same question we’re answering at Flagstaff Ventures. Mark invests in the technology that drives a lot of insurance companies and his fund is only available to institutional investors or family ... »
During the pandemic, there has been a run on seeds. With vacations and business travel cancelled, people stayed home and grew vegetables and flowers. As Dr. Sue Stuart-Smith shares in her book, The Well Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature, there’s a lasting imprint of our hunter-gatherer heritage. “In the garden, we can grow hope,” she says, “it grounds us and g... »
In the last few months of 2021, The Harris Poll collected data to see how the United States felt entering 2022. As we enter the third year of the pandemic, mass lockdowns are a distant memory, vaccines are readily available and the economy grew at the fastest pace since 1984, but Americans are anxious, uncertain and stressed out. Let’s take a look at some of the data from the poll: Ants in O... »
“The omicron coronavirus variant is slowing the economic recovery, making worker shortages for already- shorthanded employers more severe and leading consumers to pull back from spending on restaurants, hotels and airlines that have been battered by two years of pandemic upheaval,” reports David Lynch in The Washington Post. “Since it was first detected in southern Africa late last year, the... »
During a recent coaching call, I was asked about several specific investments I’ve made and my outlook on those assets. While the answers I gave were specific and strategic (i.e., fluid and reactive), the underlying principles were not and they centered around having skin in the game. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author, mathematician and former options trader talks frequently about having skin in... »
Before the pandemic, I’d sit at the bar of my favorite local Italian restaurant and order a Negroni, dinner and glass of wine. More than once, a bartender or server would ask me why my newspaper was pink. If you read the Financial Times, you’ve probably been asked the same question. The paper has been printed on a characteristic salmon colored paper since 1888. A lot has changed since ... »
Google dominates online advertising. The company reported revenue of $183 billion in 2020. More than $147 billion, or 80.3% of total revenue, came from Google’s ads business. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is on pace to grow 36.9% in 2021 to $250.6 billion in revenue. While regulators in Washington D.C. and Europe attempt to wrangle the digital advertising behemoth, smart marketers ... »
I played tennis with an attorney friend last weekend and I learned a few things. First, I learned my knees and right shoulder are not as young as they used to be. My joints groaned like the hull of a wooden ship in a heavy storm. Ice and Advil were my best friends for a few days after our match. Second, I learned about a huge law firm taking 90% of their employees and attorneys out of the office a... »
Danny Meyer, the famous founder of Union Square Hospitality and Shake Shack, calls mistakes the greatest renewable resource on earth. As humans, we make mistakes all day long. I made at least 20 mistakes just trying to write this article. Like waves in the ocean, there are always more mistakes coming. The real question, Meyer says, is what will we do with them? “Assuming they’re honest... »
In a wonderful conversation this week with a 5-10 year startup now producing over $40 million in annual revenue, spitting off lots of profit, I was pleased to hear the co-founder admit he struggled with a common problem I see happening right now in professional practices throughout the world–the problem of capital deployment. It’s hard to imagine the fact that 20% of the U.S. dollars in circulatio... »
Apple put privacy back under your control recently with its latest iPhone update, iOS 14.5, and the new feature called App Tracking Transparency. Apple announced this change last June and Facebook threw a historical hissy fit. Google has sworn to protect you from unwanted cookies but that’s only because it will strengthen their position as a dominant search advertiser and their business mode... »
In his latest book, The Quick Fix, author Jesse Singal, takes psychological research to task. He demonstrates over and over again how only half of all published experimental psychological findings are successfully replicated by other researchers. The subfield of social psychology fares even worse. Without a doubt, you’ve seen these trendy and popular concepts touted in TED Talks and the best... »
Last week I was browsing through a book on Epicurean Philosophy and stumbled across this great quote by Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 B.C. “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” How true this still rings today, 2,300 years later. Put in terms my thick little skull can understand, “Where we are ... »
As we continue to navigate the pandemic, our administrative team members have been working remotely since March 2020. Here’s what we’ve learned: Schedule fewer meetings No meetings back-to-back Designated “meeting-free time” Flexible work hours Find ways for remote colleagues to socialize We’ve also discovered lots of things don’t work as well online as they do in the real world. For example, long... »
The Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off coupon is so ubiquitous that one of the mailers was even found by FBI agents in the junk drawer of notorious gangster, Whitey Bulger. Comedians and television shows make fun of the coupon and I’ve done a fair amount of my own ribbing of the brand. At peak circulation, over a billion coupons were mailed per year. Nearly everyone has seen one of these or has one... »
In my work with clients abroad, I get to learn about all sorts of fun advertising regulations and standards. Because a full 20% of our client base is outside the U.S., I’ve been forced to learn quickly. In the United Kingdom, for example, they have the Advertising Standards Authority. It does nothing more than issue strongly-worded letters and seeing as how the British are so polite, even their st... »
If you observe the most productive and most successful people on the planet, you’ll notice three very important similarities in how they achieve results. It doesn’t matter if the person is an entrepreneur, doctor, lawyer, politician, religious leader, actor, teacher or any of a million different occupations. Those operating at the top 1-5% of their chosen field or profession have these three trait... »
In a few short months, Disney has gone from the envy of Hollywood to a company scrambling to adapt to a prolonged crisis. Without the anticipated summer blockbuster movie releases, the firm has been forced to realign its priorities. The reopening of Disneyland in California has been postponed indefinitely. Hong Kong Disneyland has shut down again and Disney World in Florida is on shaky ground. The... »
Ro, a digital health care startup, just raised another $200 million in venture capital, bringing its total to over $376 million. The company will use the funds to double its 70-person computer engineering team. With over $250 million in revenue generated last year, the firm’s latest round of funding came in at a $1.5 billion valuation. Ro currently runs a digital health site for men and anot... »
The first half of 2020 was one for the record books. We saw an entire decade’s worth of job gains vanish in two months. Then, about a third of the 21 million lost jobs came back. More than 1 in 7 U.S. workers lost their jobs during the economic shutdowns. Even though we’ve added jobs at a record pace in May and June, the unemployment rate remains at its highest level since the Gr... »
Today, when someone in Beijing gets the coronavirus again, the entire world knows about it within hours. 52 years after the Hong Kong flu, we still don’t know how many people actually died from it. The WHO says between 1 and 4 million people. That’s a pretty big range. For the dad reading this on Father’s Day, imagine if someone asked you how many kids you have and you said, “somewhere betwe... »
In a recent course on passive income streams, while teaching the concept of leveraging one’s time, I quoted the author of Rework, Jason Fried, who also happens to be the co-founder of Basecamp. Fried said, “40-hour weeks are made of 8-hour days. And 8 hours is actually a long time. It takes about 8 hours to fly direct from Chicago to London. Ever been on a transatlantic flight like tha... »
In coaching, consulting and reviewing the reports from our on-site trainers, human capital challenges are at the top of the list of items we’re hired to fix. As I’ve done with most systems, challenges and opportunities in business, I help my clients and trainers develop and deploy “litmus tests,” or quick “yes/no” tools to help guide next steps. Here’s one... »
From the first Netflix earnings call of 2020 and MarketWatch: “What does it mean to “watch” a show on a streaming service? For Netflix Inc., it now means viewing at least two minutes. The streaming service noted in its first quarterly earnings report of 2020 on Tuesday that it has changed the definition of viewership — while Netflix used to consider any customer that streamed 70% or mo... »
I’m back from a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, where we hosted 50+ TC Boot Camp attendees, three private coaching clients, a quarterly planning meeting for two of my companies and a scouting trip for a few long-shot investments. In two of the three private coaching meetings, a common theme we discussed was systems management. In a recent Look Over My Shoulder program, I reviewed business syste... »
Five years ago, Nir Eyal wrote a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which helped startup tech firms understand user psychology. He discussed the research on slot machines, which use variable rewards and pleasures that come at unpredictable intervals. If you haven’t read, Addiction by Design, it is both amazing and alarming. In response to pressure from psychologists and... »
Three months after its public debut, Uber posted a $5.2 billion loss that’s “impressively vast” even for a company whose business model is based on outspending the competition, said The Economist. Since its inception, Uber has lost a total of $14 billion. A few weeks ago it laid off 400 people from its marketing department, representing a third of the entire division, and has pla... »
From T.S. Eliot’s essay, The Perfect Critic, for the literary journal Athenaeum in 1920: “The vast accumulations of knowledge – or at least of information – deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when e... »
Most small business owners are used to giving answers, not asking questions. If you followed around some of the world’s top CEOs and leaders, you would find the exact opposite is true. The best leaders are great at asking questions, so that the best ideas win and the best answers quickly become evident, even if they arise from the least-expected team members. Management expert Peter Drucker ... »
From a recent Kiplinger editorial survey, “On Valentine’s Day, one in five die-hard sports fans turns down romance to watch a game. A good chunk of men, 31%, want their lovers to be bigger fans; 18% would take a pay cut to change their partners’ interest level. and both sexes would gain weight or add to their commutes to alter their lovers’ interest level in sports. A full ... »
I returned from a great meeting with clients recently and met my assistant to go over our plans for the coming week. If I’m in one of our offices, I like to go walking around and say hello, let people know I’m still alive and, occasionally, like I observed today, I get to see a new employee or two in training. At our departure desk today, there was a new smiling face in training and a ... »
At lunch this weekend, my 10-year-old son told me “at mom’s house, we keep our opinions to ourselves.” I didn’t even finish swallowing my food before I said, “I completely disagree,” quickly stopping all conversation at the table. I asked, “When should you freely share your opinion, even if it isn’t well-received?” All three of my boys had good... »
The Smithsonian magazine reported recently that archaeologists uncovered an ancient Roman bathroom, decorated with suggestive mosaics, meaning dirty jokes were built right into the walls. Just like bathroom humor has been around since the dawn of time, there are many things that never change, even in today’s fast-paced, always-on, hyper-connected society. For example, your patients will alwa... »
For many years now, I’ve taught doctors it’s best to position their practices as different not better. Consumers cannot judge whether your treatment is better or not until after the fact, so you might as well get on with the task of showing them how your office is different and solves problems that others are either unwilling or unable to solve. Consumers assume you’re going to provide great quali... »
Geraint Thomas won the 2018 Tour de France, becoming the first Welshman to take the top prize. I stopped watching the Tour several years ago, for the most part, because of the doping scandals that continue to reappear and the wide disparity in the funding of the top one or two teams and everyone else. Chris Froome, last year’s winner and Sky teammate of this year’s winner, tested positive for exce... »
In a large study of over 5,000 workers in Spain, the University of Madeira discovered that employer-provided training has the same effect on job satisfaction as a 17.7% net wage increase. I’ve been teaching for years that your employees don’t always want more money in order to increase their engagement and overall job satisfaction with your company. The ability to learn something new or achieve ma... »
It’s time to replace the Italian espresso machine in my upstairs kitchen. I rarely spend much time researching options. I’d rather make a decision and adjust as I go, but the current machine served faithfully for 10 years so I feel a little obligated to replace it with something as durable. Tasked to my personal assistant, already knee-deep in the process of replacing two other commercial coffee m... »
According to AdAge and Zenith, the estimated U.S. spending in media nd marketing services is $446 billion. In the US, internet ad spending surpassed TV for the first time ever. Market share will increase 13% year-over-year with $1,354 spent per person on marketing and advertising this year. As more big dumb companies rush into online advertising and pull out of traditional media, a window of oppor... »
Marcus Aurelius said, “Our actions may be impeded… but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” This simple but profound maxim became Ryan Holiday’s impetus for writing The Obstacl... »
Today, Millennials spend 93.5 hours per month inside an app. Years ago, I made a bold claim that “those who are unable to control their attention will have it bought and sold by those who can.” Facebook has become one of the biggest media companies on the planet, selling billions of dollars of advertising to its user base each quarter. My prediction was correct, but it is not limited to technology... »
Some clients know I use a 1941 Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter for personal communication and for many of my book drafts. It was Hemingway’s favorite typewriter and the same one my grandfather kept in his office. There’s something truly different about sitting down with a mechanical typewriter and watching your thoughts fly onto the page. On a computer, I can’t write in any of the ... »
I read five newspapers per day. I quickly go through a system I developed years ago, asking “Does this apply to me, my market, my patients, my clients, any stakeholder in one of my companies?” I look for trends and actionable data. Most of the articles talk about things that are out of my control. Unless I’m betting on corn futures, I don’t really care about the weather. So, 90% of the stuff I rea... »
In a recent article published in The Harvard Business Review, Jesse Sostrin points out the leadership paradox: “You need to be more essential and less involved. When you justify your hold on work, you’re confusing being involved with being essential.” This was the biggest leap in my transition from a solo-practitioner with one location to a business leader with multiple offices and scores of team ... »
“The vast accumulations of knowledge – or at least of information – deposited by this century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to ... »
In his classic text, M.R. Kopmeyer teaches, “push your wheelbarrow upside down.” Walking through life with your wheelbarrow right side up allows anyone to dump their burdens, worries and issues into your wheelbarrow, making your load heavier to carry. When people see that there is a man going around collecting problems, they will easily add their problems to his load. Kopmeyer wasn’t teachin... »
After I published a recent Burleson Report: A Weekend Update for Orthodontists, a private client whom I consider a friend and mentor to many of the younger members in my coaching groups, Dr. Ron Barnett, wrote me a kind note, thanking me for the insight in the articles and echoing something he’s taught his employees for years: “Your thoughts are things.” I couldn’t possibly... »
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of one of my favorite magazines, The Idler, said, “To solve the right problems for your patients, customers, clients or donors, you just need to step outside and pay attention to what is so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everyone else misses it.” He’s right, but how can orthodontists pay better attention to what their competition misses? First, through clari... »
From another brilliant opinion piece in the New York Times by David Brooks: “American life has secularized and grand political ideologies have fallen away, but moral conflict has only grown. In fact, it’s the people who go to church least — like the members of the alt-right — who seem the most fervent moral crusaders. We’re living in an age of great moral pressure, even if we lack the words ... »
In a recent Strategy+Business article, adapted from his book, 63 Innovation Nuggets, Professor George Barbee shares two simple leadership concepts. First, he teaches to “pilot simultaneously at 30,000 feet and at ground level.” The best leaders can see the big picture but are also aware of the facts and details on the ground. I’ve done both separately and they will destroy trust and accountability... »
A sign on the wall of my employee break room reads, “Are you being BUSY or are you being PRODUCTIVE?” If you’ve been following me for long, the most-recent employee engagement survey by Gallup should not be surprising to you. Only 33% of U.S. employees are engaged on the job. Internationally, the number is worse: only 13% of employees are engaged at work. Two researchers in the Harvard Business Re... »
From Peter Bregman’s article in the Harvard Business Review comes a great reminder to orthodontists: your problems implementing new strategies or following-through on the tried-and-true is not a strategy problem, but a people problem. Doctors from all over the globe fly to Kansas City to spend a consulting day with me and, without fail, the topic of “getting my team to do what I ask... »
If you or your parents grew up when the popular opinion in Congress, the news media and universities aligned with Roosevelt’s New Deal and the idea of redistribution of wealth, you’ve seen things come a long way from that ideal to Regan, who brought back the old Federalist lines of argument. These aligned closely to Alexander Hamilton, who has garnered much current interest and is the subject of a... »
I’ve been teaching for years that rational thought is not required in decisions that are often based largely on emotion. Recent research by Kulow and Kramer, “In Pursuit of Good Karma: When Charitable Appeals to Do Right Go Wrong” continues to support my theory. Study after study have shown that, although most Americans will not admit that they are irrational, their actual decisions on product pur... »
From the Journal of Consumer Research, Dubois, Rucker and Galinsky; June, 2016. Researchers have examined how power arises and is distributed via socioeconomic status, how it affects consumer behavior and even how it affects psychological state or mindset. One area researchers haven’t fully explored is how power affects the creation and reception of persuasive messages. Having power, researchers h... »
In an article in Strategy + Business, Charlotte Roberts and Martha Summerville review the components to a mindful board of directors. Their wisdom has direct application to how you run your team leader meetings and entire company meetings as an orthodontist. To begin each meeting, the authors suggest you have a “connect to purpose” moment, like showing a video or telling a short story. Each time w... »
Although there are hundreds of studies that support the findings from this article in the Journal of Psychology & Behavioral Science, it reminded me of an excellent TED talk and review of the world’s longest-lasting study on happiness. Known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, for over 75 years they have been “tracking the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about thei... »
Ask any younger person, as I do with my residents each week, whether they read the newspaper or watch the nightly news and no hands will go up. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though it is different than how previous generations acquired news and interacted with media. You must pay attention to the trends in media consumption amongst this group, as they are your patients and/or parents o... »
How do you pay attention to Feature Search Trends in our industry? If you’re not asking your patients exactly what they searched for when they found your practice on Google, now is the time to get serious about monitoring precisely what features and benefits patients are looking for when shopping for a pediatric dentist or orthodontist. Research out of the Bauer College of Business in Houst... »
In a brilliant and visceral essay published in this month’s Atlantic, Meghan O’Rourke takes us through the current state of doctors, empathy and the American health care system that has not only complicated how patients receive care but also how doctors become fulfilled in their professions. Although many doctors enter the profession to become healers, teachers and care givers, too ma... »
After 130 Years, Ladies’ Home Journal is ending monthly publication and going digital. Reported on the TODAY show, the hosts were asked how many magazines or journals they receive at home. Their answers: only one or none! As a subscriber to over 30 monthly journals, periodicals, 4 daily newspapers and someone who has been reading a book per week for years, I’m pleased to offer this ... »
Addressing the dynamic relationship between marketing and the public interest, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing is a source for understanding today’s most important issues that rest at the nexus of marketing and public policy. Each issue features a wide-ranging forum for the research, findings, and discussion of marketing topics related to business and government, including, but not limite... »
Readers rely on the Journal of International Marketing for the latest in global marketing issues. Geared both to international marketing and business scholars and to senior- and mid-level practitioners, Journal of International Marketing features analysis of the latest marketing theories, in-depth articles, and coverage of new methods. Also included are scholarly and managerially relevant articles... »
Journal of Marketing Research delves into the latest thinking in marketing research, from philosophy and theories to methods and techniques. Written for technically oriented research analysts, educators, and statisticians, Journal of Marketing Research covers a wide range of marketing research concepts, methods, and applications. You’ll read about new techniques, contributions to knowledge b... »
For more than seven decades, Journal of Marketing has been a vibrant outlet for the communication of ideas and thought leadership in marketing, bridging the gap between theory and application. By providing thought-provoking, in-depth articles covering vital aspects of the marketing industry, Journal of Marketing is the premier publication for academics and practitioners. Each issue includes origin... »
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