My middle son lives in Bentonville, Arkansas: the headquarters of Walmart. This fact made me want to learn more about Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder. As with many biographical stories, Sam Walton’s life provides several lessons for the entrepreneur. Sam Walton began his career in retail when he bought into a 5&10 franchise known as Ben […]
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Sometimes you cannot with any degree of certainty determine if someone is really telling you the whole truth, so you need to create a situation that will force the other party to reveal themselves. In the book How to Think Like a Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors discuss how David Lee
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Every few years my wife and I return to Seattle, where we got married. One of my favorite places to spend a few hours is the Pike Place Market. On our most recent trip, I was reminded of a lesson in the importance of location. Parking off Alaska Way and taking the elevator to the
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In the book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions”, Dan Ariely talks about a cognitive bias known as the Endowment Effect. Simply stated, the endowment effect is the fact the people in general place a higher value on the things they have over identical things they do not have. Dan used the
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Flipping through the channels the other night I stopped to watch a Jackie Chan movie on TV. As I watched one of the fight sequences I could not help but see many correlations between fighting and operating a small business. First, my attention was drawn to the speed of his movement, which I equate to
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Good marketers also use primacy and recency in their messaging to make sure that potential customers will be able to recall the most important elements of their message.
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People make decisions on emotion and then back up their decisions with logic. Good marketers understand the value of focusing on messages that will make the customer feel good. Wedding photographers do not take pictures, they capture the magic moments of that important day. I have seen signs on vacation that simply say “Horses for
Business growth can occur in two dimensions: horizontally or vertically. On the vertical dimension, you employ marketing tactics to sell more offerings to an existing set of customers. Using tools to get your existing customers to buy from you more often or to buy your other products may involve methods that create loyalty, and are
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How to employ a three-page website to test the market’s readiness and verify that a product or service will sell before you make an investment.
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Nikola Tesla was perhaps one of the world’s greatest inventors. His experiments with alternating current or AC proved that transmitting electricity through a copper wire with AC was much more efficient than using direct current or DC, the power source used by Thomas Edison. He also invented the electric motor and even invented the wireless
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