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Acquiring a private company
I’ve been negotiating the potential acquisition of a private industrial company. All the details are covered by a non-disclosure agreement, so I can’t provide a case study (yet). At this point in time the deal is not going through once we asked the target what their price expectation was. The target has retained the services…
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Theory of Constraints spelling
Yeah I misspelled Theory of Constraints in my rush to post earlier. I don’t normally spell it Thoery of Contraints. I thought I’d add another point that I learned from The Goal. In business accounting Inventory is an asset, which normally means it is a good thing. However inventory must be insured, counted, protected and…
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Theory of Constraints
I got a question on my mention of Theory of Constraints (TOC) in an earlier post. As my factory production has reached capacity, my most critical goal is to introduce TOC into my production facility. I first heard of the Theory of Constraints in the book The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox.…
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Deal with the Micro Manager
A former CEO of mine was a micromanager. I knew this before I took the job as the company was a client for a couple of years. Socially, I like my boss and we’ve know each other for many years. I’d even call us friends. Given my interest in entrepreneurship, I have strong feelings against…
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ASX Company Announcements RSS feed
Update 8 June 2011: The twitter feed of all company announcements is now at @mktbot which has an RSS feed. See goosmurf’s comment below for a Yahoo Pipes piggy back. Update 31 July 2009: I may have a solution, stay tuned and comment below if you want this. Alternatively use my contact form. Update 2007:…
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Retail KPI’s – the germination
I’m developing a series of KPI’s for a retail operation. They own nine garden shed outlets and don’t currently track anything. It’s late and I’ve got a pile of notes, but I’ll document the process here. One of the key elements is avoid collecting useless data, and reward the collection of useful data that reinforces…
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Trade Show Strategy
I’m at a trade show in Cologne Germany. I’m questioning my trade show strategy. I race around all the halls and grab flyers or brochures only from stands that pique my interest. I then do some small talk, but really it’s just an introduction and “I’ll email once I get home and review your website”.…
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Email Confidentiality Notices
Many emails coming to me have default confidentiality or commercial-in-confidence signatures. I think privacy aware individuals or organisations see them and adopt them without thinking through the issues. Firstly if I haven’t specifically solicited a confidential email why should it be binding on me. Here is an interesting point from the abuse.net database: IF YOUR…
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What sells online?
Flemming Funch at Escape Velocity posted in Ugly sells? and challenged Mark Daoust’s Site-Reference.com post The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites. It is not fancy, it is not exactly beautiful. It’s one of the best-kept online secrets (and worst-kept direct marketing secret). It is possible to be too well designed or professional. Especially if that…
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How to Get Inbound Links for Online Business
I’ve had two interesting meetings in the last week. Both were with other fathers whose kids attend the same school as mine. Both also run online businesses. They’d heard I’d been in online businesses for years; was in the top 3% of worldwide sellers on eBay (more in a couple of days on that); and…