Investing Local

Not everyone is cut out to start a business. In fact, starting a company is an irrational act. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem-solving skills, business acumen, stamina, and a keen sense of timing, to their fledgling enterprises. And the best of these know how to communicate with a variety of audiences by telling a great story. A Founder has many audiences that compete for attention—The Core Team, Investors, Suppliers, and Customers to name a few. Each is critical to the success of a new enterprise and the ability to prioritize, communicate with them, and engage them at just the right time, is essential to the success of any start-up. With limited resources, failure to engage with any one of these important audiences at the right moment can be the difference between success and shutting down. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem solving skills, business acumen, stamina and a keen sense of timing to their fledgling enterprises. The key to a successful start-up is solving a high value problem that customers care about and will pay for a level that provides the business outcomes desired by the product owner. In addition to sound advice for managing your product and business relative to competing products, you must get to know your customers, understanding the problem along with changing requirements and designing solutions that customers will appreciateNot everyone is cut out to start a business. In fact, starting a company is an irrational act. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem-solving skills, business acumen, stamina, and a keen sense of timing, to their fledgling enterprises. And the best of these know how to communicate with a variety of audiences by telling a great story. A Founder has many audiences that compete for attention—The Core Team, Investors, Suppliers, and Customers to name a few. Each is critical to the success of a new enterprise and the ability to prioritize, communicate with them, and engage them at just the right time, is essential to the success of any start-up. With limited resources, failure to engage with any one of these important audiences at the right moment can be the difference between success and shutting down. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem solving skills, business acumen, stamina and a keen sense of timing to their fledgling enterprises. The key to a successful start-up is solving a high value problem that customers care about and will pay for a level that provides the business outcomes desired by the product owner. In addition to sound advice for managing your product and business relative to competing products, you must get to know your customers, understanding the problem along with changing requirements and designing solutions that customers will appreciate.

Before the coronavirus epidemic, Amazon had been consuming some 2% of all U.S. household income, a percentage that has assuredly risen since the outbreak’s onset, particularly among the company’s more than 150+ million Amazon Prime members. While 51% of American households attend church, 62% have Prime memberships. In the best of times, the company’s presence in our daily lives is inescapable. As Amazon gains many invaluable lessons from the Covid-19 outbreak, the company will only become more ubiquitous in the decades ahead. Soberly aware of Amazon’s staying power, the CEO quipped to employees in 2018: “I predict one day, Amazon will fail. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be thirty-plus years.” At the time he made that comment, Amazon was twenty-four-years-old. Bestselling Good to Great author Jim Collins says Amazon needs to build a new mechanism for growth. That mechanism—a virtuous cycle “flywheel” that used data to attract more buyers and sellers whose new data contributions could then be harnessed by the flywheel—was championed by Bezos and today has been made to accelerate even faster using Amazon’s massive AI engines. As the author argues, Amazon is a business where AI is increasingly making the decisions that humans used to make and keeps getting smarter on its own. Rivals have taken notice. This why some companies, such as Walmart and Alibaba, have chosen to steal from Amazon’s playbook while others have tried to identify the few things the Seattle juggernaut can’t do and excel at them. Bezos has built one of the most efficient wealth-creation machines in history, a juggernaut. This convenience, however, will come at a cost. It will lead to massive job disruptions and our lives being affected by technology in ever more invasive ways. Joining us for our discussion on The Amazon Effect is Brian Dumaine who is on the phone from his New York office. Brian Dumaine is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Fortune magazine. His latest book is Bezonomics: How Amazon is Changing our Lives and What The World's Best Companies Are Learning From It. Welcome to Mastering Your Money, Brian Dumaine .

After suffering from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic for four months, the ailing U.S. economy was widely expected to suffer another loss of four and a quarter million jobs in May, but in a stunning surprise the economy instead created 2.5 million jobs! The news was a complete surprise and a major step toward a recovery, but the road back is still likely to take many months

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“With backgrounds in design thinking and software engineering, the founders of Airbnb (Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk) leveraged technologyto develop a web based user interface that made finding, selecting, and booking travel easier. In the process, they also made it easy for homeowners to earn extra income, whether that be through renting a second home or simply listing a spare bedroom. In one decade, Airbnb transformed what it means to go on vacation. The homeshare juggernaut turns homeowners into hosts, guest rooms into cash cows, and overnight stays into dynamic encounters and lasting friendships. Its very name has become synonymous with finding unique short-term stays anywhere in theworld, enjoying great services and hospitality, and having amazing experiences. Airbnb is a noun, a verb, an adjective, and a movement — and the rest of the industry simply can’t keep up. But competition isn’t what defines this phenom of the sharing economy, community does. Its leaders blended innovative digital tools and a global village spirit to build unprecedented brand loyalty — at a time when most brands struggle to just stay visible.

The words Millennial and Baby Boomers are seldom used in the same sentence. Even more rare, as a way to connect the two generations in a show of solidarity. Today we will discuss these two distinct generations to illustrate how they can learn valuable lessons from each other simply by listening more closely and sharing more freely. Baby Boomers are people born between 1946 to 1964 and Millennials between 1981 to 1996. No artificial barriers should divide the two generations. If we are to understand each other more fully, we should try to embody mutual values and best practices in how to create an ideal quality of life, how to face the future for mutual enrichment, and how to give back to each other and to society at large. Joining us for our discussion Being Entrepreneur is John Jantsch who is calling in from his Hartford, CT office. John Jantsch has owned a business for almost three decades, observing and documenting the entrepreneurial experience through his own unique story. He is the bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine, and more. His books have been translated into ten languages, and his writing has appeared in Inc., Entrepreneur, and Southwest: The Magazine His latest book is The Self-Reliant Emtrepreneur Welcome to Mastering Your Money, is John Jantsch .