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Business Insights from Andrea Hill

Most Popular Article

What a Trade Show Can Teach Us About Good Marketing

Trade shows function like temporary cities, bringing buyers, sellers, education, marketing, and operations into one shared space. When they work, alignment is visible. When they don’t, misalignment is just as clear. This article uses trade shows as an analogy for B2B marketing, exploring what happens when organizations lose focus on their primary customer, how drift happens quietly, and what it takes to restore clarity and long-term value.

First Things First: There's an Order to Profitability

The building blocks of profitability are clear and they even have a required sequence to them. But without knowledge of the building blocks - or awareness that these building blocks even exist! - your marketing can underperform for years (or decades).

Principles of Graphic Design

Most small business owners are doing a lot of graphic designs themselves. But without understanding graphic design principles what you save in time and fees will cost you in results. This 36-minute video will help you understand the basic principles of graphic design. Whether you are doing your own graphics or working with a graphic designer understanding these concepts will most certainly improve your marketing efforts.

Radical Inclusiveness - the Competitive Edge

In a business climate where competitiveness and innovation are everything equality and diversity in the workforce are important keys to success.

Outstanding Customer Service is a Culture Thing

The question of how to deliver the outstanding customer service consumers expect is easy to answer but harder to implement.

    Ethics
    Purse strings mean a lot in our society, and that simple truth plays out in the most basic of our interactions. How we treat one another should be based on something far more valuable than that.
    Merchandising
    Brands are the glue that holds a relationship together, and not just in marketing.
    Marketing
    Don't just use digital design to do your old work faster. Use it to transform your business.
    Retail
    When you introduce someone to the joy of buying art the experience can be transformative. Consumers should have that experience buying designer jewelry.
    Branding
    This business made its values and strategy so transparent that we as customers can see what matters to them and why they matter to us. That's branding.

    Leadership
    When we define ourselves too narrowly, we fail to see all the ways we can connect with other humans, and in that failure lies all the previous failures of humanity.
    Management
    While a healthy ego is essential to any business success, it is the ability to balance ego and humility that leads to the most influential leaders.

    Tell Better Stories

    It's not enough to sell a product or a service any more. You must also be able to tell the story. The Pip Storytelling Deck is a tool we use at the Werx Brands to construct and tell better stories. You can be a master story-teller too!

    Management
    I don’t think companies can afford to continue to operate in the old hierarchical ways. Those structures will be the dinosaur bones in the dirt within this century.
    Management
    Focusing on weakness or even mediocrity at the expense of rewarding strength will lower the average performance of your organization.
    Management
    Here are some of the key structures that are absolutely necessary when converting to a more team-based organization.
    Management
    An annual employee review process can be a powerful driver for business growth and innovation. Unfortunately, in most companies it's not used for that at all. Here's how to improve.
    Management
    First in a series of 8 articles on becoming a better leader. How do you balance patience with people against impatience with progress?
    Management
    Twitch your nose all you want, but then you should probably get down to the grown-up work of evaluating, making informed decisions, being patient, accepting current reality, and creating incremental change.
    Management
    You already know that reading, writing, and an education are a requirement for success. Now you must add technical skills to that list.
    Management
    This failure to make connections is not isolated to the medical community. Business owners regularly fail to make the connections necessary to ensure the health of their businesses.
    Management
    Why business diversity? Because when a business embraces many different perspectives, thought processes, and world views, it fires up the collective brain.

    Video

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    At the end of the day, we all have to fight our demons alone. And I think that's the source of loneliness. If you spend your whole life insisting there are no demons to fight or hiding your demons or determined to fight them in private, you end up existentially alone.

    Perfectionism is a luxury for (starving) artists, or artists with benefactors. The rest of us must learn the difference between being in love with our own ideas and being in love with progress.

    Hmm . . . my favorite new term-of-the-week: Ratlicker
    "A person who refuses to wear a mask, or take any of the basic precautions to help society prevent an air born illness during an epidemic. ( In reference to the bubonic plague being spread by rats. )"

    Don't get FOMO over unicorns in the news. It's not usually the first person with the idea who makes the money, or even the first person who invests the cash. The person who invests the discipline is always the one to bet on.

    "Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
    William James

    Maybe the reason its so hard to remain in quarantine is that it's hard to outrun sadness when you're forced to be still.