Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Archives for December 2017

Hug a scrooge today, they need love, too

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This is Jim’s traditional Christmas column.

Some say I’m a scrooge. They might be right.

Here are three exhibits (some say excuses) in my defense of this indictment:

1. The early part of my career was spent in retail. Retailers know what that does to your holiday spirit. There’s a syndrome for everything else; why not one for retail survivors? Let’s call it PTHSS: Post-Traumatic Holiday Shock Syndrome.

2.  Since I don’t wait until the holidays to give someone a gift, I just don’t get all worked up about holiday giving. Not that the ladies mind getting stuff all year (let’s not lose our heads!).  It’s just that they want me to be giddy about giving at Christmas-time. Giddy? Bah! Humbug!

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Jim Blasingame’s 2017 predictions reconciled

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1. The U.S. economy will expand at 3% GDP growth. Actual: 2.75% annual GDP. The last three quarters over 3% couldn’t cover 1.2% in Q1.  -1

2. Eight years of record regulation growth will reverse in 2017. Actual: Trump’s 2 for 1 regulatory order resulted in essentially no new regs in 2017 (CEI). +1

3. The NFIB Index will report small business optimism increasing for the first time in eight years. Actual: The Index set 44-year optimism records all year. +1

4. After eight years of deleveraging, small business profitability will increase.  Actual:  NFIB reports dramatic 2017 profits growth.  +1

5. For the first time in eight years, small business borrowing will increase.  Actual: Up, but only slightly (ICBA). +1

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Entrepreneurship becomes the mother of liberty

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Speaking of America’s founding in “The Fortune of the Republic” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We began with freedom.”

Indeed. But that freedom didn’t become useful until the Founders converted it into liberty and it will last only as long as the stewards of each generation protect and maintain it.

Freedom is a state of mind anyone can assume. But liberty is a contract we bestow upon and expect from each other. And from that contract, American entrepreneurship was born as the child of liberty.

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Business planning is your business plan in motion

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The Age of the Customer is disrupting and making obsolete many older practices, but not the requirement for business planning, especially cash flow.

A business plan is the result of thinking, researching, strategizing and reaching conclusions about how to pursue opportunities. It may exist only in the head of the planner, but it’s better when written down.

Whether elaborate or simple, a written business plan is an assembly of facts, ideas, assumptions, and projections about the future. Here are three ways to use a written plan:

1.  Document the due diligence on a new business venture or the future of an existing one.

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