Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Celebrating 20 years

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If you will permit me, today I would like to talk about a couple of milestones of which we’re kind of proud. 

On Monday, November 17, 1997, I began broadcasting The Small Business Advocate Show for two hours Monday through Friday, and ever since that first day the program has been nationally syndicated. This week we’ll celebrate our 19th anniversary and the beginning of our 20th year on the air. 

In January 1998, we began simulcasting our show on the Internet, which makes us one of the pioneers of Internet streaming. We’ve been archiving our show since 1999, including multiple on-demand streaming options. In 2007 we began creating podcasts for each segment of my live show. That’s over 2,600 podcasts every year. 

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How “the Cloud” can empower your small business

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One of the greatest products of human society is the marketplace. Webster defines it as a place where goods and services are offered for sale. 

Over millennia, innovations took markets from local to global, and now to the 21st century iteration – virtual. Virtual markets are powered by “cloud computing,” aka “the cloud,” and accessed via the Internet and a handy interface program presented on a screen of some size.

Historically, as trade expanded markets, products led the way because services were difficult to convey to the last mile of consumption. But technology has helped services catch up, and now digital services are delivered efficiently from the cloud. And more than anything else, this last reality is helping small businesses compete and grow in ways that were formerly the domain of larger companies. 

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Small business survival lessons from Jeff Foxworthy

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You’ve no doubt seen the classic Jeff Foxworthy act, the one where he says, for example, “If you have more than one car jacked up in your front yard, you might be a redneck.” 

Just as Jeff got rich delivering this comedic routine, you can benefit from his cause-and-effect logic by applying it to your small business. Except unlike Foxworthy, it won’t be funny if you resemble too many of these one-liners. In fact, your business might not make it. Or as comedians say, you’ll bomb. 

*If you’re holed-up inside the four walls of your business instead of getting out into the marketplace where customers are acquiring new expectations, you might not make it. Don’t presume you know what customers expect from you – get direct updates by asking them, every day. 

* If your budget cuts include wiping out your marketing plan, you might bomb. Appropriate adjustments may be warranted – going dark isn’t. 

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Managing capital is not the same as managing cash

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There are many tasks every small business owner must handle personally, but none is more CEO-specific than allocation of capital. Because the only thing more precious to a small business than capital is time. 

Cash management is also a CEO-critical task, but operating cash is not capital. Cash is for expenses and is measured daily, weekly, and monthly. Capital is for investment and, as such, is measured in years, possibly even generations.

Below are three classic capital expenditure categories.

1.  Replacement and upgrade

This is not repair – that’s an expense funded by operating cash flow. Replacement/upgrade is a bigger commitment, most often caused when repair is no longer an option, or by obsolescence.

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3rd Ingredient® Part 8: Six marketplace motivators besides fear and greed

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Fear and greed, it has been said, are the two primal emotions that have propelled human civilization.  Of course, both have their dark side, too. 

Greed is positive and productive when channeled toward personal and professional improvement. But it turns ugly in pursuit of a single-minded or selfish outcome. When fear delivers important information it’s not only useful, it’s essential. But it can also morph into paranoia, or cause inaction.

As I’ve discussed recently in this space, at this very moment, the nature of fear and greed is changing. For 10,000 years, the only form humans have known is analog. This means any leveraging of them was likely mechanical, moving no faster than the speed of sound. 

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Naisbitt’s Razor: The great small business advantage

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On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dialup over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.  

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

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