Last Thursday I went our for my morning walk with my wife, Robyn. She told me that we had a problem with our washing machine. She thought that the motor had given up the ghost. We have had it for some time so we decided not to bother with calling a repair man and to [...]
This is not really a story about marketing. However it is something that you might want to know and to think about if you like food. We eat quite a bit of fish in our household. I normally buy fish at a little hole in the wall fish shop in Kiama. The shop is tiny. [...]
So someone calls you up and says that they want to buy your company. You take a deep breath and then say, let’s talk… There are a lot of wrinkles in selling your business. The main one is that most people are so unused to the concept that they stumble at the first fence…. Imagine [...]
Niall Ferguson, the Scottish economic historian, often talks about people who see economies as balanced ecosystems ignoring the fact that these ecosystems are always teetering on the edge of chaos. The thing that takes the system out of balance and into chaos is often something that has been ignored or discounted as impossible – like [...]
The economics of content. Way back in another lifetime there was a great music publisher by the name of Lou Levy. Lou had a lot of great sayings, that I believe he originated. His son, Leeds, used to toss these sayings out from time to time to make a point. One of them was, “There [...]
It must be one of those weeks. This morning I got a skype message from my friend, Ervin, in San Francisco, to tell me the sad news that Bruce Jackson had died in a plane crash in Palm Springs over the weekend. Bruce was one of the legends of the live sound business in Australia [...]
Amazing to think that it wasn't too long ago that EMI Records ruled the waves… This was the company that in the '60's brought us the Beatles, The Beach Boys, Gerry And the Pacemakers, Freddy And The Dreamers… Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Cliff Richard, The Band… And then more recently artists such as [...]
One of my friends, who is also a client, has been going through a difficult period with his business recently. Its a start up, and it is still very early on in its evolution, and it is entirely self-funded. There are revenues, but not enough to cover overheads yet. In a business that is self-funded [...]
Systems evolve over time. Look at the eco-system that drives most of the western world. It has been around for a relatively short time in historical terms. It is a sub-set of capitalism that may now be showing signs of weakness as a continuing driver for wealth creation. I’m talking about consumerism. Consumerism is assumed [...]
Dug out from the archives of the New York Times….. June 13, 1897 NYTimes American Publishers say they are Suffering by Copyright Violations There-Steps Taken for Redress. “Canadian pirates” is what the music dealers call publishing houses across the line who are flooding this country, they say, with spurious editions of the latest [...]