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Photo Credit: Catspyjamasnz (Flickr.com)

I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the stock market, but I do know one simple rule I abide by:

If I don’t understand how a company is going to make money, I don’t invest in them.

Facebook is one of those companies that I’ve always been skeptical of, primarily because I had a Facebook account from 2007-2011 and never really understood what their business model was. Sure, Facebook’s been a boon to marketers of certain products, and as it’s grown, it’s allowed for social sharing in ways that wouldn’t have been dreamed of five years ago. But ultimately, its revenues are based on selling advertising to people who don’t want to be advertised to.

And that’s why I’m watching today’s IPO with a somewhat pitted feel to my stomach. I’m sure that the number of casual investors jumping into the fray is going to make things very exciting for the media. The stock price is going to jump like crazy due to all of the speculators trying to jump in and make a quick buck. And yet, I’d be willing to bet that a year from now, Facebook stock is going to be like Groupon stock – holding steady and even peaking in the first few months due to speculation collapsing down into the doldrums once the investors who have it realize it’s been overvalued and now is essentially worthless.

GRPN Nasdaq Performance as of 5-18-12. Source: Google

One of the biggest indicators that Facebook stock is in for some rough seas ahead is that insider investors like Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management are selling off some of their stakes – a large chunk of the total stock for sale – quite likely because they know that they’ll make a lot more off the speculator market than they’ll make staying invested in Facebook over the long term.

Meanwhile, you’ve got stories about casual investors like high-school investing clubs or fathers who are plunking their daughters’ college savings into Facebook stock. These are people who aren’t sophisticated about investing, who are eager to put their money into something popular and hyped up by the media, and who – this is important – aren’t shielded from the risk of an investment that goes awry. If Facebook fails to deliver on the high hopes that some have assigned to it, it’s going to take a lot of people down with it.

They should have done their research. I’ve seen some excellent articles on how businesses are realizing they get a poor ROI on Facebook advertising or how Facebook is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme (metaphorically, at least). Facebook ads don’t work for most traditional businesses, and unlike Google, which is positioned to provide information to those searching (and ads are a type of information!), Facebook is about sharing information with friends and family members, not about viewing commercial messages. Advertising is not something Facebook does well, even if it does allow for targeting.

Many marketers have had success with brand engagement on Facebook through “Pages,” but the interesting thing about those pages is that Facebook doesn’t charge a fee for marketers to use them. In other words, Facebook’s primary draw for marketers isn’t a part of its revenue stream.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. It’ll also be interesting to see how public investors react if Facebook fails to become the next Google or Microsoft and follows Groupon’s trend instead.

UPDATE: Wow, Zynga’s stock sure took a nosedive in the midst of this Facebook craziness. Zynga is, of course, the game developer that creates soulless social games like Farmville for Facebook. They’re very closely tied to Facebook’s financial future, and their stock price, like Groupon’s, began dropping in value once investors began to wonder how Zynga was going to meet their expectations. Apparently, investor confidence is low in Zynga today in part because the Facebook IPO is failing to meet expectations.

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Photo Credit: Iowa State University

As someone who was in college not too long ago, I know all too well how expensive school can be when you choose to finance it with student loans. I also know what a confusing mess it can be – the process for obtaining loans was hardly straightforward, and even though I asked many questions of my overworked financial aid adviser, I never really felt like I had much clarity in understanding what I was signing up for. While I was aware of my disbursements, I wasn’t always sure what the interest rates would be for each loan after school, and I definitely didn’t realize that I would be writing checks to five individual loan servicers once I entered into repayment.

So, I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to read on the Des Moines Register website that a recent study conducted by Iowa State University with its own students found that one in eight students didn’t realize they had student loan debt, and nearly 40% underestimated the amount of student loans that they owe.

The financial literacy study, which surveyed 801 undergraduate Iowans in fall 2010, also found 10 percent of students underestimated their debt by more than $10,000. Only 22 percent had not taken out loans.

The results show a need for additional financial counseling to help students understand their borrowing and how it will impact their lives after graduation, researchers said.

ISU, for the first time this summer, will send emails to all students showing how much they owe, their estimated monthly repayment upon graduation and a list of lenders, said Roberta Johnson, ISU director of student financial aid. Loan histories had previously been available, but not enough students were using the resource, she said.

The survey results did not catch researchers by complete surprise, said Cynthia Needles Fletcher, a professor of human development and family studies. The complexity of the college financial aid process and the fact that students accumulate debt over time makes it easy for a student to lose track of what they owe, she said.

SOURCE: Des Moines Register

Given that Iowa is among the top 10 states with high average student loan debt (public university student debt is about 16%, or $4,250, above the national average of $25,250) and that two thirds of college students graduate with debt, this is a trend worth being concerned about… particularly when students receive little counseling from most universities to help them understand the impact that student loans will have on their post-graduation salaries. While the article says that the federal government is setting up a website to help them calculate their likely salary by major and minor as well as their debt obligations, this is likely too little, too late for many students who are already in the system, saddling themselves with enormous debts, and not even really understanding what it is that they’re signing up for.

I’ve been thinking for years now that student loan debt default is our next financial crisis. Let’s hope that these early indicators prompt the right level of action now – otherwise, college may be unaffordable for the next generation and make things much tougher on us all.

Continue reading »]]> You might have seen articles like this one from Mother Jones a few months ago floating around the web, citing a recent report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) suggesting that breakfast cereals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be when you look at the sugar content.

I thought I’d take a look at how a reasonable serving of four common breakfast cereals stacked up against things that I’d get in trouble eating for breakfast. The results were interesting.

What are your thoughts? Are you as surprised as I am that Honey Nut Cheerios have so much sugar in them? Post your thoughts in the comments below!

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Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame

Speakers of Note is a series of articles where we provide summaries of great talks we’ve heard from business leaders around the country.

Who: Stephen Dubner, co-author of the bestselling books Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and SuperFreakonomics, host of the Freakonomics podcast and NPR radio show, and contributor to the Freakonomics blog, among other things.
Where: IBM Performance 2012 Seminar, May 15, 2012, St. Louis, MO
Topic: Economics and Horse Manure – Can You Tell The Difference Between the Two? (Note: Not the official title, but certainly the central theme of the keynote)

Stephen Dubner is one of those book authors who you’ve got to hear live at least once – he’s got a unique perspective driven by data that’s only really come into common knowledge because of his two Freakonomics books (co-authored with economist Steve Levitt) and the various Freakonomics spin-offs (which include a documentary, a blog and a podcast). Dubner’s perspective is that there’s a hidden side to everything, and it often manifests not by applying the conventional wisdom, but rather by daring to ask questions that no one else has thought about and examining the data from a different perspective.

His hour-long keynote kicked off a day of hearing about how IBM software solutions can provide powerful predictions, and we’ve got to give some kudos to IBM for bringing in a speaker who essentially warned the audience that it’s difficult for human beings to use historical data to predict the future (despite the fact that IBM’s Cognos and SPSS software are largely designed to do just that). Fortunately, the two messages weren’t contradictory; Dubner explained early on that there’s a difference between taking measures to reduce risk (possible through educated assumptions based off historical data) and trying to reduce uncertainty (impossible since there is no way of anticipating what uncertainly might happen). IBM’s software falls in the former category, and Dubner spent much of his time elaborating on the latter.

• We as human beings are really terrible at predicting the future, says Dubner, but we’re inclined to try, and have been since prehistoric times (where our ancestors would look for ways to minimize death through their own actions). Our willingness to try to predict the uncertain future is in some ways a negative tendency (since it leads us down false paths) and in some ways a wonderful thing (since it leads us to new discoveries).
• Dubner offered a story about Romanian witches. In Romania, witches who served as fortune-tellers were taken quite seriously by many people, including some government officials. A few politicians asked some fortune-tellers for predictions, used those predictions to shape their decisions and later determined that the fortune-tellers were wrong. The politicians responded by placing a tax on the fortune-telling industry to hold the witches accountable for bad predictions.
• He told another story about how his 10-year-old son, named Solomon, grew very concerned in 2011 when the controversial pastor Harold Camping began insisting that the Biblical rapture was supposed to occur on a certain date. The day came and went, and Dubner’s son found himself relieved, but also disturbed by what had happened. He became angry that Camping had gotten everyone so stirred up. “I know what we should do,” Dubner’s son declared. “He should be taken out and shot.”
• Dubner suggested that these were the right ideas, actually, but the wrong application. He suggested that we should also hold the soothsayers of our own culture – people like financial analysts, stock brokers and consultants – accountable for their predictions as well. The reason for this isn’t to be malicious; it’s to provide a strong negative incentive against being wrong.
• “The fact is that we’re addicted to predictions” said Dubner. And a big part of the problem is that the incentives for making bold predictions are strong, while the incentives for making more realistic predictions are weak. When someone makes a bold prediction and they wind up being correct, they are taken seriously from then on. But Dubner argues that those who get into this sort of game become more confident in themselves, making them more likely to make wrong assumptions and less likely to be correct – in fact, their odds are worse than a coin flip.
• Dubner then went on to explain that uncertainty often drives bad decision-making, and he referred to four different areas familiar to those who have read the Freakonomics books: the stock market, the NFL, the entertainment industry and the corn industry. ”The best and most prominent people in all of these fields do about as well versus the market as a monkey with a dart board,” said Dubner.
• Much of what contributes to this is that big, bold predictions with a definite outcome sound so much more attractive to us, and the media loves them. “The media gives us anomalies that are treated as the norm,” said Dubner.
• He used an example of shark attacks. Annually, only around 5-7 shark attacks occur around the world. (Yes, this is actually tracked by a database in a Flordia university). One year, the media was reporting that unprovoked shark attacks were a huge concern due to a particularly gruesome attack in the US. As it happened, there were only four attacks that entire year, which was below average. Dubner quipped that more people were probably killed by fatalities related to news vans rushing to cover shark attacks than by sharks themselves.
• “We’re very good at being scared of the most horrible outcome that may occur,” he said.
• Dubner then moved on to an interesting segment about urbanization. Basically, at the turn of the 20th century, horses posed a major problem to city development. The population of horses rapidly grew, resulting in a huge surplus of manure (once valuable to farmers, but a stinking nuisance to city-dwellers), an increase in pollution and disease, a reduction in available crops and an increase in transit-related fatalities. Some of the smartest people in New York City got together to try to figure out what to do to resolve the problem, and in their planned 5-day conference, they gave up after two days, finding themselves unable to figure out how the horse problem could be dealt with.
• The problem resolved itself not by those dealing directly with horses, but by two disruptive industries – electric streetcars and gas-powered automobiles, both of which provided safer, cleaner, faster forms of transit that all but eliminated the need for horses. In fact, the New York Times called the automobile an environmental savior. (Ironic, considering its current vilification as a greenhouse emissions producer.)
  

  Freakonomics is a highly recommended read.

• Dubner then touched on four takeaways from this story.

  >We should acknowledge that the future is hard to predict.

  >>We should understand that technology creates opportunities for solving problems in ways we never could envision before an advance arrives.

  >>>We should realize that change, innovation and invention often come from outside industries and sectors, and every year of education that individuals within a society has not only increases that individual’s earning power, but also allows society as a whole to benefit due to each individual’s increased ability to contribute.

  >>>>The value of any commodity can boomerang over time.

• This last takeaway led to an amusing anecdote about a man who stole some horse manure for his garden (believing it was all right to take it due to his history with the farm). The alleged thief was a Harvard economist, and a friend sent him a note afterwards, saying “Congratulations – most economists are net exporters of horse manure. You’re a net importer.”
• A great talk, but Dubner wasn’t done. He closed out his keynote by suggesting that the best thing that any of us can do is to ask questions that haven’t been asked before and not to let the laughter of others dissuade us. He talked a bit about Steve Levitt (who is a master of this) and then concluded with a story about some unusual research by an economist named Keith Chen who was trying to get on the tenure track at Yale.
• Basically, Chen devised an elaborate experiment to determine what behaviors are hard-wired into our brains when it comes to money. He decided to conduct an economic experiment with Capuchin monkeys, which aren’t known for being very smart or teachable. (You can read the details in Dubner and Levitt’s article in the New York Times, found here) The big idea was to see if these monkeys could express their preferences for food items through money (in the form of shiny metal washers). It took six months to train the monkeys to use the “money,” but once they learned how, they were able to show a preference for buying their favorite foods and for responding to simulated “price increases” by buying alternative products. And then, one day, the monkeys got ahold of the washers and something peculiar happened – one of them gave his washer to a female monkey in exchange for sex. Once the act was done, the female eagerly strode forward to purchase some food with her newly-acquired “money” — the first-ever recorded act of monkey prostitution.

Clearly, Dubner covered a lot of ground in his hour-long keynote, but the good news is that if you’re interested in any of the above, you can read his books and articles, visit the Freakonomics blog, listen to the Freakonomics podcast or watch the Freakonomics documentary, which has some rather entertaining stories taken from the first book directed by an all-star team of documentary filmmakers.

Our takeaways

Dubner gave us a lot to digest, but we have no problem saying that there’s a fine line between predictions and fantasies. Using predictive analysis to try to anticipate what’s going to happen is a fool’s errand, and while it sounds very good in theory, it often results in bad decision-making. It’s far better to use data to manage risk and reward (two applications that IBM is certainly offering with its software solutions, and which we wholeheartedly endorse!) rather than to try to predict what’s going to happen next.

It’s just like an example that Dubner used in his talk – we can predict the weather fairly accurately for the day, but take it into the week or the month and we rapidly lose predictive ability. Take it even further into a 10-year weather pattern model and the prediction’s unlikely to describe the future at all. We just don’t have the capability to make those predictions.

But, we would add, we do have the capability to look at the worst of what the weather can give us and to prepare ourselves for those patterns as they emerge. And we also have the ability to see that it’s going to be a sunny day in the 70s with a low chance of rain and take advantage of the beautiful day while it lasts.

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Photo Credit: Scrunchleface (Flickr.com)

Obesity is the next major health concern now that smoking has been largely conquered, and there are some pretty serious implications of Americans getting larger: the strain on the healthcare system will be enormous, the overall health of the population will decline, and adult life spans will decline, making the Baby Boomers or Generation X the first generation in US history to have a lower longevity than their parents.

The CDC is projecting that adult obesity rates will reach 42% by 2030, with a quarter of all American adults in the “severely obese” range. If this is true, the article says, the added cost to our society could be another $550 billion on top of the $2.6 trillion already spent on healthcare.

This may have other impacts on society as well:

The new study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, used obesity prevalence data from 1990 through 2008 to extrapolate future trends. The information came from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a federally funded telephone survey. People underestimate their weight when asked on the phone; that fact was compensated for in the mathematical model.

The researchers also incorporated variables, measured in each state, that affect obesity rates. These included the price of gasoline, which discourages walking when it is low; access to the Internet (and other technologies), which encourages sedentary behavior as it increases; and restaurants per 10,000 people, which increases eating out and weight gain when the number goes up.

Source: The Washington Post

Of course, like any projection, the 42% obesity figure makes a number of assumptions, some of which may invalidate the entire forecast. In fact, the very same article says that a competing theory is that obesity rates have plateaued at the current range, 35.7%. The article also doesn’t mention if the growth is expected to occur in younger adults who are moving from overweight to obese or if it’s meant to occur in older adults as they retire. The implications for either scenario are vastly different in terms of public health policy.

The projections are also making use of a metric  called BMI (Body Mass Index). Unfortunately, this metric is not the best possible choice, because it bases ideal measurements off height and weight and doesn’t take body shape into account. It’s also not a good metric for children. There have been cases where BMI has been applied towards children who are three pounds off their target weight and labeled obese (despite appearing as happy and healthy as any child should!). An significant increase in adults with a higher BMI is certainly a trend worth attention, but it’s always important to ask what those metrics are telling us and whether they’re being appropriately applied to the population.

Still, all of this suggests that even if BMI is not the most appropriate metric and adult obesity rates have plateaued,  the health of everyday Americans could be better (and if it were improved, it could save our society hundreds of billions of dollars on healthcare!). But with studies suggesting that the brain is hard-wired against losing weight the body’s put on, reversing the trend may require much more than wishful thinking.

Continue reading »]]> Facebook now has 901 million active users worldwide, of which 526 million are active daily users on average. 500 million use Facebook on their mobile devices. 125 billion friend connections have been made through the network, and (The source for all of this data is, of course, Facebook.)

Of course, Facebook’s been targeted by those who have concerns about its lack of regard for its users’ privacy, its tendency to treat users as a product rather than as customers, and its potential overvaluation of its worth as it prepares for an IPO. These are all actions that at least can be traced back to the decisions made by people running the show.

But it may also have a darker side full of unintended consequences: Facebook may be the gateway to a new form of online addiction, especially among women and those who are anxious or socially insecure, but which may also affect extroverts.

That, at least, is the suggestion of a research team from Norway at the University of Bergen that has developed a brief six-question test to help Facebook users understand if they’re addicted:

The Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale is based on six basic criteria, where all items are scored on the following scale: (1) Very rarely, (2) Rarely, (3) Sometimes, (4) Often, and (5) Very often:

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

[Lead Researcher] Andreassen’s study shows that scoring “often” or “always” on at least four of the seven items may suggest that you are addicted to Facebook.

Source: ScienceDaily

The full paper was published in the journal Psychological Reports (here’s a link if you’re interested). I’ve only read the abstract and the press releases, but I noticed a few interesting things.

1) The scale was developed by interviewing students, which means that it probably has strong application to millenials, but probably less so to those in other generations. It’s important to keep in mind that neuroscience has shown that when younger people experience addiction early, their brains develop differently. For example, this has been studied under the more general Internet Addiction Disorder.

2) According to the abstract, there scale has positive relationships to Neurotocism and Extraversion, but a negative relationship with Conscientiousness. In other words, people who like a lot of attention or who are insecure are more likely to become Facebook addicts than those who have a more balanced life. (The latter group uses Facebook primarily for networking and sharing, as it’s intended). But what the study doesn’t seem to probe is whether or not those who are risk for Facebook addiction are also at risk for other types of addiction, or are already addicts.

3) According to Doctor of Psychology Cecilie Schou Andreassen, the lead researcher on the study, women are more at risk as well because of the social nature of the network. This is interesting when you consider that men are more likely to become addicted to drugs, alcohol and gambling (80% of addicts who seek treatment are male), but that women tend to have more serious struggles with addiction and are less likely to seek help.

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Bill DeWitt III, President of the St. Louis Cardinals

Speakers of Note is a series of articles where we provide summaries of great talks we’ve heard from business leaders around the country.

Who: Bill DeWitt III, President of the St. Louis Cardinals
Where: UHY Advisers Next Executives Breakfast Seminar, May 8, 2012, St. Louis, MO
Topic: The Business of Baseball

St. Louis is definitely a baseball town; sure, you’ll find your Blues hockey fans, your Billikens basketball fans, or perhaps, if you look hard enough, your diehard Rams football fans. But get out your red shirt with the Cardinals logo and tell your friends and co-workers that you’re headed down to Busch Stadium to see a game, and you’ll stir the envy of everyone around you.

For that reason, it was hardly surprising to see a packed room of young professionals waiting to hear Bill DeWitt III, President of the St. Louis Cardinals franchise (and son of principal owner Bill DeWitt, Jr. and grandson of Bill DeWitt, Sr., who managed and owned several different teams over a 50-year career). DeWitt spoke for around 30 minutes before opening up the floor to questions. And in that time, he provided a lot of interesting information about the behind-the-scenes business of baseball.

>St. Louis is a unique market, said DeWitt, because it’s only 24th in terms of its media size, and yet hosts a top 10 (out of 30) ball club due to its passionate fanbase for Cardinals baseball. There’s a tradition and a legacy for the team that runs deep in the town, but that extends far beyond the city’s borders out into the country, where St. Louis is the closest large city for many hours in any direction. The influence of St. Louis’s popular and far-reaching AM radio station KMOX made it easy for Cardinals baseball games to penetrate deep into areas remote enough that going to see a Cardinals baseball game could be a part of a family vacation to the city.

>Cable TV is offering some major growth opportunities to Major League Baseball clubs because contracts that were more favorable to the cable channels are expiring and allowing the clubs to renew at much higher rates. There’s a much higher demand for getting access to games via cable television, and the service has proved itself to be resilient during a recession (since television provides a form of cheap entertainment that people are reluctant to give up during hard times). Right now, cable is providing an important revenue stream to baseball clubs that’s actually rising faster than prices from ticket sales.

>DeWitt said that he doesn’t see online streaming as a disruptive influence at this point, but that the MLB has set things up so that those who use the official online streaming service pay into a central pool that’s distributed evenly among the teams. This provides an opportunity for the MLB to operate in a way that’s favorable to everyone, strengthening the benefits provided to the industry.

>One of the things the Cardinals have implemented as an organization have been technological platforms that allow for customer relationship management and dynamic ticket pricing. DeWitt made sure to note that dynamic pricing tends to bring ticket prices down rather than up; while popular games (such as weekend battles with the Cubs) may draw in slightly higher prices, dynamic pricing is often used to lower prices to make less popular match-ups more affordable to families who’d just like to go see a game live. The Cardinals organization really wants to find a way around the common excuse that “it’s just too expensive to go see a ball game with my whole family” — this helps to ensure that the stadium is more full more often, benefiting everyone involved.

>DeWitt also emphasized that while his organization does have a strong sales force, they have an equally strong service team that’s on hand to assist season ticket holders. Service is part of what makes the experience so much fun for the diehard fans, and DeWitt said that this is one of the reasons that the Cardinals have been so successful as an organization.

>Concession prices, said DeWitt, are high not because of a constant desire to raise prices, but because that is how the industry standard has evolved. He said that he feels that aside from inflation, concession prices probably won’t rise significantly in the near future simply because every price increase has an effect on the sell-through quantities of products being offered. And, he noted, there are ways for families to get around high concession prices, such as days where families can bring their own food inside or promotions at the family pavilion.

>The secret to having a strong team is having a mixture of “kids” and “veterans” – new players and experienced ones. DeWitt said it’s nearly impossible to keep the same roster for a five-year period due to the way that salaries scale up and that contracts work. Turnover has to happen for clubs to remain profitable. Every player has to be evaluated in terms of what they’re offering the team, and since no single player can win a game, it’s important to have a strong team and not just one or two high-priced stars. DeWitt acknowledged that ever team has its own “Moneyball guys” to help value players, and that often, trades are made to try to maximize resources and potential for the season.

Bill DeWitt III at the UHY Advisers Next Executives Breakfast, 5-8-12

>Winning is a crucial part of success, because it does allow the club to charge more for tickets and helps to draw in more fans. Getting to the playoffs can help fans keep up their confidence, even if it doesn’t translate into winning a pennant or World Championship. As DeWitt said at the beginning, “If you make it to the dance, you have the chance” to increase your profile, both among fans and cable television carriers.

>The way in which the Cardinals organization uses social media is to offer insights into the organization that fans will appreciate rather than to try to offer live scores or sales information. Social media can be used to create interest in happenings at the ballpark or during the season, and the Cardinals keep that stream official to maximize exposure and exert some control. Still, they encourage the people working for the club to contribute to the official stream, creating opportunities for unique content that will help the fans to share in the passion of the people working behind the scenes. It’s all about balance.

>DeWitt also addressed the issue of Ballpark Village, a planned addition to the stadium area that will add retail space, offices and attractions for Cardinals fans and tourists. While this project has been stalled several times by all sorts of circumstances, DeWitt assured everyone in the room that it’s coming, and he said that when he looks out in the left field area, even with its breathtaking view of the St. Louis Gateway Arch and the courthouse, he feels like something is not quite right yet (“like a missing tooth,” he said).

Our takeaways: Baseball is a lot of fun, but it’s still a business at the end of the day. It’s important whenever you’re selling fun to a broad market to be sure that you understand the experience and are able to offer different pricing options to your customers so that you can expand your opportunities.

Baseball teams have to constantly change and evolve in order to be profitable, but this translates into excitement for the fans as well. Seeing a veteran player enter into a period of reinvention can be just as exciting as watching an up-and-comer with great potential deliver. Understanding that the players all contribute to the whole (rather than allowing one or two stars to have all the resources) is the key to keeping the teams fresh and new so that fans won’t feel the experience is growing stale. The same could be true for products and services; diversity is important, and aging cash cows need to be augmented with rising stars to keep the product or service line modern.

Having diversified revenue streams helps to ensure that you always have the capital to reinvest in your organization, and using modern technology such as CRM and dynamic pricing can help boost sales by targeting those who are more price-conscious.

Continue reading »]]> It’s been a long time since we’ve updated this blog, but thankfully, things are about to change.

When I started this blog back in 2010, business was slow, and I had a lot of time to devote to daily updates and posts. Unfortunately, as business picked up, so did my workload, and I began running out of time to write the in-depth articles I’d been putting together. I tried a few different ideas (writing shorter articles, creating slide presentations and the like), but no matter what I did, I just couldn’t justify the time spent working on the types of content I wanted to create. I was too busy doing research for our clients.

Now that it’s 2012, business is still booming – incredibly so. But enough that I’ve been able to bring on some staff and allow myself more time to focus on the things I’d like to be doing amidst our research projects.

Like, well, blogging.

I suppose we’ve come full circle in a way, but as I’ve gone around the curve, I’ve had lots of time to think about what we could be doing better with this blog, and how we could make it more useful to our readers. And we’ll be making those changes this month with a visual overhaul and a whole new emphasis on articles. We’ll also have new contributors helping me to keep the content daily.

We hope you enjoy the new Research & Planning Blog!

-Sean and the crew at RPG