Who is More Useful to Your Business? A CMO or a CRO?

I think I can safely say that you don’t go into business to lose money… unless you intentionally do so for a tax write-off. Yet making money is not as easy as it’s often characterized. It takes a great idea mixed with execution. It takes hard work mixed with luck. And, it takes money mixed…

What Does BACON Have To Do with POOP?

I was excited and honored to be the keynote speaker at a national conference where the words… CRAP, SH!T, and POOP are in every presenter’s speech and are spoken openly and frequently in almost every conversation had with attendees. It was the 2023 APAWS National Conference in Myrtle Beach South Carolina. APAWS is the Association…

Could You Improve a Customer’s Journey with Artificial Intelligence Marketing?

Last week, I made a mistake. I grabbed a soda out of a cooler, and it was a Diet Pepsi. I’m living in Pepsi Country. Pepsi was founded in nearby New Bern, North Carolina. But I gave up diet drinks a while ago because I don’t like the taste of artificial sweeteners. Artificial is generally…

Is Your Marketing an Investment or an Expense? Good Questions!

It’s been an interesting week. We are in the dog days of summer. People are vacationing, getting their kids back to school, or just soaking up (or avoiding) the sunny days and warm weather. Speaking of dogs. Our dog Layla picked up a case of the dog flu from doggie daycare. The daycare was incredibly…

Making An Argument For Better Marketing

Is your marketing working for or against you? In any case, you are the judge. I recently took a college course on The Art of Debate. It was with a Wake Forest professor named Dr. Jarrod Atchinson. It contains over 24 half-hour lectures and digs deep into the history, purpose, and strategy of debate. In…

Making Connections… Where are the Wires?

CONNECTIONS I grew up with wires, LOTS OF WIRES. Being a musician and an audio-video and computer geek, I still have bins filled with wires. Audio cables with RCA, XLR, TRS, TOSLINK, MIDI, and banana clip connectors. Video cables with BNC, VGA, DVI, S-VIDEO, and HDMI connectors. Computer cables with SCSI, Ethernet, USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire,…

FOMO to ROI in 5 Easy Questions

I started my podcast back on November 1st, 2014. I am about to cross the 1000-episode barrier. Next year will be 10 years. Although some of those episodes are “Best Of” repeats, I have done a monocast (solo episode) and expert interviews for over 450 weeks. Over that time, the business climate and the podcast…

I Lost It All… And Why I’m Happy About It!

Have you ever watched the movie “A Christmas Story”? There is a scene where Ralphie is helping his dad change a tire for the first time. He was holding the lug nuts in the hubcap, and his dad’s hand hits the hubcap, sending the hardware flying through the air, glistening in the lights of the…

Fad, Fame, Or Fortune… It’s About Business (and Time)

Test of Time Back in 2015, I talked about my concept of the Marketing Trifecta. I will explain what that is in a bit, but there has been a lot of buzz over the last 8 years about new tools that will revolutionize marketing. I have seen so many of them try and fail, come…

Your CPA Wants to Know Your CPA

Mistakes… They are only bad if you don’t learn from them. Now, there are different levels of bad. You can put the wrong creamer in your coffee bad, or the Three Mile Island, nuke the east coast of the United States bad. But if you live to tell about it, you can always learn something…