The Pragmatic Populist

Guest Post: Business Plans vs. Business Strategy

Conquer your enemies. Use your own agility to make your opponent move even slower. The faster you can make decisions and take action, the more deadly you will be when facing your opponent. There is a business book making the rounds at the Tech Ranch that, similar to the last  paragraph, seems like it’s about military strategy. [...]

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Not Being Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

I love startups. I love the chaos. I love the insane hours. I love the energy. I love the types of people who are attracted to work on high-risk ideas with long odds. I love the culture that evolves around them. I love it all. I have spent [...]

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Why Winning the "SEO Game" is About Your Content

As a content strategist one of the things I spend a great deal of time discussing with entrepreneurs is SEO.  As I’ve written here before, my first goal in any SEO discussion with someone is to help educate them on what SEO is and isn’t, and what it really can do versus what it really [...]

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These are a few of my favorite things

One of my favorite parts of the end of any year are the ‘year in review’ and/or ‘next year’s prediction’ lists.  And when it’s a year that ends in a “0,” the lists are usually longer, more interesting and cover a longer window.  So, too, already with this year.  As we head into 2010, we [...]

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Lies, Damn Lies and SEO

One of the reasons that I have always loved being in the web business is because things constantly change.  When I first got online in 1993, we used bulletin board systems and monochrome monitors.  When I got my first tech job in 1996, everything was about corporate Windows networks and preparing for Y2K (remember that?).  [...]

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Mixing Business and Family

For some families, business is just part of the package.  As someone who grew up in a family-owned business, one of the reasons I ducked-and-weaved every time my husband used to bring up the idea of us owning our own business was because I saw a lot of headache (and heartache) as a result of [...]

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Partnership Planning

Earlier this year, my husband and I took a small business workshop offered by a local certified public accountant.  He covered the ins-and-outs of both starting and growing a small business, starting with assessing the pros and cons of each type of corporate structure: sole proprietorship, limited liability company, corporation and various partnerships.  His (relatively [...]

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Personality tests are one of my favorite types of brain candy.  I find something innately amusing about trying to discern something about someone’s psyche from how they answer a quiz or the way they seat themselves around a conference table during a meeting.  Whether there is validity to them or not is always secondary to [...]

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My Favorite Bloggers

As someone who consumes most of her daily doses of new information through the blogosphere (as opposed to traditional media), there are different bloggers I read for different reasons.  As I’ve been trying to streamline my process for writing more (and better), myself, I’ve been thinking more and more about what I specifically get out [...]

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Grumble, Bumble, Facebook Trouble

I was reading an article this weekend, on Entrepreneur.com, and it actually made me a little snarky. In Health Insurance, a 401(k) and…Facebook?, author Justin Petruccelli discusses a new Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey in which 58% of teenage respondents stated that the ability to use social networks would be a factor in their [...]

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