B2B Stories

B2B Stories

Thoughts from the General: How About Some Good News

It is important to be aware of bad news, and more importantly, to take steps to deal with it. However, recognizing, celebrating, and enjoying the good news should be part of everyone’s life journey. A favorite expression in our family is “Don’t Postpone Joy” Here is some good news list from far and wide. The strength of the dollar. For the first time in twenty years, the dollar is worth almost as much as the Euro (the other important currency in the world). This news is mostly positive. It indicates

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B2B Stories

Simon Says: The 12 Days of Christmas, adjusted for inflation

The major economic concern this year has been inflation. The latest data suggest that prices have risen by 7.1 percent over the last year. This has hit consumers’ pockets hard and at this time of the year made Christmas more expensive but by how much? A whimsical take on the cost of Christmas is provided by PNC bank which calculated the cost of the presents in the 12 days of Christmas. A partridge in a pear tree is 25.8 percent more expensive due to the higher cost of fertilizer. Higher

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B2B Stories

Good things come to those who plan

Let’s just go ahead and preface with this: I fell into entrepreneurship and therefore leadership. And riding a bull is about the equivalent of being a business owner; perhaps you can relate. There are tremendous ups and downs, spins and ejections. So, keeping that in mind, I wanted to talk about questions that continually come up for me while I am out in the community: “How do you do all the things you do?” “I see you everywhere! Do you sleep?” “Do you have a clone?” “I didn’t expect you

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B2B Podcasting

Free Access: Job market cooling in Georgia

  The state recorded its second straight month with a slight increase in the jobless rate and companies are suing Georgia over backroom deals in granting medical marijuana licenses. More in this Georgia Business Daily Business Update by Mike Petchenik.

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B2B Stories

Big business: The 25 top grossing Christmas films

Christmas vacation is a great time to download a movie or pop in a DVD (or, if you’re really behind the times, a VHS tape) – especially this year, as the weather makes staying inside seem prudent. It’s also often a good time for movie producers to lure people to the theaters. Christmas movies are big business, both at the box office when they’re released and later as they’re shown ad infinitum on cable channels. There are a number of lists online of the top-grossing Christmas movies, all with varying

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B2B Stories

Downtown businesses participate in decorations crawl, voting ends tonight

When Brandy Gibson relocated her business from Monte Sano Avenue to Broad Street last year, she fell in love with the new location’s storefront windows. Gibson, owner of Tiffinie Bleu Bridal Boutique (pictured above) located at 1251 Broad St., is one of 32 business owners participating in the fourth annual Making Spirits Bright Downtown Décor Crawl, a month-long event sponsored by the Downtown Development Authority of Augusta and Augusta & Co. “I decorate them every year, so when I found out about the crawl, it gave me another reason to

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B2B Stories

The business of Christmas: Americans spend billions each year

In the 1960s, both the Charlie Brown and the Grinch TV specials forewarned about the growing commercialization of Christmas. Despite their warnings, Christmas has become big business in the United States. Here are just a few facts about the business side of Christmas. • Christmas tree farms sell 25-30 million real trees each year – in 2018, it was 32 million, accounting for about $6.1 billion in sales. The states producing the most Christmas trees are Oregon, North Carolina and Michigan, but there are Christmas tree farms in every state.

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B2B Stories

Ebenezer Scrooge still provides lessons for modern-day business owners

Each year around this time, one of the world’s wealthiest fictional characters receives a lot of attention. That, of course, is Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly and bitter character created by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol and retold in a number of movie versions. But just how wealthy was Scrooge and how did he earn all that money? Dickens’ novel, published in 1843, doesn’t say for certain, but obviously Scrooge was extraordinarily wealthy for the time period. Various people have ventured guesses at Scrooge’s wealth. Forbes listed him as the

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