Alibaba has created the hotel of the future and it’s wild, wonderful, and just a little creepy. FlyZoo, which is reportedly a Chinese pun for “must stay,” is a 290-room ultra-modern boutique hotel in Hangzhou, China that lets guests play with technology, check in with ease, and spend the night in the future for a low price of around $205—and at the cost of your privacy.
Category: Tools and Information
13 Fatal Marketing Mistakes That Could Sink Your Business | AllBusiness.com
The right marketing strategies can elevate your brand and give your business positive attention and exposure, while the wrong ones can sink your company. To find out which strategies work—and the ones to avoid—we asked entrepreneurs from YEC Next and YEC this question:
Q: What common marketing strategies should entrepreneurs avoid and what should they be doing instead?
Where Can You Find the Best Excel Templates for Business? | Small Business Trends
Spreadsheets have long been an important tool for businesses. You can use them for just about anything. This includes budgeting and planning out important marketing campaigns.
No tool seems more synonymous with spreadsheets than Excel. Microsoft’s tool allows you to easily fill in spaces and create tables. But it also takes advantage of some more advanced features. However, starting from scratch won’t give you a productive business.
You may want to take advantage of all that Excel has to offer. But maybe you don’t know exactly how to get started. So templates become a great option. Check out some sources for Excel business templates that can help you in 15 different areas of business operations.
Choosing Your Company’s Core Values | Business
This is a collection of lessons I’ve learned that relate to how companies should choose and live by their core values. At Thrive, we live by “relationships and results,” and it’s more than just a tagline.
The memory is almost 30 years old now. But it still resonates to my core.
The setting for this vivid recollection is a Target store. One of my elementary school teachers just happens to be there too.
It was one of those moments where you see your teacher outside of school and you just freeze.
My mother told me to go over and say hello. But I was shy and refused. My mother grabbed my shoulders, looked me in the eye and delivered some advice that’s never left me: “Matt, relationships matter. People matter. You need to go say hello to your teacher.”
That’s now ingrained in my business at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. “Relationships matter” is one of our core values.
What are your core values? Here are some tips for building your business culture.
Importance of Finance to Your Business | The Startup Magazine
Finance is one of the very subtle sectors of a business that can make or break entrepreneurs. Ideally, all companies need finances for daily operations. This is what makes the concept of finance very important as an area for all organizations to cover. In South Africa especially, there is an underlying need to keep a business well financed and managed, in alignment with the economic development goals of the country. Below are some of the reasons finance matters to business organizations:
Acclaimed Chef Michael Solomonov Didn’t Hit His Stride Until He Embraced Something He Had Long Hoped to Forget: Where He’s From | Inc.com
Michael Solomonov is co-founder, with Steve Cook, of CookNSolo, a 300-employee Philadelphia company comprising 11 restaurants. He has won four James Beard awards, including Outstanding Chef in 2017 for the Israeli restaurant Zahav. With the introduction of Federal Donuts, now in five locations around the city, CookNSolo ignited the national trend of coffee-doughnuts-fried chicken restaurants. Solomonov’s success required both exercising his culinary imagination and vanquishing his personal demons. –As told to Leigh Buchanan
My mother’s father was a pediatrician: the Jewish doctor in this little town in Ohio. They traveled to Israel a lot. That’s where she met my father, who had moved to Israel from Bulgaria in 1948. After I was born they came back to the United States. My father took over a jewelry store that was a family business on my mother’s side.
Fighting Debt With Debt: America’s Penchant for Personal Loans | The Simple Dollar
Taking out a personal loan to consolidate or pay off mounting debts is not exactly a new development.
However, according to a recent Lending Tree study, it has grown to be the overwhelming reason Americans access personal loans these days. In fact, the study revealed that managing existing debt represented 61% of personal loan requests in 2018. The next closest category was home repairs, at a meager 7.7%. That’s a significant gap.
What’s more, consumers seeking a personal loan to pay off debt requested the highest origination amounts: $14,107 on average for credit card refinancing, and $12,670 for debt consolidation.
But is this growing penchant for using personal loans to tackle debt the wisest approach? Is it smart to fight debt with more debt? Here’s what the experts had to say.
A Duke Athlete Invented a Simple App. Now the NCAA Can’t Run March Madness Without It | Inc.com
Sixty-eight teams. Thirteen cities. Buzzer-beaters and surprising winners. The same things that make March Madness one of the most spectacular events in sports also make it a logistical nightmare.
Enter Teamworks. In 2005, Zach Maurides was an offensive lineman on the Duke University football team, struggling to juggle his class and practice schedules–plus meetings with coaches, advisors, trainers, nutritionists, and team doctors. “There were about 10 or 15 distinct parts of our program that were all trying to develop me in a different area,” he says. “They didn’t work together very cohesively, and they didn’t communicate with me in any kind of streamlined fashion.”
4 Lucrative Careers You Can Move Into Without Getting Another Degree | Entrepreneur
Switching careers can feel intimidating, but you’ve got to make some moves if you’re spinning your wheels at your current job. Tech industry jobs are hot right now, and you can make great money once you’ve got the know-how to compete with other tech candidates. Here’s a breakdown of the fields with the best opportunities.
Best Promotional Events For Businesses: 4 Marketing Ideas | Getentrepreneurial.com
A significant proportion of marketing advice for small businesses focuses on digital marketing – using your blog, targeted advertising, or social media – and this approach makes it seem as though digital advertising is the only kind that matters. In doing so, this advice overlooks the power of in-person contact and any exciting and affordable ways to reach your community. Build deeper connections with these classic strategies, standbys from a brick-and-mortar era, that never stopped working.
Join Your Chamber Of Commerce
Your local Chamber of Commerce may seem like a minor organization, especially if you’ve been in business for a few years, but joining forces with your area branch can yield a number of benefits. In particular, the Chamber of Commerce tends to promote new members and can increase the visibility of area businesses through their events, social media activity, and community outreach events. Your Chamber of Commerce also offers valuable networking opportunities, which can create connections and foster cross-promotion with other local businesses.
Dispatches From The Front 