A while back, water started coming through the ceiling of one of my rental properties. I talked to a handy friend and he said I needed my roof repaired as there’s nothing else in the attic that could be creating water (no pipes or anything). I called a number of roofers and asked them to come […]
Business Ideas
People Don’t Leave Jobs, They Leave Managers
I’ve been interested in retention: why employees stay with or leave an organization. There’s been a recent focus on Silicon Valley misogyny, with Susan Fowler’s poignant blog post leading to shakeups at Uber. A cynic might suggest that the people being fired are a public relation’s sacrifice and that the company has an inherent problem going all the way to […]
How Do “If We Don’t Sell It, We’ll Buy It!” Deals From Real Estate Agents Work?
It seems just about every town has a real estate agent that offers some sort of “I’ll buy your house if it doesn’t sell” deal. It’s natural to wonder how this could work – does the agent have dozens of homes they own? Are they just THAT good? Is it a scam? How It Works […]
The Magic Of Multiple Bids
It’s often a tricky thing when you’re trying to make a purchase for the first time. My wife and I have decided that 17 windows in the duplex that we’re living in need to be updated. It’s a 90-year-old house and we think the windows are original. Every time I look into windows they always […]
Using Money To Understand The Publishing Industry
A woman recently posted in a Facebook authors’ group I’m a part of that she was rejected after submitting her series to a publisher. She wrote, “It was an audiobook company who said my sales aren’t enough for them to be successful. What stung the most was when she said, ‘you just released your fifth […]
Professional Dungeon Masters
There’s been a new trend in role-playing games (RPG): professional dungeon masters, who are people that run role-playing games for money. With RPGs, the dungeon master (DM) does quite a bit more work than the other players. They need to understand the system better than anyone else playing, design the adventure, keep track of the […]
Machine Learning Is The New MBA
Years ago businesses noticed that graduates from Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programs had a toolset that was unusual and useful. These graduate programs were producing people distinct from general undergraduate business programs, in that they had a good understanding of general business principles applicable throughout an organization, combined with analytical techniques that could be […]
Many Software Developers Are Underpaid
Young people are flooding into computer science programs. Working as a software developer, or tech worker generally, is seen as an easy path to a high salary. In spite of this, it’s clear that above-average software developers are underpaid compared to the value they bring to organizations. The range in productivity of developers is HUGE. […]
Monetizing Communities
I’ve been a member of online communities since before most people had heard of the internet. Before internet access had reached the masses, bulletin board systems (BBSes) allowed computers to connect, one-on-one, and form local, small versions of what we’re all now apart of. One element of this has been the evolution of online communities, […]
Website Visitors
When you’re getting started with something, having a metric to measure your progress is important. At the lowest possible level, just your time devoted to the activity can work, but it’s better if you can manage a more sophisticated measurement than that. I’ve been trying to write commercially, and the ultimate measurement for that is […]