Broadside

Broadside: For people building businesses.

  • Cognitive flexibility & the final act

    Well, we did it. We’re at number nine, the final installment of the series on creativity. Here’s a list of all the posts in order: Today we must address the final aspect of the creative act: cognitive flexibility. There’s a whole field of study surrounding cognitive flexibility, but here’s a simple definition from Wikipedia to…

  • A template for value-based pricing

    Last week I told the story of “Billy” and the hourly rate battle between his dozer operator and my Ivy-League writer. Today, as a follow up, I want to share a basic template for implementing value-based pricing. What is value-based pricing? Value-based pricing is a pricing strategy where the price is set based on the…

  • What dozer drivers & writers have in common

    I once had a client, back in my agency days, that always beat me up on price. That’s not extraordinary. If you’re in business you’ll always have customers that pinch pennies. But my guy was a special kind of frugal and one clash over cash has always stuck with me. My firm was redesigning his…

  • The power of tenacity

    We’ve been talking about the aspects of the translative requirements, meaning the components needed for translating the creative act into something real. They are courage, tenacity, and cognitive flexibility. Today, we will address tenacity. And it is here that I must confess my lack. I have not been the most tenacious of fellows over the…

  • Why I don’t believe in the free market

    I don’t believe in the free market. I don’t believe that it can solve our problems or that the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s 1776 banger, The Wealth of Nations, will guide our society to ever-increasing wellbeing. Surprising, I’m sure. After all I’ve been a business owner for decades. My consulting clients are business owners,…

  • The secret to higher prices & happier customers

    I told the two-dollar-sauce story on Friday and at the end of it I suggested a solution: charge enough that you don’t have to nickel and dime your customers. And, like the steakhouse, you could simply bump up your pricing to cover incidentals—a sort of cost-plus approach. Your product retails at $10, but comes without…

  • Why $2 can get you fired

    There are two high-end steak houses in Charleston and I was determined to try one of them on my birthday. I made reservations weeks in advance, as you can’t get a table otherwise. When the evening finally came, Lydia and I dressed up and hit the town. It was a beautiful night, especially for February.…

  • How to beat the bots

    In Friday’s newsletter I wrote that although pundits are decrying the end of certain kinds of work (writing, coding, designing, problem solving) because of ChatGPT, the AI has a fundamental flaw. The flaw is that all of it’s understanding of the world (assuming it can understand) is based on the internet, which is not an…

  • ChatGPT’s major blind spot

    There is a lot of concern over how ChatGPT will change our world. People are fearful for their jobs, concerned about their privacy, and worried that so much potential power resides in the hands of Skynet—I mean private companies like OpenAI and Microsoft. However, there’s a specific aspect of the bot that seems like trouble…