Business Systems

Gravity Payments Pays Up: The Good and the Bad About a High Minimum Salary

The media is still buzzing after the CEO of Gravity Payments, Dan Price, announced that he was cutting his own salary to ensure that none of his employees make less than $70,000 per year. It’s a magnanimous move, and the employees, many of whom saw their salaries double instantly, are justifiably happy. For some background, Gravity Payments is a Seattle-based payment processing firm. In young tech companies like Gravity...

5 Steps to Increase Your Productivity By 20%

Are you an executive with too much on your plate? You are not alone. Fortunately there is something that you can do about it. During 3 years of research,  productivity expert Jordan Cohen showed that while executives waste on average a whopping 41% of their day on low priority tasks, this can be dramatically shifted for the better by using these 5 tricks to can streamline your efforts and free up...

Valuing Your Business for Sale

There are many different ways to gauge the price of a business for sale. Some of the more common include valuing the business based on profits, cash flow, assets or sector. The challenge with all of these methods is that they rely solely on financial data, and miss valuing intangible assets such as customer goodwill, corporate culture, staff relationships, and brand. All of these are crucial ingredients in the...

Lessons from Silicon Valley

This New Year’s my fiancé and I traveled to the heart of Silicon Valley, to meet my new nephew. While for me the baby was the star attraction, my fiancé was equally enthralled with the wheeling and dealing of my brother-in-law, a senior lawyer in a law firm that has assisted such tech heavy-hitters as Google and Sun Microsystems with their IPOs and acquistions. And so between baby coddling...