Corporate culture

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...

How to Build Your Company Culture on Core Values

A company culture is just a mirror of its owner. The clearer an owner is on what they stand for (and what they won’t stand for) the stronger the company culture  they establish will be.  In Forbes online, Stanford MBA graduate Kevon Saber gives us the following questions that he used to build the culture at his online wellness app company: 1. When have you felt most alive? Kevon discovered...

9 Critical Mistakes Leaders Make

In this succinct and informative video, Harvard Business Review interviews 9 experts on leadership to discover what they think are the most critical mistakes leaders make. 1. Irresponsibility Good leadership comes from being responsible – for your company, employees and customers. Poor leadership results when you put your self-interest before the interest of the institution that you run. 2. Betraying Trust Trust is the most valuable currency not only for doing...

2 Foundations for Creating a Healthy Workplace

A healthy workplace is not something that happens by accident. If your company aspires to be a top employer, consciously pursuing workplace health needs to be a top priority. The good news is that not only does a focus on workplace wellness go a long way to attract and retain great employees, there is a growing body of research to prove that such initiatives provide a substantial return on...

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...

Sales Diva

My mother is a sales diva. Whether it is selling homes, furniture, vitamins, makeup or water filters she brings a wholehearted (almost evangelical) passion to her work, and a genuine caring for her customer, that allows her to excel at whatever she lays her hand to. I didn’t always see this as a good thing. When I was in my teens she was bitten by the network marketing bug...

Love and the Retail Environment

Work is love made visible. And if you can’t work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy. Khalil Gibran What does it really take to motivate people to bring joy, along with their best effort, to work in a retail environment? Keep 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...