If you love to be in the outdoors and particularly enjoy seeing up close wild animals, you likely need a guide to help you. Whether the shooting is with a camera or a gun or fishing rod in pristine country, when someone goes into the “wilds” danger lurks. Some of the danger is from animals in their normal habitat; some of the dangers are the countryside. In the Book Andy Russell – Memories of a Mountain Man, published by Macmillan, Toronto, 1984, Mr. Russell lives at the base of the Rocky Mountains and makes his living as a guide. He takes people, typically wealthy people from New York area into the mountains to see the mountains including the animals, sometimes they shoot an animal with either a camera or a gun. In the book, Mr. Russell writes nobody knows better than a mountain guide that the rugged country in which he lives and works is never through with teaching him as long as can put one foot ahead of the other. The mountains have a way of never letting you bask for long in the feeling of having graduated to the ultimate crest of skill where nothing can touch you. They have a way of springing things on you when you least expect it; moments of profound truth where your heart is in your mouth, when you know you are looking at death and survive. Mr. Russell goes on to state some times he almost died but somehow did not. Treating nature with respect is a theme throughout the books.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in the same manner the mountains need respect for guiders, the market needs respect from investors. Anyone who does not give respect to the market and takes it for granted will lose money quickly. Although this blog suggests it is easier to work with the market though dividend paying stocks, markets go up and they go down. Sometimes for no other reason than the tide goes in and it goes out.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

 

 

 

 

The subject of the book The Greatest Game Ever Played is golf. The book was written by Mark Frost and published by Hyperion, NY, 2002 and if you consider the many tournaments played the narrowing of the field must at first glance be very hard. The book is about the September 1913 US Golf Open – this was at a time the British and Scottish golfers dominated the leadership board at any tournament. Part of the reason was two British golfers were simply the best in the world – Harry Vardon and Ted Ray and in terms of golf courses in the US in a relative sense there were not that many so there were not that many championship quality golfers. The US Open was the changing of the guard when US Golfers would become more dominate. Within the mix of the top professionals (and the money won meant there was a new tournament next week and being the golf pro at the golf course) and a few amateurs. One of those amateurs was a 20 year old Francis Ouiment. If you check Google – Francis won the tournament and golf became very popular to where you will find many golf courses.

Watching golf without knowing much about it is generally a less exciting event – watching it on TV with commentary brings in the decision making process and the understanding why those who play, play the game. An example in the book is: to stand in the still, perfect sweetness of this place outside of time, a club in his hand, looking down at a small white ball, knowing exactly what he was about to do.  To bring the focus to reality by executing the shot desired using all the mechanics of physics.  The book has wonderful descriptions as seen above and makes it an exciting reading.

Another aspect of the game of golf or at least championship golf is the poker part of the game – bluffs, perfect shots, and psychological warfare, the stresses. In non competitive golf, the above are much more friendly including walking in nature and sharing an outing.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, after the 1913 US Open, more people took up the game and business changed to what it has grown today. After the US Open because Francis Ouiment was an amateur, lived across the street and was a former caddie – golf was seen to be open to more than the idle rich. Each industry has a turning point where it becomes the standard, at some point (it is easier to see looking backwards), after that date it seems easier and then consolidation is the next stage. At the consolidation stage, it is easier to invest in dividend paying stocks.

There are more questions than answers, till next time – to raising questions.

For many people on the planet, the furthest they will go is within 100 miles of their birthplace, for others the world is their playground. For the later group, there is a magazine which is devoted to ensuring they see the sights few see – Conde Nast Traveler who tries to have great writers write about great places, thus making the journey and destination both important. With great writers, the descriptions are wonderful to read. The Book of Unforgettable Journeys was published by Penguin Books, NY 2007 and takes a person around their world in your reading spaces. An  interesting addition to the chapters are after the story are companies to help you if you decided to journey to one of the places described. It is one of those wonderful books to read in the winter for helping you decide where place you would like to journey to.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, similar to taking a trip there is or should be some preparation or research. Having a reasonable idea of where you what to go and one or more highlights you would like to see. If you buy a stock, you should have an idea why and some benchmarks on what would be a reason to sell or to hold it longer. For dividend stocks, the journey or receiving dividends on a regular basis helps make the decision process easier.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

 

 

At the Climate Meetings in Paris, one of the many solutions to climate change is to have more vehicles move from gas powered to electric powered with the electricity generated as clean as possible. If that change happens, the utilities companies will continue to be even more valuable. At the moment we look at utilities both for their continuing abilities to pay a dividend and the outlook for interest rates. If interest rates go up, the stock tends to go down, however the dividend rate continues to be paid. What companies are the ones to buy?

Peter Ashton of Recognia Inc published a chart in one of the newspapers on oversold US Utility Stocks.

The criteria he used

1. minimum market capitalization of $ 20 billion  or the larger more established companies
2. companies are currently trading at least 10% below their 52 week high.
3. dividend yield of at least 3%

 

Rank   Company                Ticker   Recent      Mkt Cap    % chg            Dividend

Close          US Bill        from 52 high  yield

1. Exelon                         EXC-N    27.70     25.5         -28.8%           4.5%
2. Duke Energy              DUK-N   67.72      46.8         -24.7             4.9
3. Southern Co                 SO-N     44.58      40.7        -16.1               4.9
4. Dominion Resources    D-N    67.22      40.1         -16.9               3.9
5. American Electric     AEP-N     55.61      27.3         -14.9               4.0
6. PPL Corp                       PPL-N     33.65      22.7         -11.8               4.5
7. PG&E                              PCG-N    52.36      25.7          -13.0              3.5
8. NextEra Energy           NEE-N    98.88     45.7          -12.2              3.1

 

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the important aspect of this chart is trying to lower your risk and keep your money. To lower the risk, narrow the field and determine why the companies went down and sometimes the market oversells. By exercising control or doing nothing but ready to do something, you can buy seemingly bargains. Are the companies a good buy now, it depends on how long you intend to keep them. If for a long time, the answer is yes.

There is more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions,

 

 

 

If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 31 Everything in Life Involves Selling Something

Mr. Herjavec is an admirer of anyone with great selling skills.

4 Qualities of Outstanding Salespeople

• They believe in what they do
• They enjoy and engage people
• They listen more than they talk
• They eliminate reasons not to make the sale

At its core, selling consists of relating to another person and persuading that person to go somewhere he or she had not planned to go.

Good salespeople know where to apply their energy with a potential customer and when to stop wasting their time on tire kickers and window shoppers.

Planning a sales pitch to a customer with my team begins reviewing all the good things that are likely to happen including reasons why the prospect will surely respond positively. The answers come, then tell me the reasons why we will not get the sale. Once we eliminate all the reasons for a prospect to say no, the only answer that remains is a yes.

Chapter 37 Humility is More Effective than Arrogance

It is never pleasant when things go wrong, but it is never wise to assume the other person is to blame either. When things do go wrong, it is a good time to learn how to improve the way you do business and to appreciate the difference between optimism and realism.

The longer Mr. Herjavec is in business, the more he realizes that success is almost never hinges exclusively on the quality of your product or service. It also involves on the people you deal with and the way they relate to each other.

A successful sale depends not as much on how well you communicate the content of your pitch as how good you make people feel.

If a pitch does not go well, try to learn call the group and ask what you did well and what you did not for the next time. Perhaps you can do better and the relationship can become one of your biggest customers.

How I Handle Customer Complaints

• Assume the client is right 99.9% of the time and move on
• Remember the role that customers play – you are in business to serve your clients, who pay the bills
• How to fix things with clients is as important as what you fix
• There is no such thing as a small complaint – address and solve all complaints
• The ultimate complaints are usually expressed silently – most do not complain, they walk away
• The first response to a complaint must be good communication
• Test your system to anticipate and eliminate complaints
• Treat your employees like clients
• Solutions are important. Blame is useless, do not finger point – solve first.
• When the problem is solved, analyze. The goal is to find ways of preventing reoccurrence.

Linking to dividend paying companies, there are more chapters and information in the book which is good to learn from. After buying your shares, you tend to pay more attention to the company and one method is how they sell and how they handle complaints. The better they do it the better the financial results.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 22 Don’t Bank on the Banks

Business does not get done without credit. Banks love to market themselves as your partner in business, if you are profitable the image works. If you are not making a profit, you must remember the bank is there to lend you money to be repaid, not to be a venture capitalist or business partner.

How to Get Financing

• Know your facts – Mr. Herjavec is amazed how little research has done by many people who seek money to fund their business. You need to know your cost of production, your wholesale margin, and expected retail price. Every business operates in a market, what is the size of it; is it increasing or decreasing? You need to know the facts of the business.
• You have 90 seconds – you have someone’s undivided attention for 90 seconds for them to understand your concept or idea. Your task is to seize the other person’s attention from the beginning.
• Communicate effectively – present your facts and figures in a manner that generates confidence. Watch your body language,
• Value your company realistically – the biggest obstacle encountered by pitchers is the value they place on their business.
• Understand relative value – what is the value of their business related to others in a similar field.
• Know the golden rule – a thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it
• The only measure of success is sales – sales are tangible proof that your vision is real.
• Define your share of the market, not the size of the market. Nobody cares if the total market is $ 10 billion what they care about is how are you going to capture a share of the market.
• Do not underestimate your role – you may believe the facts speak for themselves, they need someone to speak for them.

Chapter 24   Prepare to Wear the Black Hat Major Problems Rarely Fix Themselves

5 Serious Symptoms of Trouble

• A constant shortage of cash to pay all bills in full when they become due.
• A reliance on bank loans and overdrafts to keep the company solvent ( it is one thing to be short of cash because you are growing like crazy; quite another because you are borrowing to fund operations)
• A dramatic reduction in the owner’s income and profits.
• A constant concern about potential failure
• An inability to reduce the company’s debt position.

10 Steps Forward

• Stop the bleeding – check the cash flow
• Forget the quick fix solutions – separate short term actions with long term needs and manage them in parallel
• Do not delegate – this is the time for micromanagement on your part. The situation likely took some time to happen with the current management.
• Make a clear distinction between turnaround expenses and operating expenses.
• Do not try to hide the urgency, proclaim it.
• Manage up if necessary
• Identify and nuture your most profitable products or services – your core business
• Find the niche where you can be number one – becoming the dominant player in your market is the best way to create stability
• Know the biggest source of savings on employee salaries
• Expect to win

Linking to dividend paying stocks, while companies losing money are to not to bought, even profitable companies have lost money and if you look at companies that existed 50 years ago, few exist now. You need to watch out for the signs.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 13 Learn from Failure, Profit from Change

Experience may be a good teacher, but its lessons are often painful. The best way to dull the pain of a business failure is to isolate the cause, identify the lesson learned, and change your policies, strategies, or processes to deliver future sucesss.

Why Businesses Fail:

• Undercapitalization – most companies start on a shoestring with insufficient capital to grow by taking advantage of opportunities. The fact many entrepreneurs overestimate the degree of success makes the problem even worse.
• Lack of industry experience – every year you are in business you have learned how to do things correctly and avoid doing things wrong.
• Lack of management experience – it is easy to identify the wrong way to manage a company, it is more difficult to identify the correct way to manage one and to implement all the ideas you know.
• Poor record-keeping and financial control – you may think you are doing well, but until you gather the necessary data and know how to evaluate it, you are driving blind through a blizzard.
• Ineffective planning – the most successful companies achieve greatness by developing plans and strategies communicating them to key members of their organization and aiming for performance targets.
• Inadequate education – education helps reduce the incidence of failure
• Poor staffing – successful companies have talent from top to bottom of the organization
• Unwise product/service timing – Timing really is everything.
• Unwise economic timing – you have a better chance of succeeding in business when the economy is growing.
• Unwise personal timing – youth brings energy, but age brings wisdom.
• Lack of marketing skills – you need to sell your product
• Lack of partners – if you can locate a partner who is strong in the skills you are weak in, you enhance your possibilities.

Chapter 15 Your Customers Always Come First

Rules of Waitering That Apply to Business

• You do not get to choose your customers – all restaurants seat diners to fill up the general area, not according to the skills of the waiter. Learn to accept that some people will be more satisfied than others. Selling to people who share your interests is easy. Selling to people whom you have nothing in common is not, but it is necessary.
• The customer is not always right – it is more important to make the customer feel good. Lots of things can happen at a restaurant but ensuring the person left feeling positive is the key. A free dessert and sincere show of concern help greatly.
• The most important to improve customer service is the person serving the customer. Most people do not want to deal with the manager, they want to focus on someone who understands their concern and can solve it on the spot.
• The buck stops at the customer service person. Good waiters accept responsibility when things go wrong, even though it is clearly not their fault.
• Rudeness loses. Being rude to customer even though they are rude is not good, but managing to be pleasant and civil in the presence of rudeness can provide surprising rewards.
• Never appear overwhelmed even when you are. People value coolness under pressure.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the good thing about these companies is that they should be able to learn from the failures. Not everything they do will be successful, although there is no reason why the metrics should not be seen early to avoid losing too much. All companies must sell their products or services – continuing to improve is the key issue.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 8 Having One Good Idea is Never Enough

Many people assume one good idea is all they need to achieve success. It is never as simple as that. On the TV shows, Mr. Herjavec has seen all kinds of ideas and every pitcher we encountered honestly believed that he or she had created the better mousetrap. There will be many reasons why people do not buy and that is an important criteria of business – you must sell something.

Six Rules for Driven Entrepreneurs

• Your idea need not be totally originally – it should be distinctive and deliver unique benefits.
• Ideas that can be easily duplicated by others may have no value.
• If it is not patentable, the opportunities for success are limited
• The odds are against you
• Prepare yourself for the unexpected and unanticipated
• Unless you can not wait to get started on building your business each day when you wake up, reconsider your goal.

The 8 Biggest Myth about Running Your Own Business

• The product is so great it will sell itself. Nothing gets sold until the person with the need and ability to buy it learns about it
• The best way to get rich quick is to start your own business
• If you make a profit in your first year, consider yourself lucky
• If you believe you will be able to convince your bank to be my business partner. Starting a new venture represents a risk. Banks do not like risks. They want to be updated but are not your business partner.
• I will build my business with discounts to early customers and be able to catch up on pricing later on. Once you offer a discount, it is very difficult to boost the price to the necessary level without losing money, customers or both.
• I will match or beat my competitors prices and still make money. Unless your know both your own and competitors margins, this is a losing proposition.
• My employees will be my friends. You can be friendly but not be friends with them.
• I will have more free time when I am the boss. Most business owners worker longer because they enjoy it.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, often times the companies doing the buying of the medium sized business (exit strategy) are the dividend paying companies. In a dividend paying company maintaining the sales is a large challenge and start ups can be bought and then all the operational channels can be used to enhanced the product. It is the dividend paying companies looking at the smaller companies and deciding which ones can be tweaked enough to become an offering by them. How well are they doing it? How much does it cost them to buy market share?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 5 How to Pitch a Good Idea and How Not To

5 Ways TV is Like the Real World

• You have a short amount of time to make your point.
• People judge you by who you appear to be
• Past success does not guarantee future success
• Fast learners have a distinct advantage
• People who do not really matter love you when you are important and shun you when you are not.

Chapter 6 Why Pitches Go Wrong

Mr. Herjaec writes within 30 seconds he can tell whether he is likely to entrust his money to the individual making the pitch, even before I hear the reason for the person being at the studio. It is something intangible: a blend of confidence, assurance and even a bit of swagger. If the first impression fails to make me confident, the pitchers have 60 seconds to change my mind or I am out.

The Most Common Mistakes by Pitchers: Being Greedy

Greed combined with a lack of understanding of basic business principles has destroyed many dreams of pitchers.

Successful entrepreneurs treat business like commodities –or a farmer raising crops. You buy or plant the business; you grow it until the price is right and sell it to the highest bidder.

Most business people do not hit a home run the first time at bat.

How to Value Your Venture

• Your company is worth what the market says it is worth.
• No sales equals no value.   Limited profit equals limited value.
• An established value can be enhanced.

Chapter 7 Believe in Yourself

5 Commandments for Budding Businesspeople

• Identify your passion.
• Do Your Research – start with an idea back it up as you indentify and quantify a real need
• Hold off on expansion. Starting small enables you to change the focus if necessary. Consider expansion only when your core business is running smoothly and profitability.
• Set fixed goals Have no more than 5 to 6 goals and review them on a regular basis.
• Have an exit strategy. Whatever you choose can influence your operating decisions.

 

Linking to dividend paying stocks, we all evaluate companies from our different perspectives and often time the initial reaction or gut reaction is correct for lots of reasons. We use research to determine if our gut is correct. The process remains the same whether evaluating companies or deciding to invest in new ones.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.