Business
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The Power of Three: How We Owned Three Brands and Ran Three Sales Forces
- December 13, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business
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When you’re a manufacturer with a national reach, you’ll often work with manufacturers reps as well as your own sales force. In fact, your sales force will often call on the manufacturers reps as part of their territory. Manufacturers reps often have access to projects and clients that you might not otherwise get because they
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Headquarters and Second Offices Don’t Have to be in Expensive Cities
- November 29, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
The big expansion news over the last few weeks has been Amazon search for a second North American headquarters and the speculations about where they’ll actually place it. Dozens of cities are all clamoring for Amazon’s $5 billion investment and hoping to be the city to employ 50,000 employees, many with six-figure salaries. Many cities
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I Don’t Believe in Remote Work for Employees
- November 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Productivity
This one is going to make me unpopular, especially with today’s modern marvels of broadband technology, video conferencing, and our ability to multi-task and work anywhere in the world. I don’t believe in remote work for employees. (Not a big shocker, I’m sure, since you already read the headline.) But I believe that if you’re
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How Do You Recover From a Devastating Incident?
- October 25, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve had to fire a lot of people over the years, usually related to performance issues. But in the 21 years I was president of the company, I never had a layoff. That was one of my precepts of managing a business: I believed layoffs were really a
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How Do You Keep Up Company Morale?
- October 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Measurement
Company morale can have more dramatic rises and falls than a roller coaster. You’ll have your seasonal ebbs and flows, highs before a big product launch, lows after a major crisis or periods of poor performance, as well as the occasional holiday-related highs. But you can also have pockets of high and low morale throughout
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Do You Have a Disaster Plan for Your Manufacturing Company?
- September 6, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Safety
With Hurricane Harvey passing just a couple hours southeast of me, and Hurricane Irma hitting Florida, I have been wondering what businesses in the affected area have done to protect their data and information from disaster. I’ve heard stories of businesses that have had to shut down because they lost their financial and client data
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Treat People Fairly, and They’ll Be Fair With You
- August 9, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
I’ve always tried to treat people fairly, even going above and beyond what’s expected of me. I’ve been in more than a few situations that I didn’t need to do this. I wouldn’t have done anything wrong, and I could have received a small benefit to myself in the end. But by treating the other
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If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It Right or Don’t Do It
- July 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
A few months ago, after I left Robroy and started my own consultancy, I received a very nice note from an old manufacturer’s rep named Jack, and it brought back a lot of memories. David, I keep up with you through Brian C. and John S.. I’ll never forget you calling me when you got
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Hire Slow and Fire Fast to Avoid Workplace Toxicity
- July 19, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
Toxic employees can have a negative effect on company morale and production. Their bad behavior doesn’t just limit them and their accomplishments. It spreads like a sickness to the people who work around them, causing all kinds of internal strife and dissatisfaction. Even your star employees, who are probably pulling the weight of the toxic
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Learn From the Past So You Don’t Repeat It
- May 31, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Innovation
The further backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. I’ve always been a big fan of Winston Churchill, and as I was growing up, I adopted several of his quotes as philosophies to live by. This month, I’ll discuss four quotes that have guided me over my professional career. Being