Business Articles

Practical thinking for owner-run businesses on pricing, inventory, cash, customers and getting found, and on making better decisions with the data you already have.

27 articles, newest first

Build, Buy, or Get Help: An Honest Framework

Data ownershipOct 19, 20265 min

AI made building your own tools a real option for a small business. That doesn't make it the right one every time. Here's how to decide between building, buying, and paying for help with the hard part.

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ContinuityOct 19, 20265 min

SDE: Do You Own a Business or a Job?

Seller's discretionary earnings adds your own pay back into your profit. Then comes the step that makes it useful today: Subtract what it would cost to replace you, and see what the business earns on its own.

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Pricing and marginsOct 19, 20265 min

The Margin Question Most Owners Can't Answer

Which of your services actually makes money? The usual way of answering points owners at the wrong line. A worked example shows how to read margin by service, and by hour, before you cut anything.

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ContinuityOct 19, 20265 min

What Turnover Actually Costs a High Country Business

Turnover in Boone runs on the academic calendar, whatever kind of boss you are. The real cost is paying for the same training every semester. Written operations make each departure survivable.

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Getting foundSep 17, 20266 min

What Is a Good Customer Acquisition Cost?

Every benchmark answer dodges the real question. Your margin and your payback window set the ceiling on what a customer can cost you. This is that math, walked slowly, with the calculator ready when you want your own number.

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Pricing and marginsSep 14, 20266 min

Is Wholesale Worth It?

A wholesale order looks like found money until you price the margin you traded for it. How one case sold wholesale compares to direct orders, and the break-even that says when the trade works.

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CapacitySep 10, 20266 min

What a No-Show Actually Costs You

Owners can name what an empty chair costs, and the number is almost always too low. The napkin math for vanished appointments, what a normal no-show rate looks like, and which fixes have measured effects behind them.

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Getting foundSep 3, 20266 min

How to Set Up an Online Presence for a New Business

Four phases, mostly free, an evening per item, order mattering more than speed. We stood up our own presence this year and kept the receipts — the address that leaked for months, the profile seen three times, the 250 spam links, and the AI summary that confused us with a British firm.

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Getting foundAug 31, 20264 min

Why Isn't Your Website Contact Form Working?

A broken form is the quietest failure a website can have. The five ways forms die silently, the two-minute monthly test that catches all of them, and what our own contradictory records taught us about trusting a form nobody has tested.

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Getting foundAug 27, 20266 min

How Do You Show Up in AI Search Results?

AI models quote what they can extract, attribute what they can identify, and skip what they can't parse. When we first measured our own site it ranked 22nd for its own name and an AI mixed us up with a British firm. The fixes were ordinary; measuring them is the hard part.

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Getting foundAug 24, 20265 min

What Analytics Does a Small Business Website Need?

Three free tools, and one matters more than the others. Search Console is the report card nothing else can produce, GA4 is the census, and Clarity is the camera. What each answers, the setup decisions that matter, and where all three go blind.

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Getting foundAug 20, 20265 min

Fewer than you fear. At the baseline a profile is not a marketing channel but a public record that vouches for your identity, to customers and to machines cross-checking it. What to claim, what to keep consistent, and the preview card almost nobody checks.

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Getting foundAug 17, 20266 min

How Do You Set Up a Google Business Profile?

The mechanics take an evening; the four decisions are where profiles go wrong. Exact name, true category, honest hours, and a description that follows Google's rules — walked through on our own profile, including the step we skipped.

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Getting foundAug 13, 20265 min

Should Your Website Use www or Not?

Neither form is better, and the split matters anyway. To a machine your www and bare addresses are two different websites, and everything your site earns is credited to whichever one your configuration testifies for.

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InventoryAug 10, 20265 min

What It Costs to Hold Inventory

The 20-to-30% carrying cost rule is a shrug standing in for five real numbers: money, space, spoilage, insurance, and markdowns. Adding up your own version takes twenty minutes and moves every ordering decision.

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Pricing and marginsAug 6, 20265 min

Why Didn't Cutting Costs Increase Your Profit?

Cutting a cost rarely cuts the work it was paying for. The work migrates onto whoever is left, usually the owner, at a rate the books record as zero. That is how a payroll line improves while the business gets worse.

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InventoryAug 3, 20265 min

How Much Safety Stock Do You Need?

Safety stock is insurance, and certainty is priced like insurance. Going from 95% to 99% sure costs about 40% more stock, and doubling your lead time grows the buffer by 1.4x, not 2x. The dial is worth choosing on purpose.

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InventoryJul 30, 20265 min

How Much Inventory Should You Order at Once?

Ordering costs fall as orders get bigger and carrying costs climb, so there is a quantity where the total bottoms out. Finding it takes three numbers, and checking your habit against it takes two.

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CustomersJul 27, 20265 min

Your Star Rating Is the Last Page

A star rating is an average, and averages lag. The words and dates underneath move first. Reading a year of reviews backward tells you what changed inside your business, and when it changed.

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Pricing and marginsJul 25, 20265 min

Should You Raise Your Prices?

The unanswerable question is how many customers you'd lose. The exact one is how many you can afford to lose. On a 62% margin a 10% raise lets you lose one in seven before it costs you a cent — and a 10% cut makes you win one in five just to break even.

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Cash flowJul 23, 20265 min

What Banks Look at Before a Small Business Loan

The week you want money is the worst week to start becoming readable. Four moves that build the lender's checklist in advance, and they pay for themselves even if you never borrow a dime.

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Data ownershipJul 21, 20265 min

Know What's Worth Owning

Buy the plumbing, own the core. A field guide to spotting which of your tools could vanish tomorrow without a trace, and which ones are quietly holding your business's crown jewels.

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ContinuityJul 16, 20264 min

The Bus Test: One Question, Four Audiences

Customers, lenders, successors, and someday-buyers are all quietly running the same test on your business. One set of evidence answers all four.

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InventoryJul 16, 20265 min

The Two Inventory Questions Nobody Actually Runs

How much to order and when to reorder are arithmetic, not instinct. The answers are close at hand, the mistakes are expensive, and one of them probably describes your storeroom right now.

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ContinuityJul 15, 20265 min

Is Your Business an Asset, or a Job You Can't Quit?

A one-minute test: You leave for a month, starting tomorrow. What breaks first? The answer tells you what you actually own, and every piece of it is fixable this quarter.

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Data ownershipApr 15, 20263 min

Why Your POS Data and Marketing Should Talk

Your point-of-sale system knows what sold. Your marketing knows what got attention. Connected, they tell you what actually works.

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Data ownershipApr 5, 20262 min

The Real Cost of Disconnected Business Tools

You're paying for tools that each see one part of your business. Here's what that fragmentation is actually costing you.

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