On Dreams

 

One thing this era of real-time information and instant feedback has done (thank you Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc.) is to make magazines - and print publications in general - become very good at what they do and, lest they perish, better all the time.  

Two great examples of very good publications are Inc. Magazine (you're waiting a whole month for a new edition – 30 days!) and The Week (you guessed it...published every seven days).

Both are anxiously awaited and consumed at first sight.  The Week not only provides exhaustive articles about the past week in politics, business, arts, etc., but various other writers and editors view on the same story providing a well-rounded, sort of non-partisan, look at a particular current topic.

Inc. Magazine, The Magazine for Growing Companies, is one I have lived with for many years.  Each edition provides profiles of small- to medium-size businesses who, at some point, had the dream of creating and building a company.  Grant it, Inc. considers small companies as those with millions in revenue, but I can dream, can’t I? Overall Inc. is very motivating and essential reading for this business owner. I admit I become a little giddy when the annual Inc. 500 edition featuring the fastest growing privately held companies arrives in my mailbox.

One of the articles in this month's Inc., which is both motivating and instructional, is “Dear Future Entrepreneur.” This article gives us advice from the founders of companies who are living the dream they dared to have.  Here is some advice they have to share with us, the “next generation” of entrepreneurs:  

Tomorrow Can’t Wait – “I look back and think, ‘Why didn’t I get started sooner?’”  - Cloud Ettinger, Founder and president, Red Cloud

Focus – Don’t diversify, always “go back to your original premise.”  - Kimberly Kovacs, Co-founder and CEO, OptionEase

Remember Where You Came From – His employees are trained to do at least one good deed a day.  - JJ Frazier, Founder and CEO, New Horizon Security Services

Start Now – “You’ll never be fully prepared to start a business."  - Michael Simmons, Co-founder and CEO, Extreme Entrepreneurship Education

Learn by Doing – With your business, “You’re in the best university in the world.”  - Steve Vicinanza, CEO, BlueWave Computing

Start Early  – “When you start younger, you have the guidance you need.”  - Taliay Herbert, Founder, Baggie Swagg

Open Pandora’s Box – “Business is about testing your boundaries.”  - Stephen Mills, Founder and CEO, Aqiwo 

Dare to Dream – This entrepreneur was laughed his the face by executives at Rite-Aid, his employer, for his idea to improve services.  So he left and started his own company to provide those services.  - Reddy Annappareddy, Founder and president, Pharmacare

The entire article, including great photos of the founders (think body-writing!) can be viewed here. 

Best wishes to all for a Merry Christmas and Peaceful New Year!

- Steve Curtsinger

Need a Showroom in Detroit? That's No Problem!

If there is ever an industry where the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts," it is the exhibit industry.  One project may have many people collaborating toward the completion of an ultimate goal.  Even exhibit companies who do everything "in-house" have to rely on other companies to supply various aspects of an exhibit project, be it manufactured components, shipping services or exhibit installers to name a few.  It's true, especially in the exhibit business, that no one is an island, and anyone ever involved in the industry - from exhibitors to exhibit suppliers - knows this.

At Integra Display we collaborate with many different companies and individuals on several levels giving us vast capabilities to meet many diverse marketing needs. And at times we supply display materials and graphics to others who are not the end users.

Recently we got together with Image-Tek in Novi, MI, to take care of client, Shiroki North America from Smithville, TN, that needed a showroom and lobby in their new Detroit facility. The collaboration resulted in the fabrication of a showroom displaying the company's products and featuring high impact large-format graphics.  Photos of the final installation can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/3wr34f5

Another great match-up is a display manufacturer who produces Made-In-The-USA displays and exhibit materials for Integra Display and other display designers all over the world.  They have recently introduced and eco-friendly line of displays called Magnetix and it is getting alot of attention.  We have Magnetix featured on our website this month: http://tinyurl.com/3cww72y

Project size and scope, no doubt, does matter and does impact the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" mathematics.  I have often told my clients that I have a "cast of 1000's" working with me and, honestly, with some projects that number seems low.  The bottom line is our clients just want a great product, delivered on time, within budget and that will achieve their goals.  And with all of our available resources, I can confidently say, "That's no problem!"

Dealing with the Prez

Recently my wife rolled up to the check-out counter at Kroger with $196.00 worth of groceries.  She knows she had $196 worth of groceries because she had self-scanned all of her groceries, bagged them and loaded the into the cart to take out to the car.

Then some unfortunate things happened: First, she wanted to pay with a check; second, Kroger only accept checks up to $150 in self-checkout; third, and most unfortunate, she had only one check.

The clerk made an exception this one time and my wife went merrily on her way, right?  No, the clerk would not let her write the one check for $196 and she left without the groceries.

Seth Godin, in his start-up manifesto, The Bootstrapping Bible, discusses many advantages that small businesses have over the big boys.  One is Presidential Input and, in this case, its what you might have gotten from a small independent grocery store.  But not at Kroger.

If the president of Kroger had been standing where the clerk was, do you believe he would have made the same decision?  Risked losing even one customer? Risked all the bad word-of-mouth advertising? Let $196 walk out the door?  Probably not.

Company presidents don't do that.  Policy-ridden bureaucratic companies do.  And that's one of the benefits of working with small businesses: You can always deal directly with the President of the Company who is willing to cut through the crap, who sets policy and "will never lose someone over a stupid rule."

Moore's Law revisited

I'm not much of a techno-geek, but even I have heard many times of Moore's Law.  In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel, published a paper describing a trend in which the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.  The law has shown its usefulness many times in our recent digital age especially in relation to computer memory, storage, processing speeds, even manufacturing costs.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that Moore's Law probably does not apply to raw information.  I'm referring to messages - useful or not - generated in our world today through the traditional means of marketing and advertising such as print ads, TV, radio and billboards and new media made possible by the internet, such as this blog you are reading, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, You Tube and on and on.   Some of you may remember that Google used to show you the number of pages it was searching to provide you with the results page(s) of your search phrase. In 2005, Eric E. Schmidt, president of Google decided to take off the feature on the Google home page giving the number of indexed pages.  The last day stated "Searching 8,168,684,336 Web pages." In 2008, the number of unique pages indexed by Google had reached 1 trillion!  That's a big increase in just three years.

There's a mind-boggling amount of information out there and its both challenging and fun to find the information that's useful right now.  Challenging as to not get too distracted ...  fun because the possibilities seem endless.  Bill Gates states in the introduction of his book "Business @ the Speed of Thought" that "business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the past 50."  The book was written in 1999, and this statement sounds about right.  He also writes that the "computer industry is about as far in development as cars were in 1910 and planes were in 1930."  Amazing.

I hope you'll continue to read Integra Display (the blog) and perhaps find useful information here. We have indexed this blog on Technorati - AJ4A36M9B9S7 - to make it easier for those interested in effective trade show and event marketing to find. (We'll also discuss interesting people like Gordon E. Moore, Eric E. Schmidt and Bill Gates...)

References:  The New York Times, Wikipedia and Bill Gates' book referenced above.