Sorry, but an almost-non-stop schedule and limited internet access set our live blogging schedule behind. We arrived at the Stagecoach Trails Guest Ranch late Thursday night with mild concussions from the 15-mile dirt road approach. This was about the only time we regretted having the RV, which varied from hydroplaning on the loose dirt to bumping up and down on the washboard contours of the more hard-packed sections of the road. Why did we visit a ranch, you ask? Well, Scott set it up and we are a bit suspicious that he was just looking for an excuse to wear his cowboy boots. Whatever … [Read more...]
Got Milk? Yes, and in Glass Bottles
We spent today with the owners of the Rosa Brothers Milk Company at their processing facility in Tulare and on their dairy farm in Hanford. Noel, the younger brother, runs the processing facility where they bottle milk, make ice cream, and sell their various products. It was both fascinating and fun. First of all, we got to wear these really cool outfits: We also got to taste their offerings. Paul particularly recommends the Root Beer milk and the Cookies & Cream Ice Cream. This is Noel serving up some Strawberry milk: We then headed over to the 1,000 cow dairy farm where we met … [Read more...]
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Council Bluffs would appear to be just a nice, quiet suburb of Omaha, Nebraska, which sits on the other side of the Mississippi River. But Council Bluffs has a lot of charm and excitement of its own. Some people come for the casinos that sit along the river. Gambling has slowly become a larger part of the city’s economy since a dog racing park was established there in 1986. You can still catch some greyhound racing in town, but we went to the casino instead. When we visited, we spent our evening at an Italian restaurant, a casino, and watching baseball games back in our respective hotel … [Read more...]
Small Business In South Africa
Along with some of my colleagues at the Stanford Business School, I spent last week traveling to South Africa to meet with local businesspeople and politicians. While not exactly the crazy Spring Break involving beer and bikinis that some people crave, it was an extremely interesting week. When Mike, Scott, and I go around the U.S. talking to small business people, we hear the challenges the little guy faces from regulations, the lack of available skilled employees, and large competitors. Those issues are multiplied in South Africa where the pro-labor government has put in place a set of … [Read more...]
Mountains, Nut Graphs, and Leitmotif
Instead of giving you any insight into how a small business can operate effectively, today we give you a look inside the process of creating a book about small business. The Roadside MBA team (Mike, Scott, Paul, and Paul’s retriever Josie) is currently sequestered in a scenic cabin near Lake Tahoe. Over the last few months, we’ve made considerable progress on our book (and by “we”, I mean Mike --- Scott has also been busy, but post-season Little League assistant coaching is not doing much to help small business people). So we came together to edit, brainstorm, and try to hit our upcoming … [Read more...]
Roadside MBA Goes to Russia
I’m traveling in Russia this week. The relationship between this trip and the Roadside MBA can be summarized in this picture.First, note that it is snowing and [expletive deleted] freezing, just like a few days in Kansas I remember well as we drove around talking to local small business people. But more importantly, you can see the incredible reach of the big American multi-national. In addition to many retail options from the U.S. (and I was glad to see we are successfully exporting clogged arteries, as there are plenty of Cinnabons, McDonalds, and Sbarros to go with the Dunkin Donuts), I was … [Read more...]
Your Small Business as a Laboratory
Economists use data to answer questions about labor markets, firms, and the like. A trendy way to study these issues is to run “experiments” where economists go into firms or other locations and try to conduct the economic equivalent of medical researchers that test drugs on “treatment” and “control” groups. We like these sorts of experiments because we are interested in what they tell us about economic theory or other social science phenomena. But business owners sometimes stand to gain much more because experiments can be used to uncover profitable opportunities.Who picked this, how much … [Read more...]
Cameras
We see a lot of video cameras in operation on our visits to small businesses. Before we started this project, I would not have guessed that but they seem to be everywhere. Here’s a picture of one in a warehouse we recently visited, which is monitoring valuable inventory.We have seen video cameras monitoring employees and inventory at a car repair shop, watching over a warehouse full of cigarettes and other convenience store inventory, capturing every nook and cranny of a fish market, and in many other places. We also visited one small business that is developing camera-based security solutions … [Read more...]
More from Slidell
On our trip from Atlanta to New Orleans this week, we met with a total of 15 businesses ranging from a solo mental health provider with a few contract workers to a few companies with about 100 employees. We saw people making fire hose, we saw pets getting treated, and we saw a lot of people buying a lot of fish. We also visited four states and drove a lot of miles.Trip ended with a drive over the Lake Pontchartrain causeway to the New Orleans airport. If you look in the lower right corner of this shot, you can see the Superdome which was going to get a lot more crowded over the next few days … [Read more...]
Hattiesburg
Beginning of day highlight: Major thunderstorms. As a result, Paul started the day a bit grumpy because he had to run on a treadmill instead of outdoors. Also, he had to watch Today while exercising because there is no NPR station with decent reception in Hattiesburg.After this rocky start, the day was a huge success in terms of meetings. We started with a local provider of broadband internet and phone service. This is an interesting business because the technology and the best way to package products (with cable? with cell service? dial-up, DSL, fiber, etc) are changing all the time. So the … [Read more...]