In the song Levelland, James McMurtry wonders why the city fathers of that West Texas town decided to put the town where it is. Flatter than a table top Makes you wonder why they stopped here Wagon must have lost a wheel Or they lacked ambition.    We've often pondered related questions as we've driven from town to town on our journeys.  Why is Hattiesburg MS there?  How did Frankfort KY come to be?  And why is Liberal, KS where it is?  (And why, come to think of it, is it named that?  But names are a whole other blog post...) The topic arose again as we sat down to dinner in … [Read more...]

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...]

I write, exhausted, from a Delta flight back home to Salt Lake.   What a great week.... I'll get to the business stuff in a minute, but first let me fill you in a bit on our travels.   It was sunny but cool in Slidell, LA today; really pleasant for driving around. The not-so-nice part is that it was, well, Thursday.  Our six Roadside MBA tours to date have all had similar timing; we meet Sunday, travel Monday through Thursday, and return home Thursday night.  We spend most of each day talking to business leaders, then drive two to four hours to the next city, compare notes and decompress … [Read more...]

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...]

Hello to all you winter-bound northerners...  We were in partly sunny Pensacola Florida on Tuesday (72 but windy).  Big Navy presence down here, and lots of pelicans too.  Local public art combines the two, with interesting effect: We spoke to businesses from both ends of the age spectrum here.  One was a fish market, a local institution started by the current proprietor's father back in the 1930's.  Frank Patti, now in his eighties, runs Joe Patti's, and still begins his days with 4 am phone calls to Spain to place orders for fresh fish to be flown in, and ends them by cleaning the … [Read more...]

We just pulled into our motel for the night in Pensacola, Florida after a 2.5 hour drive from Dothan, Alabama.  We had some fantastic visits in Dothan, including a company that manufactures fire hoses and one that recycles the precious metal from the catalytic converters of junked automobiles (see photos  below).We had great plant tours at both of these locations, but what was really exciting was the interesting economics at play in both of these businesses and how they linked to successful business strategy.  We learned that making fire hose requires substantial sunk investments, which … [Read more...]

For all of our trips, we start out by setting out a route.  We try to pick four cities/towns, each in a different state, that are reasonable driving distances from each other.  The longest drive we ever took between days was on a cold and snowy January day from Pueblo, Colorado to Garden City, Kansas (more than 4 hours!), but typically we do around two hours or do between stops.  I'm excited about the upcoming trip, because it is in the part of the country where I have not spent much time - Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, and Mississippi. Once we get the locations picked, the next step is … [Read more...]

Hi all, and welcome to our very first post on the Roadside MBA blog! We are in the process of preparing our sixth Roadside MBA tour.  We've gotten a little better at our trips each time, and I think our big innovation on this one will be weather.  You see, the last time we took in a trip in January we traveled from Denver to Oklahoma City, visiting smaller cities in Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma along the way.  Average high temps were in the single digits, which was difficult on Paul, him being a Californian and all. So, this time we are headed south!  The three of us (myself, Mike … [Read more...]