Category: Blog

25 reasons Spring is a great time of the year.

Business renaissance. If you’re in a seasonal business that benefits from warmth, like landscaping or outdoor dining, it’s time to roll! Temperatures are moderate. Spring marks the end of frigid winter and the transitional period to scorching summer. The earth's axis is angled between its closest and furthest position from the...

American English: one language, many differences

EVERYONE KNOWS that Americans don’t exactly agree on pronunciations. Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect. Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualisations of a linguistic survey that looked at...

Speaking the right language? The importance of customer profiling

An important part of great marketing is speaking the right language! [caption id="attachment_4103" align="alignright" width="300"] America tongue language open mouth. Studio shot.[/caption] If you know who you are trying to reach with your sales and marketing messages, the next step is to figure out what language they speak. No,  not...

Questions that will help your business grow

Recently, we worked with a respected manufacturing company that was concerned about multiple years of flat growth in a thriving industry. They believed that their products were chosen because they were of the highest quality in the category, but they could not figure out why they weren’t growing. We worked with the...

10 Business Decisions that Influenced the Future  

We've found 10 examples from the last 75 years when individuals, companies or groups saw a need and took dramatic action, often creating something historic out of nothing--advancing not only single invention or program, but also the business principles that influenced not only that time, but today and our future. Here they are:...

4 Dimensional Trust in an Age of Change

When you or your company or group seek to operate in a change environment, or if you are going into a time of change, the highest priority will be to create and rely on embedded, earned trust. And in times of change, the last thing you need to experience as an...

Resuming the series: Valcort’s 35 Keys to Business Growth

We’re resuming today our writing on Valcort’s 35 keys to business growth, which highlight our comprehensive view of the most important disciplines that companies and organizations will master if they are to consistently succeed.  To help you review the discussions to date, we’ve provided below the links to the articles...

Reaching the people most important to your business

Valcort 35 Keys to Business Growth: #19 Continuously evaluate the most effective way to reach each of the different customer groups you serve. The easy part of marketing is to state a crisp, sensible plan for success: Whether we have a product that will be of interest to 10 or...

15 tips for successfully reaching “unreachables”

It’s only natural for us to want to market our products or services to everyone, in hopes of capturing a larger audience. But every business has some “unreachables” who seem unsuited for or resistant to your overtures.  Now, some of these people are placed in that category for a good...

IRS approvals, Red Cross problems and top stories from the nonprofit sector

Nonprofit Tax-Exemption Approvals Double, Thanks to Simplified Form.  The Internal Revenue Service approved 94, 365 applications from organizations seeking 501(c)(3) designations in fiscal year 2014, more than double the number approved in the previous two years. 4 Options for Targeting Donors.  You have four options when evaluating how you might...