The United States Postal Service (USPS) operates on a scale unimaginable to most business owners.  The USPS is the second largest civilian employer in the country. On a given day, USPS delivers 584 million mail pieces and generates $224 million in revenues. Yes per day.  Last year, revenues exceeded $67 billion. Unfortunately, the USPS has one metric that stands out from the rest: in fiscal year 2010, it lost over $8 billion.  This year it expects to lose $7 billion. While the scale of the … [Read more...]

The AOL-Huffington Post Deal has generated hundreds of expert views on the matter.  Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions, in general, show mixed results.  Despite making sense on an Excel spreadsheet, many M&A transactions are plagued by problems: systems integration issues, differences in cultural communications, lack of post-merger direction, and a failure by management to articulate the benefits to the market cause the downfall of many transactions. According to Thomson … [Read more...]

Behavioral economics and behavioral finance are some of the most fascinating areas of study today. The disciplines combine economics, finance and psychology in ways that better model how consumers actually make decisions. In general, the study of economics is based on theoretical models that only remotely resemble the complexities of the real world. These models assume that individuals behave like machines that always know what is in their best interest, always do what is in their best … [Read more...]

I recently wrote about the importance of managing inventory due to its direct impact on working capital.  In the article I mentioned Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, Soap.com (Soap is no longer around - updated June 2019 - see what happened to it here)and BeautyBar.com, which used effective inventory management to generate respectable profit margins in the otherwise cutthroat business of online retailing.  Quidsi is on track to surpass $300 million in sales this year.  The company was … [Read more...]