General Business Writing
I have written the blogs and articles below for some of my many clients outside the hospitality industry. If you are looking for a blog or content writer, and you are not in the hospitality business, please review the work product below to get a feel for my creative approach.
In the Beginning…
On a bright April morning in 1979, the legendary founder and chairman of the newly minted conglomerate, City Investing, walked into that year’s first strategic planning session and declared, “The only permanent element in our business is change.” We all just sat there and waited for him to continue. He didn’t. He got up and left the room.
A CONTRACTOR'S GUIDE TO FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS
Hard times teach hard lessons. The great recession of 2008 has alerted the construction industry to the fact that it cannot rely on boom times and unlimited growth to insure profitability. Shrinking revenues over the past six years have inspired contractors to take a closer look at their management practices and search for ways to maintain profitability in the absence of top line growth.
* The Ugly Truth about monetary incentives… and Why They Never Work! (page 7)
Premier Meeting Services collaborates with Athena Education Group, LLC, as the continuing medical education provider to plan, develop, and implement live CME conferences, meetings, and symposia at the local, regional, national, and international levels. Over the years, our main challenge has been to keep medical education meetings up-to-date and attractive to an often repeating but ever-evolving audience of medical professionals.
At Premier Meeting Services we are advising clients to revise their AV budgets to include a professional video production company. Like most meeting planners who produce continuing education programs and company training sessions, videotaping high profile presenters and breakout sessions is nothing new for us. But, recently, we have upped our game.
We realize how valuable a complete video record of every event is to attendees, clients, and meeting planners alike. Professionally produced video re purposes and magnifies an event as follows:
The Essence
The legendary Notre Dame football coach, Knute Rockne said it all: “The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.”
Vince Lombardi, no slouch himself at putting together great teams, said: “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
Another football great, Joe Paterno, offered this insight: “When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.”
Henry Ford knew a little about building teams when he said: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”
No one wanted to argue with Steve Jobs when he said: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
The Baby Boom Generation looms over the long-term care industry like a tidal wave. Every year for the next twenty years, 3 million of the 75 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 will hit retirement age (Barr, 2014). By 2029, when the last round of "boomers" retires, the number of Americans 65 or older will climb to more than 71 million (Colby & Ortman, 2014). In other words, we are looking at a tidal wave of more than 30 million additional retirees in the next fifteen years.
Busy Life in London
How To Prevent Exhaustion
Success often turns to failure for the busy London young professional. Human resource directors at leading British companies and public sector groups believe that 30% of their London staff suffers from exhaustion. Work-related stress, depression and anxiety cost Britain f530 million a year, with workers taking 13.8 million sick days.
As we work with nonprofit accounting departments helping to install the FAMCare Cost Tracking/Financial Module, we are noticing a notional bias that seems to pervade the entire industry and prevents nonprofit organizations from operating efficiently from a financial perspective.
Because most nonprofit employees are focused on mission and not on profits, they do not feel the need to prioritize financial management. Perhaps the very title, nonprofit, changes the focus of everyone working in the nonprofit arena.
Today, social workers increasingly rely on digital tools. Online therapy, advocacy by social media, and earning an MSW degree online are just a few of the additional tech innovations that are evolving in social work. However, the social work profession reflects generational differences in acceptance of technology.
Global Vision Technologies’ mission is to help case workers leverage technology. FAMCare, our rapid case management software, has lightened the case load burden of social workers across the country by eliminating the need for complex filing systems, keeping all related case records in one place, customizing reports, and providing mobile access to all files.
As social service agencies grow and new case management software is introduced into the market, finding the right software to fit your agency’s size and mission can be a daunting task.
I began my trading career in a rented room in Vacaville, California while I was still attending college. I had bought a book from an ex cab driver that told me I could make a fortune trading options. Anyone could get rich! I, of course, believed the book and proceeded to set up trading screens in my room. A postal worker who brought home a different ugly girl every night and a cool older black dude that loved to drink boxed wine into the wee hours occupied the other two bedrooms of an old dilapidated house we were renting from a strict old lady. In that time zone, I could start trading at 6:30 in the morning and would trade options till about 9:00 A.M. when I had to leave for work at the local Circuit City.
I was an over confident rookie options trader who had borrowed $2,000 off a credit card for investment capital.
In search for the next destination…
The primary responsibility of professional meeting planners is to choose the perfect destination for a meeting, event, or exhibit. Typical meeting planning used to center on choosing an appropriate venue in one of the main convention cities across the world. New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dallas, Miami, London, Paris, and Rome were the A-list, and all the rest were secondary.
In the last twenty years, however, cities around the world have developed their own hunger for this lucrative convention and incentive trip business, and hotel rooms and convention centers are popping up in the most unlikely places. This explosion presents meeting planners with a wealth of quality, capacity, and budget options. It also presents them with the challenge of keeping their databases up-to-date.
At Microsoft’s 2016 Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Angela King, senior event marketing manager at Microsoft, rolled out a new program that all meeting planners should note.
Experienced delegates knew their way around and could attend break-outs and presentations without missing the networking opportunities that abound at the conference. Ms. King realized, however, that first-time attendees (who make up 40% of the delegates) were at a decided disadvantage. The vast conference offered so many learning opportunities that new attendees were often overwhelmed and unable to take advantage of all the conference had to offer. She decided to try to remedy that.
Financial measurements are sufficient and appropriate in the for-profit corporate world, but strict financial measurements rarely reveal the strategic performance of the typical nonprofit. Financial performance measurement systems in the nonprofit world usually focus only on the measurement of donations, expenditures, and operating expense ratios. Success for nonprofits, however, should be measured by how effectively they meet the needs of their constituencies.
For the last six years, American Express has conducted a world-wide survey of meeting and event professionals in an attempt to uncover the trends that will characterize the meeting and event industry in the upcoming year. They survey thousands of event owners, meeting planners, corporate meeting producers, venue operators, airlines, meeting vendors, and travel professionals around the globe.
Premier Meeting Services studies the survey carefully and produces an extract of the findings. Here is what the industry is predicting for 2017.
OVERVIEW
BARRON’S
A recent article in Barron’s said this:
“Non-Profit accounting is arguably one of the last vast wastelands of corporate accountability; rules are lax, disclosure is minimal and available data are usually months, or even years, old.”
Robert Kesten, a consultant, policy advisor, and nonprofit executive added:
“A good accountant or bookkeeper working for a nonprofit can make it pretty hard for a donor to pick up on accounting issues.”
Recently, the FASB (Federal Accounting Standards Board) introduced new recommendations regarding: net-asset classification, improved disclosures of information useful in assessing liquidity, whether NFPs would be allowed to use either the direct method or indirect method of presenting operating cash flows, and whether unrestricted net assets should be renamed net assets without donor restrictions.
Question - Do some nonprofits utilize poorly worded, but entirely legal and ethical, accounting rules to hide their true financial position?
One of the most important steps in planning events for nonprofits is attracting, recruiting, and retaining volunteers. Our post-event feedback questionnaires ask the question: What was your event’s most critical element of success? By far, the number one answer is – the volunteers.
It is surprising how many event planners come to us with no clear plan of how to attract, and hopefully retain, volunteers for future events. It’s not that it doesn’t occur to them that they will need volunteers, it’s just that they don’t seem to realize how important the volunteers are to their event’s success.
On March 20, 2016, President Obama made history when he became the first American leader to visit Cuba in the post-Cold War era. Prior to his trip, the last American president to set foot in the country was Calvin Coolidge in 1928 – more than 88 years ago. Since the time of President Dwight D. Eisenhower the U.S. has placed an embargo on the communist nation of Fidel Castro. During his visit, President Obama declared the embargo will end when Congress approves the final legislation. Many restrictions are still in place, however.
American companies seeking to do business in Latin America have begun to contact Premiere Meeting Services about the meeting and event possibilities in Cuba. They see our pending new diplomatic relations with this communist country as an opportunity to educate their employees about the Cuban culture. They want to “immerse” employees in the still unspoiled local culture to help them develop a deeper understanding of Cuban and other Latin American markets.
A large pharmaceutical company asked their meeting planner to design an event around a new medical technology they were about to introduce to their sales force. They wanted the event to be a training in the new technology – a celebration of the product itself – a party that would motivate the sales force – and anintroduction of the technology to the medical community at large.
PRIORITIZE OBJECTIVES
When the pharmaceutical company first contacted the meeting planner, they said they wanted to hold a national sales training for a new product introduction. The planner, of course, immediately started to scan
