The Richwood Report

There are some things we can all do in our presentations to put our excellent products in the best possible light and make a favorable reception more likely. This article lists some of them, taken from the teaching of a professional speaking coach.

By the way, we noticed today that we have passed the 1600 visit milestone with over 3000 page views since the beginning of the blog. Thanks to all for your regular visits!

As the new year approaches, we can, if we are wise, try to look into the future for signs of success. This is not as easy as it might sound. Here is an article about the mystery of business. We recommend reading the whole thing, but here are some samples:

If we accept the interesting description of faith by St. Paul ("evidence of things unseen") we can understand entrepreneurship and capitalist investment as acts of faith.

Everyone who is in business understands this. It requires a thousand daily acts of seeing the unseen future to be in business. The reality of the marketplace is that the consuming public can shut you down tomorrow. All they need to do is to fail to show up and buy.

and another:

Sales history provides nothing but a look backwards. The future is never seen with clarity but only through a glass, darkly. Past performance is not only not a guarantee of future success; it is no more or less than a data set of history that can tell us nothing about the future. If the future turns out to look like the past, the probabilities still do not change, anymore than the probability of the next coin toss landed on heads increases because it happened previously five times in a row.

It is a mystery how businesses succeed, but, to our good fortune, they do, and the smartest people are often at a loss to explain why. We do know about a few things, like the importance of wisdom in leadership, reliable information and dependable, talented people but still, the future is, just that, the future.

There are thousands of reasons why entrepreneurship should never take place but only one good one for why it does: these individuals have superior speculative judgment and are willing to take the leap of faith that is required to test their speculation against the facts of an uncertain future. And yet it is this leap of faith that drives forward our standards of living and improves life for millions and billions of people. We are surrounded by faith. Growing economies are infused with it.

So, from Richwood to all the folks who work with us: employees, distributors, vendors, customers and friends--here are our "Happy New Year" wishes and the hope that, as we invest our work together, our effort will succeed in providing the needs of our families. Best wishes to all for health, happiness and success in 2006.

There are some good points here for anybody wanting to cut out a bit of the market by selling quality and benefits.

R & D is important to any manufacturing business. You can't afford not to do it but if you don't do it right you can spend an awful lot of money and still not come up with anything anybody wants to buy. Here, from BigPictureSmallOffice is a good summary of how to make R & D work for the good of a business.

This is an emergency. It could happen here.