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It seems so obvious that a company would want as much business intelligence as it can get. But I have been inside hundreds, if not thousands, of companies — and most businesses are not organized intelligently. The proverbial right hand rarely knows what the left hand is doing. When Operations doesn’t communicate with Accounting, invoices don’t go out on time. When Sales & Marketing doesn’t work synchronously with the Inventory Management System, trouble is on the horizon.

According to Wikipedia, Business Intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

This is a very workable definition but it is a mouthful. To be more succinct, Business Intelligence means having the right information for your business at the moment you need it.

It’s not sexy — but it’s critically important to businesses of all sizes and shapes. A recent IBM commercial asks if anyone would blindly cross the street knowing there were no cars driving by 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 days ago. Of course not, but isn’t this how most businesses make the majority of their decisions?

An engineer in Los Angeles has made Business Intelligence his life’s work. Tooraj Kazeminy has done dozens of implementations for a significant number of companies — many of which you have heard of — to help them get a handle on their data and turn it into useful information. Look him up and speak with him. It will be worth the call. He has shown me how valuable this technology can be. This isn’t just a good idea. It’s mandatory to stay ahead of the competition.

What if you could have access to technologies that provide historical, current, and predictive views of your business operations? There are software platforms that provide many of the common functions of Business Intelligence technologies such as reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Because platforms already exist, your company won’t have to pay to reinvent the wheel. Order an assessment of your current business structures and data management issues, and you could be on your way to having better reporting, better information, less noise, and more focus on your industry or company’s Key Performance Indicators. It’s not terribly expensive to implement these platforms and the return on investment is fast and dramatic. The value is outstanding.

You might be wondering if your software already does this. It might do some of it. But if you have operations software to manage your plant, or Salesforce type software to handle lead flow, and some accounting package to control the company finances, you will end up with multiple systems all with different reports. The problem with this is different perspectives might not translate into accurate and reliable reporting.

Business Intelligence platforms take each of the data warehouses your company uses and takes the specific information each executive, or each department, needs to support better business decision making. This is why Business Intelligence systems are often referred to as decision support systems.

Don’t confuse Business Intelligence with competitive intelligence. Both support decision making. Business Intelligence mostly uses internal data, while competitive intelligence works with mostly external data, though some internal information will be sought to support decision making.

Use this as a starting point. Call on resources to learn more. Contact Tooraj Kazeminy to see if these concepts can help your company. As a fellow entrepreneur, I encourage you to use this information to stay ahead of the curve.

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A great example of a company that is very focused on its niche is a company at Los Angeles International Airport called Wally Park. These guys are in the business of parking cars and taking brilliant care of them. Travelers can park their cars at any of several dozen airport hotels. They all have a valet, they all have a parking garage, and they all will put your car in a shaded place and return it to you, probably dent-free. But, Wally Park is a cut above. It is truly a different experience. These people have mastered the art of parking cars. They utilize every trick in the book that I recommend for entrepreneurial businesses.

1. They use a Revenue Octopus™ (http://tinyurl.com/29etkck). Entrepreneurial companies need at least eight different ways of making money which are derivative of their core business — which in the case of Wally Park is fees for parking your car. Not only do they charge for parking your car every day, but they have different levels of service such as valet, self-service, covered and uncovered parking. They will wash your car. If you're a busy executive and you're traveling all week, the last thing you want to do on Saturday is spend time at a car wash. They'll handle it for you. They'll also change your oil –- who wants to spend the weekend at the oil change place? They'll do it for you. For an extra fee of course!
   
   
2. They know what their customers want. Travelers want to leave the airport fast, so Wally Park also drives their vans around the airport every five minutes instead of every 15 to 30 minutes like most of the airport hotels. They also promote their exclusive WallyGuard Door Ding Protective Pads, 24/7 shuttle service, immediate check-in/check-out, free Wi-Fi Internet in the lobby, complimentary amenities, exclusive member programs and more. They park a lot of cars and they move a lot of people, so dealing with this company is a superior experience. They get it because they are so focused on the specific needs of their customers.
   
   
3. They know how to accommodate special needs. I had a situation this week: my mother-in-law was coming back to Los Angeles after being out of town. We were unable to pick her up so we called Wally Park and asked if we could drop her car off and leave the keys for her. They had dealt with this situation hundreds of times. They told us exactly what needed to happen. The valet would take the order, they would keep the keys, and as long as my mother-in-law could show a driver's license proving her name was the same one we had marked on her claim ticket, they would take care of her -– even though she would not have a claim ticket in her possession. Could an airport hotel accommodate this very simple request? It was no problem, since Wally Park specializes in parking and they do a brilliant job at it.

You need to do a brilliant job at whatever it is that you do. You need to be quick. You need to be clear. You need to be focused. You need to be precise about what business you're in, and you need to position yourself as a world-class expert. This is what we call Guru Marketing, and it is a critical success factor for your business no matter what type of business you are in.

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Ordinarily, real estate is a market that's imperfect. But even in an imperfect market, prices tend to be somewhat consistent or at least close to uniform. There are comparables that are developed by appraisers that help stabilize the marketplace. But this economy throws all of that out the window.

I've described owner distress, property distress, and market distress in previous columns http://tinyurl.com/3alujq5 and these are the factors that are weighing very heavily on the market. Because of the various amounts of distress among property owners and among properties, it's very difficult for appraisers to create comparable situations when an owner is in personal financial distress, such as a divorce, an impending foreclosure, or other financial disaster. Perhaps the property owner has a business where a loan has been called, which has a domino effect on the business owner’s real estate.

An anomaly market makes it very difficult for sellers who are not professionals to stay rational. When they're under the pressure of impending foreclosure, divorce, or other personal situations, they will frequently sell their properties at prices that may not come close to matching the market price. This is why professional buyers and sellers have the edge every time. If you are not a professional buyer of real estate, you may not know the price that a property “should” sell for. You may think you know, but do you?

If you want to take advantage of the opportunities in this anomaly real estate market, then you need to align yourself with a professional or a professional group of buyers.

Many groups have been set up to take advantage of these turbulent times. These companies have set up funds to acquire distressed real estate assets nationwide. These companies look for properties that have a value-added opportunity associated with them. They rehabilitate properties that need cosmetic or other simple types of repair, so they can turn them over and maximize the return on investors’ capital. The goal is to buy low and sell for a moderate price in short order.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can take advantage of this market, contact a professional property picker and manager. In the meantime, if you're not a professional buyer of real estate, be careful, because the anomalies which work great for professionals, can sometimes eat non-professionals alive.

If you have an opinion or thought on this topic, please write a comment in the form below. Let us know what you think and if my thoughts resonate with yours. Our followers enjoy reading what others think. Send a link to this blog to one or more of your friends and get them to become one of our subscribers. This will help us expand our circle of influence and allow us to share this and other great material with your friends. Thank you for being one of our loyal readers. We appreciate you and we are rooting for your success.

Often dubbed a "Growth Architect" by his clients, Joel Block advises companies on explosive growth strategies by driving revenue and sales. Well known in the capital markets, Joel is a successful entrepreneur, speaker , advisor and astute investor.

Joel is President/CEO of Bullseye Capital (www.bullseyecap.com), a full-service real estate company that supports owners and buyers of real estate assets with brokerage, leasing, property management, and mortgage services. The company also provides investment opportunities to accredited investors. A leader in real estate syndication, the company invests in properties and offers seminars to assist others in acquiring the skills needed to raise syndicate capital to acquire properties. Imagine knowing how to pool funds to purchase any real estate investment, whether it is for single family, multi-family, commercial, or another kind of investment property. For full information, go to www.syndicatefast.com.

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The real estate market, on the other hand, is far from perfect. Very little information is known about buy and sell transactions on homes, apartments, commercial properties, industrial centers — often times not until months after the transaction has taken place. It's the lack of instant information that makes the real estate market such a great place for professional purchasers to make plenty of money.

The opportunity to take advantage of an imperfect market is always available for the people who have the most information. And those tend to be the professional investors who are often brokers. Real estate brokers also have lots of information that consumers don't have, which is why the licenses they carry require them to make certain disclosures to consumers when making purchases. Because they have special information, state governments consider it unfair for them to compete against consumers without advising about their license status.

But as long as proper disclosures are made, there is no limit on what professional investors can accomplish. Especially in this crazy market, professional investors are enjoying their lives in the real estate candy store. Check back next week and I will show you how this imperfect information combines with significant market irregularities to yield opportunities that haven't been seen in the real estate market for decades. I'll also show you how to take advantage of these opportunities - especially if you are not a professional investor.

If you have an opinion or thought on this topic, please write a comment in the form below. Let us know what you think and if my thoughts resonate with yours. Our followers enjoy reading what others think. Send a link to this blog to one or more of your friends and get them to become one of our subscribers. This will help us expand our circle of influence and allow us to share this and other great material with your friends. Thank you for being one of our loyal readers. We appreciate you and we are rooting for your success.

Often dubbed a "Growth Architect" by his clients, Joel Block advises companies on explosive growth strategies by driving revenue and sales. Well known in the capital markets, Joel is a successful entrepreneur, speaker , advisor and astute investor. Joel is President/CEO of Bullseye Capital (www.bullseyecap.com), a full-service real estate company that supports owners and buyers of real estate assets with brokerage, leasing, property management, and mortgage services. The company also provides investment opportunities to accredited investors. A leader in real estate syndication, the company invests in properties and offers seminars to assist others in acquiring the skills needed to raise syndicate capital to acquire properties. Imagine knowing how to pool funds to purchase any real estate investment, whether it is for single family, multi-family, commercial, or another kind of investment property. For full information, go to www.syndicatefast.com.

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If you look back through the last few years to some of the business tragedies that will become business school case studies for years to come, I can't point to a better example than General Motors. When its financing arm, GMAC, fell onto hard times, they thought about the many different ways they could solve their problems. The solution: hire tens of millions of dollars of attorneys to convert GMAC into a bank, and then fly their executives with their lawyers to Washington DC, and put them in line at the federal funds window to take TARP money to rescue that company. You will probably recall that the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) was set up in 2008 to rescue the ailing banks to avert a sub-prime mortgage crash.

I am not aware that car lenders were what the government had in mind when they designed the TARP bailout program, but according to the Detroit News, GMAC, which morphed into Ally Bank, received $12.5 billion in relief.

Think about what would happen to an entrepreneur if he or she ran into trouble. I can promise you, there'd be little if any relief from any source. What's more egregious is that the CEO of General Motors has the nerve to come on television and tell the American public they've paid off all their responsibilities. As much as I'm pro-business, it's shocking to me that by eliminating legacy costs, much of which were on the backs of their pensioners, GMAC has paid off their responsibilities. They wrote off billions of dollars and took away billions of dollars from their former employees. Further, they stiffed their vendors - many of which are entrepreneurial companies - to pay off debts to the government. Now they're telling the story about how great life is. This isn't about knocking General Motors — this is about why entrepreneurs are having so much trouble.

But this isn't all doom and gloom either. Every business has to find an opportunity out of this difficult time, and for me I see it as an opportunity to be a leader in the development of a new kind of entrepreneurship. The days of the Lone Wolf are absolutely over. It's too complicated, it's too expensive, and it's nearly impossible for someone to go at it by themselves. Instead, it's become more important than ever to form partnerships and alliances with other people. Operate like you're a company. Operate like you're one of the bigger guys on the street. You'll find out that maybe you do get some economies of scale. Each industry has the opportunity to reformulate itself with new groups of entrepreneurs. I know people that have created expense-sharing partnership — sharing office space that has shared conference rooms, using the master suite concept so everyone can have a better deal than any one person could arrange by themselves.

I'm creating a model where real estate entrepreneurs band together, each raising smaller sums of money so the aggregate is a large amount where lots of good can be done and profits can be made. The economies of scale are critical. Why pay an attorney a large sum of money to do a small deal when a nearly identical amount of money can be paid for a much larger transaction, which proportionately costs much less.  It’s hard for entrepreneurs to work together, because lone wolves tend to act alone and egos get in the way. But we must find a way to work together and to complement one another.

This isn't idealism in motion, this is the new reality that we all have to deal with. And if we don't deal with that reality, the opportunities of entrepreneurship in America will go away, damaging this country for a very long time to come. A few visionary entrepreneurs really have a new opportunity, and I hope that you'll act on this one fast.

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About Joel G. Block, President of Growth-Logic, Inc. — Often dubbed a "Growth Architect" by his clients, Joel Block advises companies on explosive growth strategies by driving revenue and sales. Well known in the capital markets, Joel is a successful entrepreneur, speaker, advisor and astute investor. To bring Joel into your company, please visit http://www.joelblock.com

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An important principle that I've always embraced is to avoid over-negotiation. Whenever I'm in the middle of any kind of give-and-take situation, I always ask myself if I'm being a pig or a hog. I want to be a pig; I never want to be a hog.

Some time ago, I was involved with a client company that was in a distressed situation. As is frequently the case, the distress was crystal clear: the company was bleeding cash out of every orifice, and the owner could not control his business, his staff, nor his cash outflows.

Nevertheless, when an employee group that I was advising began to negotiate with the owner regarding the possibility of acquiring the business, he drove an extremely hard bargain. While I never begrudge anyone the right to negotiate hard, this particular individual was fast running out of time. He wasn't in a position to hold out for every last drop. Unfortunately for him, the employee group lost interest in acquiring the business - and without any other prospective buyers in the wings, time ran out and the business owner lost the company.

Rather than taking a mediocre deal that would at least have ridded him of debt and given him some cash, he had to sell his house to pay off the business debt, because the house had secured the company's loans. He ended up without any cash and no bragging rights, either.

So, as you are working hard every day to build your company, or as you're building your career, don't over-negotiate. Remember: pigs get fat, and hogs go to slaughter.

If you have an opinion or thought on this topic, please write a comment by entering your thoughts in the form below. Let us know what you think and if my thoughts resonate with yours.

Our readers enjoy reading what others think. Send a link to this blog to one or more of your friends and get them to become one of our subscribers. This will help us to expand our circle of influence and allow us to share this and other great material with your friends. Thank you for being one of our loyal readers. We appreciate you and we are rooting for your success.

We are in the real estate syndication business. We invest in properties and we offer seminars to assist others in acquiring the skills needed to raise capital (syndicate capital) to acquire properties. Imagine knowing how to pool funds to purchase any real estate investment, whether it is for single family, multi-family, commercial or another kind of investment property. For full information, go to www.syndicatefast.com.

Our real estate company is Bullseye Capital (www.bullseyecap.com), a full service real estate company that supports owners and buyers of real estate assets with brokerage, leasing, property management and mortgage services. We also provide investment opportunities to accredited investors who want to take advantage of the opportunities.

About Joel G. Block, President of Growth-Logic, Inc. Often dubbed a "Growth Architect" by his clients, Joel Block advises companies on explosive growth strategies by driving revenue and sales. Well known in the capital markets, Joel is a successful entrepreneur, speaker, advisor and astute investor. To bring Joel into your company, please visit http://www.joelblock.com.

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The answer to this question is very simple. It's "yes" and "no".

The answer is "yes" if you are a real estate professional. If you’re not a
professional, if you’re not exposed to the market on a regular basis and if
you don't know what's going on precisely in the markets where you operate,
then now is not a great time for you to throw some money around, hoping that
you can cash in on the distress in the marketplace.

At present, the real estate markets are nothing short of a big mess. The
banks are taking over more property then they know what to do with. But
ironically, unlike in the 1980's, the banks are not being forced to
liquidate their inventory by the FDIC, (the agency that regulates banks)
once they take it back. Because there isn't pressure from the FDIC to
liquidate the portfolios of under-performing real estate, the banks would
rather let it sit on their books, than recognize the giant losses that come
with liquidating or writing off the toxic assets on their books. For that
reason, the markets have not fallen to the place where many investors
believe they should be. Real estate investment, and the capital needed to
acquire real estate, has not normalized - and it likely will not normalize
for a few more years.

For that reason, now is a brilliant time to buy real estate, if you are a
real estate professional. If you are expertly aware of the markets,
reviewing the markets everyday and looking at deals, studying transactions,
and histories every day, then now is like being in a candy store. There's
tremendous distress in the market place, and the number of anomalies that
exist are nothing short of amazing. There are huge amounts of opportunity in
certain pockets of the market. You just have to know where to look.

There's no playbook that tells a novice, or someone who does not spend all
day long looking at real estate, where they should go, and what properties
they should buy. Every sector of the marketplace has irregularities, and
seasoned investors are the ones that can spot the irregularities from a mile
away. There are tremendous opportunities for people with the "know how" to
make money. For others, it's a crap shoot.

And as usual, buyers need to beware.

So how does an investor, that's not a full-time professional, take advantage
of these markets?

It's imperative for investors who want to get into the marketplace, to
partner with professionals. Get onto the team of somebody whose an expert at
picking, rehabilitating, repositioning, and disposing of assets in highly
profitable sectors. It's possible to get on the teams of professional
investors, by positioning yourself as a cash investor, and letting someone
who knows more about the real estate game than you do make the buy,
rehabilitation, and sell decisions on your behalf, and then you share the
profits with the experts.

Our company creates these investment teams by pooling funds that mostly come
from investors, and by sharing the profits that we make with our investors.
We're are not the only company that does this, but we are fair and we are
good at what we do. If you'd like to join an investment team, you should
seek out professional investors that you believe are competent and capable
of succeeding in this turbulent marketplace.

If you'd like more information about our strategies and what we're doing
everyday to take advantage of the anomalies and irregularities in the
marketplace, then be in touch with us right away. The opportunities that
exist will not last forever, but they are available now to investors who are
savvy, who are willing to move fast, and who are able to exercise self
discipline - to profit by recognizing that "pigs get fat and hogs go to
slaughter". I explained this critical investing concept previously - go here
to review (http://tinyurl.com/y9×4l7d).

Don't go out by yourself if you don't know the markets. Get behind people
who know what they are doing, and make money from their efforts.

If you have an opinion or thought on this topic, please write a comment by
entering your thoughts in the form below. Let us know what you think and if
my thoughts resonate with yours.

Our readers enjoy reading what others think. Send a link to this blog to one
or more of your friends and get them to become one of our subscribers. This
will help us to expand our circle of influence and allow us to share this
and other great material with your friends. Thank you for being one of our
loyal readers. We appreciate you and we are rooting for your success.

We are in the real estate syndication business. We invest in properties and
we offer seminars to assist others in acquiring the skills needed to raise
capital (syndicate capital) to acquire properties. Imagine knowing how to
pool funds to purchase any real estate investment, whether it is for single
family, multi-family, commercial or another kind of investment property. For
full information, go to www.syndicatefast.com.

Our real estate company is Bullseye Capital (www.bullseyecap.com), a full
service real estate company that supports owners and buyers of real estate
assets with brokerage, leasing, property management and mortgage services.
We also provide investment opportunities to accredited investors who want to
take advantage of the opportunities.

About Joel G. Block, President of Growth-Logic, Inc. Often dubbed a "Growth
Architect" by his clients, Joel Block advises companies on explosive growth
strategies by driving revenue and sales. Well known in the capital markets,
Joel is a successful entrepreneur, speaker, advisor and astute investor. To
bring Joel into your company, please visit http://www.joelblock.com.

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