I went up the street last week to pick up some milk at the filling station and suffered flashbacks. You see the petrol station I visited is just up the street from my office and it is one I developed when I bought if from my dad back in 1996. I spent the following ten […]
It is a Zen Buddhist saying that if you want to reach enlightenment you should “chop wood, carry water”. And if you want to retain enlightenment you need to, you guessed it, “chop wood, carry water”. This is an exhortation to do the work that matters for you, and to guard against distractions and anything […]
It all starts with an idea or an observation. The observation could be a change in the law, a decided case in the WRC or civil courts, a social change, something I learned over the last 30 odd years in business, or an idea from a book I’m reading or listening to. Then I write […]
Reading “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek at the moment and am struggling a little bit. I am only half way through and hope I can accept, or reconcile, the hypothesis put forward by Sinek. His proposition is that people do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it. He points to […]
Steve Jobs put it best of all when he explained how marketing was about values. You need to know: Who you are, and What you believe When Jobs was launching the “Think Different” brand marketing campaign in 1997 he said, To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world; it’s a very […]
I have written many times in the past about the value and effectiveness of story in marketing a business. You only need to look at Apple, for example, as company who have sold products in a wide range of industries based on the Apple story and what Apple purports to stand for. What other company […]
The journal you see on this page is one of the most important tools I own. When I refer to it as a tool I mean it is instrumental in maintaining sound mental health. It allows me to go to a place of complete privacy, solitude, stillness where I can gather my thoughts and put […]
When I was building a block of apartments in Edgeworthstown, Longford in 2006 I made it my business to learn how to drive a teleporter. A teleporter, as you probably know, is like a bit like a cross between a digger and a forklift because it is essentially a tractor with an extendable boom and […]
When I was 23 I bought my first property. Since then I have bought and sold many others, perhaps as many as 17, but I have truthfully lost count. There have been shops, houses, apartments, freeholds, leaseholds, pubs, petrol stations, and sites. In Dublin, outside Dublin, in Meath, Cavan, Longford. In addition to the buying […]
Dennis Yu, who I came across again recently, is known as the $1 per day Facebook ads guy. But it is obvious that he knows his stuff and has a genuinely interesting approach to advertising on Facebook and the other social media networks. He suggests a 3 x 3 grid of 9 videos, each of […]