Yesterday, I had occasion to meet up with Jaimeson Keegan, who’s the President/Floor Sweeper (according to his business card) of SUPERHEROES Management. It offers athlete and entertainment talent representation combined with social media strategies and some other stuff that I thought was a very sensible aggregation. Anyway, we’re both up here in the Northwest and just thought we should get together and meet each other. Not being from Southern California, we get lonely More…
Archive for September, 2011
Get Out of the Office! It’s Amazing What You Can Learn
Thursday, September 29th, 2011Lessons From Interbike: Focus In or Focus Out
Monday, September 26th, 2011I had occasion to be in Vegas on business while Interbike was going on. The company I was working with was exhibiting there, so I took the day to wander around the show. I’d never been to Interbike before. There was something different about this trade show from all the others I’d ever been to. It took me a little thinking time with my favorite adult beverage after I got back to begin to More…
Quik Grows its Sales and Profits; I Thought I Heard a New Attitude
Monday, September 12th, 2011At the start of the quarterly conference call, Quiksilver founder and CEO Bob McKnight always makes a short speech highlighting the good things that are going on. After Rossignol, and through the balance sheet restructuring, they felt a bit like pep talks. He would highlight in a pretty nonspecific ways some things that were going well, and often they seemed like small things. It felt like he was offering reassurance where he could. More…
Zumiez’s Quarterly Results; Their Computer Systems are a Competitive Advantage
Sunday, September 11th, 2011From a financial statement analysis point of view, this is kind of boring. The balance sheet is solid enough that I’ll pay it the ultimate compliment of not discussing it. No bank debt, and the inventory was more or less constant on a per square foot basis. In the conference call, one of the analysts even wanted to know if they had any plans for dividends or acquisitions as a way to More…
Cyberboutiques. I Don’t Know if this is a Great Idea or a Waste of Bandwidth.
Friday, September 9th, 2011My wife sent me this article from the New York Time’s Fashion and Style section. For some reason, I don’t read that section regularly. Not enough graphs, charts, and numbers to get me excited I guess. I played around a bit with the application at the web site. It was a bit jerky and slow, but I could certainly see the potential. Either that or I couldn’t, and I guess that conundrum is what’s More…
PacSun’s Quarter. Can the Strategy Work in this Economy?
Friday, September 9th, 2011PacSun’s 10Q was filed two days ago. I’ve been through it and it offers a few tidbits of interesting information. But mostly, PacSun CEO Gary Schoenfeld said a lot of what needs to be said, at least strategically, in the conference call. Here are his most relevant comments: “The economy is not getting better and competition remains fierce for a limited amount of discretionary spending. As a team, we remain committed to our turnaround More…
Billabong’s Annual Report; The Relationship between Strategy and Operating Environment
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011Billabong’s annual documents (which you can see here and here) provides us with a superlative opportunity to look at the nexus of a company’s strategy and its operating environment. The conference call transcript was also worth reading, but it seems to have disappeared from their web site. I can send anybody who wants it a copy. Of course I’ll spew forth all sorts of numbers (in Australian dollars). But I want to look More…
