Peter
If you follow business news this company has been making headline news over the past few weeks. Last week the media was covering its war with ride sharing competitor Lyft. This is why people talk about business as warfare. It’s been a while since we have witnessed such fierce competitiveness.
Someone sent me a link to this article in The Economist. If you have very young kids or plan on having kids someday, you’ll find some valuable advice on raising them to be successful.
The Age of the Sharing Economy
One of the most interesting business stories out there currently is the disruption taking place in the taxi cab and limo industries. Yes, I am talking about Uber and Lyft the two startups which are wreaking havoc in these spaces. They enable car owners to become instant cabbies if there’s someone in need of a ride along their route.
Additional players in the people movement business include ZipCar which will rent a car to you if you prefer to do the driving. Its cars are dispersed all over the city and can be located with a smart phone app. There are also companies which allow people in urban centers to share ownership in a vehicle along the sames lines as a timeshare condo.
Locking your customers in for more business.
This strategy is quite simple. The more you can lock customers in for repeat business the better your company will do.
Let’s start with a high profile example of this growth strategy. Marissa Meyer took over as CEO of Yahoo roughly two years ago back in 2012. Since then Yahoo has acquired 37 companies and counting. Her strategy is to keep adding various services from mobile technologies such as Aviate, to social media such as Tumblr, in order to keep Yahoo users coming back on a daily basis. By creating lock-in Mayer is increasing Yahoo’s value to advertisers which is where the real revenue comes from. If a company allows a situation wherein customers have to go elsewhere for an important product or service there is an increased risk of losing them permanently.
Felix Dennis is dead after a prolonged battle with throat cancer. He was only 67.
Felix was a true example of a rags-to-riches story. His career in the magazine publishing industry began in the latter part of the 1960s. By the end of his career his empire controlled more than 50 magazines and websites including Auto Express, Mac User, Computer Shopper, Men’s Fitness, PC Pro, Octane and Viz. His biggest publication was The Week, “a digest of global current affairs, which has a circulation of almost 200,000 per week.”
In 2007, he made £144.5 million by selling off all 31 international editions of Maxim, when it was the best-selling men’s magazine in the world.
He also made millions from co-founding US computer mail order company MicroWarehouse, which floated on the stock market in 1992. (source)
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