The most valuable companies over 100 years

Amazing. 100 years ago the largest, most valuable companies actually had products!. The only one I can see that made it through is Standard Oil/Exxon. By 2017 the top five are all tech--Alphabet is Google.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-100-years/?

And Wal-Mart.  What change since 1950. When we were in Arkansas we visited the original Walton store, a 1950 Ben Franklin Five and Dime like the one in my home town of Mt. Morris many years ago, but Sam was ambitious and expanded. He didn't like the franchise's rules so started his own chain. It wasn't a Wal-Mart that killed my home town small businesses, it was a strike by a union at the printing plant, then changing technology, then moves to the south by the companies where everyone worked.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/walmart-nation-mapping-largest-employers-u-s/?

Income inequality?

Is this income inequality or job choice?  The owner of a local commercial and residential moving company, Two men and a Truck (franchise), is a woman, Gail Kelley. Right now, you can interview for a job at $12/hour lifting and moving heavy objects, but after 21 years as the owner, Ms. Kelley probably makes a lot more.

The President needs to know there are choices people make that can account for their success.  According to ColumbusCEO she originally wanted to be a ballerina, but failed. Then she wanted to be an artist (has a BFA from CCAD). After working for Radio Shack for 16 years, she and her husband bought this franchise and moved to Columbus. Now after business success she has started painting and is selling her work. Business success has allowed her to be an artist.

Could the federal government ever do what Starbucks did?

In January 2009 the stock of Starbucks was about $7, and today it’s in the mid-fifties, down a little from a few months ago.  So how did they turn it around without a government stimulus package?

“The company cut costs when a serious recession hit the economy in 2008. Raises were slashed to a minimal amount, vacation and personal time was cut and the health plan was altered to require more out-of-pocket expenses on the part of employees. The company pushed product sales hard, requiring managers to more aggressively market retail items such as coffee mugs, coffee makers and ground coffee to their walk-in customers.

Recently, the company has made some changes to improve its compensation for management employees. Starbucks has maintained health-care coverage as well as a stock-option program, known as Bean Stock. The company has also increased its contributions to its 401(k) program a retirement savings plan that is available to hourly and salaried employees.”

Read more: The Average Salary of a Starbucks Store Manager | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_7486618_average-salary-starbucks-store-manager.html#ixzz2MIILv2l9

Sadly, no one in this administration and very few in Congress have business experience, and when they get to Washington it’s like having play money to spend.

Canada ranks No. 1 in “Best Countries for Business”

"Canada ranks No. 1 in our [Forbes] annual look at the Best Countries for Business. While the U.S. is paralyzed by fears of a double-dip recession and Europe struggles with sovereign debt issues, Canada’s economy has held up better than most. The $1.6 trillion economy is the ninth biggest in the world and grew 3.1% last year. It is expected to expand 2.4% in 2011, according to the Royal Bank of Canada. . .

What hurts the U.S. is its heavy tax burden. This year it surpassed Japan to have the highest corporate tax rate among developed countries. The U.S. also gets dinged for a poor showing on monetary freedom as measured by the Heritage Foundation. Heritage gauges price stability and price controls and the U.S. ranks No. 50 out of 134 countries."

The Best Countries For Business - Forbes

Instead of liberal celebs threatening to relocate to Canada, maybe we'll see American entrepreneurs go there. It's closer than China, safer than Mexico. For starting a new business, the U.S. ranks #13 (New Zealand is #1).

Why we need legal immigrants

This morning I was shopping at a small center near Kenney Road and Old Henderson Road, the northern boundary for Upper Arlington, an up-scale suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where I live. As I looked around the stores, I decided over 50% are probably owned by immigrants. There were 4 or 5 hair and nail salons with English names, but Asian writing on the windows; a Turkish bakery; a Thai restaurant; an Indian restaurant; a belly dancing studio; a martial arts studio, a photography studio and some others I couldn't identify.

Owning your own home is not "the American dream," that's shelter and a hole in the financial boat, but owning your own business with the chance to become wealthy or have something to pass on to your children has been a dream of just about every immigrant group that has come by ship or plane, or on foot. I think Americans are sitting on their hands and wallets waiting for the government to do something about the economy, but immigrants are not waiting. They've escaped dictators, Communists, Socialists and anarchists. They've struggled and sacrificed and are willing to work 18 hour days, 7 days a week just for the opportunity to be in business.

I welcome these immigrants to my neighborhood.

Working up a tax storm in Illinois -- George F. Will

Illinois, Obama's home, continues to punish its residents.

A study by the Illinois Policy Institute, a market-oriented think tank, concludes that between 1991 and 2009, Illinois lost more than 1.2 million residents — more than one every 10 minutes — to other states. Between 1995 and 2007, the total net income leaving Illinois was $23.5 billion. The five states receiving most refugees from Illinois were Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona and Texas. Two are Illinois’ neighbors, three have warm weather, two — Florida and Texas — have no income tax. In January, a lame-duck session of Illinois’ legislature — including 18 Democrats who were defeated in November — raised the personal income tax 67 percent and the corporate tax almost 50 percent. This and the increase — from 3 percent to 5 percent — in the tax on small businesses make Illinois, as the Wall Street Journal says, “one of the most expensive places in the world to conduct business.”

Working up a tax storm in Illinois - The Washington Post

Saving 400 jobs

This is how it's done (and I'm guessing Obama will get the credit for this one).

Little Tikes Co. has been offered $4.3 million in incentives from Ohio and local (Hudson) officials to stay in the state.

We, the tax payers of Ohio, have saved 400 jobs and possibly added 66 by bribing the company with tax breaks. . . we pay more, they pay less.

We have a Democratic administration in Ohio, but both parties do this. Businesses have been taught to shop around for the biggest tax breaks, playing one city or one state against the other, and the cheapest labor. Powerful unions are a big reason to look elsewhere. That's why some go overseas.

The Green MBA

Somedays I'm just overwhelmed by the green hype. As a Christian I take stewardship and conservation very seriously. We are commanded by the Creator God to do that. The record is clear in Genesis--God created everything, including the first couple, a man and woman, and gave them two commandments: 1) Be fruitful and increase in number and 2) rule over his creation--plants and animals, oceans and air, beasts, birds and seeds. And then he declared it all good.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

You can look through any academic program at Ohio State (or any college or university near you) and see the endless moralizing, preaching and nagging about the environment, but there's no foundation--nothing about God's creation, the fall, justice, mercy or why other than self interest we should be caring for planet Earth. At the top level (very thin) it's humanism (man is in charge); dig deeper and the middle level, really thick, is Marxism (the state is in charge and a one world government would work best); but at the sludge level which is bottomless, it's pantheism (we are all one divine being, one consciousness, animals have the same worth as people).

Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business came in 24th on the list of the “Beyond Grey Pinstripes Global 100” of the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education. “The CBE equips business leaders for the 21st century with a new management paradigm—the vision and knowledge to integrate corporate profitability and social value. . . CBE is a part of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program (BSP), an organization dedicated to developing leaders for a sustainable global society [which] creates opportunities for executives and educators to explore new pathways to sustainability and values-based leadership.” Van Jones, the White House Green Jobs czar who escaped to John Podesta’s think tank when his Communist and radical ties were exposed, was one of the invited speakers at the 2008 Ideas Festival of the Institute.

Hello Agriculture, Political Science and Social Work students--I guess you’ll have to become the bankers and financiers, the investors and CEOs. It has captured all your buzz words -- global sustainability, greening the business world, building a just economy, climate change, climate justice, economic justice, emerging green economy, environmentally responsible. Now all we need is someone to make money and invest again in America.

The founder and “mother” of the CBE, Judith Samuelson, wants the White House to go much further in its plan to control executive compensation. She seems completely unaware of the extent that government interference in business has brought us where we are in this Wall Street Journal article.

The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce

Will Obama attack them too, or are they protected from his anger and ire because of their Spanish surnames? The web site of the El Paso Chamber (all in English, incidentally). According to today's WSJ wealthy Mexicans are migrating to El Paso in the largest number since the revolution of 1910. Link. Murder has exploded in Juarez, now at 300 a month (Isn't that more than Iraq and Afghanistan?). Even the non-rich need body guards to stay in business, so they are moving to El Paso.

Cindy Ramos-Davidson, chief executive of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said her staff was swamped with requests from Juárez businesspeople wanting to settle in El Paso. They started more than 200 companies in the 12 months ended July 31, a 40% jump from the same period last year.

March will be a 2-fer for me

March is Women's History Month and Irish Heritage Month in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau 36.5 million
U.S. residents claimed Irish ancestry in 2007 (the year we visited Ireland). This is more than eight times the population of Ireland itself (more than 4 million). Irish was the nation’s second most frequently reported ancestry, trailing only German. My ancestors also came from Germany and Switzerland and were Lutherans and Mennonites many of whom became German Baptist Brethren (Church of the Brethren) shortly after arriving. The Scots-Irish I'm assuming were Presbyterian types--but I don't have much evidence.

Although I have no idea why, Irish Americans make more money. The median income for households headed by an Irish-American is $56,966, higher than the $50,740 for all households. In addition, 8 percent of people of Irish ancestry were in poverty, lower than the rate of 13 percent for all Americans. Appalachia is heavily Scots-Irish and they sure aren't rich. 72% of Americans of Irish heritage own their own home, which is also higher than the national average of 67%. After visiting Ireland and learning its history and how brutally they were driven off their land, I can sort of see that one. There are 9 cities in the U.S. named Dublin, one right here in central Ohio where famous people like Jack and Tiger play golf at Muirfield and others and librarians go for millions and millions of shared records (OCLC).

There were 154.7 million females in the United States as of Oct. 1, 2008 and 150.6 million males. By age 85, there are twice as many women as men in that age group, but I don't hear of too many government grants going to address that situation. They all go the other direction--to give women even more advantages and health benefits. $34,278 is the median annual earnings of women 16 or older who worked year-round, full time, in 2007, up from $33,648 in 2006 (after adjusting for inflation). Women earned 77.5 cents for every $1 earned by men. But that's a pretty silly statistic because men and women doing the same job with the same education and the same family situation, make virtually the same salary--women may even edge ahead on this, if you're comparing single people. During the ice storm last week I saw two women and a truck at 6 a.m. cleaning the parking lot and side walks where I get coffee. I'm guessing that if they are private contractors with some hustle in their bustle, they are pulling down just as much money as the guys, and getting home in time to fry up some bacon in the pan.

There were 116,985 women-owned businesses with receipts of $1 million or more and nearly 6.5 million women-owned businesses in 2002. Women owned 28 percent of all nonfarm businesses and employed more than 7.1 million people. 38% of women 16 or older worked in management, professional and related occupations, compared with 32% of men. So you can see that President Obama's confiscatory tax policies are going to really hurt business women, which makes the Lilly Ledbetter Act a piece of poo.

There's a pretty good chance that those taxes will be prepared by a woman--62% of tax preparers were women in 2007--our accountant owns her own firm.

Dear Valued Customer

Rarely do I get a letter from a company that starts that way and ends well, but this one did. I have used the freebie from SiteMeter since I started blogging 5 years ago, and so do most of the bloggers I visit, because yesterday I was frantically looking at them. SiteMeter had "upgraded" and I'd lost every reason I'd used them, including my total count, which I figured was about 245,500. What was available to me was totally worthless, so I fired off an e-mail of complaint. Apparently several thousand others must have too.

Dear Valued SiteMeter Customers,

As you’re no doubt aware by now, we’ve chosen to roll back our website to the previous “classic” version.

Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely."

Ya think? Today, my old version with the features I like was back, but if I'd had more time to pursue it yesterday, I would have already replaced the code and would never have known I'd been switched back.

There's a very basic marketing principal in business and in relationships. You can't give away something and then later change your plan and expect people to value your product and pay for money what used to be given away.

Who gets the green from going green?

A lot of the environmentalism information and advertising about which I comment comes not from "right wing" publications, but my husband's architectural and engineering journals and newsletters. Also the Wall Street Journal, which although it covers the business world, is right up there with NYT in way left off the page. Green is a huge business (especially for ad agencies), much of it tear down, start over, and use more (but different) resources. And many of our largest companies and most powerful politicians stand to gain the most. Al Gore, for instance--worth $2 million when he left office--now one of the world's richest men, with a fortune built almost entirely on warning us about the phony global warming issue (some of his wealth comes from serving on boards of corporations which will benefit from new government regulations). Nancy Pelosi is another--investing in wind power while refusing to let America drill for oil, while the rest of us face soaring prices from her Congress' inaction.

Al Gore says everyone will benefit when new government rules require companies to pay to reduce global warming. But some people will benefit more than others, as will some companies. Benefiting most are those like the ex-vice president who can set up and invest in companies that will profit from the federal regulations imposing heavy costs on others. Al Gore's Carbon Empire

Blue states, black administrations, green messages and red ink

I don't know how Obama kept a straight face when he recently visited Detroit, deep in a red ink state. Or how he pumps up minorities in any major city. Talk about shucking and jiving! And Detroit's mayor is in jail. There are so many layers to that one I don't even know where to begin--affair with a staffer, perjury, leaving the country, shoving someone, etc. The governor's a woman. The state's taxed or driven businesses out of state with powerful unions. And Obama promises to raise taxes to help them. Oh, Lordy Lordy, is he even 40? And to think poor Bob Taft (Ohio's former governor) was hounded into obscurity by Democrats for accepting a free golf game.

Joining New York and California on the list of most unpopular states were New Jersey, Michigan and Massachusetts. . .

As the fiscal problems of some states increase, we are likely to hear more about how the federal government must bail them out. It's the failings of the federal government (that is, the Bush administration), that are responsible for state budget woes, so the argument goes.

But any look at the states with the biggest deficits reminds us that governors and legislatures are largely the authors of their own problems, and that the biggest trouble some of them seem to have is that their taxing and chronic overspending have made them toxic to the business community. Don't ask the feds to fix that.
See full story at Forbes.com

"OBAMA: So I want to first of all acknowledge your great mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who has been...
(APPLAUSE)

... on the frontlines -- has been on the frontlines doing an outstanding job of gathering together the leadership at every level in Detroit to bring about the kind of renaissance that all of us anticipate for this great city.

And he is a leader not just here in Detroit, not just in Michigan, but all across the country. People look to him. We know that he is going to be doing astounding things for many years to come.
And so I'm grateful to call him a friend and a colleague. And I'm looking forward to a lengthy collaboration in terms of making sure that Detroit does well in the future." Obama speech in Detroit in May, Right Michigan

Fortune 100 Foundations Lean far to the Left

From article summary: "Although many believe selfinterested corporations lavish funds on politically conservative groups, it just isn’t true. A painstaking analysis of tax returns for Fortune 100 foundations reveals the nonprofits overwhelmingly favor groups that push for bigger government and tougher regulations." Of the 53 nonprofits of the top 100 which donated or funded political causes or candidates, the ratio was 14.5:1--$59 million for the left, and $4 million for the right. Read the story here

If this defies common wisdom (not to mention common sense), there must be a reason. As in most things--you only need to follow the money. Or follow the banker or CEO into the halls of the Senate. They give to left leaning, pro-big-government politicians because the regulation or influence will hurt their competition. Why would big oil or big automaker or big lumber be funding and supporting environmental issues that on the surface would seem to be anti-business-as-usual. Well, obviously, it's the small guy with fewer resources and smaller R & D budget who will be hurt, not the mega-behemoths of industry.

La Raza, for instance, which wants the Southwest returned to Mexico in fact if not in treaty or out and out war, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the wealthy foundations of the top Fortune 100 companies. Now why do you suppose big business has a stake in keeping wages down through illegal immigration? Hmmmm. Banks also are heavily investing in Hispanic causes, which tend to be sympathetic to amnesty and illegals. James Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has made political contributions to high-profile Democratic lawmakers and candidates, including New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama, and extremely small amounts to a few Republicans (I'm betting they are RINOs). The JPMorgan Chase foundation gave 2.6% of its giving dollar to political causes, all of which were on the left.

So the next time you read or hear a whiny liberal or progressive legislator, journalist, academic or bloggers moaning about the conservatives being so rich, look for those crossed fingers behind their back or keyboard--just 'taint so.

Entrepreneurship

Next to diphtheria and ophthalmology, I think entrepreneurship is one of our most frequently misspelled words--I misspelled it about 5 times drafting this. Now this book will shatter a lot of myths, "The illusions of entrepreneurship," (by Scott Shane, Yale University Press). Reviewed in today's WSJ by Nick Schulz. My take aways (not quotes):

In the U.S. each year more people start a business than get married or have children.

A typical U.S. entrepreneur is a married white male in his 40s who attended but didn't complete college, and he lives in a city like DesMoines or Tampa, not in California or Michigan (where they chase people out with high taxes and regulations).

The richer the country, the lower its rate of business starts.

Entrepreneurs earn less than those who work for established businesses.

Encouragement by the government to go in to business through the use of protectionist subsidies and tax breaks actually encourages people to enter highly competitive fields, making them more likely to fail.

Here's a great line

Randall Bloomquist of WGST, Atlanta, reviews Graig Havighust's book, "Air Castle of the South," (U. of I. Press) in today's WSJ. It's about the rise and fall of WSM, an AM station in Nashville, which was created by National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1925 to sell insurance to rural folk and ended up creating and spreading country music and the Nashville sound. I'll probably never read the book, but I loved this line:

"As history it is engaging but less than definitive. . . demanding that WSM [now owned by Gaylord Entertainment] live or die by the media economy's new rules feels a bit like asking your grandmother to work at Burger King to make ends meet."

Successful in starting businesses

I saw a small item in the WSJ that successful business start ups are more likely to come from the top 25% income group than the bottom. Well, doh! You mean having educated parents who stay married and provide you with the better things in life really makes a difference? Who'da thunk it.

Didn't Ronald Reagen say something about the difference between a small businessman and a big businessman being the government getting out of the way: see the quote here.