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+ Bridge in the News - Bridge in the News
Bridge in the News

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September 8, 2022 Dollars and Sense Advice from Mom 👩‍🦰
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Dollars and Sense Advice from Mom 👩‍🦰
September 8, 2022
When I was a kid, my mom instilled in me a lesson to always get paid for my work. When I went to mow a lawn or do my newspaper route, she’d remind me,  “Be sure you get paid.”  As an adult, these flashbacks are vivid like a scene from Citizen Kane—just swap out the Rosebud sled with my newspaper delivery bike.  Today, this lesson still resonates when running Bridge. When calling a store that hasn’t paid its Bridge bill, I’m confident in asking ...
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September 1, 2022 Gift Cards Are a Gift to ...Stores 💸
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Gift Cards Are a Gift to ...Stores 💸
September 1, 2022
When is the last time you received a Starbucks gift card?  I’ve received them as holiday gifts, and I’ve given them to sales reps as thank you gifts. Starbucks gift cards, like their shops, are ubiquitous.  They are almost as popular as gift cards from our nemesis: Amazon.com. Just about every month, a company offers me an Amazon gift card if I sign up for a service. WBGO, the local, Newark-based, non-profit radio station known for jazz, recently offered me an Amazon gift ...
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August 26, 2022 Click Hear 🎧
Click Hear 🎧
August 26, 2022
Whenever I visit my 76-year-old mom in Myrtle Beach, SC, she picks me up and the oldies station is playing in her car. I’ve tried changing that dial, and one has a better chance of outmaneuvering tennis star Daniil Medvedev. I imagine the oldies music brings her back to her youth. I read a study that people’s favorite song is often when they were 17 years old.  That’s right: the 'best songs’ may not be the best songs but rather simply be what you heard in ...
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August 15, 2022 We Suck 🪠
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We Suck 🪠
August 15, 2022
Last week, Amazon bought iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner, for $1.7b.  Why? Yes, their 'Rosie from the Jetsons' has AI and is in your home (which is where Amazon wants to be), but the reason Amazon wants it is because customers want it. Which leads us to ask: Why do customers want Roomba? Because it does something that humans find annoying and hate doing: cleaning. Roomba has spotted the value that robots bring to the world and it's not simply being ...
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August 10, 2022 We Deliver and Install
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We Deliver and Install
August 10, 2022
I don’t own a car, yet I have a strange desire to read Dan Neil's car column each weekend in The Wall St. Journal.  Why would someone who doesn’t own a car, won’t be buying one soon, and hasn’t owned one in 25 years read a car column? It's a mix of enjoying the design and technology of automobiles, wanting to know what Dwayne Johnson may be buying next, loving Dan’s witty writing style, and, confession, simply being 13-years old at heart. Cars are ...
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August 3, 2022 The Everything War
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The Everything War
August 3, 2022
An East Village Artist’s Death Prompts a Reflection on the State of Indie Retailers Today

…….

While thumbing through the Times, I noticed a smiling young woman’s picture in the obituaries. In the black and white photograph, she's standing on a fire escape with a historic building and a bridge in the distance.  I was initially attracted to Ronni Solbert’s 1959 picture, yet I was even more drawn in by what I noticed next to her photo: a children&...
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July 28, 2022 Always Be Reading 📚
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Always Be Reading 📚
July 28, 2022
In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, a motivational speaker played by Alec Baldwin addresses a group of salesmen. He writes three letters vertically on the chalkboard, “A B C.” He explains that the acronym means "Always Be Closing."  

The way that Baldwin's character thinks about sales, I may think about reading. I think of: "ABR,” Always Be Reading. Whether it's breakfast, lunch, or dinner, I try to get in a page or two of the Times, Wall St. ...
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July 12, 2022 Super Subscriptions 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️🦹🏽‍♂️
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Super Subscriptions 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️🦹🏽‍♂️
July 12, 2022
This past week, Amazon announced it was adding Grubhub delivery to its Prime subscription (Read the news about Amazon and Grubhub here). The goal of Amazon Prime (and other subscription services) is to make the subscription so pervasive that it's sticky. Don’t like Prime movies? Ok, but you love free Grubhub delivery. If you don’t need feature X and want to cancel, you realize you still need feature Y and keep paying for the subscription. 

This past week, The Wall St. Journal...
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July 6, 2022 'Dem Apps 🍎
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'Dem Apps 🍎
July 6, 2022
In the movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon, who plays a handsome MIT janitor moonlighting as a math savant (can one say, “Hollywood career vehicle”?), woos a young lady (played by the actress Minnie Driver) by outmaneuvering a few competing, obnoxious cads. When Damon’s character gets the girl's telephone number, he proudly shows it to the other guys and boasts, with his South Boston access, “How 'bout ‘dem apples?”  I imagine Tim Cook imitating this...
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June 30, 2022 Showtime 🎪
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Showtime 🎪
June 30, 2022
The next book our Bridge team may read is John List’s book The Voltage Effect.  List, who is a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, shares a variety of suggestions to grow a business. He warns us about false positives, such as what the “Just Say No” drug campaign experienced. He suggests we look for businesses with scalable ingredients. (People are not scalable, but good news for Bridge: software is!)

I'd add to List's advice this simple maxim: show ...
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June 20, 2022 Rescued Kennel Puppies Love Bridge 🐶
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Rescued Kennel Puppies Love Bridge 🐶
June 20, 2022
My friend works at the Swiss running shoemaker ON. She recently texted me and suggested I try their running shoes.  Three weeks later, I was handling two boxes of their Swiss engineered shoes.   On one ON shoe, there is a little Swiss flag and the words “Swiss Engineering” printed. When I get a pair of Nike’s, they don’t say "Beaverton-engineering" or "US-engineering." Nor do Adidas shoes proclaim “German engineering.”  ...
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June 15, 2022 Building the Horizon 🌄
Building the Horizon 🌄
June 15, 2022
The Brick report helps our company track our past and current progress. Our team can easily look back at the last 78 weeks and know what we did. (Most companies would be hard pressed to do this easily.) The Brick brings us together and keeps us on the same (web)page.  Its success leads to me ask: “Could we have an approach that helps us look at our future?" I’ve sometimes thought about crafting a weekly 'Horizon Report' that would share what’s next for us.  

...
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June 13, 2022 Optimizing 🦾
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Optimizing 🦾
June 13, 2022
We’ve chatted about the importance of checklists. Checklists can be checklists literally as well as figuratively (i.e. software).  Checklists help us order our thoughts and actions.   Yet, the last step on each checklist should be: removing as many checklist steps as possible. This ironic strategy is necessary because steps inherently are friction, and friction is our enemy. We want to help our clients avoid the drag of clicks and thinking.

Embracing lists that we seek to ...
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May 31, 2022 Ambassadors 🍪
Ambassadors 🍪
May 31, 2022
I was reading enviously about college kids adopting an app called BeReal and noticed that BeReal is employing ambassadors on college campuses. I even looked up the app’s page about this ambassador program (https://bere.al/en/ambassadors). Sure enough, a week later the Times published another college app piece on Sidechat (yes, I was sadly still reading about tween apps a week later…). Again, the app is finding success via campus ambassadors.  

Thus far, ...
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May 17, 2022 Connection 👫
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Connection 👫
May 17, 2022
In the past, we’ve used spin classes and gyms as inspiration for Bridge. We see them as metaphors for helping retail business owners.  The founders of SoulCycle, Elizabeth Cutler and Julie Rice, must have been eavesdropping on us: they are expanding their spinning approach to another sphere. The Times reports they have started Peoplehood, a business that seeks to help people via self-help (group-help?) sessions. It’s SoulCycle for the soul&...
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May 11, 2022 Bus-ta Move 🚌
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Bus-ta Move 🚌
May 11, 2022
In Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, which the Bridge team is currently reading, the author Jim Collins confesses that he missed a key ingredient 25 years ago when he wrote the first edition. He states that he now realizes the most important part of achieving a great company is: getting the right people 'on the bus.’  I agree. Fourteen and a half years ago (long before I opened this book), I was lucky enough to pick up the right ‘passenger:' Moshe replied to my job posting (...
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May 3, 2022 The Prestige
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The Prestige
May 3, 2022
While eating a slice of coal-fired pizza at Arturo’s in Soho yesterday, and getting an occasional whiff of Houston Street garbage, I had to admit: I was at a loss for insight to share with my coworkers this week.  Each week, I send out a motivational message to my team that precedes a summary of what they accomplished. We call this report the Brick report. This would be my seventy-second Brick introduction: What else could I say--and would they miss it if there was not an introduction...
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April 25, 2022 Checklists Can Help Save Lives and Main Street ✅
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Checklists Can Help Save Lives and Main Street ✅
April 25, 2022
In a 2007 article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and an author, advocated that more hospitals use checklists. He cited many medical studies showing how checklists save lives (and money).  Implementing one checklist, a hospital "…prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs."  The startling part: the list was only five steps long! In other words, people don’t consistently follow...
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April 19, 2022 Competing With Ourselves🪞
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Competing With Ourselves🪞
April 19, 2022
About two weeks ago in Charleston, SC, in spin class where I sounded like I was getting a hair transplant, I enjoyed being at once together with my friends in the class and yet competing with them.  When they peddled harder and stood up, I wanted to also.  Our competing didn't mean that there was one winner and everyone else lost. It wasn’t a zero-sum game.  In that spin class, we all won.  After that class, we all felt great.  Competition is an ...
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April 12, 2022 Moat-us Operandi 🏰
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Moat-us Operandi 🏰
April 12, 2022
When I flew home yesterday from Charleston, while most people were seeking relief from their sunburns and reminiscing about their vacations, I was delving into The Wall St. Journal’s profile on Tracy Britt Cool, an ex- Berkshire Hathaway star.  Mrs. Cool’s new company Kanbrick invests in businesses with $10m - $50m in revenue.  What does Mrs. Cool look for when investing in a company? People and moats. 

At Bridge, we’re reading Jim Collins’ Beyond ...
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