Ron's Bloghttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/en-US2008-09-30T23:45:52ZSquarespace Site Server v5.0.0 (http://www.squarespace.com/)Counterflowhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/9/26/counterflow.htmlRon Morris2008-09-26T10:00:00ZI was pretty much raised by my Grandpa, Jim Huddart. None other than Henry Hillman himself once referred to Grandpa Huddart as “the most honorable and hard-working man he has ever known.” My Grandfather worked 62 years for the Hillman Company; he started in a coal mine and eventually became a purchasing manager for that particular division. (Oh that I wish I could have half of his integrity and honor). My grandfather hardly ever said anything. That’s one way we’re very different. He figured you were better off saying nothing than just spewing out idol calories and empty rhetoric.

But he had a few aphorisms. One of them was, “If all the fish are going one way, you go the other way.” It’s funny … he truly believed that, but yet stayed with one company his entire life. Was he pointing the way for me? Or, was this his philosophy underneath a bigger philosophy of loyalty to one entity? I’ll never know.

Nonetheless, that advice has served me well for most of my life. It has resulted in nearly a dozen start-ups, most of which owned their niche, and a life of making my own decisions truly free from outside influence.

But today, I think I may have gone too far. Why? Because I bought AIG stock.

]]>Gifts from Abovehttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/9/19/gifts-from-above.htmlRon Morris2008-09-19T10:00:00ZLate last month, I spent a week lying on the beach in North Carolina. I spent a good deal of time watching my two children cavort in the surf. I also watched them do all the other things that kids do at the beach (including carrying two to five pounds of sand back to the house twice daily).

This year, unlike the previous three years, I actually got into the ocean myself. The last two years it was not physically possible for me to “take a hit” from the waves, much less deal with the strong undertow. I just didn’t have the strength to extricate myself from any difficult circumstance.

You see, one year ago I was a goner. Plain and simple, on May 17th of 2007, my oncologist told my wife, Karen, and I that they had simply “run out of options” and that I should “get my affairs in order,” certainly before the end of the year.

I’ve had some gut-wrenching moments in my life, who hasn’t? I was arrested once and was looking at the possibility of significant time in prison. Fortunately, this didn’t happen. I also remember distinctly the exact moment when my doc first told me I had “300 tumors on my liver.” All I can remember from this is how incredibly heavy my legs had suddenly become and how difficult it was for me to even move my jaw. And, of course, I remember my business partner telling me, upon my arrival at the office, that my father had just passed away.

Tough moments, all of them. But none compare to that sit-down on 5/17/07. My doc was in tears. I remember thinking, “He’s a professional … he must deal with this all the time. So why is he crying?”. But he and I had become so close. Eighteen trips to the operating table will do that.

Again, this was just more than a year ago.

Through a series of minor miracles, I was able to not only find someone who could help me, but also: a) qualify for this individual’s experimental cancer treatment program; b) survive that experimental program; and c) be one of just 20 (out of 63) individuals for whom the experimental program actually produced positive results.

In other words, I’m alive. I hadn’t expected this.

]]>Saving Pittsburghhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/9/12/saving-pittsburgh.htmlRon Morris2008-09-12T10:00:00ZYou know, it wasn’t all that many years ago that I could stand in my driveway on any given Friday night and watch airplane after airplane glide into its landing pattern for Runway 28-L … the primary landing strip at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport.

I was amazed at the fluidity and shear number of 737’s, 717’s, DC-9’s, MD-80’s, and Airbuses landing. It seemed as if a new plane would land every two to three minutes.

Try that tonight. Go out in front of your house and look to the West. You can honestly stand there for 10-20 minutes and not see a plane.

It’s a whole new ballgame.

Now part of this relates to US Airway’s decision to shut down its hub. Part of it. But mostly, this diminution of air traffic relates to the overall malaise that has struck the western Pennsylvania economy in recent years. You don’t need to be terribly omniscient to see what I am talking about. Drive anywhere (over horrible roads) and you’ll witness shuttered manufacturing plants, padlocked distribution centers, and parking lots with weeds growing up through the cracks. If Pittsburgh were a business, it would be “out of business.”

I grew up here. I lived mostly in the city and close-in suburbs such as Brookline and Dormont. I remember going to the 1960 World Series, game 7. Maz’s shot had barely cleared the left-field wall when Grant Street became a sea of tickertape (you see, office building windows actually opened in those days).

I was only 11 years old, but I remember the confetti and tickertape coming up above my knees!

There is no question that our city is in the worst condition it has been perhaps ever. This, despite the fact that we are a relatively clean city, a city that still has excellent neighborhoods and schools, and a city with great universities.

(And, Oh … did I mention the fact that we have an overabundance of clean and fresh water. Do not underestimate the value of this particular commodity.)

So why? Why the exodus? Why are so many Pittsburghers so scared?

]]>TEQ - 25th Year Anniversary Questionhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/9/5/teq-25th-year-anniversary-question.htmlRon Morris2008-09-05T10:00:00ZEarlier this year, TEQ celebrated its 25th Anniversary. To celebrate, they asked columnists to answer different questions related to the Pittsburgh region. The following is a reprint of Ron Morris’ question:

Where would you like to see the Pittsburgh region’s entrepreneurial/business climate in 25 years?

]]>With All Due Apologies to Jeff Foxworthyhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/8/29/with-all-due-apologies-to-jeff-foxworthy.htmlRon Morris2008-08-29T10:00:00ZYou just might be an entrepreneur if ….

You moved into your new house two years ago and yet have still not unpacked your belongings.
You can’t understand why people stand in lines without either: a.) reading, b.) talking on the telephone (business, not gossip!), and, c.) measuring the exact amount of time each patron takes so that you can calculate, to the minute, exactly how much longer you are going to be there.
You can’t go to a play or a sporting event or any paid-for gathering of people without calculating exactly how much gross revenue is being generated by that event.
You cannot take your car in for service and not find at least a dozen ways that: a.) service can be improved, b.) costs can be reduced, and, c.) waiting times can be both cut and made more productive for the customer.

]]>We Coulda Been a Contenderhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/8/22/we-coulda-been-a-contender.htmlRon Morris2008-08-22T10:00:00ZWell, it’s been just about nine months since the stuck-in-the-past citizens of western Pennsylvania made their choice for mayor.

I bring this up because, as an investor in a high-tech start-up run by ex-mayoral candidate Mark DeSantis, I have more opportunity than most to actually spend time with this delightful and brilliant man.

These are tough conversations for me. Not because the company he convinced me to invest in is unsuccessful. To the contrary, MobileFusion is doing quite well. In fact its underlying technologies may someday change the world. But because whenever he’s speaking my mind tends to drift to, as JFK once said, “things that might have been”.

In case you’ve forgotten, fellow Pittsburghers, you/we turned out a guy with experience, smarts, contacts, vision, and maturity.

In favor of you-know-who.

So, indulge me, please, as I think of “things that might have been”, had more of us just possessed the guts and vision to pull any lever other than the one marked Democrat last fall.

I was thinking the other day, “Pittsburgh has so many unique assets: virtually unlimited supplies of water, great Universities, safe streets (well, comparatively), and a solid heritage of hard-working people just to name a few. But what it lacks is leadership --- someone who can parlay these assets into some direction that we can all follow:

Which begs the question, “If I were to choose a leader for this region, what exactly would he or she look like?”

Try this on for size.

]]>To Build, or To Beg - That Is The Questionhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/8/15/to-build-or-to-beg-that-is-the-question.htmlRon Morris2008-08-15T10:00:00ZYou can build a company in two ways. You can either trade equity for cash (and use that cash to create your product, your distribution channels, and your marketing), or you can hang on to your ownership in that company and instead go out and rely on good old sales (customers!) for your start-up capital.

I have never really understood why so many people like to go the former way, because once given, equity never comes back. Money, on the other hand, is both “losable” (my word) and “winnable”.

For instance, you start a business with the cash you have saved and/or what you can rustle up from a few friends and banks in loans. You keep most of your stock, reserving some small portion for that one-in-a-million employee who absolutely works his or her tail off!

Because you have little working capital and almost no assets, you have a short amount of time to acquire the one and only resource that you will need in order that you can survive --- CASH!

And where does one get cash? Why from customers, of course! And so this particular entrepreneur goes about building the product(s) and/or services that only a large company can both envy and purchase.

The start-up with no cash is also extremely loyal to his customers. And so he takes care of those customers. For without them, there IS no company.

The start-up with no cash also understands things like: “urgency”, and, “time is money”, and “selling is everyone’s job”.

But what about our friend “the equity-seller”?

]]>Blog Fodderhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/8/8/blog-fodder.htmlRon Morris2008-08-08T10:00:00ZI hope you saw the article in last Sunday’s PG titled Requiem For Real News. This article, which obviously appeared in a newspaper, dealt with the almost break-neck speed at which just about every metric dealing with this medium was and/or is headed south.

Readership? Down.

Circulation? See Readership.

Advertising and related revenues? You got it.

The article even went on to cite the feeble efforts by newspapers to counter these on-line renditions by offering their OWN on-line counterparts. Unfortunately, while newspapers have carved out their fair-share of the on-line market, they still lose due to the plain and simple fact that electronic media simply cannot command the same dollars for their promotional messages as their hard-copy counterparts.

All over the world, newspapers are closing their (once-glamorous) overseas correspondences and offices. Last year, some 7,000 journalists lost their jobs.

It gets worse … for what is filling this void is none other than the ultimate pap and twaddle spinners … BLOGGERS!

Yes, just as Alvin Cash and the Crawlers once described 1966 as the era of “Twine Time”, the new millennium might as well be called “Slime Time” as more and more media moguls, whose interests are far removed from hard news reporting, invest in opinion instead of fact.

And why not? Hard news, aka facts, is costly to gather (hence, lower gross margins) and, it is (mostly) more disturbing to digest. It brings the reader right back to the real world, and people in the real world tend to hoard their cash, not spend it like drunken, well … reporters!

Bloggers, ironically, depend upon the few remaining hard news providers for their blog fodder. But where else can they get the original fact bases for their … uh … their hyperbole? After all, they just can’t create news out of wholecloth? Can they? (Well, can they?)

So here is my entrepreneurial slant on this one …

]]>Of Greyhounds and CEOshttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/8/1/of-greyhounds-and-ceos.htmlRon Morris2008-08-01T10:00:00ZIt’s Easy to be Easyhttp://www.taeradio.com/rons-blog/2008/7/25/its-easy-to-be-easy.htmlRon Morris2008-07-25T10:00:00ZA month or so ago during the US Open, the network ran a Nike commercial message over and over.

The ad was narrated by Tiger Woods’ father, Earl. Aided by appropriate visuals (including actual clips of Tiger as a teen and pre-teenager), Earl related to the viewer how he would do everything short of firing a starter pistol as his young son attempted to concentrate on his golf shot(s). If you watched the Open, you’ll no doubt remember the ad, as it was extremely well produced and it certainly hit its target(s). If not, then you can hit the play button below to see what you missed.

All one can think of is that old German aphorism (many credit the Irish, but it truly IS German in its origin), “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.”

Of course, this particular collection of antics is at the same time funny, sad, mean-spirited, and effective as hell.

I have a strong-willed, smart, handsome, and reasonably athletic son who, on August 8th (08-08-08) will be EIGHT. He lives in a house that I couldn’t even possibly imagine when I was his age, and he brings home grades that I never could have even sniffed at age 7, 10, 13, 15, 20, or EVER!

And, he probably right now is thinking that, “this is how it will forever be”. In fact, I KNOW it!

Sure, I tell him about living in apartments (21 in all before I even started sixth grade). These were apartments that could easily fit into what we now call our “Great Room” on the first level. And, I tell him about me selling eggs door-to-door --- 144 dozen each and every Saturday morning --- to make 3 cents a carton for my school clothes.

You already know how this is received. Sure, he’s polite … but is he even LISTENING?

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