Roger Waller’s Blog

In my last posting I wrote about our current financial crisis and to watch the impact of reduced credit opportunities and how it might relate to limiting business growth.  The September 29, 2008 issue of Advertising Age (www.adage.com) had as their lead headline … “Credit crunch takes bite out of McDonald’s.”  In the article it was pointed out that Bank of America stopped making loans to, yes, believe it or not … McDonald’s.  Yikes, what is going on … is the Big Mac in trouble?  In my Marketing course we discussed how McDonald’s was going to start aggressively competing with Starbucks by coming out with ‘classier’ coffee.  To make this happen McDonald’s needed to add special coffee bars in their 14,000 locations.  The current credit crunch caused Bank of America to stop making loans to McDonald’s which in turn will slow the addition of the coffee bars to the various McDonald’s locations.

Now that the government has approved the bailout/what ever you want to call it/etc.  bill that will provide $700 billion to some one … what will be the impact on Bank of America and McDonald’s?  We won’t know the true answer until we see a new coffee bar situated in one of the McDonald’s locations that we might frequent.  No coffee bar no easing of credit restrictions, if we see a coffee bar that might mean we’ll be seeing more business growth.

It’s interesting to think about the impact on a small business person’s dream of expansion and how this credit crunch might slow that growth.  If BIG McDonald’s has a problem, I’d imagine that the ‘little’ person also is facing a slowdown in growth possibilities.  This will mean that we should revisit some “Guerrilla Marketing” concepts as we think about how to save money without hurting or slowing sales growth.  In my Marketing class I spend a fair amount of time discussing Jay Conrad Levninson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” concepts.  You should visit his website, http://www.gmarketing.com, to get some ideas on how to apply some of  his low cost methods of gaining customer awareness of your products.

That’s all for today … keep your eyes out for the McDonald’s coffee bar as that might be the truest test of seeing that credit is being eased and that we are getting out of the credit crunch (at least for business … may be not for us, individually).

Check back to this blog for more of my thoughts on business and current events.

You must be wondering how all of the bailout talk will be impacting our lives over the next few weeks, months, and years.  Well, so am I.  It’s interesting to have people asking … “what do you think” … and really not have any good feel for an answer.  But, that seems to also be the case in Washington.  $700 billion is a lot of money and I’m not sure if any one knows where that money is going to go.

Some of the business journals such as Business Week (http://www.businessweek.com/) are pointing out that the credit questions in the market place are more important than the stock market.  I tend to agree with this.  As we discuss in our Introduction to Business classes at Delta College, once a stock has been issued by a company any subsequent sale of that stock doesn’t generate any increased funds for a firm.  So, if the stock market drops that may impact our retirement funds and/or our own personal wealth (either long term or short run) but it shouldn’t cause a business to shut the door.  But, if a firm cannot generate funds to grow by either short or long term borrowing that could create a major slowdown in the marketplace.

In our Marketing class we discuss the issue of environmental scanning and seeing how what is going on in our marketplace(s) can impact our business.  Delta College has to be concerned with these same issues.  How would a downturn in the economy impact Delta College?  Our Marketing text ((Marketing, Pride/Ferrell) indicates that we should consider six forces: Economic, Political, Legal and Regulatory, Technological, Sociocultural, and Competitive as we analyze our environments.  Well, we can see that the Economic forces we currently face seem to indicate that credit will be harder to get.  That means we will see more competition from our students for various scholarships and grants to help pay for college.  We might also see more students deciding that a community college is easier to afford than a more expensive alternative.

Keep using your critical thinking skills that you refine in our Delta College classes to analyze and decide for yourself about “What’s going on right now.”

Now you can access the Delta Biz Network

at http://rogerwaller.net/deltabiznetwork

What a good question.  I’ve looked at other blogs and read about blogs and thought about blogging, yet taking the first step and getting a blog spot is a pretty daunting task.

Once you make that step of getting a site, the next question is, what do I do with it?

My motivation for a blog really relates to a couple of issues.  The first one is to see if I’m up for the challenge.  The second is to try to establish a spot that does a review of current business activities.  Well, o.k., I might include some other subjects, but my main focus will be business topics.

Why business you ask?  Well, I teach business subjects at San Joaquin Delta College and I wanted to have a forum to share my ideas on current subjects.  My focus will be on some of the subjects I teach which include marketing, international business, accounting, and an introduction to business course.  So, as you can see, I have a broad range of subjects I can blog about.

I’m still wondering if I’m up to the challenge, but only time will tell.  You will also be able to tell based on my posts.  I hope you’ll find them interesting, thoughtful, fun, exciting, o.k., I’ll stop.  No reason to oversell my blog product before it gets established.

Thanks for reading, check back later for even better blog comments (I hope).