Mark Riffey's Page

Emergencies of all forms seem to come at the worst possible times. How your business manages day to day transactions quite often makes the emergency worse for your clients. Bear with me, this story - and the lesson that goes with it - requires a bit of background discussion. Last week was crazy for me. On Friday night, [...]

Despite the fact that you can obtain the same thing anywhere in the world, a client of mine does a fine job of selling their high-end, custom version of this product in many countries. We were talking yesterday during a telephone coaching session about return policies for online sales. One thing led to another, and it came [...]

Last week, a story in one of our local papers noted that a local business had lost a customer that they had served for thirty years. Thirty years is a long time to have a customer. That’s really impressive. This big, regular customer accounted for a major portion of this local business’ revenue. When the owner of that [...]

With the recent same-sex marriage ruling in California, more and more businesses are going to be faced with making serious, perhaps business/life-altering decisions about their operations - assuming they haven’t already. One excellent example is the case of New Mexico wedding photographers who refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony in 2006. Earlier this year, the state [...]

Denial of Service (DOS) attacks occur when slimy types hit a web server with thousands (millions, whatever) of requests for access all at the same time. Their goal is to bring a website down under the unanticipated workload. A common strategy is to focus these thousands/millions of requests on a website all at once during an important [...]

Today’s guest post is a brief story in Baseline magazine about how Google treats their employees. Unless you work in an IT shop (ie: a geeky guy like me), you probably haven’t read Baseline, but I highly recommend it. It was the source of the excellent coverage of the Delta Nervous System years ago that changed how [...]

What message do you send to clients when you have a live sales chat feature on your website, but no live support chat? It says to me that I am not as important after the sale as I am before the sale, which is exactly how I felt today when visiting a website whose service I [...]

Earlier this week, the long-awaited Firefox 3 web browser shipped. Last Wednesday, a cake from their competitor - the Microsoft Internet Explorer team - arrived at the headquarters of the Firefox development team to congratulate them for releasing their new version. Obviously, someone at Microsoft is paying attention to their competition. Do you? I don’t mean to suggest that [...]

There’s just nothing better than making some grumpy old business obsolete. This week’s grumpy old business is the Associated Press (AP). Why? Because they have decided to start charging $2.50 per word when you excerpt their story (even though such excerpts are permitted under Fair Use as long as the excerpt is of reasonable length). Now, to be [...]

Dan Kennedy is often heard saying “Money loves speed”. While that is likely true, it seems that money also despises a few other characters: the laggard, the do nothing and the shows up 5 years late. One of the distinct advantages that small businesses have over the box stores and franchises is that it takes those two [...]