Think Like a Spider Web, Not an Organizational Chart

Here is the best thing I heard all day … Life is not an organization chart. Life is more like a spider’s web. Things happen in strange ways. – Ross Perot There is a lot of truth in this. You cannot think lineally about your life or business. You need to think in three-dimensions. This [...]

from Joshua Kennon

Five Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom, Tammy Kennon, and Her Company, Chenille Appeal

This is my mom.  You’ve probably read about her but never seen a picture.  She’s the same one that would slip notes into my lunches in elementary school telling me how wonderful, intelligent and loved I was. Back in the early days when she and my dad started their company in a two hundred square [...]

from Joshua Kennon

Coco Chanel Only Owned 10% of Her Business – Intelligent or Stupid?

I am going to start reading several biographies of Coco Chanel before long, so I made a run to a department store today to pick up some Chanel products (I have a habit of wanting tangible representations of whatever I’m studying around the office, which is why we need “investing cabinets”, which contain things like [...]

from Joshua Kennon

Cherrywood Capital Group Successfully Divested Two of Its Investments

Phase I of our secret project and my third quarter goals are both going really well, even though I’m spending an inordinate amount of time on the manuscript for my next book, which is a guide to calculating intrinsic value of stocks, bonds, real estate, and other assets. Everything Merging Under the Kennon & Company [...]

from Joshua Kennon

Today Was a Day for the Stock Market Record Books

I took the day off, spending most of it playing video games.  About 4:30 p.m., my dad gets in touch with me by calling Aaron, who tracks me down and hands me the phone.  It seems that the stock market had been in total chaos, setting an intra-day volatility record, and he had been frantically [...]

from Joshua Kennon

The Success of the iPad Will Come Down to App Development

Five days or so into my experience with the iPad and it continues to exceed expectations (by far). I’ve spent somewhere between $120 and $150 in the Apple iTunes App store, which compared to my previous purchases of apps (read: $0), means there is more cash flowing into Steve Jobs’ coffers. The overwhelming indication continues [...]

from Joshua Kennon

My Mom at the Billy Joel and Elton John Concert

My mom wasn’t allowed to go see Elton John as a kid.  She came from a very fundamentalist household and seeing a “homosexual” wasn’t something God’s people did, or so they were told.  So, she would wait up at night and watch him on television instead of going to bed.  Once she was old enough, [...]

from Joshua Kennon

Wholesale Chenille Letters, Patches, and Varsity Jacket Business Launching

A few months back, I told you that we were launching a new division of Mount Olympus Awards called MOA Team Supply.  I explained that we were going after an entirely new market, specifically athletic directors and schools that want to purchase wholesale chenille letters, chenille patches, and even wholesale varsity jackets.  We’ve finally got [...]

from Joshua Kennon

How to Find Investment Ideas

Years ago, I wrote an article called Finding Investment Ideas for Your Portfolio for About.com, a division of The New York Times.  I’ve been thinking for the past few days about how it is that I seem to come across so many opportunities and then I realized that most people like me are always looking [...]

from Joshua Kennon

DeLong Sportswear Files for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy

If you are involved in the sporting goods industry, you probably know that there are only a handful of companies that manufacture letterman jackets in the United States.  Among the biggest was a company called DeLong Sportswear, headquartered in Grinnell, Iowa.  A few months ago, rumors are that DeLong went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy and [...]

from Joshua Kennon

The New Team Supply Business Launches This Week

There’s some exciting news coming out of headquarters in the next few days regarding the expansion of our flagship custom apparel company.  We’re going to aggressively go after a new market that has seen its primary players devastated by the credit crisis and, like any good American, we are going to use the situation to [...]

from Joshua Kennon