Hope you had a great Superbowl Sunday! Did you know that Super Bowl Sunday is the second biggest snack day of the year? Second only to, you guessed it, New Years Eve. I confess that I’m far more interested in the ads, and the strategy that sits underneath each of them, than the actual game.

Last year’s ads were terrible. This year’s weren’t much better. It seems that all the time spent home thanks to COVID did nothing to spark any big ideas.

How have the elections impacted your business?

For many, especially those who sell large ticket items like machinery, cutting edge technology, or even facelifts, its like a large number of clients have hit the pause button. They’re waiting. Not sure for what exactly as life goes on either way. It’s a pattern we see before every election, most especially the week before – and if you know it’s coming you can not only prepare for it, but profit from it too …

Last week while in Toronto I stumbled across perhaps the sexiest piece of furniture I’ve ever laid eyes on.

There I was, minding my own business and making tracks to a meeting at my client’s office when it practically jumped out at me. Ok, jumped might be a slight exaggeration. It’s probably hard to imagine a 200 pound leather chair leaping off the pavement and bowling me to the ground. But there it appeared before me – a chair about 6 feet tall made of the finest cherry red leather– the “vintage” kind you might find in a weathered 1960’s Corvette belting out Beach Boy tunes on a hot summer’s day.

The first time I ventured into the “bowels of Detroit” as some people call it was just a couple of years ago. I had been summoned to appear in the Supreme Court (no, not in that way – but to get sworn in as a US citizen alongside the melting pot of new immigrants who mostly didn’t speak English.) When I drove my car in downtown Detroit it felt like I had left America altogether and was instead in some burnt out husk of an impoverished African nation.

A homeless couple barreled up to my car at the lights, knocking on the window and demanding money.

Vacant buildings outnumbered occupied ones, broken windows and “no trespassing” signs peppered the landscape and there was trash everywhere.