Business & Entrepreneurship

Do You Need Debt to Start a Business? SBA Loans and How to Tell Good Debt From Bad Introduction When you start a business and your own savings fall short, should you borrow money to get going anyway? Or is it smarter to stay debt-free and build slowly? A friend of mine asked me exactly […]

Introduction Hi everyone, I’m Suzuki from Eco Drive. Today’s question: how did Nissin Cup Noodles spread this far around the world? A little while back I wrote about the cup of noodles I ate on a northern lights tour in Alaska. It was around 5°F late at night on a snowy mountainside, and we were […]

Hi everyone — I’m Suzuki from Eco Drive. Today I’m picking up the third of the three challenges I ran into starting a business here: employee retention — how hard it is to keep good people. Last time, in Part 1: How Often Do People Change Jobs? 9 in 10 U.S. Workers Have, I wrote […]

Part 1: How Often Do People Change Jobs in the U.S.? Introduction Hi everyone — I’m Suzuki from Eco Drive. Today’s theme is the difficulties of starting a business here that I learned by actually doing it, and this is the third one: how hard it is to keep employees. I’ve now been running my […]

Introduction Hello everyone. This is Suzuki from EcoDrive. You may have heard that Tesla started selling its Superchargers to businesses. The natural question is whether that has anything to do with your own store or company. Actually, it may have a lot to do with you. If you have roughly four parking spaces, this could […]

Hi, this is Suzuki from Eco Drive. This is the second half of what I wanted to say about pay — about letting go of an assumption I’d carried over from my years working for someone else. In the first half, How Do Car Salespeople Get Paid? Commission vs. Salary, I went through why commission […]

How Car Salespeople Get Paid — and Why Eco Drive Chose Salary Introduction Do car salespeople really live on commission alone? And how tough is full commission in practice? If you work in this industry, or you’re thinking about getting into it, how the pay works is one of the first things you want to […]

Part 1: Why Cash Flow Can Be So Tough When Starting a Business in the U.S. — My Real Experience with the Bank-Loan Wall Introduction Hi everyone — I’m Suzuki from Eco Drive. Today I want to talk about the cash-flow challenge I ran into right after starting my business here in the U.S. I […]

Why So Many Used Car Dealers Are Going Under (Part 1): Tight Supply and a Race to the Bottom on Price Introduction Hi everyone, this is Suzuki from EcoDrive. Today’s topic is why used car dealer bankruptcies have become such a hot topic across the US. What got me thinking about this was that a […]