Business & Entrepreneurship

Introduction Have you ever heard of a product called Ochinai Ringo? I hadn’t until recently. The name was given to apples grown in Fujisaki, a town in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. The story behind it hits close to home for anyone running a business. A Quick Guide to Ochinai Ringo The name: Ochinai Ringo […]

Our Car Rental Business Lost About $50,000: 3 Lessons Learned Introduction Hi everyone — I’m Suzuki from Eco Drive. When something fails, it’s hard to see anything but the loss and the frustration. Most of us would rather not fail at all, if we had the choice. I get that completely. But when you look […]

Stuck With 70 Cars in the Pandemic: The Survival Plan That Turned Into Our Worst Miscalculation Introduction Hi everyone — I’m Suzuki from Eco Drive. What comes to mind when you hear the word “failure”? For most of us it’s something to avoid, something we’d rather not revisit. This article is about a stretch when […]

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 […]