Business

Now to be fair, $50,000 was Sharon's best month and it came from growing a multitude of blogs over several years.

But as we get into Sharon's story, you're gonna have a sense of what's possible with a blogging business if you focus on the right things.

And yes, you can still do that now.

Some things have changed, but content marketing remains possible.

She was also stressed, too busy, and watching every cent her family spent.

She wanted something better for her life.

Tired of being so tired, Sharon decided an online business was the answer, at least to some of these problems.

She had been reading family travel blogs, noticed that some of them seemed to be working well.

Professor Garg is a historian of cities, capitalism, international development and modern South Asia.

Today we'll be discussing his recently published book, Agents of Inertia, Business, Urban Crisis and Economic Decline in the 20th Century Calcutta, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

Once one of Asia's most important commercial industrial centers, Calcutta, experienced a profound urban and economic decline over the course of the 20th century.

But what explains this decline? Challenging conventional explanations, Professor Girk, his book argues that the city's most powerful business communities, rather than consistently promoting urban development, often resisted infrastructural improvements in order to protect their existing economic interests.

I've been trying to push this idea, but nobody seems...

You know, maybe I have to work harder to prove this idea.

Business confidence, even today, is such an important...

You know, we read about business confidence all the time, but historically, we don't study business confidence at all.

yeah

and um i had a paint but that means if i had a paint is either a higher painter to paint but i don't believe in hiring somebody to paint yeah um but if i go and spend time painting i wouldn't have time to put into the the business and the stuff that i have to do now so I find out, like, I have a lot of things that I plan to vibe code on Automate and a new, like, revamp all set of systems and things.

And I have the plans on how to do it, which, of course, would take me real long to do, but I have a plan on how to do it.

But if I could get agents to do it, I might just go and buy the ChatGPT subscription for one month and try it and just see if it could, like, Okay, let's throw our army out there and refine our whole set of things.

all right first article is

from ebony de leon yeah all right here's the here's the premise of it across the caribbean there are quiet beliefs that hold that holds many small and medium-sized enterprises back we don't have enough data to do analytics It sounds reasonable.

After all, when we think about data, we imagine complex dashboard, large teams and expensive systems, advanced structures built for multinational corporations, not family-run businesses, side hustlers or growing enterprises, navigating tight margins, which is what most of us are.

One of the biggest misconceptions she states is that among SMEs is that data must be collected and it can be used.

Welcome back to Open for Business, the podcast offering practical guidance and some humorous insights to business owners looking to optimize their professional and personal lives.

I'm still

Stuart Brown.

You really got to take your time, think this through, have the right people counsel you on making sure what the best alternative is for you and not simply maximizing the dollars and cents.

That's exactly right, Norman.

What we are trying to do is bring to our audience here at Open for Business questions, answers, and just get them thinking about what their alternatives are.

So, Ed, that was an excellent, excellent answer.

I do have one more question for you.

She's an author.

She's a business.

She's an author.

Julie, kill me.

So the reason why and I know that that's confusing.

My bakery was in New Jersey because my mom helped me set up my LLC and helped me.

You know, I never went to business school and the whole thing was very daunting.

She found me a test kitchen and she lives in Jersey because that's where I'm from.

But I would encourage a lot of people to take a look at it and see, you know, how their brand came together.

And then there was another moment that I thought was really cool, right? Business-wise is when you start to outsource some of your manufacturing.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's a good segue into the, well, first off, before we segue into the final topic, on that point of your methodology, is there somewhere folks can find this so they can dive deeper, so they can go brush up on it, get educated? Do you have like a one pager on it? Do you have a book on it? Is in your book?

Yeah, we've got, if you go to our resources page, if you go to cornerstone-business.com, which you have a link in there, go to our resources page.

And I, we've got white papers on POMO and unsolicited offers.

We had white papers on the survey that I mentioned earlier.

You've never been in these situations, whatever.

So the part of the business side of things is, Business is multifaceted from a hundred different ways, like collecting money, making sure that your costs are all accounted for.

I'm annoyingly detail-oriented when it comes to cost product-based pricing.

And when someone asked me, like, well, how did you come up with that number to get, you know, to sell that thing for that price? If I showed you the spreadsheet, it would melt your brain.