Author: Lloyd Graff

We are at the 1/16 pole headed to the finish line of 2018.  What does the news tell us about 2019 business? As usual it is a mixed-up picture – a patchwork mosaic of information and gut feel. GM announced yesterday that it is going to let go of 25% of its salaried employees.  This is probably overdue for the still bloated Detroit company but, nevertheless, shocking for a company that is making loads of money now.  But GM, like Ford, sees a changed new-car industry within 5-10 years and is shedding its pouch to prepare.  Sales are down a…

Read More

I’m writing this blog to announce a slight shift in my business career, which has been evolving this year. Several longtime clients of Graff-Pinkert have asked me to help them find machining businesses to acquire and other owners have requested I find them a buyer for their businesses because they felt that I had the right network and skill set to do it. My initial inclination was that I’m purely a machinery dealer, not a business broker. But then I thought, why not try this. Perhaps I can add value for some people who I really care about. If I…

Read More

It’s November 6, and I’m sitting at Starbucks writing this piece, across from the polling place I chose not to vote at in 2018. For over 50 years I have voted at every opportunity. I’ve voted for Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Idiots. But this year I’m not going to be an idiot and participate in an exercise that does nothing positive for me or my community and wastes almost two hours of my precious day. In my America of 2018 the political system has evolved into a fat duopoly (a dual monopoly) of parties that vie for the spoils from…

Read More

The mavens and savants are struggling with lots of economic numbers coming in that do not conform to popular wisdom. We have a very tight labor market right now, but the wage increases are merely bubbling up at a 2% per year pace. I have to admit this number does surprise me because Amazon just raised everybody at least a buck an hour, and the minimum wage law, which used to be an issue for the angry liberals, is now a forgotten artifact in a competitive economy. People in the food-serving business do have to pay more or they will…

Read More

The World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers starts tonight in Beantown. I’ll probably watch, but I may listen to a podcast or write or play Words with Friends. But if the Chicago Cubs were in it this year I would be watching with rapt attention and texting my son-in-law, Scott, and Noah. I’d be living and dying with the team I love so much. Why do I care so much? I don’t know the players personally. They change every season and often a lot during the season. Many of them are from the Dominican or…

Read More

The recent Kavanaugh spectacle enthralled me as much as any big sports event. It really was the Super Bowl of Senate pillow fights, and I loved it. Now we have another fascinating slugfest shaping up in Federal Court. It’s Harvard, Yale and MIT against the Asian kids and parents who want to break down the admissions barricades. Harvard and buddies in the Ivy League are fighting fiercely to uphold their right to handpick their Freshman class of 2,000 or so students. They want the right make their schools look how they like. Can you blame them? They are their schools,…

Read More

You never know when life will teach you a lesson when you least expected it. I was at the local Farmer’s Market in Homewood, Illinois, last Saturday.  I was hoping to buy the last good peaches of the year.  I surveyed the sellers’ wares, and nothing looked spectacular.  I finally found a batch that appeared okay.  I asked the farmer, a young woman from South Haven, Michigan, how the peaches were.  “They’re good, last ones of the season,” she said.  So I bought them. I took them home, left them out overnight and tried one the next morning.  Awful.  Mushy…

Read More

Scroll down to listen to the podcast with Jason Zenger. In today’s podcast I interviewed Jason Zenger, president of Zenger’s Industrial Supply, in Melrose Park, Illinois, a company that specializes in selling tooling and industrial supplies to the metal working industry. Jason also has a popular podcast called “Making Chips,” which he cohosts with Jim Carr of Carr Machine & Tool. Jason and I discussed how he eventually came to work at his family’s business and how it has grown and modernized over the years. Rather than simply distribute commodity products the company’s strategy is to become its customers’ single…

Read More

I’ve really been trying to stay away from political stuff in this blog, but the Kavanaugh sex allegations are just so juicy I feel compelled to comment. I was aghast when I first heard that Senator Dianne Feinstein was pulling a “Hail Mary” with the Christine Blasey Ford letter, but the more I read about it and her, the more I felt she really does believe that Brett Kavanaugh, as a 17-year-old prep school basketball player and self-proclaimed virgin, assaulted her, groped her and left her indelibly scarred. Did he really do it while “stumbling drunk”? I doubt we will…

Read More

Scroll down to listen to the podcast with Russell Ethridge. Today Brett Kavanaugh is being interrogated in hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee as he attempts to thread the political needle to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. In today’s podcast I interviewed Russell Ethridge, a solo practitioner lawyer in Detroit, who also listens to cases as a judge two days a month for the humongous sum of $15,000 a year. He believes the legal system must work for the guy accused of drunk driving for the second time and the secretary in the local real estate firm accused of…

Read More