In the mid-1990s, Drew Greenblatt started dialing his way down a list of 800 brokers, lawyers and accountants, looking for a business to buy. He had sold a security alarm installation company, and he was looking for four qualities in his next venture: an honest seller, a viable market, a rational purchase price, and a business that sold to other businesses. He was through with coddling consumers. In 1998, after three years of searching, Mr. Greenblatt bought a sleepy Brooklyn manufacturing company with about 18 employees for $600,000. The company made one product, wire baskets for bagels, that it sold…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Donald Tokowitz, born in Chicago in 1934, is a great American success story. His immigrant parents moved to Los Angeles when he was two years old and changed their name to Sterling. Son, Don, has lived the American dream, of sorts, becoming a divorce lawyer investing in L.A. real estate and then buying a pro basketball team. Back in the early ’80s, late L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss, with whom Sterling had real estate dealings, encouraged him to buy an NBA franchise of his own. It was a great chance to have some fun, get good tax breaks, meet women,…
Energy extraction can coexist with native peoples and forests PASSENGERS arriving on the sole daily flight to the Las Malvinas gas-processing plant by the lower Urubamba river in Peru are ushered into a waiting room and shown a video. This contains a long list of “don’ts” for the Camisea gas project’s 600 permanent workers, including bans on bringing food and having contact with the Amerindian peoples of the surrounding forest. To get on the flight, which is chartered by Pluspetrol, the Argentine firm that operates the gas concession, passengers must have a medical pass, issued only after vaccination against flu…
The Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA) reported that according to 67 members who reported solid figures — March was the best month for shipment volume since they have been keeping track. This is good data to keep track of. It’s more important I think than broad sentiment vibes from purchasing managers across the economy or bumpy employment numbers that the stock market traders focus on but which do not directly reflect the sweep of the economy. The winter certainly affected the first quarter in some negative ways, mostly retail, but the PMPA numbers show me that the cold weather machine…
When the Internet nerds from Tumblr sold out to Yahoo, they rented a $75 per square foot space in New York’s iconic Flatiron Building. One of the first things they did upon moving in was to install a ping-pong table right in the middle of the office. It seems like every hot Internet startup puts in a table and paddles as soon as the ink is dry on its lease. Therapists use the “thwup” of pimpled rubber on celluloid ball to calm and focus their patients. Kuka, the big Japanese robot maker, brought in a ping-pong world champion from Europe…
While the robots imagined in science fiction novels have often looked like humans, today’s robotic armies are emerging in all shapes and sizes. Take the little army of bots made by SRI International, called “Magnetically Actuated Micro-Robots,” that are designed to build small things on small scales. They look like a swarm of ants, and they can be controlled by a central computer. The bots are incredibly fast for their size, able to move at 35 centimeters a second, according to a video posted by SRI. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, wrote that this is the equivalent…
In a March 7 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry that was made public on Monday, more than 200 business owners, venture capitalists, and the odd Stanford B-school professor have asserted that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline is not in the economic interests of the U.S. Over its lifetime, the 875-mile extension linking Alberta tar sands to refineries and tankers in the Gulf of Mexico would cost billions more than it brings in, the letter states, and “these costs will be borne by U.S. citizens, businesses and taxpayers, while the profits from the pipeline will accrue to private corporations…
A brief history of where your money goes and why. The appropriate thing to say about taxes on April 15 is that they’re absolutely terrible. And yes, sure, they are, in a way. Filling out taxes is miserable (especially considering the IRS could probably do it all for you), watching money leave your bank account stinks, and seeing the difference between your adjusted gross income and your take-home pay is depressing. But perhaps more than any other law, taxes are a keen reflection of what we value as a country. You know what you’re paying this year. Here’s some information…
I attended my first Technical Conference held by the Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA), this past weekend in Indianapolis. Some observations. I think there are a lot of good things going on in American machining firms now. Talent is arriving, just in time to replace the tiring Baby Boomers whose feet are aching from 40 years of tending gear gnashing machines. Young people are coming in via community colleges, or out of sheer boredom of frying lettuce at Subway for $9 an hour, 26 hours a week. The message that you can earn a decent wage, earn respect, and find…
We’ve seen April Fools Day. My turn. What’s happening? For machining people, the first quarter was solid if not spectacular. The harsh winter hampered production, and inventories piled up in the last quarter of 2013. Automotive was a little soft in January and February, but generally machining folks were satisfied. Not so for companies selling capital equipment. After a strong finish to 2013, machinery and capital goods firms were looking forward to a strong start in 2014. They did not get it from the scuttlebutt I hear. Nobody knows why for sure. You can blame the rush to use the…