Category — Business Management

Paul Edmondson knew he had a great idea, but even he didn’t expect such rapid growth. Edmondson is the CEO and Founder of online publishing site HubPages, which launched in August 2006 and now has over 100,000 registered users. It gets more than 5 million hits a month, mostly from search engines like Google and Yahoo. Authors create content-rich pages with easy to add text, photos, videos, and RSS feeds and earn money from Google Adsense, Amazon, and Ebay. To reach the masses, Edmondson and his colleagues have created the site so that no technical knowledge is required. And it’s free. Definitely a killer startup.

In this interview I ask Paul Edmonson how he knew he was on to something and what prepared him to go out on his own.

LD: What gave you confidence that HubPages would be successful.

E: We thought if we made a great product and built a community that people would use the service. We had a simple plan. To try things. To do more of the stuff that worked and to stop doing the things that didn’t. Nearly 6 million people visited HubPages.com last month. One of the things we did well was monetize Hubs, so we introduced a new ad optimization product called YieldBuild that served nearly 200 million ads last month as well.

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As the world’s largest corporation, Wal-Mart is famous for the influence they have over their vendors. And if you’re going to work for a Wal-Mart supplier, you need skills. Solid understanding of the retail business and cutting edge data analysis skills are required. And who better to school you? Smiley himself.

High Tech Retail Requires Special Skills

Wal-Mart suppliers use sophisticated software programs to access to sales data online in real time. Suppliers need account reps who can make constant decisions about the information they receive. Under-performing sellers must be replaced with new items based on the numbers.

Basic category management skills for Wal-Mart suppliers include the ability to work with software programs like RetailLink and ProSpace as well as the analytical skills to use the date received. Students use technology to optimize allocation of products, identify inventory problems, design displays, and instantly see the effects of changes.

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Hospital administrators, and directors of other health care facilities, are taking a cue from personnel management theories taught in business schools. They’re finding that by effectively managing volunteers in their facilities, they can maintain many of the creature comforts their patients appreciate without becoming awash in red ink.

While the strength of any hospital or health care facility is its medical personnel, many of these facilities, faced with rising costs, have had to cut back on comfort services that made hospital stays a bit more pleasant for patients in years past. Administrators are now trying to make up for these paid-staff losses by seeking out dedicated volunteers to handle everything from non-emergency patient intake to food services, running the gift shop, taking patients to and from radiology, doing back-office clerical work, and even bringing a patient an extra blanket or a newspaper. Crucial to making a volunteer effort like this successful is keeping volunteers happy, and that means effective human-resource management.

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