Business Markets

WASHINGTON, July 5 (UPI) — The U.S. corn crop remains slow compared with the long-term average, following up late planting with late silking, the Department of Agriculture said.

The silking stage is when the corn sends out silky tassels, which are critical for pollination.

The USDA said 6 percent of the U.S. crop was in the silking stage, compared with a long-term average of 12 percent for this time of year.

Farmers report 10 percent of the crop is in very poor to poor condition, while 90 percent is either in fair, good or excellent condition. Still, corn can run into an early fall, which can make a critical difference at harvest time if the ears are not fully developed.

The USDA’s weekly crop report said 8 percent of the soybean crop was blooming, also behind the five-year average, which has 18 percent of the crop in bloom by this week of the year.

Soybeans, like corn, are 90 percent in fair, good or excellent shape.

The rice crop in the six most critical rice-producing states is 95 percent in fair-to-excellent shape, and rice is ahead of its average progress for this week of the year — 10 percent headed out compared with 9 percent for the long-term average.

Fifty-six percent of the winter wheat crop has been harvested, slightly ahead of the historic average.

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Business planning is the magic bean for successful businesses. Put a plan in place, give it the continued attention it needs and your business is going to grow stronger and better. Whether it grows bigger and stronger depends on the plan you’ve chosen, but the point is, without business planning, you have a fair chance of ending up with nothing but some churned up dirt to show for your efforts.

This business planning makeover is designed to ensure that you create a Business Action Plan that will provide your small business direction for the coming year – or longer. When you’ve completed it, you will have a Vision Statement, a Mission Statement and specific business goals that enable you to put your business planning into action.

The Basic Questions of Business Planning

So let’s start with the basics of business planning.

The assumption of business planning is that you want your small business to be successful.

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As federal authorities and Exxon Mobil Corp. worked Tuesday to clean up an oil spill in Montana’s Yellowstone River, a U.S. lawmaker called for hearings to investigate the pipeline rupture that created the spill.

U.S. Rep. Ed Markey said pipeline owner and operator ExxonMobil should appear before Congress to answer questions about its operation of the Silvertip pipeline, which spilled as much as 1,000 barrels of oil near Billings, Mont., late Friday.

“ExxonMobil has turned parts of the Yellowstone River black with their spilled oil,” Markey, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. He added that lawmakers should examine “the holes in oil pipeline safety that led to this incident and how we might prevent another spill in the future.”

Markey noted that Exxon’s Montana oil pipeline met all regulatory requirements and that federal authorities had inspected the line in December. He proposed that U.S.

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The presidents of of 11 area chambers of commerce will head to Washington, D.C., Tuesday to lobby for better air and rail connections, and lower energy costs. But they wont fly directly to Reagan National Airport in the capital city. Instead, theyll take Southwest Airlines to Baltimore, and then either take a train or drive to the Capitol.

Chuck Steiner, president of The Chamber of Schenectady County, said the group looked at flying to Washington, but that the fare was higher and the times not as convenient.

Theyll leave Albany at 6:25 a.m. and return at 9:30 p.m.

In Washington, the group plans to meet with U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and U.S. Reps. Chris Gibson and Paul Tonko.

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Plain and simple, the real reason to participate in any marketing activity, including Facebook and others, is to generate a customer.

That point of view gets overlooked in favor of the “see how many fans you can get” social media game. One of the things that has become painfully clear of late is that having lots of followers does not equate into having lots of business. I know plenty of well-known, heavy hitter social media types, the ones that show up on lots of tops of Twitter lists, that are broke.

I’m not suggesting that having no followers is the way to go either, but turning followers into leads and converting those leads into profitable business is the real reason to spend time and money in any tactic.

Again, I’m not suggesting that this means you find a way to buy a few fans and then spam them into submission, but you must have a workable plan in place to move people from followers to prospects.

For most businesses this means email. If you

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When people used to ask me why I wanted to achieve a particular goal in my business or get to a certain turnover, I never used to be able to answer them and I always came away from that interaction thinking the same thing:

Why do you want to know my why?

After all, I thought in my wisdom, it doesn’t really matter why I want to achieve those goals; the fact is that I do want to achieve them. Hmmm. I have to say that I have drastically changed my mind and here is the reason. I found that if I didn’t know why I was doing something, it was pretty hard for me to achieve it.

Knowing why gives me a reason to get up in the morning and a reason to try my hardest to achieve my goals. But…and it’s a big but. The why has to be important to you; it has to matter to you. In fact, I would go so far as to say – if you don’t want your ‘why’, what on earth is it all for?

You see, I think running a business is supposed to be fun. Think back to when you started your business. It was your dre

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