Tag: business

Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice

clients and real estate agent looking at roof of house for sale
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A brief description of how to appraise a business, a home, or anything else.

By Mark D. Harris

Determining the value of something is a daily task for everyone and has been since the dawn of time. We value groceries, dishwashers, and even our time in dollars, so a bag of groceries that costs $50 is worth one hour of our time, while the dishwasher is worth ten hours. Value includes a host of factors. Acquiring a business, for example, should result in direct financial gains. Acquiring one of your suppliers, however will result in direct financial gains and synergies with your existing business. Reacquiring a shop once owned by your grandfather should result in direct financial gains and meet your emotional needs. Value is unique to each individual but will usually fall within a widely accepted range. Legally, value is what a reasonable buyer with full information and under no undue influence would pay for an entity in a free market (Hitchner, 2017). Valuation has become entertainment, with expert valuators at the Antique Road Show identifying “rags” (clothes, furniture, letters, items of unknown value) that are actually “riches” (valuable artifacts, antiques, and collectibles) for the owners and viewers.

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A Brief Overview of Lean Six Sigma

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By Mark D. Harris

As small businesses, churches and other small religious organizations strive to be more effective and more efficient in providing goods, services, pastoral care, and social support, process improvement principles such as Lean Six Sigma can help. Such tools are not only for manufacturers.

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The Balanced Scorecard and the Republican National Committee

19th century picture of young Abraham Lincoln
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The Republican National Committee (RNC) has struggled to capitalize on some big advantages in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. The Balanced Scorecard is a widely used tool to help businesses, non-profits, and governmental organizations achieve their goals. Perhaps by looking again at their operations, the RNC can prevail in 2024.

By Mark Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

Introduction

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a proven tool for organizational evaluation, strategy, and improvement. Typically, it includes factors such as “financial,” “customer,” “internal processes,” and “learning and growth.” According to Blocher et al., 2021, BSC financial goals include increasing profitability, growing revenue, and reducing costs. BSC customer satisfaction goals address improving the profitability of each customer, raising customer satisfaction, and reducing the time required to fulfill a customer’s desire. Internal process goals would be improving quality and productivity. Finally, learning and growth goals should focus on developing employees, using technology more effectively, and communicating strategy better to all stakeholders.

The BSC was developed in the 1990s, and since then has been adopted by thousands of organizations in a wide variety of fields. The BSC has found a home in the public sector, as I used it in the US Army Medical Department for over 20 years. Miller, 2017 wrote that the public sector, especially when reelection depends on organizational performance, has widely adopted performance measures such as the BSC. Private sector companies of all sizes have capitalized on the BSC, and it has proven itself valuable in non-profit organizations as well.  I worked in the past with the Republican National Committee (RNC), so this work will discuss how the BSC might look in the context of the RNC.

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Business Models for the First and the 21st Centuries

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Businesses and other organizations can be understood in three different types. Facilitated Networking, Value Added, and Solution Shop business models, and combinations thereof, have existed since before Rome ruled. Modern entrepreneurs will benefit as they think of their endeavors in these ways.  

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

Several women at a baby shower share stories about giving birth, providing tips to an expectant mother on how to make delivery easier and less painful. One older woman provides a beautiful baby dress, while another shares the address of a bargain store.

A farmer plants acres of grain. He and his family labor over their fields for months, watering and weeding while the crop comes in. In due time, they harvest an abundance. They keep some grain for their own consumption and sell the rest.

Two colonels pore over a map on a battlefield, discussing how to defeat the enemy dug in on a ridgeline nearby. They are not sure of their opponent’s strength and disposition, but they are losing the initiative and need to act soon.

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The Year in Business, Educational and Financial History

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7 Jan – The first commercial bank in the United States, the Bank of North America, opened for business (1782).

16 Jan – The Pope appointed the Medici family as the official bankers of the Papacy (1412).

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Discovery and Innovation in the Business of Health Care

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How can you do something that you have never done, or discover something that no one has ever known? Read below for some help. 

Discovering things previously unknown is one of the most important, and most enjoyable, things that anyone can do. Most people do it every day, whether as simple as finding a new restaurant they love or discovering a new comet in the heavens. Fundamentally, new discoveries come from observation, analysis, and experimentation. A husband looking for a new restaurant to try with his wife might observe something that in his experience resembles a restaurant on a street corner. He then analyzes the available information to decide if he wants to try it; what kind of food they, the opening hours, and whether it is clean and inviting. Finally he and his wife try it out, completing the process of discovery.

New discoveries are often far more difficult than finding a great new place to eat. Identifying a new comet can require expensive equipment and uncommon expertise, while sequencing the human genome, learning about subatomic particles or curing cancer are some of the slowest and most resource intensive discoveries of all. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer followed the same observation-analysis-experimentation sequence. In the 1930s a few surgeons noticed that they seemed to be performing lung cancer surgeries on a lot of smokers. Some published their observations and that induced others to analyze the existing information and hypothesize that smoking is associated with lung cancer. Researchers then developed experiments to test the hypothesis and in 1956 the British Doctors Study provided the first convincing evidence that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer.

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