Business Class News's Podcast: Recent Episodes
Business Class News
Business Class News prides itself in educating its listeners about new and exciting products and solutions. We work with our clients to provide the best information which is helpful to our listeners
Karl is always talking to subject matter experts about how they can help companies grow.
Karl had a great conversation with Jim Buffington, a leading expert in future-ready tax software and innovative accounting technology with Intuit, and gave some amazing insights on how ProConnect Tax, is the ONLY professional tax software with built in-tax advisory and insights, that empowers the industry with digital tax strategies and compliance solutions for new laws.
Tax firms are currently encountering significant challenges, including ongoing staffing shortages and the complexities of preparing for 2025 tax policy changes. These combined pressures not only affect tax professionals' sense of accomplishment but also negatively impact their job satisfaction and career opportunities.
Tax professionals and CPAs are working long hours to manage tax reform and compensate for workforce shortages. A solution that not only enables them to offer clients significant savings with customized tax plans but also leverages automation to fill resource gaps and offers cloud-based flexibility to work from anywhere at any time is crucial—these advantages help busy tax professionals streamline tax workflows and adapt to tax law changes. Despite these hurdles, optimism prevails as Intuit’s ProConnect Tax software pioneers new paths in tax compliance and strategic tax planning for 2025.
Here are some great resource links to learn more:
QBOA for Accountants: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accountants/products-solutions/accounting/online/
ProConnect Tax: https://accountants.intuit.com/tax-software/tax-online/
Education Center: https://accountants.intuit.com/training/
With inflation coming in hot in the last PCE report, the outlook for Fed cuts in the second half of 2024 is getting more bleak by the minute.
Rather than selling, homeowners are rethinking their money-making strategies and are entering the Short Term Rental market heading into the Summer. Homeowners need to know how to maximize profits and exactly what they need to do to comply with local regulations.
Pam Knudsen, senior director of compliance at Avalara MyLodgeTax discusses how owners can to set themselves up for success using AirBnB and other Short Term Rental market platforms with an actionable list of best practices.
About Pam Knudsen
Pam Knudsen is Senior Director of Compliance at Avalara MyLodgeTax, leading the Lodging tax team and Returns Experience/Reconciliation team for Sales & Use. She serves as a leading voice in vacation rental tax compliance and regulation, in addition to bringing in-depth experience across software/SaaS technology as well as ERP systems. Pam joined Avalara in 2012.
Whimstay is dedicated to offering the best deals on last-minute vacation rentals.
We offer the biggest discounts on bookings made within 30 days of check-in, but we also ensure great deals year-round compared to other major booking sites.
We do this by partnering with professional property managers to offer exclusive discounts on properties that might otherwise remain unrented. On average, guests save nearly 25%, and over $200 per booking.
Featuring an extensive selection of vacation rental homes, condos, cabins, villas, and resorts, Whimstay is becoming the go-to choice for savvy travelers.
Whimstay recently emerged as the industry leading travel site for booking last-minute vacation rentals at fantastic rates.
If of interest I can look into getting a media rate discount if you (or someone else from your team) if you want to try Whimstay to book a getaway yourself.
US based start-up Whimstay announced last month that bookings are up 400% last year compared with 2022 and that it attracted 1.2 million unique users to its site in 2023.
The improved growth is attributed to new features, functionality, doubling its number of listings and forming several strategic partnerships.
Whimstay has significantly outperformed other online travel agencies and booking sites, emerging as the marketplace leader for bookings made within 30 days of check-in.
Creating fun and accessible chemistry stories has been a labor of love for Colleen as a retired University of Arizona chemistry professor and author of a series of kid’s chemistry comic books. In 2023, the PBS short documentary, “Comic Book Chemistry” was awarded an Emmy. This documentary centered around Colleen’s vision, chemistry comic book series and her success with teaching college-level chemistry concepts to kids. During Colleen’s 30 years of teaching chemistry, she became aware that her students were struggling with basic concepts, including fluency with the symbols for the elements themselves. These comic books, videos, and activities are Colleen’s gift to all future scientists – one that will help them succeed in college chemistry.
Colleen holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Penn State University, was awarded a Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research at the Universite Pasteur in Strasbourg, France under the direction of Nobel Prize Winner, Jean-Marie Lehn. Colleen was a tenured faculty member with research expertise in environmental toxicology, medicinal chemistry, and chemistry education. She has published four chemistry textbooks, over 30 peer-reviewed articles, and has presented her work globally.
Karl talks to Michael Steiner, Marty Strong and Dr. Jens Hartmann in our NEW series Masters of Disruption, which was the brain child of Marty Strong who is a Board Member of BEST Robotics.
Our spotlight shines on Dr. Jens Hartmann who is an award winning executive focusing on change management and culture change.
Dr. Jens Hartmann talks about the science of culture, and how the brain has a huge part to play in preparing individuals and organizations for changing the dynamics of the future performances.
In this new series from BEST Robotics, Masters of Disruption, we bring some of the greatest minds from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to hear their take on how students, and the future workforce are working together to drive innovation and learning environments. Karl spoke to Michael Steiner, Marty Strong and Vinay Kunwar and they had an insightful conversation about this subject to start the series off. Vinay, the CEO of India First joined the conversation from his office in India and he talked about the collaboration with his organization and BEST Robotics.
Acquisition integrations are when the parent company takes over the target (acquired business), right?
Well… not exactly. There are different approaches used to merge, or integrate an acquisition. Here’s an overview of them, looking at it from our specialty of working with lower-mid and mid-size businesses (i.e. those with less than 1000 employees).
You’ve completed an acquisition, have an integration plan ready to go, and Day One has arrived: you’re ready to tell the world about the deal and the bright new future. Let’s tell everyone, right?
Not so fast… not everyone wants to hear the same message. Different groups of people have different perspectives and different interests. You need to create a Communication Plan to tell different audiences what is relevant to them.
A basic integration communication plan should cover the following:
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When you acquired a business, you had an intention, a strategy, of what you wanted to do with it. For example, you wanted take advantage of a very specialized team and the product that they develop, so that you can increase sales revenue.
Acquiring a business is a set of intensive stressful activities that culminate in closing a deal. However, in many ways, buying a business is the easier part of realizing your acquisition strategy. You should now prepare for a major change in how you work on this merger. Acquisition Integration is a campaign of concurrent activities focused on a set of common objectives (known as Key Objectives), that take place over a long period, while continuing the activities of the general business.
READ MORE
https://www.bcn.news/feature/intista/ive-just-bought-a-company-now-what/
Karl talks about the importance of pre-qualifying your sales prospects, and creating intelligent lead campaigns to maximize your closing efficiencies
In this weeks segment, Karl talks to Terry Toomey on the status of business resources that are designed to help businesses grow and thrive, especially in rural America.
Business Class News has partnered with The Industry Hub to help new and existing businesses grow and scale. Each month in 2023, BCN will showcase businesses that are either growing or just launching. The Industry Hub will share tips and advice on how to succeed in business. We will be giving you an advanced preview to an interactive program that is being launched, which has been developed for all types businesses from the start-up to the mature and ready to grow.
SPONSORED BY THE INDUSTRY HUBTerry Toomey, the Executive Director of The Industry Hub will be a regular contributor on BCN and our podcast shows.
We are also inviting business owners to register their business for consideration in our series “Business Sunrise”. These are 3 minute snapshots that allow the business owners and leaders present there companies.
Karl spoke to Janie Bordner, Executive Director of New Horizons and talked about the amazing vision and mission of the organization.
Janie talks about their goals, and objectives and also about the amazing Celebrity Chef Smackdown event they are holding to raise funds so that they can achieve them.
You can get more information by visiting their website
Celebrity Chef Smackdown Event - https://newhorizonsofntx.org/celebrity-chef-smackdown-2022/
About New Horizons
In 2002, Bob and Ellen Nichols saw a need to reach children with the message of Jesus Christ in a small neighborhood in Bonita Springs, FL. Ellen was local elementary school teacher, and Bob was a professional boat captain. They began their ministry by going door to door inviting kids to come to the “Super Kids Church,” which would meet every Sunday morning at Manna Christian RV Park. This kids-only church became a huge success!
The Nichols’ began praying for God’s direction on how to reach more children. Seeing the problems in the neighborhoods and recognizing the tremendous need to help the children from non-English speaking homes with their school work, Bob and Ellen were led to find a place to provide free after school tutoring.
In January 2003, they opened the first Super Kids Club in Rosemary Park and also founded New Horizons of Southwest Florida, a non-profit organization. From its first day with 20 children meeting on Wednesday afternoons, New Horizons Super Kids Club has expanded to four locations open Monday through Thursday. The Super Teens Club opened in 2006 in order to continue meeting the needs of students through high school graduation.
As the impact in Southwest Florida expanded, New Horizons Programs, Inc. was created in 2015 to launch the first affiliate location – New Horizons of North Texas. The visionary efforts of Tom and Nancy Cooper were instrumental in bringing the affiliate organization to their home town of Dallas to create faith-based after-school programs throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
By God’s amazing grace, New Horizons now includes eight different programs that operate throughout the year providing more than 60,000 hours annually of tutoring, mentoring, and faith to over 500 at-risk youth in Southwest Florida and North Texas.
Entrepreneurs designing solutions utilizing technology can get feedback, recognition and $20K from Tech Titans and enterprise companies on the cutting edge. In a new Grand Challenge, entrepreneurs submit an application which will be judged by representatives of technology companies, and finalists will be showcased for a virtual pitch in front of a panel of celebrity judges on Thursday, October 13, 2022.
The challenge will be open to entrepreneurs nationwide. The 2022 Tech Titans Innovation Collider Grand Challenge is seeking innovation solutions, systems or applications that advance sustainability and drive technology innovation for one or more of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs https://www.sdgactioncampaign.org/17goals/) that you believe are most important for America.
Entrepreneurs, start-ups, small and MBE/WBE-certified technology companies should be pre-revenue to revenue less than $2 million. There is no cost to participate. Participating companies can be located anywhere in the United States, and do not have to be Tech Titans members. Deadline for applications to be submitted is September 5, 2022 at 5:00 pm CT.CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Last year’s Grand Challenge recipient, Dr. Corey Clark, CTO of BALANCED said, “As a result of winning the Grand Challenge we were able to push further into our research and development for a distributed privacy preserving machine learning platform. We expanded our work within the area, bringing on more researchers and developers to further our capabilities in this space. We have made significant progress in developing a fully privacy preserving machine learning infrastructure that is capable of scaling and training a neural network within a volunteer distributed grid environment while maintaining privacy of data and the model being trained. The support from Tech Titans and the Grand Challenge award allowed BALANCED to move toward creating a commercial model that brings privacy preserving machine learning to our proprietary HEWMEN platform.”
Awardees will receive:
- A minimum cash award of $20K
- An invitation to the Tech Titans Awards Gala on October 27, 2022
- Enterprise-level mentoring that could include access to technology resources and potential customers/partners
- Introductions to funding resources
The hope is that the entrepreneur/start-up will negotiate some form of:
- Technology licensing
- Funding
- Customer/supplier relationships
- Strategic partnerships
- Other business relationships
The Tech Titans Innovation Collider offers myriad services that enable large companies to partner with entrepreneurs, university researchers and thought leaders to collide, connect, collaborate and create groundbreaking solutions that accelerate business value. These services include providing executive e
In this segment extract Don Springer talks about the purpose of a board.
You have got a board and you are doing a good job, but how do you raise our professionalism as board directors?
- How do we improve board composition?
- How do we focus on strategic vs. operational issues?
- How do we refine our board succession plans?
- How should we use technology for our boards and our business?
- How do we improve our M&A capability?
- How do we extend our network?
- How do we improve our risk orientation?
We’ve got a board and we’re doing a good job, but how do we raise our professionalism as board directors?
- How do we improve board composition?
- How do we focus on strategic vs. operational issues?
- How do we refine our board succession plans?
- How should we use technology for our boards and our business?
- How do we improve our M&A capability?
- How do we extend our network?
- How do we improve our risk orientation?
In this segment of Link'd AM we focus on philanthropy and how non-profits can really benefit from having a team working with them to realize the potential.
The SMU Cox Graduate Entrepreneurship Club, founded in 2000, is a student-led organization dedicated to promoting innovation within the SMU community. The Cox Graduate Entrepreneurship club fosters opportunities for student club members to achieve their goals of starting and launching a viable business, exploring venture capital interest, supporting a startup, or inspiring entrepreneurial thinking. The Cox Graduate Entrepreneurship club provides members with resources, hands-on support from the SMU entrepreneurship community, mentorship, and support from the Dallas startup community.
Karl talks to Seun Suberu, founder of College Plus and Full time student, and they talk about the balance between college life and being an entrepreneur. A lesson we all learn as we advance though our careers.
Karl speaks with David Vincent, VP Product Strategy and Customer Engagement at Appsian, a Global ERP Security platform that monitors various levels of threat detection, controls and ensures that its customers are audit ready to be compliant in this very important part of a business - data protection.
David talks about how businesses need to think not only of the protection of their customers data but also prepare themselves to align with the ever increasing Corporate Governance pressures for the Boards of Directors.
ABOUT APPSIAN
Appsian Provides ERP Security Below The Network Layer
Unlike most security companies that focus on perimeter protection, Appsian is focused on protecting the asset below those layers – your data and financial transactions.
Our unique approach that combines data security with controls for identity and access management, along with governance, risk, and compliance has earned us recognition across the ERP landscape. Including two awards by Cyber Defense Magazine.
Be Visionary: Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization is a self-help, business leadership book that demonstrates to existing and aspiring leaders the positive impact of applying flexibility, creativity and decisiveness to achieve results - even in uncertain times. More importantly, this book helps leaders to understand that while business operations optimization may have value in certain circumstances, it can also adversely affect a leader's management style, his or her message and replace strategic thought with short-term focus and gratification. For example, even the most efficient wagon-wheel manufacturer in the early 1900s was put out of business by the invention of the automobile - think and lead strategically!
Pre-Order: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Visionary-Strategic-Leadership-Optimization/dp/1785354329/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30AS0SCMUETSR&keywords=be+visionary+marty+strong&qid=1649362134&sprefix=be+visionary+marty+strong%2Caps%2C95&sr=8-1
Karl spoke with Finch Fulton, the VP of Policy and Strategy at Locomation, and they had a fascinating conversation around their business model, and how it fits with the topics Business Class News has been showcasing - The Future of Our Workforce.
Finch Fulton joined Locomation in February 2021. He previously served at the US Department of Transportation under Secretary Elaine Chao from 2017-2021, was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy and was the nominee to be Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy. There, he led the USDOT’s efforts around the safe integration of transportation technologies into the US transportation system. This included the development of key policies and initiatives around automated vehicles, commercial space operations, data, machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts, hyperloop systems, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and more. He helped develop the President’s UAS Integration Pilot Program and Automated Driving System Demonstration Grants, managed the Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology (NETT) Council and served on key transportation-related White House working groups.
He also served in the House of Representatives under Congressman Jim McCrery and Congressman John Fleming, M.D., in the Senate for Senator Jeff Sessions and in the private sector focused on the State and local integration of technology. He is a native of Mobile, Alabama, a graduate of the University of Alabama, received his MBA from Johns Hopkins University, and has been involved in trucking and logistics through his family’s business his entire life.
ABOUT LOCOMATION
Locomation was founded in 2018 by a team of the world’s foremost experts on autonomous vehicles, robotics, and artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center and trucking industry leaders with deep knowledge and experience in every aspect of the trucking business.
The name Locomation is the convergence of locomotion and automation. It isn’t fixated on one single transport mode, but rather describes our grand vision: automation for anything that moves. We began our journey with middle mile freight automation, the most critical link in the supply chain and the one best suited to integrate human-guided autonomous technology. We’re creating capacity in a world that’s demanding more, faster every day. And from here, we plan to go everywhere autonomous transportation is needed.
We are motivated by the challenge of solving problems that have hindered the trucking industry for decades. Trucks transport more than 70% of the nation’s freight. E-commerce has sharply increased the need for freight trucking services. Demand is expected to grow 36% between 2020 and 2031.1 At a time when demand has never been stronger, persistent driver shortages create capacity constraints that force carriers to turn down orders.
On this segment of Link'd AM, Karl talks with Mike Bright, Ph.D. who is Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Grove City College in Grove City, PA.
Grove City is a small (2500 students), Christian, liberal arts college with a strong commitment to balancing the liberal arts, science and technical degrees.
Karl and Dr. Bright talk about the current state of engineering and how the need has changed over the past few years, and what it looks like going into the future.
They touch on many things that have been touched upon in his conversations with Michael Steiner, the Executive Director of BEST Robotics, of which Dr. Bright has been involved with for many years and served as President until recently.
ABOUT GROVE CITY COLLEGE
A legacy of faithfulness.
Faithfulness to our 1876 founding purpose is one of our core values, and it is central to our unique higher education story. Daily, we seek to be faithful to our mission to equip students to pursue their unique callings through an academically excellent and Christ-centered learning and living experience. This dedication through the years of the Grove City College community, including nearly 29,000 alumni, has led us to the pinnacle of nationally recognized liberal arts and sciences colleges.
Our road has not been easy, but extraordinary accomplishment rarely is. Faithfulness to our mission led us to and through a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in the 1980s. Today, faithfulness to our mission creates educational outcomes that employers and graduate schools find highly desirable.
Today I spoke to Nirav Patel, VP of Product Development, and we focused on how to get the most out of launching a successful program.
The key to any successful launch and execution of these programs is getting the right elements into the mix.
Pre planning is such a crucial part of an implementation and ChannelAssist and our XLA Solution team have adopted a process called Hyper Onboarding, which allows the project team to discover what client really needs and aligns it with the original scope.
Getting this additional overlay of requirements allows for adjustments and refinement.
In our conversation we talk about the process, the planning and what you should consider when implementing an engagement program.
Our vision is to turn your donations into Training, Education and Technology for Veterans and their families in need
Working computers can provide a new life to struggling veterans rather than being discarded.
Many veterans face two significant barriers when competing in the modern workforce: the lack of a computer and the lack of the skills needed to effectively use that computer.
T4T supports these veterans by collecting used technology that would usually end up in landfills, then refurbishing the laptops and other devices.
They provide the reloaded technology, along with training, to veterans in need for low or no cost.
Who We Are:
Tech For Troops was started in Richmond, Virginia by a mother and son team who were passionate about military veterans in need and wanted to do something to help. In 2013 after hearing about the force reductions and a huge number of returning soldiers, they decided to collect used PCs and Macs, refurbish them, and provide them to veterans’ support organizations.
Since then we’ve grown to supporting veterans nationwide and continue to look for ways to offer workforce support and training.
Information on Donations : https://techfortroops.org/