Brianna Liestman

Every week I post a different “Throwback Thursday” photo on the Boating Industry Instagram account. It’s a huge benefit of having 87-some years of archives at your disposal. Sometimes I go back pretty deep – back to the 1930s – and other times I stay a little closer to home, like when I picked up the 1999 archive book last ...

The New Markets Task Force of the Recreational Boating and Leadership Council will be presenting its educational training module to the industry in a Boating Industry webinar at 2 p.m. EST on Jan. 5. The program has been presented live at several industry shows already. The discussion around engaging new markets has largely discussed the income potential of engaging these ...

If there’s anything we have learned from the year 2016, it is that this was not the year to be a betting man or woman. That is, of course, unless you like betting dangerously against the odds. From the Brexit decision to the U.S. presidential election to even the Cubs winning the World Series, it has been a year of ...

The parent company of Snapchat – Snap, Inc. – filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has an eye toward being valued at more than $30 billion. So if you thought Snapchat was just some silly trend for high schoolers, think again. As the social network continues to grow in immense popularity, it will become a ...

Assuming none of the efforts to block or delay the overtime rule are successful, business owners will need to have all their ducks in a row in three weeks to make sure their employees are properly classified under the new standards from the Department of Labor. That’s not a lot of time to get organized. There is a lot you ...

If you have quality employees you want to keep working for your business, you need to have a plan to develop them and lead them on a satisfying career trajectory. This plan has to be an actual plan, not just an “idea” for how you might do this in the future. Recent interviews I have conducted for a couple recent ...

For the second year in a row, the sports co-op REI will close on Friday, Nov. 25 – Black Friday – in an effort to not “feed the Black Friday frenzy.” The move closes 149 stores and gives over 12,000 employees a paid day off, supported by a social media campaign #OptOutside. Despite the cold Minnesota weather, I participated in ...

The grocery industry and the boating industry are, on the surface, completely different from one another. After all, one is a need-based industry while the other is want-based. However, there is a lesson we can learn from the grocery industry’s resistance to change. According to an article in The Washington Post, the typical manager of a food retail shop is ...

A recent study from the Harvard Business Review shows that investors today prefer companies with fewer physical assets. That is not great for the boating industry. HBR looked at the 2015 S&P 1500 Index, a mix of small-, medium- and large-cap stocks, and separated the index based on industry sector. Then, HBR examined each industry’s average percentage of physical assets ...

Last week, 21 states sued the U.S. Department of Labor over the impending rule that would require employers to pay overtime to any salaried worker making less than $47,476 a year. Republican Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt filed the suit in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, urging the court to block the implementation. Other plaintiffs include Alabama, Arizona, ...