Nicholas Upton

Everyone has had that job. You’re working along efficiently and getting stuff done when a superior swoops in and changes everything. That well-oiled machine is now on fire and the staff is trying to manage a clunky new system that just doesn’t work. This happens across all industries, at every level and in just about every business at some point. ...

LinkedIn has been around since 2003 and has been seen in various lights. The glowing light of posting all your accomplishments for the world to see; the dim slog of updating things and approving connection requests from months ago and the dark busywork of fixing your header when the whole layout changes. For a long time, there was little reason ...

We talk a lot in this industry about developing the boating lifestyle and extending the boating culture to customers. Recently, the Boating Industry team took a day trip to see a couple of our Top 100 dealers in action. I know there are great businesses across the country promoting the lifestyle, but Parks Marina is among the best I’ve seen. ...

Summer is almost here. More people will be on the water, more people will be buying boats and more people will be parking at marinas across the country. The only thing standing between you and a successful summer is the arduous process of finding seasonal help. Between writing a job posting, placing that listing someplace, interviewing and dealing with all ...

Paid search is a wonderful way to precisely target your prospective customers, but it’s not exactly the most intuitive way to advertise. All those menus, all that jargon and piles of competing advice make getting an ad online a bit of a headache for the uninitiated. But before you start targeting, grouping keywords and running campaigns, there is one big ...

Google might be embroiled in a massive antitrust suit in Europe, but that doesn’t mean that operations have stopped by any means. One thing that has just about every tech blog, marketer, content strategist and web developer sweating is impending search algorithm change from Google. Sweeping changes to the way search functions will focus on how a website is viewed ...

Research says that 66% of small businesses value phone leads above all others, and spend $68 billion in advertising to get people to pick up the phone. When I read that, I thought of my favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Whenever I order carryout, it’s the exact same rapid-fire response, “Quang!” The immediacy of the cashier is made clear by their frantic ...

We talk a lot about arcane marketing tactics, productivity and technology, but sometimes the most valuable tool is a pen and a slip of paper. Being personable on the sales floor and in the service bay is par for the course, but going the extra mile with customers is a great way to make them feel welcome and keep some ...

An interesting look at email marketing by MarketingProfs gives us some good data on what works for an email subject line. Digging into a study of 21 billion emails across 2,500 brands, they found that a few words provided the most interaction. So here’s a glance at some of the best and worst words to use in your subject line ...

If someone asked me a few weeks ago what I could get for $5, I would have a short list including soup, a piece of bread and maybe a head of cabbage. But now that paltry sum looks less like a sad, Soviet-era grocery bill. What changed? Well, I rediscovered a site that entrepreneurs, outsourcing gurus and growth hackers have ...