Growth doesn't happen by talking louder. I've been in the promotional products industry for a long time – 26 years to be exact. To put that number in perspective, I've lasted longer in this industry than the average career of a Major League Baseball player (6 years), longer than the average marriage in the United States (8 years), and even longer than David Lee Roth fronted the mighty Van Halen (14 years). That's a long time to be in one industry.   For the first 13 years, I

The best things you'll ever build will also be the hardest. As I write this, I'm less than 24 hours removed from co-hosting the most recent PromoCruise. For those unfamiliar, it's an event where we take sixty branded merchandise suppliers and distributors – along with their plus ones – on a cruise, aiming not only to change how we network in the promotional products industry but also to elevate it by emphasizing the importance of relationships.   This is where I would typical

Sometimes a bit of chaos is the creative spark you need. If you're reading this during the first week of November when this blog drops, I'm somewhere in the Mexican Caribbean on the fourth PromoCruise. At this point, you'd think that organizing and running a networking event would be some variation of "wash, rinse, repeat." However, for a variety of reasons, this PromoCruise feels very much like the first time – and I'm not talking about the 1977 hit song from Foreigner.   As