Tim Cailloux

I am working on a financial model for a rental home business. The basic concept: buy a house, fix it up, and rent it out. I have run the numbers using a few different financing options and so far none of them produce a sustainable investment model. The basic model inputs are: Home Value Loan [...]

When you know about your customers, it helps you when you talk to them.  Whether the data is used to improve customer relationships or convert a prospect into a customer, what you know about them helps you make a better decision.  A friend of mine calls it “the art of being right.” Having useful data [...]

The Greeks may have forgotten to develop a suitable prefix for a number as large as 1027.  Similarly, the developers of the metric system may have neglected to include this figure in their system a la Bill Gates’ often-attributed (but incorrect) “640K is enough for anyone!”  The Internet has risen to the challenge and is [...]

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial recently that discussed walking away from an underwater mortgage.  In it, the Brett Arends argues: You shouldn’t feel bad about it, and you shouldn’t feel guilty. The lenders would do the same to you—in a heartbeat. You need to put yourself and your family’s finances first. It’s interesting.  [...]

Business intelligence is about collecting and using data to make decisions.  The type of data that you collect should be useful to your organization, even if it isn’t useful to anyone else.  If you are a retail food company, it may be the data that you collect is the shelf space dedicated to your products [...]

“No” is the second best answer. It gives you a path to find future opportunity.

If you allow yourself to repeat the same pattern and hope to improve your condition, you overlook the opportunities to be exceptional.

After a grueling 14 hour flight to Japan, I look forward to riding the train from Narita Airport to Osaka. When my plane leaves the gate 5 minutes late, it’s still on time. When the Japanese bullet train, the shinkansen, leaves the station 1 minute late, it’s 1 minute late. It’s hard to relate seeing [...]

Growth in the Middle East will be hard for companies in this decade. As the US recovers from its credit crisis, Europe is on the brink of its own problems. With those two topics dominating news headlines, Dubai’s debt problems haven’t been discussed as often as they should. Dubai is arguably the economic engine for [...]

Economic uncertainty in Europe is problem for computer companies looking to revitalize their EMEA business in the short term.