It’s November. The Midwestern Iowa leaves feature Technicolor rainbows of colors; bright red, deep orange, a thousand shades of yellow. A bit of warmth lingers, but Thanksgiving, December, and the Holiday season make this time of year go by quickly. Two painful realities of the season loom in the distance - yard cleanup and annual planning.  As I jot down these few words, I feel the approaching pain of a future Sunday afternoon manhandling a rake around the property.  Some pay a neighborhood teenager to handle the raking. But it’s hard to find an $8.00 an hour surrogate for End of Year Planning. Planning needn’t be the dreaded task hanging around the corner. Join me as we remove the pain out of the process. Start early . Many of us don’t dig into the task of Year End Planning until the last minute. A few of us dread the seemingly gigantic nature of the job so much, the procrastination pushes us into next the year. I know people who move paper clip sorting to the front and ce...

A couple of weeks ago we posted a story about scams going out to distributors. Well, they continue. Here is something fresh from the inbox, only this time we decided to reach out to the number listed. After several rings it was picked up and answered "FMC Corporation" in a less than professional manner – not a good sign. We asked the person answering if he was Paul Graves to which he proceeded to confirm. Playing the part of a local distributor, we indicated that we provide freight with our orders so in order to properly quote, we required a shipping address. Things got quiet for a moment then we were told the products will be shipped to either Wisconsin, Australia or someplace garbled and unpronounceable. The person on the other end of the phone asked if we could email our questions to them rather than talk on the phone. I plan to reach out sometime in the near future, just as soon as I set up my own scam email address; something like W. Coyote Automation of Ariz...

We have all received some sort of scam message or been warned by friends "don't open that" in our personal lives.  I suppose it had to happen sometime. We should be both honored and terrified. Finally, after all these years, the scammers have managed to discover the distribution industry, too. Here’s the scoop, all of our websites identify with distributors. We publish a lot of information and our email addresses are all over the web. To the untrained eye and Google key word searches, we probably appear to be a distributor. A couple of months ago, we received a request for quotation from a major public university. Looking at it closely, I debated as to whether it was fair for me to forward it to a friend near the school. But I looked again. The email address for the university didn’t look exactly right – I mean how many big time public institutions have their purchasing department using a Yahoo email address. Still, maybe there was a reason, so I did a search...