Big Techs

Most of the best clients a DFW business lands came from someone telling someone else. No ad spend involved.

Here's the part people skip. Did you ever go back and thank the person who sent them?

This is the part that surprised us most this week.

If you have fewer than 100 employees, the Texas Workforce Commission runs a program called Skills for Small Business. It pays up to $1,800 of training per new employee and up to $900 per existing one, over twelve months. The training runs through a local community or technical college and you pick the courses.

There's a detail worth catching: someone you hired up to twelve months before TWC receives your application still counts as new. So a person you take on in October could still be eligible next summer.

We built a free calculator that works out roughly how much of next year's training bill the state would cover. Four questions, one number: https://www.bigtechs.net/assets/texas-training-grant-calculator.html

Full edition here: https://www.bigtechs.net/editions/031

Most businesses we talk to are paying for at least one thing nobody has opened in a year. Usually a tool somebody signed up for to solve a problem that has since gone away.

When did you last read your own card statement line by line?

There's usually one client paying a rate you set three years ago and have been quietly avoiding revisiting.

You know which one. So do they, probably.

What's actually stopping the conversation?

Be honest about Saturday. Are you not checking email, or are you checking it and just not replying?

Those are two very different habits, and only one of them is actually a break.

There's a live example on the Texas list right now and it's close to home.

SP+ filed for 313 people at DFW Airport, separating September 30. More than 100 are shuttle bus drivers. Ninety are in express parking. Eighty-seven work Terminal Link.

None of it was a downturn. SP+ lost the airport parking contract back in June and the work went with it.

We want to be careful how that gets read. This isn't a bargain bin, it's 313 experienced people in good standing who did nothing wrong and who are going to land somewhere. Plenty of them would rather that somewhere was a 40-person business in Arlington.

The full story is in this week's edition: https://www.bigtechs.net/editions/031

Half the deals in this metro get sorted out in a coffee shop rather than a conference room. Something about the chairs being worse makes everyone get to the point faster.

Which DFW coffee shop is your unofficial second office?

Every recurring meeting was useful once. That's how it got on the calendar in the first place.

The problem is nothing ever takes one off. Which of yours has outlived the reason it started?

The businesses that get paid on time usually don't have better clients. They just send the invoice the same week the work finished.

When do your invoices actually go out?

Most owners assume a layoff is private news you hear about afterwards. It hasn't worked that way since 1988.

The federal WARN Act covers employers with 100 or more staff. Before a mass layoff or a site closure, they owe 60 calendar days of written notice, and it goes to three places on the same day: the workers, the state, and the local chief elected official.

That third copy is the reason any of it is public. Texas receives it and posts it.

So the information exists, it's free, and it shows up two months early. The only missing piece is somebody reading it. This week's edition shows you how: https://www.bigtechs.net/editions/031