Category: Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
In the business world, reason always trumps passion.
Doesn’t matter how much you love your new business idea or invention, so many factors must be carefully assessed before any financial plunge: The market, the competition, availability of capital and investor interest, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
But isn’t the final key to a successful startup also about passion?
How can the entrepreneur work 24/7, against seemingly insurmountable odds, with no paycheque for months on end … without passion?
How could successful entrepreneur Bob Holm have created the Strawman All-Natural Bison Farm and Mother’s Market (Edmonton’s first two-day-a-week indoor farmer’s market) without passion?
Holm may look like a pint-sized biker, but he’s a bright, self-educated, experienced businessman. Having foreseen the global crash of 2008, he converted his considerable St. Albert real estate holdings into cash during the halcyon business day ...
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It was the TELUS publicity machine at its finest.
Every heavy hitter in the city, from Mayor Don Iveson to Premier Rachel Notley, had been summoned. Huge video screens stretched across the Westin Ballroom.
When TELUS executive chairman Darren Entwistle, with his movie star looks and sonorous voice, made his entrance, the music reached rock band decibels. All that was missing was a cloud of dry ice.
Make no mistake. TELUS wanted to make last week’s announcement of its first big-city fibre-optic roll-out in Edmonton as big a deal as humanly possible.
Indeed, it is a big, big deal.
TELUS will be the first telecommunications company in North America to make fibre-optic available to every household in a major city, the first to wire an entire city to Internet speeds and connectivity.
“It’s not a question whether TELUS can afford the billion dollar investment to fully wire your city and then others,” says Canadian telecommunications analyst Mark Goldberg from Toronto. ...
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This is extraordinary.
A year ago, the global price of oil plummeted – from $100 (US) a barrel to $50 to $60, where it seems to have come to rest.
Ours is an energy-based economy. Every other time oil and/or natural gas prices fell, in 1983, 1998 and 2009, Metropolitan Edmonton suffered. Unemployment rates jumped, jobs dried up, housing prices fell, folks left town.
But it’s been a year now, and we’ve scarce felt this oil price meltdown!
Unemployment is up a bit, but just as many folks – 745,000 of us – are working as was the case during the last boom. New houses are being built and purchased at a near record clip.
Companies may not be hiring in droves, there’s not much in the way of lay-offs.
We’ve dodged some serious bullets. But how much longer?
Don’t kid yourselves. Edmonton remains a government and public sector town. Combined, education (42,000 jobs), health care/social services (82,500 jobs) and public administration (39,000 jobs) mak ...
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Just last week, Edmonton discovered a knowledge-based mega-industry in its own backyard, totally unrelated to the oil patch.
Gilead Sciences came out of hiding to stage a grand opening of a new free-standing laboratory beside its original quarters east of the Beverly Bridge and north of the Yellowhead.
Who knew that 300 highly-trained, well-paid scientists were out there, creating hundreds of millions of dollars of new wealth flowing back into Metro Edmonton's economy?
Gilead is a global pharmaceutical (drug) company based in California. Its HIV, Hepatitis C and some cancer treatment drugs have been “first to market” in the global drug market – so much so that its stock has jumped from $17.35 per share five years ago to $113.98 today. Gilead’s market cap value (share price times the number of shares) is a staggering $167.45 billion dollars.
Edmonton is riding Gilead’s success. The division here houses much of Gilead’s scientific expertise, not in dru ...
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Should Alberta business be terrified of this new all-orange New Democrat government?
Or thrilled?
Probably half and half.
One thing is for sure. The day after the New Democrats pulled off Canada’s biggest political upset in the last decade – taking 54 of Alberta’s 87 provincial ridings - the business community was absolutely and utterly stunned.
At every corporate executive and board meeting, at every Chamber of Commerce get-together, the same question was asked.
“Does anybody know any of these people?”
And the answer was 100% “nope, no idea who they are.”
It’s terrifying that the reins of power and control of a $42 billion budget is being passed over to a bunch of school teachers and social workers who have never run anything besides community leagues, a few school boards and ND constituency organizations.
It’s exhilarating that a huge breath of fresh air – a hurricane of fresh air – has blown out the accumulated cobweb ...
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Sorry Mr. Morton, but your story is full of holes.
Weeks before the May 5 provincial election, former minister of finance (under Ed Stelmach) and energy (under Alison Redford) Ted Morton released a report under the guise of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, where Morton works as an executive-in-residence.
In “The North West Sturgeon: Good Money After Bad?” the conservative academic contends that the $8 billion North West Sturgeon Upgrader now under construction north of Fort Saskatchewan could – “could” – become a white elephant, that future governments could end up losing “up to” $26 billion over the upgrader’s life.
The huge problem with Morton’s analysis is the other half of the “could”.
Because the upgrader, despite a run-up in its costs, could just as well end up making a $26 billion profit for the province depending on North American oil prices over the next 30 years.
Originally the government ...
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Forgive the disappointment.
I had hoped beyond hope that Jim Prentice would have the vision and determination to truly, with this budget, start weaning Alberta off its addiction to resource revenues.
I had thought we'd see a financial plan that wouldn't push things off to the dim, distant and unforeseeable future.
I had hoped that, despite the collapse in resource revenue from $8.7 billion to an expected $2.9 billion, Thursday's budget speech would be packed with steely resolve to stop spending resource revenue as it comes through the door.
I hoped Prentice would announce and then stick to a serious resource revenue savings plan that would, one day, enable the Heritage Trust Fund to absorb these wild gyrations in oil/gas revenues and then release, on an annual basis, a steady, predictable flow of reinvested oil/gas revenue to the provincial treasury.
I'm a simple guy when it comes to money management, not the sharpest knife in that particular drawer. But at the end of the day, despite all the t ...
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A lot of lawyers went to work early this morning," chuckled the veteran politician on hearing that four girders being installed at 2 a.m. Monday on the new 102 Avenue bridge across Groat Road had somehow simultaneously buckled.
The lawyers won't be dealing with this minor but intriguing catastrophe, at least not for a few months.
Yes, it is minor.
Nobody was hurt or injured.
The buckled girders, some 160 tonnes worth of combined weight, did not come crashing down into Groat Ravine.
Traffic will be disrupted on Groat Road and 102 Avenue. That's an annoying inconvenience, not a crisis.
The engineering/building community is intrigued. There's no obvious explanation. The experts consulted for this column dismiss the high winds theory. Alberta's bridge engineering/construction standards are among the world's best. The parties involved -- Supreme Steel, AECOM engineering and construction, Graham Construction - have excellent reputations. All are experienced bridge builders.
Nobody cuts corners. ...
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Spread out those Tarot cards, old gypsy queen, and tell us whither goest oil and gas.
Are we doomed to $50 or lower oil prices forever?
Will excess greenhouse gases caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas raise the world’s temperatures until all is parched desert and the oceans are metres higher due to polar ice melt?
To save the planet, as per American President Barack Obama’s line of thought, must the world end its reliance on fossil fuels - within our children’s lifetime?
If demand for oil and gas dwindles, will Alberta turn into a have-not province? Will 100,000 young people a year leave for greener pastures in (choke) Ontario and Quebec?
The gypsy queen, like everybody else, does not know the future.
But logic and clear thinking suggest Obama is likely wrong, that the odds are excellent for long-term prosperity in this province, based on environmentally sound oil and gas production, based on sound, long-term, provincial government planning and policy.
Her ...
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JASPER – After the Mountain Park Lodges (MPL) annual shareholders’ meeting, as has been their custom for some 47 years since the first MPL Jasper hotel opened its doors, three generations of MPL owners gathered for dinner last weekend at its new hotel, The Crimson on Jasper’s Connaught Drive.
In the mid-1960s, when the Marmot Basin ski resort consisted of little more than a few tow ropes, the Jasper National Park administration expanded the Jasper townsite footprint, putting four new hotel-suitable properties up for very long-term leases.
Six hiking/skiing/outdoor enthusiasts and Edmonton doctors – obstetricians Jack Day, Tim Cameron, Steve Parlee and Leo Gans, anaesthesiologist Dr. Martin Hagen and his wife Dr. Odette Hagen - decided to combine business with pleasure.
Finding accommodation on weekend Jasper ski trips was problematic. Why not build their own hotel? Seven ownership shares, at $14,000 each, were divided between the docs, the Millar family (Millar Western), the F ...
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