Morning Glory < 30 Seconds
January 8, 2021
By Cliff Oxford
Damage Control 101. Do we douse Trump’s dumpster fire the whole world is watching, or throw another log on it with “order of highest emergency,” impeachment, or 25th Amendment?
Give Trump a 12-day paid golf pass and hide all the butcher knives and nuclear codes. Great news President Trump—you have not used up all your vacation time. Use it or lose it. He'll buy that.
Get Jim Mattis on the phone to Merkel and Macron¹—we are having some “difficulty” with a short-timer, soon-to-be ex-employee. Ty remembers that line when he told me about a former employee of mine who called and left a message impersonating the police. Difficulty is a great word.
Unhinged losers. Dial the heat down, not up, and every arsonist soon discovers nothin’ is colder than ashes after the fire is gone.
Here is the deal—The Rose Bowl, Charles Schwab, and Elon Musk left for Texas but the virus didn’t. Right now LA is pandemic epicenter with hospitals sending out emails—don’t bring deceased patients to be resuscitated. There’s a new exponential transmission variant, B.1.1.7, in town, and another cousin just reported first case in South Africa.
Travis Tritt's song—The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’. Neither are these numbers to thread the needle. The new variant with exponential transmission capability makes up 1% of all cases yesterday. By March it will exceed 50% of all cases. 9x more deaths and hospitalizations when you run sheer case-growth numbers on a spreadsheet.
President Biden will shut it down with a sales pitch—four weeks to lower the surge, vaccinations catch up, and we can get back to normal. More money from D.C. is coming so what’s the problem?
Side Deal. Old habits—Potentially same problem as my childhood friend Eugene Kicklighter who called this week with a real “order of highest emergency” and he put it well: “They ain’t buyin’ no more.”
He was talking about his bundled wood business, which shoppers pick up at grocery stores like Kroger, where he has a large account. He understood over last five years a drop in sales with climate change, but he explained customers were not buying even in “cold snaps.”²
Immediately, I got in my car and drove three hours to Gateway Restaurant for a strategy meeting. Long story short—after 40 glasses of iced tea, Eugene decided his was selling love, not firewood. January kick-off agenda—old and new customer buying habits. Lifesavers.
U-Haul just ranked California dead last in its annual inflow/outflow survey—and vicious rumors flying around Disney going to relocate near Ft. Myers, Fla., and will this knock out capital of show business, Hollywood. Unlikely. Triangle of Malibu, Burbank, and Culver City.
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IPO Glow—Hipcamp, "Airbnb of the Outdoors" that offers vacationers rural places to stay or pitch a tent, raised $57M to value it at more than $300M. Hope for Okefenokee Swamp Park, and I got some land to sell. IPO by June.
Entries/Exits—Best New Trend. Women CFOs with enterprise authority—Meghan Frank at Lululemon, Carrie Wheeler at Opendoor, and huge one is Ruth Porat at Google with her right hand, Erika Gruppo, who official title is Chief Juggler. Sales teams need to absorb.
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