We are pleased to announce the winner of the summer internship marketing challenge in renewable energy. Tyler Vock a senior at South Burlington High School will be joining New Breed Marketing for a two week paid internship.  Tyler chose to focus on Hydro Electric power in his submission. His winning submission was chosen based on the level of background research conducted in his chosen field, level of creativity and the thought and work put into the final presentation.

“This opportunity is what many kids at my age dream of and I have the opportunity and I will put everything I have into doing the best job that I can and learning all I can from New Breed,” Tyler said after hearing he was accepted. Tyler will be attending UVM in the fall majoring in Business and possibly a minor in environmental science.

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We had a number of entries this year and would like to thank all other students who sent in their entries.

Below is his winning entry: ???????? ??? ????? ??????????? ??????? ???? ????? ??????

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posted by M. Hall  5-18-09

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Does anyone remember the last bubble?

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With the advent of the Internet, the pundits all promised a new economy—that it would grow high into the sky. There is no doubt that the investments in technology, the Internet, social media and the rest have made our economy incredibly more productive, but we are now feeling the dark side. We have discovered that the economy is driven by human nature and not technology. Technology only facilitates what has always occurred—fear and greed. For a few years I have guessed that yes, we are in a new economy, which I call ‘the saw-tooth economy’.

Listening to Bloomberg Radio the other day, I had a chance to hear Alan Greenspan defending his guidance of the money supply through the last bubble. His final remarks were something like, We’ve always had bubbles, and despite regulation and our best intentions we will always have bubbles, because bubbles are a result of human nature and you can’t, in the end, control that. After thinking about what he’d said, I thought, He’s absolutely correct.

After all, what does ‘Web 2.0’, user generated content, immediate interaction and viralizaton of ideas (right or wrong) do? It accelerates the pace of human interaction. Information moves quickly, but so do human emotions. Fear of a loss of income, of a pandemic, of losing everything becomes a contagion, moving instantaneously through the aforementioned media outlets. The great depression rolled out over a number of years, in part, because the information (and resulting emotional reaction) moved relatively slowly.

Ignoring for the moment the irrationality (Greenspan’s words) of growth to the sky, what does accelerated communication give you? It gives you the acceleration of the historical business cycle process. Think of four to five years of steady growth punctuated by one to two years of ruthless recession. Everyone pares back on spending, inventories, and staff nearly simultaneously—hence, the Saw-Tooth Economy, a repeated zigzag of growth and loss. In my opinion, this is the first of what will be a series of very painful recessions.

The good news is that the U.S. still has the world’s most flexible and creative economy. If you believe in “creative destruction”, no economy does it better than the U.S. We were the first to recognize the problem (ok, we had a head start, for the most part we created it), to take aggressive action and will be one of the first economies to recover. Our allocation of capital will reorganize quickly and we’ll be on to the “next big thing” before you know it.

What does a company do to prepare for this? Our little company was designed specifically to withstand this type of shock. It’s been a challenge over the last year for sure, but there is no doubt that we have fared better than most.

At the moment, we’re growing, hiring and stable. I think it’s important to think in terms of scalability, not scalability in the traditional sense of a business model that is cheap to make larger, but in the sense of a business structure that can grow and shrink over time to respond to events.

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Who is in the most pain right now? Car companies for one. Their model is designed for a steady state production of a very large number of complex assemblies. This massive infrastructure is difficult to scale up and down quickly. Who is doing ok? Nike, Apple, aside from having strong product demand, they have decoupled their value from manufacturing, enabling them to scale appropriately to meet demand.

How does your sales and marketing scale? Is it bifurcated in a way that enables you to adjust your sites as conditions warrant?

posted by G.Dow  5-13-09

business · business scalability · market bubble · recession · saw-tooth economy · Surviving recession · web 2.0