I was talking with Sally Massagee, a CPA in Hendersonville, NC, about ... all sorts of things. One of which was how to read financials. I have always looked at our P&L with an intuitive, squinty-eyed fuzziness-sort of the way art directors look at page layouts. I really never grasped the detail. But I was able to understand things like balance, trends, fixed cost, topline billings, and stuff like that. I thought the word for me was financially challenged. But Sally taught me otherwise. "Listen to the numbers" resonated with me. If you look at numbers and all you see…

Here's a fun tidbit. Our brand character is Johan Sebastian Bach. We love how he went about his business. He composed music, because it was his job. He went to work every day and composed the music that needed to be composed that day. Over the course of his career, he developed things like counterpoint and voice leading best practices that became the standard for composition students for 300+ years. And he developed a body of work that qualified him as one of the three greatest composers in the history of western music. And he made a living at it.…