Whether you’ve been to your destination or not, business trips are always exciting because you have the unique opportunity to see a new place through fresh eyes. 

Even if you’ve been there before, there’s always more to explore — and you might find that more opportunities are available to you because you’re representing your company.

5 Things to Remember on a Business Trip

It’s normal to be excited about your first business trip. After all, your expenses are paid for by your company — for the most part, at least. Just keep in mind these crucial tips when you’re traveling for business for the first time.

1. Get Enough Sleep

Adults need roughly eight hours of sleep to function well the next day. Booking a red-eye flight or staying out too late to enjoy the sights can get you into trouble before a meeting. You need to attend your meetings while awake and alert. Staying out all night to explore the city can wait until after the business part of your trip is done.

2. Keep Your Receipts

In case your company decides to reimburse you for what you spend while you’re on a business trip, having the receipts can be handy to keep track of your expenses and offer proof if asked in the future. You should also educate yourself on how much your company allots for meals, travel and lodging so that you can budget accordingly without spending too much of your own money.

3. Take Safety Precautions

Protecting yourself is vital, especially when you’re in an unfamiliar area. It’s a good idea to share information like your flight and meeting details with trusted friends and family members back home so they know where you are and when they can check on you. Knowing the local laws can also help you protect yourself, as can making yourself seem like a resident instead of a tourist. Also, leave your expensive items at home, just in case.

4. Learn Language Skills

Suppose you’re traveling somewhere abroad where a language you don’t know is common. In that case, you should acquire a baseline knowledge of that language before you go. You can’t expect everyone to know your language, especially if they aren’t the people you’ll be dealing with on the business end of your trip. Learn enough of the language to recognize and speak common phrases. You never know when or who you’ll need to ask for directions or find a bathroom.

5. Have Fun

It’s okay to pencil in some time to explore new areas. Once you have everything business-related figured out, take a day or a few hours to do something you know you’ll enjoy and explore the city. Think of it as a treat for doing so well on your first business trip!

5 Things to Avoid on a Business Trip

Hoping for the best is excellent, but you should also be prepared for the worst. Sometimes, things just happen, and even though a little setback here and there may be inevitable, being ready for preventable ones can make a world of difference.

1. Looking Messy

On your trip, you want to look prepared and presentable at all times. Making a good first impression is vital. Minor changes, like tailoring your clothes to fit correctly, can go a long way in improving your appearance and impressing other people.

2. Waiting to Book

Don’t wait to book flights and hotels until the last minute. You want to ensure that everything you have planned can play out just as you imagined it. Having nowhere to stay or missing a flight can drastically alter your trip and leave a lasting bad impression on your responsibility level.

3. Coming in Unprepared

Look up addresses before you leave. Learn the names of the people you’ll be meeting, if applicable. Arm yourself with knowledge of your company and what you can do for potential customers and clients. Preparing a pitch can help you feel more confident about your abilities and leave a good impression on potential clients. 

4. Forgetting to Register for Rewards

If you sign up with an airline, car company or hotel as you use their services, you can start earning points toward other trips. You’re missing out on free and valuable points that you can redeem for later trips if you don’t take advantage of these programs. Using extra points for something like a future room upgrade or complimentary breakfast would be nice, especially if you’ll be traveling a lot for work from here on out!

5. Being Negative

While plenty of things could go wrong on a business trip, you may just find that you have the time of your life in a new area. Explore all there is to offer, and keep the work-life balance going strong. Keep your emotions in check, and remember that there’s always a chance you’ll have an even better time next trip.

When in Doubt, Plan It Out

The most significant takeaway you can know about traveling for business is that you should always be prepared. Plan out your routes in advance and write down your meeting times until they’re seared into your brain. 

Then, once all the work is out of the way, you can start planning for leisure activities and destinations you’d like to experience on your trip. Safe travels, and have fun!

The Game of Life-the box top I remember.

Pink and blue pegs in a tiny plastic car. A pathway that took you to college and a job. A spinner that made a great, whirring, sound but needed it frequently oiling. Stock and insurance certificates. And $100,000 bills with Art Linkletter’s picture on it. It was all in The Game of Life.

I grew up in the mid-’60s playing Life with my family. It was faster-paced than Monopoly, less cerebral than Scrabble or Chess, and harder to cheat at than Go to the Head of the Class (yes, I memorized all the questions). And it was fun, twirling the spinner and hoping for the career with the highest salary. You could wind up a millionaire, or you could wind up in the poorhouse.

By the time we were raising our kids, Life had fallen well down the list of treats on family game night, far below our favorite, Sorry. Still, our first thought for the theme at Laury’s Bat Mitzvah was to base the celebration on Life. Only when the party designer couldn’t grasp the concept did we switch to an Animal Kingdom idea.

This morning I learned that Reuben Klamer, the man who invented The Game of Life, passed away on September 14th. He was 99 years old–almost making it to that ultimate life marker of a century.

It feels like another little bit of my childhood is seeping away. As the sole survivor of my first nuclear family, I have no one to share that time of my life with. There is no one who remembers the nightly dinner table (always starting with Campbell’s Soup, always including dreadful canned vegetables); who remembers the Sunday night’s watching What’s My Line (me peaking around my bedroom door into the living room); who remembers the weekly walk down Morse Avenue to Ashkenaz for kreplach soup, a toasted bagel, and a Coke.

So you see Mr. Klamer, the end of your days has made me nostalgic and a bit sad. I don’t know how you lived your life, but I know your Life was part of a wonderful time in mine. Wherever you are now, your spinning wheel will never stop whirring for me.

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Restaurant management can be just like any other kind of management: tricky yet rewarding. Managing other people and a whole building can cause crazy amounts of stress, so it’s essential to know what you’re doing and become an authority on all things having to do with your business.

Managing a restaurant is more than just overseeing waitstaff and cooks. It involves analyzing your restaurant at its core and making the right decisions for yourself, your business, and the people who work there. With so many factors in play, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. While you can never feel fully prepared before you start, you can take a few measures to ensure that your management accomplishes what you need it to.

5 Crucial Parts of Managing a Restaurant

When managing a restaurant, you have to juggle multiple responsibilities and communicate with around a dozen people at once. If you’re new to the management life, you should learn a few key aspects that fit seamlessly into any managerial style that you should emulate.

1. Set Goals and Monitor Progress

When you set goals for your business, make sure they’re SMART goals. These goals are attainable and realistic, so you can feel a sense of accomplishment once you achieve them, no matter how small they may be. Make sure your goals are realistic for the time you’ve allotted to complete them, else you may find your restaurant falling a bit short.

Next, you’ll need to find ways to measure if you’re stepping closer toward your goals. For example, analyzing what your break-even point is can be essential to know when an item on your menu will ultimately become profitable, helping you plan future specials.

2. Establish a Consistent Foundation

You should always be consistent in your rules and your treatment of others. Favoring any one person can reflect negatively on you and damage others’ self-confidence and respect toward you. You set an example for your entire restaurant. How can you expect your employees to outperform you?

One way to set an excellent example for everyone you work with is to ensure you always present your best self. Ironing a shirt can make a big difference in your presentation and change your style from lax to professional in just a couple of minutes. Minor changes to your appearance can set you apart as an authority figure who takes your business seriously. 

3. Guide Your Employees

You are responsible for how well your employees perform. With the proper guidance, they’ll better understand their jobs and work harder if they respect and love the workplace they’re a part of. Reward your employees for jobs well done and remind them often how much you appreciate them.

Also, you should encourage your employees to be open with you about how they feel. Your employees are a way for you to see what’s happening on every rung of the ladder that you may not be able to see from your position. You should demonstrate leadership and initiative to set an excellent example for everyone who works there.

4. Listen to Your Customers

Your Customers offer you a window into your service. No one on the inside of the restaurant can provide you with that insight. Also, don’t underestimate the power of reviews and word of mouth. Potential customers use reviews to gauge whether a restaurant is worth their time and money. Having poor reviews could negatively impact your business, so you should consider making your customers’ experience as positive as possible.

Similarly, good reviews will have a positive impact on your business. Suppose potential customers see that other patrons have enjoyed the food, service and atmosphere. In that case, they may be more likely to purchase from you or visit your restaurant.

5. Strive for Excellence

Don’t settle for a procedure or routine just because it works. Look for something that can improve over time, and always aim to do your best. Set new goals continuously. Once you’ve found a flow that works for you, you can challenge yourself and your employees to do better and accomplish more.

Use Experience to Become a Better Manager

It’s tough to determine the most essential part of being a manager because so much of it changes by the day. You have to mold yourself to fit multiple roles and ensure that you’re supporting and encouraging your team to the best of your ability. Once you’ve done all you can and have come up with procedures that ensure your restaurant is operating at peak performance, you can take a step back and admire all you’ve accomplished alongside your employees.

We who make the rules also have the might
Therefore our way is right
In this matter you have no say
It’s going to be our way
We’ve had enough of your rejection
Submit already and take the injection
What is it that you don’t trust
Why can’t you be like the rest of us
We know what’s best
And we will worry less
All you have to do is say yes
And for a while longer, you will remain
See! That didn’t’ cause pain
Now we’re all the same.

The Ohio Valley Conference has played football since 1948.

Late last week, the Ohio Valley Conference lost its third member in the past eight months leading to speculation of where the league turns to next.

The news affects Eastern Illinois University, which has played football in the OVC since 1996.

Austin Peay State University announced last Friday it is leaving the Ohio Valley for the ASUN Conference effective July 1, becoming the new league’s 13th full member.

“I know I haven’t been in this conference long, but these (other OVC members’) coaches and this place are first class,” first-year Austin Peay head coach Scotty Walden said during Tuesday’s OVC weekly media address. “I know that conference re-alignment, all this stuff is hard and crazy . . .

“From our university and athletics program, we just felt like we had to do what we had to do to take a step for us. And that’s it . . . I just want to say how proud I am to be a part of this conference.”

Walden, who at age 31 is the youngest head coach at the Division I level, led the Governors to a 4-2 record in the spring OVC schedule.

Austin Peay will join Eastern Kentucky and Jacksonville State – both of which left the OVC in January – in the ASUN. According to multiple media outlets, the OVC sued both schools in August, contending each school didn’t pay a $1 million exit fee.

The defections of Eastern Kentucky and Jacksonville State left the OVC and its members scrambling to fill schedules.

“We have some teams that are playing some conference teams twice, one is a conference game and one is not,” Tennessee Tech head coach Dwayne Alexander said. “That’s unfortunate. I’ll just call it out, I do. It’s a bad deal, but it is what it is. Everybody is dealing with it.”

The addition of Austin Peay will give the ASUN’s six football-playing members, allowing the conference to qualify for an automatic berth to the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs. The ASUN now will be the 15th Division I conference sponsoring football with 20 total sports sponsored by the league.

Where does this leave the OVC?

Austin Peay’s departure will leave the OVC with only six members playing football: EIU, Murray State, Southeast Missouri State, Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech and UT-Martin.

OVC commissioner Beth DeBauche issued a statement following the news.

“We look forward to adding schools who, like the members of the OVC, are committed to our principles and our goals,” DeBauche said. “We invite other colleges who are seeking this type of conference experience, for the betterment of their institutions, to contact us. The OVC welcomes those conversations.”

While thhe OVC likely does not wish to rush into a poor expansion decision, the league will certainly have to act whether it means adding one school or multiple schools.

While a university such as Indiana State or Southern Illinois might make sense geographically for Eastern Illinois, those programs are not likely to leave the Missouri Valley. Western Illinois, which competes in the MVFC for football and the Summit League for its other sports, could certainly be a candidate.

“Things are shuffling and reshuffling and it’s happening very fast, right now everything is fluid,” Western Illinois Director of Athletics Danielle Surprenant told Scott Holland of The McDonough County Voice last winter. “We’re seeing things happening with conference realignment and we’re all watching the impact it is having on college sports as a whole, especially since our program has FCS football.”

Liberals – and probably Conservatives, too – were relieved that Saturday’s scheduled Justice for J6 mob at the Capitol did not materialize in any significant way.

Some took the paltry crowd, estimated at less than 500 people, as a sign of our return to common sense or civility or of Donnie Trump’s waning influence, none of which I believe to be true.

Rachel Maddow asked, Where were all the people?

While we may not know where they were, speculation can be a dangerous past time.

We should not let the feeble turnout of a protest to support violent rioters and insurrectionists lull us into a sense of complacency.

Whether on purpose or serendipitously, event organizer, Matt Braynard, may have accomplished more than whatever it was he had planned.

There were four arrests made on Saturday, which produced one knife and a couple of guns. Kind of a nothing burger in violence-addicted America.

Braynard wasn’t expecting a big crowd, he only got a permit for 700 people. There were almost that many law enforcement officers and media folks.

The very idea, though, of a rally to support miscreants arrested for a violent attempt to overthrow the election process should set off ear splitting alarms.

Yet, as more Republicans jump on the nothing-to-see train, our own outrage seems to be waning.

It’s not surprising that many of us woke up Sunday morning with a sense of relief. Granted, Joel Osteen was still batting his eyes at the camera, but at least there was no Jan 6 redux.

Our view of a small, peaceful group on September 18 juxtaposed with the fading images of January 6 challenges our memories. Maybe it was just a regular visitors day after all. Maybe we over-reacted.

No, we didn’t. If anything, we under-reacted.

The most dangerous perception of all is that there might be some validity to the stated goal of Saturday’s rally. Maybe the shaman guy really is a political prisoner.

He isn’t, but that’s the whole point. They want us to question our own beliefs and by extension, reality. That’s what they do.

As more and more revelations come to light about the final, chaotic days of the Trump presidency and his desperate attempts to cling to power, we are venturing farther and farther from our span of attention.

FIRE! MAYDAY! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

Donnie Trump revved up his troops for months and incited a violent riot on January 6, 2021. We have thousands of contemporaneous pictures and videos offering irrefutable evidence.

Insurrectionists roamed the halls of the Capitol looking to do bodily harm to Vice President Mike Pence and elected officials on their enemies list.

Law enforcement officers were NOT hugged and kissed; 140 of them were injured, some disabled, one died.

Many testified before Congress that they were fighting for their very lives.

Make no mistake. A violent riot/insurrection/mob action took place on January 6 and many of those arrested said they were following Donnie’s orders.

The Big Lie is growing as recounts are now underway and requested in counties where Donnie won (bigly). It’s another in a barrage of lies and there must be pushback.

Donnie LOST. There was NO WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD.

Donnie’s followers think they’re patriots because they don’t know what it means to be one. They think that blind loyalty to one (broken, corrupt) man is patriotic. They have no allegiance to America or to American democracy.

They are a cult, pure and simple.

The real question, Rachel Maddow is What can expect now from Donnie’s death cult?

The only guidance I can offer is, Crazy people do crazy things.

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I love it when cities recruit artists to enrich their downtown area. Janesville, a city in southern Wisconsin, is doing just that. Janesville recently held its annual Art Infusion event, which involves mural painting, a chalk art competition, and live music. This year the call for mural artists opened up to the U.S. with artists invited from Chicago, Miami, and Chattanooga.

Get ready for a photo walk

As soon as I arrived at the transit center, my head was on a swivel. There is color in every direction, and I’m not talking about the leaves. This small-scale urban area is becoming Instagrammable, and it’s delightful. I recommend getting around on foot, as there is more than the new murals to spark interest.

The artists and their work

Chicago artist Ruben Aguirre – 408 South Main Street

“Dancing on the Stars”

Chicago artist CJ Hungerman – 20 South Main Street (located behind the building)

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Chattanooga artist Nathan Brown – 14 South Jackson Street

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Miami artist Ivan Roque – 31 West Milwaukee Street (these two images are a snippet of the large-scale mural)

“The River of Life”

Madison artist Emily Balsley – 14 South River Street. I have to include a plug about Emily’s new book because it’s so exciting. “Every Cake has a Story” by Christina Tosi and illustrated by Emily. Congrats, you two!

“My Pet Park”

Milwaukee artist David Mark Zimmerman – 200 South River Street

“Get Lost AKA The Adventure”

A perfect way to end the day

Whenever I’m in town, I stop at Rock County Brewing Company. They offer great beer with a nice patio. During this visit, I chose two newly tapped beers. I started with a Barrel-Aged Scottish Export, aged for six months in a Whiskey Acres Distilling Co. Rye barrel. This ale is smooth with notes of caramel, malt, and rye. Next up was a Guava Milkshake IPA brewed with lactose and vanilla. I’m a fan of guava in beer, at least this one! I left feeling content.

Scottish export vs. Guava Milkshake IPA

Downtown Janesville has a lot to offer, including historic architecture, a riverwalk, cute shops, and restaurants. I look forward to heading back to check out a new eatery that is opening soon. I think Sandwich Bar is going to be worthy of a trip in itself.

Part 1 of our two–part Jesse Sullivan, GOP GOV Primary candidate interview, airs on cable in Chicago tonight at 9 pm on Ch 21 (CAN TV). Interview topics listed below.

You can also watch the show 24/7 by clicking here.

The show repeats in Chicago on:

-Saturday, 9 am, Cable Ch 21

-Sunday, 8:30 am, Cable Ch 19 and

-in Rockford this Thursday, 8:30 pm on Cable Ch 17 and in areas surrounding Rockford (see the end of this post, below, for a list of those areas) and

-around the State this week on the Illinois Channel (Check your local listing)

-The show will also air next week in the Chicago metro N & NW suburbs, Aurora and Highland Park (See details here later this week)  

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Part 1 Interview topics for the show featuring Gov Candidate Sullivan include:

Who Sullivan is at his coreFixing the Illinois $420 billion pension shortfallAddressing what most view as excessive IL public sector salaries& pensionsIL’s way above average K-12 education spending. Significant public school performance failures, especially when serving low income minorities and whitesAlternative ways to educate IL’s childrenIllinois’ decade, or longer, significant individual and business outmigration    

GOP Gov Candidate Jesse Sullivan also discusses his approach to achieving reforms of State Government in a heavily, Democrat dominated state, where the Democratic Party holds power and generally opposes most if not all reforms candidate Sullivan is likely to favor.

Part 2 of the Gov Candidate Jesse Sullivan interview airs next week in Chicago and Rockford at the same times and on the same channels as Part 1 is airing this week, as indicated above.

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Surrounding areas reached by Public Affairs’ Comcast Rockford coverage include:  

Loves Park

Machesney Park

New Milford

Stillman Valley

Cherry Valley

Byron

Oregon

Mt. Morris

Polo

Forreston

Ashton

Franklin Grove

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