Growthink is happy to announce our upcoming work with Safari Air, the world's first carbon-neutral luxury private airline. As a strategic advisor to the airline, Growthink will assist with business development, growth strategy and marketing initiatives.

Safari Air is an exciting fusion of luxury service and eco-friendly philosophy. Through an innovative pay per seat model, clients will have premium access to Honolulu, New York City, Puerto Vallarta, and Cabos San Lucas. Flights will possess everything from concierge service and MacBook laptops to an unlimited selection of Netflix movies. With a keen eye on luxury, Safari Air has still found a way to incorporate a green mindset and has made a unique commitment to operate without a carbon footprint.

Safari Air joins the growing roster of Growthink's engagements in the alternative energy and carbon mitigation space. We're glad to welcome Safari Air to our exciting list of clients!

By now, most entrepreneurs have heard the old saying, "Businesses don't fail -- they just run out of money." While that saying often holds the most salience for fledgling ventures, it can and does apply to most small businesses and growing companies as well. The steps you take to deftly allocate your company's capital today can help ensure that you'll still have that company six months, six years, or six decades down the line.

The New York Times and AllBusiness recently provided a list of tips for the best ways to manage cash flow. Most of the solutions that suggest frugality and thriftiness are somewhat intuitive -- limiting spending, avoiding wastefulness, keeping your inventory at practical levels and, for the austerity-minded, foregoing a salary. The most compelling suggestions on the list, however, are those rooted in strategic planning.

A strategic assessment of your business and some clever maneuvering can put your company in line to truly maximize each dollar. Crafting financial projections that anticipate your expenses and revenues for the next 12 months can help you determine if and when you'll need more capital. The formation of contingency plans that account for the worst case scenarios can prepare you for the unexpected.

One mistake many business owners make is purchasing equipment when it can be leased instead. While a cursory look at leasing vs. buying will reveal that leasing is usually more expensive over time, the leasing process prevents you from needing to shell out large sums of upfront capital, which then frees that capital to be allocated towards other important areas.

Lastly, effective cash flow management entails knowing what areas require patience, and which need to be expedited. When it comes to bringing on new employees, try to wait as long as you can. As permanent hires are a serious commitment of resources, it's recommended that you first strive to increase current employee productivity, investigate independent contractors, or even outsource some of the less essential aspects of your enterprise. On the other hand, when it comes to receiving customer payments, it behooves you to make these exchanges happen as soon as possible. Incentivize or reward early/timely payments, and don't shy away from penalizing late payments.

Earlier this month, Walt Disney Co. made an interesting decision regarding their theme park pricing strategy. Faced with slowing sales growth at home in the US, the company decided to raise the price of one-day admission at its largest resort by more than five percent.

While the five percent hike for children and 5.6 percent hike for adults at Walt Disney World only resulted in increases of approximately four dollars, the decision was a controversial one that lead to business pundits both supporting and chastizing the company.

When your company is faced with the effects of a recession, like slowing growth or decreasing sales, what is the real best course of action?

Like with most things in business: It depends.

A good rule of thumb however, is that unless your company is renowned for its low pricing, you're safe to raise your prices. That doesn't mean you can start charging $16 dollars more for your cheeseburgers, but it does mean you have some flexibility. Making an honest assessment of how pricing impacts your clientele will position you to make necessary adjustments.

For Disney, the assessment could have looked as simple as this:

The number of people who will take vacations this seasons will undoubtedly drop a bit when there is so much widespread emphasis on pinching pennies. That said, for those families that do take the initiative to hop a flight, rent a car, and/or put every one up in a hotel for a few nights, the difference between $71 and $75 dollars for admission will not be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

While price is an important factor in purchasing decisions, the vast majority of people don't buy based on price alone. They buy based on value. However, a larger percentage of consumers will buy based on price alone, in the absence of any other value indicators. The key is to effectively communicate your value.

When you start to feel the squeeze of a slowing quarter, don't be afraid to go against the initial instinct that many have to drop prices right away. Sometimes, boosting your price can be just the tool you need to get you over the hump and get back to making money.

What marketing strategies can you use to make your company stand out from the pack? In order to answer this question, many marketers push the envelope seeking to gain mindshare by humoring, shocking, or in some cases, offending their audience. Known as Controversial Marketing, these efforts do just that: they seek to spark awareness and dialogue through sensational, controversial content.

While often considered a guerilla tactic, best saved for fledgling companies in need of a “big bang,” controversial marketing and advertising initiatives have recently been adopted by many large companies such as Clearasil, Dove, GoDaddy, and Carl Jr’s.

But before Carl Jr’s made the decision to put a large cheeseburger in the hand of a scantily clad Paris Hilton, or Dove posted large billboards above New York City featuring un-retouched images of unclothed women without makeup, these companies had some strategizing to do. While a well-executed, controversy-laden campaign can be just what’s needed to push brand awareness or sales through the roof, the mantra “no publicity is bad publicity” is not always the case, and missteps can send marketing teams back to the drawing board, and that’s only after they’ve groveled for public forgiveness.

Before you decide to put your company in the line of fire with a controversial advertising or marketing strategy, there are a handful of things you need to carefully consider. First off, you must have a crystal clear understanding of who your customers are. If you can design a campaign that speaks directly to them in an honest and direct fashion, you are on the right track. Understanding their wants, needs, fears, and desires will help you to make decisions that don’t accidentally alienate any part of your target market. For instance, in the case of those racy Carl Jr’s ads, the company had an unwavering desire to address the 18-35 year old single male. They didn’t care if they alienated or offended the family market that companies like Wendy’s or McDonalds so eagerly pursue.

Secondly, you must always consider what the backlash might be. Not that this should deter your efforts, but upon creating a campaign, step back and ask the questions: “How many customers might we lose because of this?” This is the time for expert risk assessment. If you determine that you’ve positioned yourself to gain many more than you’ll upset, then its okay to go full steam ahead. No matter what, you must make sure you’re business is prepared to navigate whatever the repercussions may be.

The last and most important tenant of controversial marketing is to know when to pull the plug and apologize. There are times when companies overstep their boundaries, offending the good taste of those they didn’t mean to offend. Efficiently issuing genuine apologies can be the first step in repairing any bruised customer relationships.

Henry Ford once commented that had he asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.”  As Ford knew well, market research can have many pitfalls.

However, market research is an integral part of any business. From the conceptualization stage of a new venture, to a vast expansion effort by a Fortune 500 company, a business is always better off for adhering to the old adage “know thy customer and thy market.” For more mature companies, such research most often plays a role in the process of innovation. Gauging market sentiments helps to identify opportunities to service new customers, better serve existing ones, or revise current business strategies.

So often, though, we see huge corporations spend small fortunes on market research, only to launch new products that fail with epic proportions (remember Crystal Pepsi?). How can it be that after going through highly standardized practices for these investigations that companies come back so far from the mark?

One school of thought suggests that it is not the tools of market research, but rather their misuse, that can send a company down the wrong track. Talking to the wrong customers and asking the wrong questions can be exacerbated by having the wrong members of your team interpret the data. On top of that, there are times where even when presented with the proper research, improper decisions are made. As any or all of these factors can corrupt your research efforts, the process begins to look more and more daunting, with few reassurances that the right decisions and strategies will appear.

In order to combat the problems that result from faulty execution of market research, it is important to take a step back and examine what the goals are of traditional market research. The first, most common experience companies have with market research is typically during their initial business planning efforts. While sometimes for these young firms market research is involved with product or business conceptualization, oftentimes it is more of an after-thought, serving the purposes of a pre-existing business model. That means that many companies can become accustomed to the inappropriate practice of using market research as a justification for what they already intended to do, rather than a tool which can guide their foundational efforts. Once a company develops this bad habit of using market research to show them what they want to see, they are forever trapped in a loop of misusing market research tools, and going about the process the wrong way.

To properly execute on market research, the most important thing you can do is to open your ears. First, this means not engaging your most demanding customers in the process. Yes, you want to do your best to keep this category of client satisfied, but true innovation will result from learning more about your worst customers, or the one’s that don’t exist yet. Looking outside of the box (or in this case, past the evangelist pool) will help you to see the forest for the trees. Next, with Henry Ford's adage in mind, avoid asking questions that directly ask what your existing customers want. This might seem counter-intuitive at times.  However, focusing on creative solutions to a market need will help anchor your research, and the conclusions you will pursue.