**Some ideas change the world. **Others make you stop, blink twice, and ask how nobody tackled the presenter on the way to the whiteboard.
This week, we found a few that might just belong in the second category. Cast your vote at the end of this newsletter for Bad Business Idea of the Week.
Death by
**Administrative Confetti****The Cold War Ended.**The Shipyard Never Really Did.Boomers, Brace Yourselves:
AI Might Be Making Entrepreneurship the Safer BetIs
TikTok ShopJust QVC With Better Skin?Borrowing Is Easy.
**BorrowingWellIs the Trick.****And From Around the Web:**Glowing Plants, Endless Shrimp, and a Talking Pasta Lid.Your Bad Business Idea of the Week poll awaits.
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*by *
Most small businesses are not getting wrecked by one big disaster. **They’re getting pecked to death by 47 tiny tasks before lunch. **
My latest piece gets into the real cost of all the little nonsense nobody budgets for: the rewrites, follow-ups, file hunts, calendar shuffling, and brain-breaking context switching that make a full day feel productive while somehow producing… very little.
And that is where a lot of time disappears. In scraps, drips, and constant low-grade interruption. And when that becomes normal, “busy” starts looking a lot like progress, even when it really isn’t.
Groton, Connecticut, suffered after Cold War military spending dried up 30 years ago. Now it is being asked to deliver again.
Thirty-five years ago, the end of the Cold War drained this hardscrabble coastal manufacturing town of its chief purpose: building America’s submarines. Now the Navy needs the shipyard along the Thames River to rev its engines back into high gear.
That leaves Groton with a high-stakes challenge: how do you resurrect a bygone era of military muscle in a far-flung seaside town that is short on workers, homes, and transit? As the U.S. races to keep up with China’s advances in maritime technology, the Defense Department is focused on upgrading its nuclear-submarine fleet. That puts Groton-based General Dynamics Electric Boat, along with a web of local suppliers, right in the middle of the job. After a string of delays, the Navy recently added $16 billion in funding for Electric Boat to keep new submarines moving, making clear that speed now matters a lot.
Electric Boat needs a workforce to match that demand. In a February memo, employees were told the company wanted to hire 8,000 workers by year’s end across Connecticut and its Quonset Point, Rhode Island plant. The company says it is confident it can find them. It has** received tens of thousands of applications** over the past three years, and one recent hiring event drew a line around the building.
Groton’s fortunes have always been tied to the country’s maritime ambitions. Electric Boat hired thousands during the Cold War. Then the Berlin Wall fell, Navy money thinned out, budget cuts landed, and the tavern emptied. Local casinos stepped in, and Connecticut’s manufacturing backbone slowly bent toward a service economy.
Electric Boat has grown steadily over the past decade after the government approved plans in 2010 to build two nuclear-powered submarines a year. **But the company fell behind during the pandemic **and is now playing catch-up while Washington waits impatiently. The hope is that Groton can scale up fast enough and that veteran shipyard workers have enough time to train a ballooning crew of newcomers before they retire. As is often the case, it takes a village!
**The Takeaway: **The government can order more submarines in a hurry. Building the town, workforce, and support system behind them is the slower part.
For decades, college grads were taught that corporate jobs were safe and entrepreneurship was risky. AI may be flipping that logic on its head.
As AI keeps getting better, the future of white-collar work looks a lot less settled than it used to. **That makes the old climb-the-ladder, work-the-9-to-5 path feel a little less bulletproof. **At the same time, AI tools are making it easier than ever to start a business from scratch.
Shopify is one example. Since 2018, the number of merchants making their first sale on the platform has increased 7X. First, platforms like Shopify helped move sellers from offline to online. Then they bundled payments, logistics, and software into one operating system. Now AI is pushing those barriers even lower.
That matters because running a business is still messy. Inventory, customer acquisition, cash flow, operations. Most first-time founders get punched around by the learning curve. Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick, is built into that system and trained on store-level knowledge, which means it can surface information, answer questions, and help founders make decisions faster. In Shopify’s telling, it starts to look less like software and more like an AI-powered co-founder.
And the results are hard to ignore. On average, merchants launching their second business on Shopify generate more than twice the sales per shop compared to first-timers. Usually, founders earn that bump the hard way.** AI tools may now be helping compress the trial-and-error phase.**
The **old story **was that entrepreneurship was the risky path. The new story might be that building your own thing is starting to look a lot less reckless than trusting some corporate org chart to love you back.
**The Takeaway: **If AI keeps stripping away the hardest early parts of building a business, entrepreneurship starts looking less like a gamble and more like a career hedge.
➡️ Will the “safe” job end up being the part with the shakier floor? Click through to find out.
Last week, when news broke that QVC Group filed for bankruptcy protection while trying to shed $5 billion in debt, it may have been the first time you’d thought about televised home shopping in a while. The company, which operates both QVC and HSN, now feels like a relic from that very recent past, back when Americans did not carry a portal to infinite stuff in their pocket all day.
Now most U.S. households have Amazon Prime, endless recommendations, and** more product reviews than any sane person could read. **Which raises the obvious question: who still wants to buy from someone on TV breathlessly pitching a rainbow rack of sporty separates?
QVC has struggled for years, with shrinking viewership, brutal e-commerce competition, and the minor inconvenience of trying to make a legacy home-shopping brand feel young again. So no, it is not exactly a victim of its own success.
What it might be, though, is a victim of its own foresight.
Long before affiliate links, influencers, and livestreamers turned half the internet into commission-based salespeople, home-shopping TV had already cracked the code:** a good pitch person can sell almost anything to bored people sitting at home.** The actual products were almost beside the point. Kitchen gadgets, makeup, business-casual blouses, whatever. The real product was the performance.
And that is the funny part. QVC may be in financial trouble, but we are all now living inside the consumer universe it helped build.
People had been trying to scale the in-home sales pitch since mass media first became a thing. But television really put the machine on steroids. Home shopping broke out nationally in 1985 with what became the Home Shopping Network. QVC followed a year later. Live selling and call-in ordering made viewers feel like they had a relationship with the hosts, like shopping was not shopping but some kind of cozy little treasure hunt.
Different medium. Same old game. Because whether it comes through your television, your phone, or some chirpy girl linking moisturizer on TikTok, it is still snake oil with better lighting.
The Takeway: The format changed, the screen got smaller, and the hosts got younger, but the business model never really left.
with Matthew R. Meehan
Businesses are still borrowing, which tells you two things: the economy is not dead, and business owners still have things to build, fix, cover, and chase.
** Reuters reported this week that commercial lending jumped** at several major U.S. banks, with JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo all posting strong growth in business loans. So despite all the slowdown talk, companies are still raising their hands for capital.
But more borrowing does not automatically mean more stability. Sometimes it means opportunity. Sometimes it means pressure. Usually, it means somebody needs capital now and doesn’t have time to make a dumb decision.
And that’s the part that too many owners miss. Getting approved is not the win. * Getting the right structure is. *Term, payment, use of funds, timing, flexibility. All of it.
👉 If you’re weighing funding options right now, ** book a call with the Credit Banc team here **and make sure the structure fits before the pressure starts.
Some weeks, the news gives you innovation.
Some weeks, it gives you a meeting that should have ended sooner.This week, it gave us three contenders for Bad Business Idea of the Week.
Photosynthesis, But Make It Neon:A Chinese biotech startup has createdglow-in-the-dark flowersby splicing genes from fireflies and bioluminescent mushrooms into plants.The dream is electricity-free city lighting. The current reality is more “enchanted garden center” than “urban planning breakthrough,” but*points for commitment to the bit.Bankruptcy, With Cocktail Sauce:Red Lobster is bringing backEndless Shrimp, the same promotion it previously saidhelped drag the company into bankruptcy.*This time there are more restrictions, which is corporate for:we would like to make the same mistake, but a little more carefully.****Marinara Mic Check:Prego is releasingfake pasta sauce lidsthat secretly double as dinner-table conversation recorders. It’s part of a partnership withStoryCorps, the nonprofit that collects and shares everyday Americans’ stories. Users can upload their recordings to the StoryCorps site and keep them private, share them publicly, or, if Uncle Tony really cooked, send them all the way to theLibrary of Congress.
