Small business owners make tough decisions every day. Some work out. Others turn a manageable problem into a much more expensive one. And judging by the questions people are asking on Reddit, there’s no shortage of candidates.
Unfortunately, all four are based on real questions business owners are asking.
In our latest episode of The Liquid Lunch Project Podcast (that we’ve dubbed Reddit on the Rocks), we **tackle five real small business dilemmas **involving debt, growth, pricing, and knowing when to stop digging.
A little math, a little common sense, and a few opinions that probably won’t win us any friends in the Reddit comments.
Cast your vote, then see how we would handle it.
Turns out,
**you can teach old tech new tricks.**Did
Victoria’s Secretjust pull off the ultimate retail comeback?Bad Housing Market.
Good Business Furniture.****Anthropic’sterrible, horrible, not-very-profitable quarter.Is
$8 BillionEnough to Keep**American Farms Afloat?**Who’s
really running your business: You or your MCA?**And from Around the Web:**Coca-Cola Steals the Colonel, Wall Street Buys the Knicks, and Florida Needs More Golf Carts.
The news shaping business, finance, and technology, for better or considerably worse.
Berkshire Hathaway is going back for seconds. After investing** $600** million in Bending Spoons during its July IPO, the company put in another $330 million, bringing its ownership stake to 4%.
The Milan-based tech company buys familiar digital brands, including AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, and Eventbrite, and works to make them more profitable. CEO Luca Ferrari says Berkshire helped inspire the strategy.
Bending Spoons was valued at about $11 billion last October. Its market value is now around $30 billion. Berkshire reportedly paid $33 per share in its latest deal, compared with a market price near $47 around the announcement. Not bad shopping, especially when you have $365 billion sitting in cash.
The investment could also signal a shift under Berkshire CEO Greg Abel toward faster-growing tech companies, rather than the firm’s usual steady, less flashy businesses.
Bending Spoons is betting that older software brands still have value, even as AI tools put pressure on traditional software companies. It isn’t buying them to flip them. It plans to improve operations, keep the profits, and use much of that money to buy more businesses.
**It’s a reminder that being a good founder and being a good operator are two ****very different **jobs.
There's money to be made in businesses everyone else has written off, especially when better management can unlock value without reinventing the product.
🔗 AOL, Evernote, and a nearly $1 billion bet from Berkshire. See why yesterday's tech is attracting tomorrow's money. Read the CNBC story here.
Victoria’s Secret was looking like another mall brand headed for the clearance rack. **Its old formula of push-up bras, runway Angels, and a narrow idea of beauty fell out of favor in the 2010s. **Wire-free bralettes took over, rivals like Skims and Savage X Fenty moved in, and the brand faced backlash over its leadership and its lack of inclusion.
The famous runway show was canceled in 2019. Then the pandemic made comfort king, which wasn’t exactly helpful for a company built on elaborate underwear.
Now the wings are back.
At Sunday’s fashion show, longtime Angels including** Adriana Lima** and Alessandra Ambrosio joined newer stars, including Gigi and Bella Hadid, with performances by Tate McRae and Katseye. Kylie Jenner walked in a diamond-covered bra reportedly worth $50 million. Apparently a normal bra wasn’t expensive enough.
The turnaround goes beyond the runway. CEO Hillary Super, hired in 2024, has helped bring shoppers back. Discounts are down, and year-over-year revenue has grown for five straight quarters. The company is also reviving Pink, its line aimed at younger shoppers.
Victoria’s Secret isn’t simply replaying its greatest hits. It’s mixing nostalgia with new customers and a broader idea of who gets to wear the wings. Sometimes a brand doesn’t need to disappear. It just needs to figure out what people actually want.
Victoria's Secret shows how an aging brand can win back customers by keeping what people loved while finally changing what they didn't.
🔗** **A $50 million bra is certainly one way to announce a comeback. The more interesting part is what's happening at the register.
The housing market is still stuck in second gear. Home sales are slightly ahead of 2025, but remain well below their ten-year average. High prices and mortgage rates are keeping buyers on the sidelines, and furniture retailers are feeling it.
Value City Furniture liquidated. Williams-Sonoma, meanwhile, has seen its stock rise more than 200% in three years.
Part of the difference is its customer base. Shoppers at Pottery Barn and West Elm tend to have more room to spend.** But Williams-Sonoma also found another buyer: businesses.**
The company has been furnishing hotels, offices, cruise ships, senior living properties, and student housing. In its second-quarter earnings report,** B2B revenue grew 14.5%.** Contract sales climbed 20%, trade sales rose 12%, and contract work made up 36% of its B2B business.
Projects include Virgin Hotels in New York, a Signature Aviation airport location in Miami, **student housing **at the University of Texas, and Carneros Inn in Napa. Unlike homeowners, these businesses often refresh their spaces on a regular schedule.
IKEA and Amazon have also built major business-to-business operations. Williams-Sonoma is taking a similar path using products and brands it already has.
When homebuyers stop shopping, selling to the businesses they visit isn’t a bad backup plan.
Selling to businesses can open a major new revenue stream without forcing a company to build an entirely new product line.
🔗 Hotels, cruise ships, and college dorms all need furniture. Williams-Sonoma figured out how to turn that into a business worth watching. See the company's strategy.
Wall Street heard that Anthropic’s growth was slowing and did what Wall Street does best: panic.
Ahead of a possible November IPO, the company behind Claude showed investors some remarkable numbers. Revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to the second, then rose another 45% in the third to $16.8 billion. That’s slower growth, technically. It’s also $16.8 billion in one quarter.
Competition with OpenAI is fierce, and Anthropic has tightened access to rivals that use its models to train their own cheaper versions. Both factors may be affecting growth.
The bigger picture is still enormous. Estimates put annualized revenue across leading AI labs near $150 billion, roughly five times the level a year ago. Supporters argue that’s just the start compared with the roughly $40 trillion businesses spend globally on knowledge-work wages.
But revenue isn’t profit. Anthropic’s latest disclosures also show huge computing bills and long-term infrastructure commitments. Its reported net losses include major accounting charges, making the numbers harder to judge at a glance.
The company has shown that businesses will pay serious money for AI. Its upcoming IPO should give investors a better look at how much it costs to deliver it.
For now, the AI boom is both a remarkable business story and a very expensive argument about what comes next.
AI demand is growing at an extraordinary pace, but the real test is whether companies can turn that growth into lasting profits after paying for the technology behind it.
🔗 Slowing growth, billions in revenue, and an IPO that could rewrite the record books. Wall Street has questions. Anthropic has some very large numbers. See what the numbers reveal.
Farmers are getting another helping hand from Washington, this time to the tune of $8 billion.
President Trump announced the Harvest Fuel Relief program to help growers deal with higher diesel and other production costs during harvest. The USDA says the one-time payments will cover part of farmers’ estimated losses for the 2026 crop year.
The timing is hard to miss. Midterm elections are approaching, and farmers have been squeezed by expensive fuel, weak crop prices, and uncertain demand from China. Soybean and corn futures recently hit their lowest levels since August.
China has bought more than 2 million tons of U.S. soybeans so far this month, including a reported 612,000-ton deal. But more purchases of grains, cotton, meat, and other products would be needed to meet the White House’s stated annual trade target.
This isn’t Washington’s first trip to the farm. The administration proposed another $11.1 billion in aid in June, after an earlier $12 billion package began paying out.
The new payments will depend on planted acreage, production costs, and USDA forecasts for yields and prices. Crop-specific rates are expected next month.
For farmers, help with this year’s bills is welcome. Whether it fixes the bigger problem of high costs and shaky markets is another question.
Short-term government aid can help farmers cover rising expenses, but long-term stability still depends on manageable costs, strong crop prices, and reliable buyers.
🔗 Eight billion dollars buys a lot of diesel. Whether it buys much relief from the bigger problems facing American farms is another matter. Dig into the details.
One minute of money talk. Several expensive mistakes avoided.
with Matthew R. Meehan
The Federal Reserve is seeing something we’ve been talking about for a while: Small businesses are turning to expensive financing just to keep the doors open.
In its latest ** Beige Book report, the Kansas City Fed noted that businesses are using merchant cash advances** (MCAs) to cover everyday expenses like payroll and overhead. And those advances are often making an already difficult cash-flow situation worse.
When money is coming out of your account every single day, it doesn’t take much for things to get tight. You can have strong sales and still be struggling to cover payroll, vendors, and operating expenses.
⚠️ ⚠️⚠️⚠️ And taking out another MCA to pay off the first one? That’s usually just digging a deeper hole.
The good news is that you may have other options.
Depending on your business and what you’re carrying, it **may be possible to restructure those advances into longer-term financing with one monthly payment **instead of daily or weekly withdrawals.
(That doesn’t make the debt disappear. But it can make a real difference in how your business manages cash.)
If you’re dealing with daily or weekly MCA payments, my team would be happy to take a look. Click the button below, send us a few details, and we’ll see if there’s a better way to restructure your debt.
The internet’s least supervised corner. Useful? Debatable. Entertaining? Always.
**The Colonel Switches Sides:**KFC is dumping Pepsi after nearly 40 years andat roughly 3,700 U.S. restaurants. Pepsi once owned the chicken chain, soswitching to Coca-Cola*this is basically watching your ex move in with your biggest rival.*Your Portfolio Needs a Point Guard:The reigning NBA champion New York Knicks areMSGK, as Madison Square Garden splits the Knicks and Rangers into separate public companies on October 26. The Knicks are valued at an estimatedgetting their own stock ticker,$11.75 billion, meaning you can soon own a tiny piece of the team without having to deal with James Dolan personally.**A Growing Gray Empire:**Florida’s The Villages, already home to roughly 170,000 people, isas part of a massive expansion that could bring its population to 260,000 retirees over the next 20 years. The place is apparently visible from space,planning 3,800+ new homeswhich means the aliens can finally find somewhere to play pickleball.
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