Stacker-Business & Economy

Small business owners have spent the last few years navigating inflation, tariffs and unpredictable consumer spending. This year, Intuit QuickBooks‘ annual holiday shopping survey found that consumers plan to spend $278 billion this holiday season, with $118 billion expected to go to small businesses, an 8.3% increase from last year. The survey also found that 76% of

Automated expense reporting replaces manual receipt collection, email approval chains, and month-end reconciliation with software that captures spend at the point of purchase, enforces your policy in real time, and syncs approved transactions directly to your accounting system. The result is a finance team that closes faster, catches policy violations before they compound, and stops

Design teams waste hours managing brand assets across fragmented tools. Files drift out of sync. Logos get redrawn. Colors shift between platforms. Consistency breaks down. A centralized vector system can be one solution to these challenges. A company’s audience probably already recognizes the colors and fonts used in marketing campaigns. Tweaking these even by a

California regulators have announced more consumer privacy penalties this year than in all earlier years combined, and the pattern behind the fines is as notable as the total. Five settlements under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have been announced so far in 2026, adding up to $17.1 million, more than double the $7.9 million from

In-house vs. agency marketing for PE-backed multi-brand companies comes down to three real options: an in-house team, one centralized agency, or multiple specialist agencies. The model depends on the expertise required, the number of brands and markets, how much local flexibility each brand needs, execution speed, reporting complexity, and how much centralized oversight leadership wants,

Bot traffic is wasting your ad budget in two ways: The money it burns on fake clicks and fake leads, and the damage it does to the data your campaigns learn from. More than half of all web traffic is now automated, and a meaningful share of paid media spend can be exposed to traffic

Organizations have spent years redesigning performance processes to support employee development, strengthen talent decisions and improve business performance. The harder challenge is helping leaders consistently commit to those processes amid competing priorities. Performance management now asks leaders to provide ongoing coaching, support employee development, document performance throughout the year and connect individual contributions to business

Vendor security review is a critical part of enterprise procurement and supply chain risk management. However, the traditional request-response model of sending security questionnaires and analyzing answers no longer scales. Vendor ecosystems keep growing, compliance requirements stack up, and sales cycles move faster. Manual risk validation can buckle under the volume. Zero-touch assessments replace reactive manual

Your decision to rebrand (or not) following an acquisition will define its performance. This guide from WebFX provides the models and scorecards that teams can use to make an informed decision.   Whether you should rebrand after an acquisition doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. As mergers and acquisitions have a 70% or higher failure rate,

You’ve navigated the acquisition — now your task is to make it a success by learning how to protect SEO’s performance during the merger. Here, WebFX shares an eight-step process.   Acquiring a brand doesn’t mean absorbing its website. There are plenty of organizations that maintain separate websites for their brands because that approach makes

Branded t-shirts, tote bags proudly displaying the company logo, or that customized tumbler sitting on a colleague’s desk. What do all of these have in common? They’re all part of a company’s marketing strategy, designed to build brand awareness and nurture business relationships. Companies use branded merchandise, products, and giveaways (aka corporate swag) as silent brand

Leading a service business often means keeping an eye on every variable that could jeopardize productivity, revenue and retention. However, even with committed teams, happy clients and respected deadlines, money may still end up being lost. That’s a frustrating scenario for agency and consultancy leaders. So where could the losses be coming from? Research from Toggl suggests response

The biggest advancement in AI sales agents comes from the software sector sales and revenue teams in the past 13 months, according to data from ZoomInfo. That’s more than three-and-a-half times the next-closest industry. Business services came in second, finance in third and after that, the field thins out fast. The speed at which vendors

Markets can be volatile, and no month illustrates that more clearly than October. From the banking panic of 1907 to Black Monday in 1987 to the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, some of the most dramatic single-day collapses in U.S. stock market history have one thing in common: They happened in October. Yet the

According to research from AI go-to-market platform ZoomInfo, there is currently high volatility in the chief revenue officer seat. Rather than cultivating talent internally, the research shows, companies are increasingly looking outside their own walls to fill the role, frequently poaching sitting CROs from competitors.  That pattern lines up with what outside research has found on