I was talking to a young man starting a business the other day. He was very excited to be in business and ready to charge forward and make his mark. He has a service, a plan and is clearly willing to work hard to achieve his goals. That conversation got me thinking about what would...Read More

We don’t always get it right at Kona Impact. Occasionally we don’t treat our customers the way we like to be treated. Sometimes we lose an email in our inboxes, misplace a phone message or fail to provide the communication we should. No excuses. Not “buts”. Most of the time we’re able to provide the...Read More

I once had a restaurateur, owner of one of most successful restaurants in town,  tell me that one of the best things he did was to ask some customers not to come back. These customers would frequent his restaurant, but all they did was to bring grief to the waiters, the cooks and the management....Read More

A few things in today’s newspaper caught my attention: 1) Governor Ige is likely to veto a bill that would have prohibited new fish collecting licenses, and 2) a story about how the recent publicity about rat lungworm disease might be affecting locally-grown produce. Both of these stories highlight what I call “existential threats to...Read More

A few weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles airport getting ready to board a flight back to Kona. The person next to me (clearly a tourist) sensed that I lived in Hawaii, so he struck up a conversation about things to do and see in Kona. His family had six nights and we going...Read More

Kona Impact has worked with probably more than 1,000 businesses in the past ten years. Most are small and medium-sized businesses, and large amount are startups, new businesses that in the very early stages. There are, of course, many things that need to go right for a business to grow and become sustainable. The products...Read More

Deep work is a concept that has existed since humankind has organized into societal units, if not before then. The idea is simple: the human mind is most productive when it can have long stretches of time to work on “big picture” problems without interruption. That is, the time that we can focus on the...Read More

As a small business owner, I spend much of my day talking with other business owners and managers of larger business. I have had this conversation hundreds of times: Business Owner: “How’s business?” Client: “Oh, we’re really busy. Putting in a lot of hours and everyone is working hard to get the orders out.” We...Read More

We’ve most certainly entered into another boom time in Hawaii. Home prices are up 50% or more since the bottom; the stock market is booming; tourism will see 7% year-to-year growth and unemployment is less than 3%. One builder I know has a three-year backlog of projects. This, of course, is good news for our...Read More

Kona Impact is proud to be celebrating our tenth year in business. We started when the economy was robust in Kona, Hawaii, and then we soon suffered a recession that devastated our real estate, construction and tourism sectors. Those bad times are behind our community now, but not forgotten. We’ve learned a lot over the...Read More