Suns of the state’s tech industry universe, mapped. Northwest Washington employment growth through 2034 by job (would you like fries with that?). And San Juan County tops latest monthly median home sales price data. Let’s start Franksplaining Business.

A Western star in the state’s tech universe.

A wall-sized star map? You might be forgiven for thinking it’s best as decoration in a child’s bedroom. But for tech company founders, wannabe founders and founder watchers, this particular starry visualized research is more of a retroactive roadmap.

Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) released its 2026 Washington Tech Universe Map at the end of July. The two-by-three foot poster displays, against a blue-black background, the intensity and direction of connections for Washington-based technology companies and company “parents” (including other companies, engineering centers and universities). Founder paths are the lines of white light moving across the sky.

Perhaps no surprise, the biggest hubs that company founders trace their lineage through are displayed in the constellations surrounding Microsoft (161 companies with alumni founders), the University of Washington (143) and Amazon (58).

Eye catching, also, is the seventh “sun”: Western Washington University in Bellingham. Western is tied to founders of 10 companies on the map, putting it right behind the top three plus Google, Seattle University and Meta’s engineering center as a noteworthy founder parent.

The trade organization’s new map (its first update since a 2015 Seattle-focused version) does not try to boil the stellar ocean. It only includes 625 firms out of what the tech news site GeekWire reported in its coverage is a non-visible universe of 25,000 Washington tech companies.

Those 625 had to meet several bars for inclusion: have a Washington state headquarters or significant engineering center, have at least $1 million in funding or revenue, be currently in business and still be independent (with some acquisition exceptions). WTIA also did additional filtering with an emphasis on connections.

“The point of this map isn’t to be a list of everyone in Washington tech,” said WTIA’s Nick Ellingson in an accompanying blog post. “It’s to show how this ecosystem keeps making itself. Microsoft, UW, Amazon — these aren’t just big employers, they’re the gravity wells that bend the entire region toward the next generation of founders.”

Less Bellingham, more greater Seattle

Yet Western’s solar brilliance is impressive. As the seventh-brightest “parent of multiple companies,” it’s shown having direct founder paths to Place, ProShop ERP, PartnerTap, Ilumagear, SecureSave, DoubleDown Interactive, Strivve, Snap! Mobile, Snap! Raise and Recurrent.

As I dug into these Northwest Washington links, I found a bit of looseness in the companies and connections, but still a lot to interest this former tech columnist for Seattle Weekly, Puget Sound Business Journal and (yes) GeekWire.

Both Place (real estate technology) and ProShop ERP (machine shop operations platform) are headquartered in Bellingham and have founders who prominently list Western in the education section of their LinkedIn profiles.

All of the others are based elsewhere: PartnerTap (partner account mapping and co-selling platform), Illumagear (personal lighting systems for industry), DoubleDown Interactive (social casino games), Strivve (payment card automation) in Seattle; Recurrent (electric vehicle data tools) in Bellevue; and SecureSave (workplace emergency savings accounts) in Kirkland.

The final two companies seem to be, at least today, one. Snap! Mobile (school sports and activities platform) and Snap! Raise (fundraising platform) share a website and Seattle address.

Western as founder wormhole

Of course, the point of the star map’s Western parentage isn’t where the companies were ultimately based. It’s that the paths of their founders, at some stage, went through WWU.

And it’s not unheard of for technology startups to move closer to where funding opportunities, support ecosystems, talent pools and, importantly, tech perceptions lie. When I spoke with the founder of the now-defunct hiring app Jyst in 2024, she said the Mount Vernon- and Bellingham-based company — after repeatedly being asked by investors where the company was from — finally decided the best approach was “anytime we weren’t in Seattle, we just said ‘Seattle.’”

WTIA did not respond to emails asking if WWU’s ranking was a surprise, or what kind of connection that each of its linked company founders had with Western (as students, faculty or perhaps some other relationship).

But Western’s prominence was both interesting and appeared welcome news to David Patrick, WWU’s dean of the graduate school and vice provost for research.

“Although I’m not personally familiar with Western’s connections to all the companies identified in the survey, I’m also not surprised to see Western ranked as a top producer of successful founders,” Patrick told me in an email.

In fact, he said, he supposed he’d expect it.

“I think a person has to graduate from college pretty inspired to want to take on these sorts of challenges and also, of course, equipped with the right skills,” he said. “Since Western emphasizes undergraduate research, professional experiences, and that style of teaching, the university tends to attract students who don’t mind getting their hands dirty, so to speak.”

Northwest Washington has a number of other startup and established tech companies not tied to WWU’s mapped constellation, such as Janicki (engineering-driven precision manufacturing), Tidal Vision (marine biotech) and Faithlife (Bible software). And undoubtedly more.

You may wonder what their place is in the Washington Tech Universe. Or if they even made the cut to show on the newest WTIA map.

WTIA, naturally, would be happy to help with that wall-sized copy of the star chart so you can closely scan the tiny text of company names and founder paths. For only $45.99. Plus tax and shipping.

For fast-food job seekers, good news?

The message from the latest annual update to the state Employment Security Department’s industry and occupation employment projections is, in brief: temper your growth expectations.

The numbers, statewide, call for a slow annual job growth rate of 0.85% from 2024 to 2029, and a nearly identical 0.84% from 2029 to 2034.

A dive into the data for Northwest Washington (Whatcom, Skagit, Island and San Juan counties) is even less cheerful for the next eight years, with a nonfarm average annual employment growth rate of 0.82% from 2024 to 2029, and 0.78% annually from 2029 to 2034.

What will be growing?

In Northwest Washington, the fastest-growing industry sector in both the near- and later-term is education and health services (which includes two subsectors, education services and health services and social assistance) with an average annual growth rate of 1.91% from 2024 to 2029 and 1.18% from 2029 to 2034. Health services and social assistance grows during both periods, while education services only grows in the 2024-2029 years.

The specific job title with the most annual openings because of growth in any sector, across both periods through 2034, is — please pull up to the window — fast food and counter workers.

Other occupations with high average annual openings due to job growth in Northwest Washington are anticipated to be registered nurses, home health and personal care aides, and farmworkers and laborers (crop, nursery and greenhouse).

Across the state, Employment Security said education and health services is expected to be the highest growth sector in both periods, and the top three occupations for projected average annual openings as a result of growth from 2024 to 2029 are home health and personal care aides, fast food and counter workers and registered nurses.

Anneliese Vance-Sherman, chief labor economist for Employment Security, put it plainly in a news release announcing the update: “This year’s projections tell the story of continuing slow growth overall, with variation by location, industry and occupation.”

Motivated data hounds (and I am you) can explore more with downloadable files for occupational and industry projections, and a to-be-updated interactive projections dashboard on the Employment Security website.

Let’s keep this brief.

Other business developments worth noting:

• Tucked into the detail at the bottom of Bellingham Whatcom County Tourism’s latest lodging executive summary was potential good news for area businesses struggling with a drop-off in Canadian shopping and tourism (as detailed last issue). Personal vehicle crossings coming from B.C. in June were up about 10% compared to June 2025. That meant, it said, three straight months of increases — positive data with the caution that “June 2026 crossings were still down -37% from June 2024.” However, an update since then from the Whatcom Council of Governments’ data dashboard shows July 2026 B.C. traffic dropping again: down 11% from July 2025 and down 36% from July 2024.

• Want to move away from it all — and pay the most for the privilege? Northwest Multiple Listing Service identified the county with the highest median home sales price in July as San Juan County, at $880,000 edging out King County’s $879,500. Across NWMLS’ service area in Washington and Oregon, the median July sales price for residential homes and condos was $640,000, down 1.5% from July 2025.

• Stockton’s Paint, a small chain of Benjamin Moore paint stores in Northwest Washington with a nearly 90-year history, is apparently for sale. A listing I’ve been watching on BizBuySell since mid-June puts the price at $1,150,000 for its three leased locations, two in Bellingham and one in Mount Vernon. “Owner selling due to relocation out of state,” states the ad. Stockton’s is notable for its local ownership and the creative 2022 work it did to beautify its store in downtown Bellingham (painting the sidewalk as color swatches).

Sometimes it’s personal.

Pssst? This is for those of you who also subscribe to Cascadia Daily News (which I do). Occasionally, I make a reference in this independent newsletter to my four years of writing for CDN, recently the four months I had a subscriber-only business newsletter.

For nerdy technical reasons, the archived published newsletters can be a little hard to find on the CDN site if you don’t know where to look. And their contents don’t show up in search.

But a shortcut exists. Like many writers, I have an Authory site.

What’s Authory? It’s a service that tracks everything an author writes, links to it in a public portfolio and automatically downloads a hidden backup (just in case, as can happen with internet publications, the original source goes offline).

On Authory, you can easily find links to CDN’s site for my four Business Matters newsletters about a) unexpected Northwest Washington insights from economists, b) Bellingham’s retail vacancy extremes, c) the faded promise of a World Cup two-nation vacation and d) a tech innovation lab tucked into Sedro-Woolley’s woods.

Plus a bunch of non-CDN stuff. That includes my personal favorite: an early GeekWire essay on how to raise a geek child. I think of it as timeless parenting advice.

What you wrote.

Since June, lots of you have read, forwarded, recommended and/or subscribed to the Franksplaining Business newsletter. I really appreciate it.

A few have also taken the step of pledging a future subscription or writing in with ideas. Some of those ideas are already percolating in my subconscious as I pull together new business topics for future issues. (Think under-the-radar manufacturers, the business of nonprofits, and more.)

Thank you for that, and email me directly at franksplaining@substack.com with your thoughts or questions. I read every email and comment.

And please keep sharing these issues with others who you think might be interested in a look at business and tech through a Northwest Washington lens.

Back in a couple of weeks. Read me then.

Who’s writing this? Frank Catalano is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Most recently, he was the regular business contributor and columnist for Cascadia Daily News in Northwest Washington from June 2022 to June 2026.

Earlier, Frank had side gigs as a columnist for, or ongoing contributor to, GeekWire, EdSurge, Seattle Weekly, Puget Sound Business Journal and KCPQ-TV Seattle. He started in radio news, spent decades as a senior executive and consultant in the tech and edtech industries, then returned to journalism. Reach Frank at franksplaining@substack.com.

Disclosure: Franksplaining Business is proudly human. No AI was used in its writing or editing.

New data aligns negative numbers south with negative feelings north. A Northwest Washington engineering-driven manufacturer goes east to grow. And fast-food wages for first-amendment output. Let’s start Franksplaining Business.

The business cost of cross-border bad blood.

U.S. businesses near the Canadian border have just marked 18 months of a financial stress test they likely hadn’t bargained for. And the impact on Whatcom County, on the far left side of the continental 49th parallel, is becoming more apparent. As are the fears.

Results of a new survey conducted by the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University and the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce describe the effects Whatcom County businesses say they’re feeling from fewer Canadian visitors crossing the border for tourism or shopping.

The survey, fielded between March and May, paints a pressure-filled picture.

Of the businesses responding — ranging from restaurants and retail to tourism and other services — 78% either agree or strongly agree that the drop in Canadian visitors is damaging. More than half, or 52%, indicated they’re either somewhat or definitely concerned about their business’ survival.

Not all business types are affected equally.

Food & beverage and retail were more likely to report damage to their businesses (91% and 85%, respectively) and concern about survival (64% and 60%) than other sectors. Length of time in business also factored into concerns: 67% of those open less than 10 years worried about survival, compared to 44% of those open more than 10 years.

What were they doing about it? Of those concerned for their business’ survival, one quarter reported making changes such as layoffs, shortened hours, fewer offerings or higher prices.

Overall, 89% of respondents said they either agree or strongly agree that Canadian visitors benefit their businesses.

“One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is how heavily our business has relied on cross-border traffic,” one respondent is quoted as saying in the infographic report. “While it has always been an important part of our customer base, the recent decline has shown how vulnerable that reliance can be.”

Snapshots in time

It’s important to note, as BPRI does in a supporting results memo, that the data displayed in the “Declining Canadian Visitors: Business Impacts” infographic doesn’t represent everyone. The 62 businesses that responded were, in the language of surveys, a “self-selected non-random sample” and that “businesses feeling the greatest impact may have been more motivated to participate.”

However, the survey’s purpose, the memo said, was as a “pulse-check on business experience and sentiment.”

Guy Occhiogrosso, Bellingham Regional Chamber president and CEO, told me he expected the negative impacts.

A year ago, BPRI and the Chamber fielded a somewhat similar survey. It drew responses from 58 Whatcom County businesses in May and June of 2025. While that survey — the results released by BPRI as the “Tariff Business Impacts” infographic — was primarily about tariffs and a trade war, it did ask businesses a few questions about Canadian customers.

Then, 52% said their businesses had been impacted by a change or drop in cross-border travelers. About 50% also agreed or strongly agreed that a drop in Canadians crossing the border “is causing damage to my business.”

Even as point-in-time pulse checks, putting the two surveys side-by-side shows a sharp increase in year-to-year pain.

“It confirms the impact,” Occhiogrosso said by email. “It also confirms that this is not a short-term change. While it is nuanced, it demonstrates that policy (on either side of the political aisle) can and does impact business and commerce.”

Contributing factors

Indicators of increasing pressure have been building for some time. According to numbers from the Cascadia Gateway Border Data Portal, visualized and published by BPRI in January, southbound British Columbia passenger vehicle traffic into Whatcom County declined 36% in 2025 compared to 2024. That meant a full-year drop from 2.4 million to 1.5 million vehicles.

While any high-school science teacher will tell you that correlation is not causation, it was at the end of 2024 that the U.S. President-elect referred to then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the “governor” of the “Great State of Canada” and started describing Canada as the 51st state. It was originally reported by the BBC to be a “quip.” Canadians, it was later widely reported, were not amused.

Since then, added factors of tariff back-and-forths and a relatively weak Canadian dollar haven’t improved the cross-border shopping trip relationship.

The numeric upshot is fewer Canadians have been coming south: overall, 20% fewer people by land in 2025 along the entire border. Money tells a similar story. Statistics Canada said Canadians spent CA$3.3 billion less on U.S. travel in 2025 compared to 2024, largely due to reduced spending on leisure-related visits.

And for land travel in this corner of the U.S., Whatcom County businesses are on the front lines (literally in border communities like Blaine, Point Roberts and Sumas).

A lot more remains to be unpacked on the impact. For that reason, I’ve volunteered to join BPRI as a research fellow to take part in some follow-up work on a pro bono basis. I’ll report on those subsequent results here (with full disclosure of my role) when BPRI releases any additional related research.

For now, the Chamber’s Occhiogrosso said, it’s safe to say that Canadian customers are “significant” when it comes to the stability of Whatcom County and Northwest Washington businesses. Though he said he tries not to be an alarmist, he felt it important to reiterate that some local places and industries are reliant on Canadian customers even if not all parts of the regional economy are.

“Significant is not necessarily vital, but it is important — incredibly important,” Occhiogrosso said. “It is part of our identity, so it is clearly important and without it, we are experiencing what that reality can look like.”

Montana gets Janicki campus — and hand-carved bison.

Privately held, engineering-driven manufacturing firm Janicki Industries is growing due east of its longtime home in Northwest Washington with groundbreaking for a new campus in Great Falls, Montana.

The expansion is noteworthy since the Sedro-Woolley company was Skagit County’s second-largest employer in 2025, according to the Center for Economic and Business Research at Western Washington University. Janicki said it has more than 2,000 employees across Washington sites in Sedro-Woolley, Mount Vernon, Hamilton and Bellingham, plus one outside of the state in Layton, Utah.

The July 10 groundbreaking will eventually lead to an $800 million manufacturing campus over the next decade. Janicki calls it its largest expansion to date. The company expects the first phase on its 180 acres to open by the end of 2027, creating 1,000 jobs in the initial five years and more than 2,000 once the full campus is built out. That’s in Great Falls alone.

Watchers of the company shouldn’t be surprised at the additional out-of-state activity. When I interviewed Janicki President John Janicki for a 2024 company profile in Cascadia Daily News, he told me he wasn’t very happy with the state of Washington over siting new facilities. But at the same time, he emphasized the company is “rooted to this area.” The Great Falls announcement reinforced that, stating “the company remains committed to growing those Washington and Utah sites even as it builds in Montana.”

While Janicki may be well known for highly technical work in advanced composites, precision machining and metal fabrication for its aerospace, defense, space and other customers (including projects involving NASA spacecraft and Boeing jets), its groundbreaking also honored home base Sedro-Woolley’s logging heritage.

During the ceremonies, the company presented the city with a roughly 74-inch tall, 57-inch wide and 78-inch long wood bison, hand carved from a single western red cedar log. The bison, described as having been finished in about 20 hours by expert carver Mark Colp, was created during Sedro-Woolley’s annual Loggerodeo competition.

Now that bit of Northwest Washington is expected to greet Great Falls residents (and future Janicki employees) from the bison’s new home about 700 driving miles east — in the hallway of the Great Falls Civic Center downtown.

Getting into others’ business.

Hat tips to these journalists for recent business coverage I found fascinating, and one outlier news release that led to as many questions as answers (one paywall ahead):

• “Saving local news starts with paying local reporters.” Yes, journalism is an economics story, too, as The BellingHammer’s Ron Judd illustrates. After reporters at Adams MultiMedia-owned newspapers Skagit Valley Herald, Anacortes American and Stanwood-Camano News went on (a brief) strike in July, Judd noted their current pay is between $19.10 and $22.29 per hour — “literally fast-food wages” in at least one case.

• “Did the World Cup Live Up to ‘104 Super Bowls’? The Winners and Losers.” The New York Times’ Christine Chung, Emma Baker and Arfa Momin used data to dissect financial winners and losers following the FIFA World Cup’s overwhelming tourism hype. Not winning? Seattle and Vancouver hotels, which actually had a drop in occupancy from the same period the previous year, ranking near or at the bottom of all host cities.

• “Allegiant Adds Free Drinks, Introduces New Class of Premium Seating.” A July 29th news release from the low-cost leisure carrier piqued this 6’4” traveler’s curiosity: Allegiant Air said it would add Allegiant First “on select aircraft in 2027,” apparently careful not to use the phrase “first-class” in the announcement. It’s not yet clear if that includes flights to Bellingham International Airport. The same release said Allegiant is also adding “free beverage options” including “sodas, juice and water.” Yes. Free … water.

I read everything.

First, a sincere thank you to all new subscribers. And a special thank you to Evan at The Hamster Wheel newsletter, who wrote one of the nicest things anyone has said about Franksplaining Business to date: “... it’s SO GOOD!” (The emphasis is all Evan.)

I will endeavor to continue to be good, and maybe better.

Please do share this newsletter freely. I encourage it. The more sharing and subscribers (free is fine), the more I’m encouraged to keep writing it. I’m all about reporting business news through a Northwest Washington lens.

And write me with your comments or ideas. I’m reachable at franksplaining@substack.com. Or leave a comment at the bottom of this newsletter post on Substack.

Back in a couple of weeks. Read me then.

Who’s writing this? Frank Catalano is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Most recently, he was the regular business contributor and columnist for Cascadia Daily News in Northwest Washington from June 2022 to June 2026.

Earlier, Frank had side gigs as a columnist for, or ongoing contributor to, GeekWire, EdSurge, Seattle Weekly, Puget Sound Business Journal and KCPQ-TV Seattle. He started in radio news, spent decades as a senior executive and consultant in the tech and edtech industries, then returned to journalism. Reach Frank at franksplaining@substack.com.

Disclosure: Franksplaining Business is proudly human. No AI was used in its writing or editing.

Increasing office vacancy rates aren’t all bad. A regional mall gets renewed national interest. Northwest Washington tech startups make a geeky list. Insta-polling PAE travelers. And building Snoopy, the World-Famous Author. Let’s start Franksplaining Business.

A tale of two (or more) cities’ vacancies.

At first, hearing that Bellingham has its highest office vacancy rate in nearly a year sounds bad.

Until you look at Seattle. Or Everett. Or Tacoma.

A new quarterly report from Ryan A. Martin, co-owner and broker at Pacific Continental Realty in Bellingham, pegs citywide office space vacancy at 5% in Q2 2026, up from 4.1% in the first quarter. That’s the highest it’s been in Bellingham since the second and third quarters of 2025, when it sat at 5.2% before declining about a percentage point.

The “modest increase” for the most recent quarter ending June 30 was accompanied by a decline in the average asking rate for space from $18.90 to $18.62 per square foot. The report said that drop suggested “landlords continue to compete for tenants in an environment where occupancy remains a higher priority than rental rate growth.”

But as in all things commercial real estate, not all city locations are equal.

Downtown Bellingham checked in with 8.2% office vacancy in the second quarter, up from 7.7% in the previous two quarters yet lower than its 8.6% rate in the second quarter of 2025.

“While this increase is noteworthy,” Martin wrote in the report, “the overall office market remains relatively healthy compared to many regional markets that continue to experience significantly higher vacancy levels.”

What exactly does that mean?

Defining ‘relative’ health

Geographically, Bellingham is a ways north of the crowded Puget Sound commercial real estate market. Second quarter data from another firm, commercial real estate services company CBRE, put Seattle’s overall close-in office vacancy rate at 22%. Downtown Seattle was a stunning 35.6%, up from 34.9% in Q1 and “continues to face persistent headwinds.”

Even looking at a city with a population similar to Bellingham’s, the City of Subdued Excitement excelled.

Everett had 115,000 residents as of April 1 this year compared with Bellingham’s 99,000 people, according to estimates from the state’s Office of Financial Management. While lumped into CBRE’s larger “Northend” Puget Sound submarket, Everett’s turf still racked up a vacancy rate of 15.8%, triple that of the Land of the Smiling Sloth.

Tacoma is more than twice Bellingham’s size at an estimated 231,000 population. It had an office vacancy rate of 23.7% in the Q2 CBRE report.

None of CBRE’s tracked Puget Sound submarkets was close to the single digits, let alone Bellingham’s 5%.

“Larger metropolitan areas such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Vancouver, B.C. continue to experience significantly higher office vacancy rates than Bellingham, largely due to greater exposure to remote work and a higher concentration of large corporate office users,” Martin told me in an email interview after his report’s release.

The relative health of Bellingham’s market, he said, is driven primarily by its preponderance of small and mid-sized local businesses, not major corporate employers.

“Professional services, medical offices, government agencies, financial institutions, and locally owned companies continue to require physical office space to serve clients and customers,” he said. “While many businesses have adopted hybrid work arrangements, those changes have generally reduced expansion demand rather than creating large blocks of vacant space.”

Another factor? Martin said little new office space was built over the past decade in Bellingham. It’s that limited new construction paired with steady local demand that has helped “keep overall vacancy relatively stable.”

Downtown’s downsides, industrial’s upsides

The special case of downtown Bellingham may be more challenging. It has older office buildings, metered parking and not-always-intuitive traffic flow when put up against locations in, say, Barkley Village, Cordata or other Bellingham neighborhoods. It adds up to downtown having, as the report put it, the “largest concentration of available office inventory” in Bellingham.

Late in the quarter, Bellingham Mayor Kim Lund issued an executive order focused on economic development. It proposed measures including streamlining permits plus what the city called a seven-year business and occupation “tax holiday” for businesses in the downtown core.

“We’ve seen a slight increase in interest from office users evaluating downtown space, and the city’s B&O tax holiday has become part of those discussions,” Martin said of the EO’s short-term effect. “I would characterize the executive order’s impact as encouraging but incremental rather than transformational.”

But the brightest spot in local commercial property demand may be industrial space.

The quarterly report said industrial sector vacancy dropped from 1.2% in the first quarter to 0.9% in the second, “one of the lowest levels observed in recent years.”

Martin doesn’t expect that to change anytime soon, even with Alpha Technologies Services’ announcement that it would shutter its Bellingham operations facility in October (as reported in the July 14 issue of this newsletter).

“Overall the industrial market is strong in Bellingham,” he said, “and I don’t see a new vacancy having a significant impact on the health of the market.”

A regional mall attracts new national interest.

Empty retail space can be far more noticeable from streets and sidewalks than most vacant office or industrial property. That likely explains why retail vacancies get a lot of public attention. Northwest Washington’s oldest regional mall is no exception.

In Bellingham, the citywide Q2 retail vacancy rate was flat at 5.8%, the same as in Q1, according to the quarterly commercial real estate report prepared by Ryan A. Martin at Pacific Continental Realty.

One outlier with a higher rate was Bellis Fair. Owned since the end of 2022 by Florida-based 4th Dimension Properties, Whatcom County’s 1980s-era mall has worked to pull in more locally owned tenants alongside national anchor retailers JCPenney, Target, Kohl’s, Macy’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Not all have succeeded. On a recent walkthrough, I noticed some local shops whose openings I’d written about for Cascadia Daily News, including The Cusp and AniMyNation, had closed. Yet Wild Ophelia’s moved in and TasTEA Spice & Co. expanded.

Tuning the mall mix

On the whole, Martin said, Bellis Fair has been relatively resilient even as vacancy has trended higher over the past year. He said it stood at about 9.5% for the second quarter, up from the mid-6% range for much of 2024, but down from approximately 11% vacancy in mid-2023.

“I don’t view that as an indication that Bellis Fair is in decline,” Martin said. “Rather, it reflects the ongoing evolution of regional malls across the country. Traditional retailers continue to adjust their footprints, while malls are increasingly attracting entertainment, dining, fitness and service-oriented tenants that are less vulnerable to online competition”.

Now Bellis Fair management said it’s getting ready to welcome two nationally known names.

General Manager David Prince said he expects BoxLunch (a pop-culture sibling to Hot Topic) to open by late September behind what is, as of July, a bright orange “coming soon” wall. Also ahead: a Build-A-Bear kiosk in the middle of mall timed, Prince said, for “early next year … we don’t have an exact date yet.”

Prince added that he anticipates locally based Cosmic Games, which had announced its move into Bellis Fair’s former Designer Shoe Warehouse outside spot a year ago, will open in late August.

Oh, and the status of that other highly visible exterior mall space once occupied by bankrupt Forever 21?

“We are working on a lease,” Prince said.

Let’s keep this brief.

Other business developments worth noting:

• Seattle Paine Field Air Terminal in Everett (PAE) has started doing pop-up quick polls by email and on social media. “LAX vs BUR” asked one in July; “Maui vs. Honolulu” posed another in May. Propeller Airports Paine Field Communications Director Jessica Kilgore said it’s “a way to concisely gather input” from travelers of desired routes for potential consideration. Alaska Airlines, the only carrier at PAE, currently flies nonstop to nine destinations including Los Angeles and Honolulu.

• Two Northwest Washington tech companies have made the latest GeekWire 200 quarterly ranking of the top startups in the larger Pacific Northwest. Real estate technology firm Place, founded in 2019 in Bellingham and today headquartered downtown in the city’s iconic Flatiron Building (formerly the home of Faithlife), ranked 25. Marine biotech startup Tidal Vision, also based in Bellingham in the Irongate neighborhood and founded in 2015, is ranked at 36 for Q2, moving up 10 positions.

• County unemployment numbers released by the state Employment Security Department for June put non-seasonally adjusted rates for Northwest Washington at 4.1% in Whatcom, 4.4% in Skagit, 3.3% in San Juan and 4.2% in Island. Those rates are still higher than a year ago (June 2025) by about a half percent or more in all four counties. Year-over-year rates were also higher in May.

Shop? Eat? I can’t be everywhere.

PSA: Looking for reports of regional retail and restaurant openings and closings? As a newsroom of one, I can’t keep up with them as I did when part of a team at CDN.

For ongoing updates, I recommend checking Cascadia Daily News’ regular Business Briefs column and Cocoa Laney’s restaurant shorts for feet on the street and eyes on the windows, Bellingham Herald’s Whatcom Roundup for credible social media scouring skills, and Skagit Valley Herald’s Business Briefly for the occasional eating or shopping item.

All three publications are (dare I say it?) available through public library online news databases if you can’t subscribe.

And for those wondering, “PSA” stands for “public service announcement,” a type of informational blurb radio stations (like those I worked at before the turn of the century) used to regularly broadcast.

Snoopy is re-author-ized.

File this under “personal business.” Even a solitary newsletter writer likes some collegial company. So it was with childlike delight I discovered that Lego had introduced its first Peanuts set, featuring Snoopy in working-writer mode.

“Peanuts: Snoopy’s Doghouse” shipped June 1. I pre-ordered it as soon as I saw that Snoopy could be posed, with a typewriter and pal Woodstock, on top. Key detail? Snoopy is typing “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Yes, there are two other posable scenes. They are cute and clever. But none motivated me to spend six-and-a-half hours building its 964 pieces more than Snoopy as the World-Famous Author.

(It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, as a pre-teen writer wannabe, I wrote a letter to Charles Schulz. But the real surprise was he wrote back. I still have that brief, encouraging note somewhere, in a file with my early writing efforts.)

What you did.

Many, many thanks to those who have read, forwarded, recommended and/or subscribed to the Franksplaining Business newsletter after the publication of its first official issue. A special tip o’ the hat to those who pledged a future subscription (should I ever charge — though, candidly, there will always be a free level). I deeply appreciate the commitment and support.

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Back in a couple of weeks. Read me then.

Who’s writing this? Frank Catalano is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Most recently, he was the regular business contributor and columnist for Cascadia Daily News in Northwest Washington from June 2022 to June 2026.

Earlier, Frank had side gigs as a columnist for, or ongoing contributor to, GeekWire, EdSurge, Seattle Weekly, Puget Sound Business Journal and KCPQ-TV Seattle. He started in radio news, spent decades as a senior executive and consultant in the tech and edtech industries, then returned to journalism. Reach Frank at franksplaining@substack.com.

Disclosure: Franksplaining Business is proudly human. No AI was used in its writing or editing.

Bellingham International Airport’s hopes for business travel — with results of a new BLI business survey. Unemployment stats. Flat(ish)-to-falling residential home prices. And recent messiness in the business of local news. Let’s start Franksplaining Business.

Small airport. Big challenges.

Is Bellingham International Airport in Washington state a business airport? It depends on whether business travelers mind connections — and how broadly you define “business.”

Yet a new survey coupled with efforts to get a grant-based airline incentive program off the ground intend to reverse declining destination and passenger counts at Northwest Washington’s commercial jet passenger airport.

First, some background. Bellingham (aka BLI), tucked into the upper left corner of the upper left contiguous U.S., currently has two national carriers, Alaska Airlines and Allegiant Air. They fly to a handful of destinations nonstop. Alaska, through Horizon Air or SkyWest flights, serves Seattle and — starting this year — Portland. Allegiant serves Las Vegas, Phoenix-Mesa and Burbank after ending or suspending service over the past several months to Oakland, Palm Springs and San Diego.

Perhaps most important to business travelers, Alaska’s service is daily, with Seattle and Portland hubs for ongoing connections. Allegiant, which focuses on leisure travelers, flies to its three destinations only a few times each week.

Following Allegiant’s April announcement that it would close its crew base of nearly two decades at BLI this November, it made the Burbank service seasonal. No flights are available to book after mid-August. That leaves only Las Vegas and Phoenix-Mesa as year-round Allegiant destinations.

But Alaska, which began its Portland flights in March, will add a regular second daily PDX flight in November and, as Port of Bellingham spokesman Mike Hogan told me in May, “the increased PDX service will have no impact on SEA, where Alaska intends to maintain 3x flights.”

Pulling up from a descent

Still, it’s a lot of destination churn that can’t disguise one trend: BLI’s passenger counts have been declining over the past few years.

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, BLI’s total arriving and departing passengers for the 12 months ending March 2026 (the most recent month available as of July 9) slipped to 431,000 compared to 500,000 for the same period a year earlier and 609,000 in 2024. BLI’s rank among airports nationally has similarly dropped to 188 for passenger departures this year, from 183 in 2025 and 168 in 2024.

By comparison, the passenger terminal at Seattle Paine Field in Everett (PAE) ranked 173 in BTS stats for the 12 months ending in March 2026 and handled 630,000 passenger arrivals and departures.

Perhaps not surprisingly, BLI’s decline follows the departure of Southwest Airlines. In the twelve-month window ending March 2024, Southwest accounted for 41% of passengers, Allegiant 44% and Alaska 15%. Fast forward past Southwest’s final Bellingham service in August 2024 and by March 2026 the trailing year’s data puts Allegiant at the top, with 61% passenger share, and Alaska at 39%.

But those 2026 numbers were before Allegiant ceased service to Oakland in May and curtailed its flights to other destinations.

New business survey casts light

History and statistics aside, how does BLI regain what it recently lost? And what do business travelers want from it?

To find out, the Port of Bellingham fielded a survey between March and June of this year (promoted through the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce) with a dozen questions aimed specifically at the regional business community.

The results, shared with me in early July by Port of Bellingham officials, provide insight into gaps and potential opportunities for airlines that BLI is courting.

The most frequent destinations for business travelers in the region today? Out of 21 listed (plus “other”), the top five in descending order were the San Francisco/San Jose area, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago.

The airports used most often by area business travelers? Seattle/SEA (nearly 80%), followed by Bellingham/BLI (nearly 70%), Paine Field/PAE (about 30%) and Vancouver, B.C./YVR (more than 20%).

The importance of additional nonstop destinations from BLI? Nearly 60% rated that as “very important” or “critical” for their business, the top two choices on a five-point scale.

BLI Director of Aviation Matt Rodriguez said the 144 survey responses solicited from BLI’s “catchment,” or market, area of Whatcom, Skagit, Island, San Juan and part of Snohomish counties will help with discussions at air service conferences and when meeting with airlines.

That catchment area, Rodriguez said, lost over 70% of its passengers in 2025 to Seattle due to a lack of available routes. SEA is a 100-mile drive from Bellingham.

“The bottom line is that our community deserves more air service. BLI is currently in a vise,” he said. “We have long relied on our Canadian neighbors to the north using our airport, but the unfavorable currency exchange rate and political tensions between the two countries have reduced the number of Canadians coming down to use BLI.”

Instead, he said, the airport wants to pull more travelers to BLI from south of the border, cutting the percentage in Northwest Washington that choose SEA.

“Our goal over the next five years is to reduce that figure by 25% or more,” he said.

A pending airline grant

One strategy is to backstop airlines offering new service by providing what’s known as a community “Minimum Revenue Guarantee” (something that more than 70% of those in BLI’s business survey weren’t familiar with). In essence, an MRG offsets the carrier’s costs if the routes don’t meet agreed-upon dollar or passenger thresholds.

“It sweetens the pot and it removes the risk on the airline’s behalf for a startup route or a route that’s been previously served,” he said. But it’s only intended as a short-term measure, not to “subsidize a desired route that does not have the demand support for it.”

Rodriguez said BLI applied this year for a roughly $850,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Small Community Air Service Development Program. If awarded — and he hopes to hear in August or September — that money could be combined with other community cash, perhaps from business organizations, to fund an MRG program and attract airlines. Other levers he said BLI could pull are waivers of landing, terminal use and other fees, all within a potential incentive package.

For its part, existing carrier Alaska Airlines said it’s already been beefing up its service and onward destinations through Portland as it’s increased frequency from BLI.

“By this fall, Alaska will offer 50% more seats in Portland than it did just two years ago, reflecting strong travel demand and the airline’s continued investment in the market,” said Alaska’s Ray Lane. “If the new route between BLI and PDX proves successful, we hope to continue expanding our presence at BLI.”

Connections, buses and determination

Meanwhile, business travelers appear to be making do.

Guy Occhiogrosso, Bellingham Regional Chamber’s president and CEO (and member of the Port’s Bellingham International Airport Advisory Committee), considers BLI the “convenient option” until it gets more airlines or routes, balancing a likely need for a flight connection with easier parking and security than a drive to SEA.

He also said that companies located in the area have inbound corporate travelers, and the airport “is an amenity that we can’t overlook or devalue.”

Lori Reese, marketing and tours manager for Bellair Airporter Shuttle, said they have “a large audience” of business travelers who take Bellair’s buses headed from the Bellingham area to SEA and back. It’s about a three-hour freeway connection.

“Many like being able to work or just relax during the shuttle drive,” she said.

And perhaps it helps, a little, to know that BLI is not alone in its challenges.

“It’s very, very common,” Rodriguez said, namechecking other small airports close to large airline hubs, including Fort Collins, Colorado near Denver and even Paine Field in Seattle’s shadow.

“It’s just really how you manage the marketing of your own airport and how well you advocate for additional routes to the airline,” he said. “A lot of people want to use BLI, so they’re excited to have more connecting routes, but we need those direct routes. That’s what’s going to help out the community and the airport.”

County unemployment and unemployed up year over year.

May jobless data for Whatcom and Skagit counties in Northwest Washington, released by the state Employment Security Department late last month, shows unemployment rates dropping from April — yet higher than May a year ago. Whatcom’s non-seasonally adjusted May rate was 4.5%, down from 4.8% in April. Skagit’s was 5% in May, down from 5.2% in April.

But, notably, both notched hikes over May 2025, when Whatcom County’s rate was 4% and Skagit County’s was 4.4%.

The year-to-year comparison also showed an increase in the absolute number of unemployed. Whatcom County’s count was 5,264 people, up from 4,543; Skagit County’s May 2026 tally was 3,037, up from 2,613 in May 2025.

Also up? The labor force in each county, which is defined as the number of people age 16 and older working or actively looking for work.

Nearby, May’s unemployment rate in San Juan County was 3.8%, Island County was 4.7%, Snohomish County was 4.9% and Seattle’s home of King County was 4.7%.

Unlikely to help future stats in Whatcom County was news early this month that Alpha Technologies Services would be closing its Bellingham operations facility on October 15 and laying off 75 people.

In a WARN letter filed with the state, publicly traded parent company EnerSys said the first layoffs were expected on August 31. The only reason EnerSys gave in its letter was “this closure is the result of and will result in the relocation and/or contracting out of company operations and/or employee positions.”

Whatcom home prices up a little; Skagit’s fall.

New analyses of Northwest Multiple Listing Service data find second quarter median home sale prices heading in different directions, overall, in Whatcom and Skagit counties.

Whatcom County’s median price was $640,500, up 1% from the same quarter a year ago. But Skagit County’s median was $605,750, down 3.9% for Q2 year over year.

Peter Ahn of NextHome Northwest Living in Bellingham did the math in the two reports. He said that increased inventory and higher mortgage rates have pushed the average time to sell a home to 46 days in Whatcom County, up 24% from the second quarter in 2025. Skagit County’s days-on-market number was up, too, but not as much: 37 days, a 6% increase.

The priciest places? Based on the reports’ median sales figures, Anacortes ($785,000) and Bellingham ($755,500) followed by a slew of locations in the $600s: Lynden ($635,000), Ferndale ($629,000), Mount Vernon ($625,000), Nooksack Valley ($617,500) and Sudden Valley ($609,950).

Ahn called out Sudden Valley “as a great option for buyers looking to remain in Bellingham due to its prices” because of its proximity.

A separate Whatcom County analysis from Tiffany Ng at Bellingham Real Estate Co. said that 2026 was typical for its surge of inventory, or homes listed for sale, in a year’s second quarter. However, Ng notes, “the high supply was not met with high demand.”

Local news is a messy business.

The first half of 2026 ended with something local news organizations generally don’t like: becoming news.

But journalism is also a business. It can be a difficult one. Nationwide, shutdowns over the last two decades have eliminated nearly 40% of all local U.S. newspapers and layoffs have thinned the ranks of many which remain.

Fortunately, no new cullings of the herd have occurred in Whatcom or Skagit counties. But drama? Lots, in a compressed time period.

First: The Bellingham Herald’s news staff ratified a new contract at the end of June, one of five newspapers in Washington and Idaho covered by the deal with corporate owner McClatchy Media. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild said in an email announcement that the agreement included raises, a $52,000 minimum salary for current employees and a “ban on AI being used to replace staff, decrease pay or reduce working hours.”

The dispute first led to a byline strike over artificial intelligence in news writing (which caught the attention of the New York Times), then a one-day, real-world strike with picketing in May at the Herald, The Olympian, Tacoma News Tribune, Tri-City Herald and Idaho Statesman before the contract agreement.

Second: The all-digital, nonprofit Salish Current both gained, and lost, an executive director between January and May. Kari Mar — who also has leadership roles with The Northern Light in Blaine and La Conner Community News in La Conner — announced her executive director role at Salish Current in January. But in a late June post on Substack, Mar wrote that after having “acquired nine legacy media publications across Skagit and Whatcom counties” she “ultimately stepped away from the publication that required the most work: Salish Current.”

Mike Sato, co-founder and executive editor of Salish Current, confirmed Mar’s departure, saying the resignation came in a late-night email to its board president on May 7. Sato wrote me that he, along with publisher and founder Amy Nelson, are currently leading the organization and working with the board on a leadership transition.

Third: Not to leave out a development with personal resonance, the owner of Bellingham-based Cascadia Daily News fired founding executive editor Ron Judd at the end of May over what Judd publicly described as “irreconcilable differences.” Much has been written about this, including by readers in the CDN letters section, Seattle Times’ Free Press editor Brier Dudley and Ron himself (in his new and highly readable Substack newsletter).

As CDN’s business contributor of four years — and freelance, not staff, so not dependent on Cascadia Daily News for salary and benefits — I decided to follow Ron out the door a week later. He had been my direct editor and the reason I joined the news startup originally. I went into more detail on LinkedIn, but suffice it to know that leaving was the right thing to do, for me. I still subscribe and cheer on the newsroom. But my business writing? Well … it’s here.

Getting into others’ business.

Hat tips to these journalists and news orgs for recent business coverage I found fascinating (one possible paywall ahead):

• “What a Monopoly importer learned when it tried to make things in the U.S.A.” NPR economics reporter Scott Horsley details, step by step, WS Game Company’s attempt to make a custom, 250th birthday edition of Monopoly fully in the U.S. to avoid punishing tariffs. Spoiler alert: no dice.

• “Yes, we have 8,282 manufacturers in WA. They actually make things.” Erik Lacitis in Seattle Times’ Pacific NW Magazine cover story profiled three small manufacturers, including Goodwinds Composites in Mount Vernon, Skagit County. Goodwinds has made composites for everything from pool cues to legs on the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

• “This factory was severely short on workers. Then it offered flexible work.” Andrea Hsu of NPR reported on how a short-term COVID-19 pandemic workaround at Roper Corp. (part of GE Appliances) in Georgia turned into a longer-term fix for filling manufacturing shifts, encouraging experienced workers to stay and attracting new workers who need flexibility. Think a pool of more than 900 workers, four-hour shifts and app scheduling.

I read everything.

Write to me with your comments or ideas. A human — me — reads, researches and writes everything. It’s an AI-free zone. I’m reachable directly at franksplaining@substack.com. Or leave a comment at the bottom of this newsletter post on Substack.

And please share this newsletter freely. I encourage it, to anyone interested in business through a Northwest Washington lens. The more sharing and subscribers (even free), the more I’m encouraged to keep writing it.

Back in a couple of weeks with some short takes. Read me then.

Who’s writing this? Frank Catalano is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Most recently, he was the regular business contributor and columnist for Cascadia Daily News in Northwest Washington from June 2022 to June 2026.

Earlier, Frank had side gigs as a columnist for, or ongoing contributor to, GeekWire, EdSurge, Seattle Weekly, Puget Sound Business Journal and KCPQ-TV Seattle. He started in radio news, spent decades as a senior executive and consultant in the tech and edtech industries, then returned to journalism. Reach Frank at franksplaining@substack.com.

This reboot of last year’s Franksplaining newsletter actually began in January, over what I recall was a fine Old Fashioned at the Admiralty Lounge in Bellingham, Washington. Cascadia Daily News Executive Editor Ron Judd and I were chatting, as we occasionally had done since I retired from writing my freelance business column for CDN at the end of September 2025.

Though I had successfully gotten away from ongoing deadlines, over that cocktail I privately bemoaned to Ron that I was still coming across business stories that needed telling and no one was doing so.

He mentioned that CDN was about to launch a handful of subscriber-only newsletters. Maybe I’d like to write the business one.

I immediately said maybe. Paused. Then yes. And I did write it for four months, exploring business developments in the region around my home in Bellingham (within Whatcom, Skagit and other nearby counties in Washington state by its border with Canada).

A turning point

Just as I was turning in my June newsletter, Ron was fired. Since he was my direct editor for “Business Matters with Frank Catalano,” I decided to leave CDN too. I even explained why in a public LinkedIn post.

But those Northwest Washington business stories? I think they still need telling.

Stories like how small airport and airline contractions affect business travelers. Why the fusion energy startup boom has put down roots in an area known for agriculture. And what local farms are doing to work with each other in a time of financial stress.

So I’m back on Substack, turning the experiment of Franksplaining from last year into Franksplaining Business this year. Perhaps consider it the natural offspring of that earlier, wide-ranging newsletter experiment (with some fun, useful stuff — read my essay of advice to my mid-career self) and my now-defunct, hyperlocal CDN business newsletter.

Franksplaining Business will have elements of both. My objective is to tell stories about business and technology news through a Northwest Washington lens. Sometimes, what’s local will be at the forefront. Other times, local examples will pepper a piece about a larger trend.

Expect (I hope) “aha” moments, analysis and some commentary. All fact based.

The initial plan

In addition to original, longer items, Franksplaining Business will also summarize key economic and business developments affecting Northwest Washington and the larger region. I’ll highlight interesting individual changes in businesses as I come across them.

This won’t be a rehash of every retail and restaurant opening or closing. Not only will my former colleagues at CDN continue to do a better job of that (I will point to their, and others’, business coverage from time to time) but I need to stay focused to keep this newsletter unique.

The occasional oddball item? Guaranteed.

How you can help

This newsletter is a solo operation. It will be a labor of love, too. I’m not offering any paid level of subscription while I determine if this is something I can maintain. But you can be a part of this effort in three ways.

First: Share the newsletter. If you like what you read, let others know. I’ll gauge interest based on readership.

Second: Pledge, if you’re able and willing. While Franksplaining Business is free, I am gratefully accepting pledges for future subscriptions if I should add a paid level (some level of reading will always be free). You’ll get a heads up when I start charging. Pledges help me understand the worth of this effort.

Third: Give me feedback. What do you think merits a larger story? What individual development is worth noting? Write to me at franksplaining@substack.com. Plus, I’ll tuck in polls where you can weigh in. Like this one, about the option for longer, monthly newsletters or shorter, twice-monthly issues.

Fourth and finally, I’ll make this pledge to you: Not a word here is, or will be, written by AI. Franksplaining is proudly all human. As am I.

Who’s writing this? Frank Catalano is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Most recently, he was the regular business contributor and columnist for Cascadia Daily News in Northwest Washington from June 2022 to June 2026.

Earlier, Frank had side gigs as a columnist for, or ongoing contributor to, GeekWire, EdSurge, Seattle Weekly, Puget Sound Business Journal and KCPQ-TV Seattle. He started in radio news, spent decades as a senior executive and consultant in the tech and edtech industries, then returned to journalism. Send feedback or ideas to Frank at franksplaining@substack.com.

Earlier this year, I was given a rare opportunity to revisit several significant stretches of my career: first education technology, then science-fiction writing and finally daily journalism. I was able to freshly consider my relationship to each. Had the professions changed, or had I?

As it turned out, the answer was yes. To both questions. Fair warning: Many personal disclosures are ahead. Plus three lessons that could apply to any profession.

An education in technology

At the end of March, I briefly returned to edtech for several days. I noticed the annual national conference of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a nonprofit group of school district tech leaders, was being held in Seattle.

I’d attended this a number of times when I was an executive for, or advisor to, education technology companies. When I asked if I could attend again for old times’ sake, I was asked in return if I would emcee CoSN’s advocacy auction as I once had done. Definitely, I said.

I spent a couple of days as I’d hoped: catching up with old friends I hadn’t seen in person since before the pandemic.

I also heard about the continuing encroachment of private equity into industry companies and how PE’s profits-above-all-else perspective had hampered industry execs. It had caused some to give up “educating” the PE suits and switch jobs, frustrated that private equity often lumped edtech with healthtech and fintech in its approach (all government-regulated sectors) with no interest in the differences. Or in the underlying mission of education.

I heard about the rush to have an AI story for every product and service, even if the technology wasn’t capable or applicable yet. I was reminded of similar previous hype bubbles around “personalized learning” and “data-driven decision making” in my three decades in edtech, and how many products never lived up to the promises, cycle to cycle.

I recalled my nostalgia for the days when edtech was considered a “get rich slow” industry, one in which there was a years-long lag time for new business and consumer tech to reach schools while companies and educators figured out what would work in classrooms and administrative offices before committing. FOMO and speed were now touted more than effectiveness.

I enjoyed emceeing the auction and seeing my friends and once-colleagues.

But edtech, as a business, had changed even more than when I had left my final industry CMO role in June 2022. I’d been right to leave.

Speculation about a future in fiction

In the middle of August, I was happily placed on three panels when the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Seattle for the first time since 1961.

Worldcon is a big deal for written science fiction. It’s where the Hugo Awards are announced and draws at least 5,000 fans, plus hundreds of professional authors and artists.

I’d spoken at Worldcons and other conventions before as an active science-fiction and fantasy writer, primarily in the 1980s and 1990s, and when I was an officer of what is now called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. I hadn’t attended a Worldcon since 2015 (or been an active fiction writer for many years before that) so having Seattle Worldcon nearby was welcome.

I spent another couple of days as I’d hoped. I attended panels about the state of the industry, walked through the art show and checked out booksellers in the dealer’s room. I reconnected with several accomplished writers who once had motivated and encouraged me: 90-year-old Robert Silverberg, when I re-introduced myself after several decades, looked at me and exclaimed, “Santa Barbara!” (where I had lived when he and I first met).

But many of the writers who had been friends and whom I might have one day counted as peers, had I kept writing and pushing, were now gone (that is, dead). I was dismayed to be reminded of the previous steep decline in circulation of magazines which I had once been honored to appear in — Analog Science Fiction and Fact and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction — and how AI-generated slop in recent years clogged submissions to Clarkesworld and other paying markets.

It was confusing, also, that the standards for being considered a “pro” writer were no longer as clear (yet perhaps not as inflexible or daunting) as when I was active, now that self-publishing with self-promotion was much easier. To its credit, self-publishing’s rise also raised many new voices and made it easier for talented writers to keep more of the publishing revenue. But independent publishing has added murkiness to the concept of “professional.”

At Worldcon, like CoSN, I enjoyed speaking and seeing my friends and once-colleagues.

But I had done a poor job keeping up with the field since I stopped publishing short fiction. I didn’t recognize most of the good, newer writers who were up for Hugo Awards. Stepping away mentally was a huge mistake: the field kept morphing and I had subconsciously assumed it would stay like it was when I left it, so I could slip back in when I was ready.

The business of professional science fiction writing had changed since I stopped. Too much. I’d have to start from scratch, again, if I wanted back in. I had left it, and it had moved on.

Reaching a firm journalistic deadline

At the end of September, I filed my last column for Cascadia Daily News. When I had the chance to return to daily journalism as a regular freelancer for this online news site and print newspaper startup in 2022, just a few months after moving to Bellingham, I jumped at it.

I had pestered its executive editor to let me contribute. CDN was doing exciting things to revitalize hyper-local news coverage in northwest Washington state, home to nearly 370,000 people in its two primary counties of coverage, Whatcom and Skagit. I hadn’t been a part of a newsroom since my last stint filling in as a deputy editor at the tech news site GeekWire in 2018 or my early career as a full-time broadcast journalist in the 1970s and 1980s.

I played a variety of roles as CDN Business Contributor: columnist, newsletter writer, company profile and industry trend piece author and business-related news story scribe. It was intense, it was heady and, though it was technically part-time, I “donated” a lot of hours sharing news tips, sources and research with the mostly young, professional staff.

I loved being able to indulge my curiosity, use my skill of clearly explaining a complicated topic and exercise the craft of writing well in the service of reporting.

But as CDN’s editorial staff grew, what I was able to pursue as a “business” story narrowed as more subjects naturally shifted to staffer beats. I, an outside freelancer, couldn’t easily take part in routine newsroom conversations where coverage decisions were made. After nearly three-and-a-half years, I also found myself not wanting to be tied to ongoing column deadlines.

It reached a head when my wife and I were celebrating our anniversary on a quick trip to Vancouver, B.C. at the end of July. We were having a great time. Yet my mood noticeably dampened when I realized I’d have to jump right back in to chase down details for a new column as soon as we arrived home.

I forced a column break during my Worldcon travel so I could think. But what Dee Dee observed after we returned to Bellingham and my regular deadlines cinched it.

“You haven’t been happy for a long time,” she said.

She was, of course, right. What had started as enthusiasm had turned into obligation, and not because of anything CDN had unnaturally altered. I liked the smart, dedicated people. Constant deadlines were just part of the bargain. But not anymore for me. I gave several weeks’ notice, penned a farewell essay, shut off my Slack and offered to be a resource when needed.

Cascadia Daily News had only improved over time. I did, and still do, support it. But I had changed.

A mixed professional scorecard

It’s been a gift to dive back into previous professional lives and take stock. Revisiting three over a span of a few months allows comparative long-term perspective from a near-single point in time.

Education technology had been a satisfying, full-on industry career. Too much of it got too caught up in the money for my money. It changed.

Science-fiction writing was paid, promising and ultimately aspirational as a livelihood. I waited too long. It changed.

News-driven journalism was a great skills and stimulation match, early and late in my working life. Continuing deadlines lost their appeal. I changed.

Others pondering professional purpose might take away three lessons:

• First, if money overshadows the mission you originally signed up for, reconsider your commitment.

• Second, if you want to pursue a path, act. It won’t wait for you forever.

• Third, if you’re not happy, force a break to rethink. Your personal priorities may have changed.

Would I ever dip back into these professions? Industries continue to change. So do I. Points of interest remain or I wouldn’t have entered them in the first place. I’ll stay in touch, as I always have.

I’ll also keep finding ways to leverage all of these varied, wonderful experiences in other parts of my life.

What results will not be a rerun.

Mostly, it was a way to play with the Substack platform as someone who published email newsletters and blogs very early (yes, I did both before the turn of the century). And partly, it was to create an outlet for writing of mine that didn’t currently have one: practical observations about business, technology and related topics.

It’s been a good experiment. I’ve written about the psychology of charity auctions, why companies should talk with business journalists, how to moderate a lively panel, advice for my younger 40-year-old self and how anyone can think like a marketer.

All of these essays have been from the perspective of someone who has done it. “Explaining through experience” has been this publication’s unofficial tag line.

A little too familiar

I’ve gathered a few dozen subscribers to the free Substack newsletter version of Franksplaining, and a few hundred readers. For a twice-a-month essay cadence with no promotion and no focused topic — basically, it’s if-I-lived-it, maybe-I-can-share-insight-into-it — that’s not bad.

Yet without a focus, I can’t get over the feeling that all I’m doing is mining ideas I’ve written about earlier, in other venues, even if it was in those cases more briefly.

Or perhaps I’m just refining and updating the observations. For example, I found after publishing an expanded Franksplaining piece on marketing that bits of the thinking about the importance of “unique, believable and true” appeared in my LinkedIn essay of five years ago.

That unconscious repetition takes a little bit of the joy out of my work on the keyboard side of this relationship. Not only do I risk retreading old ground and repeating myself, but also — as one science-fiction writer once described rewriting — I get the flavorless task of rechewing old bubble gum.

The pause that refreshes

So I’m calling this experiment a success. And taking a pause.

I won’t be taking down any of the Franksplaining essays or deleting the subscriber list. But I’ll next want to think through if I can tighten the focus of what I’m “explaining through experience” to stimulate new ideas and topics. And perhaps appeal to more readers.

Meantime, you can keep up on all of my writing on my Authory page.

Thank you for reading. I’m truly not done Franksplaining yet.

Good marketing doesn’t start with a search keyword buy, advertising creative or pretty logo design. I’ve found that good marketing has to start with thinking. With strategy.

Because marketing, at its core, is applied psychology: convincing someone to take an action that you’d like them to take.

That can be buying a product or service, for a company. Making a donation or otherwise supporting a cause, for a nonprofit. Hiring or engaging services, for an individual.

All of these require “marketing” that business, cause or person. No matter what word or polite euphemism (I’m looking at you, “advancement”) a particular organization or individual may use to describe the effort.

Marketing strategy is not separate from an organization’s or business’ overall strategy; it’s central to it.

Developing a good marketing strategy on which to hang specific marketing activities later is not something that requires a buzzword-laden system or expensive outside consulting firm. All good strategies have commonalities that I’ve summed up— across the decades I spent as an independent marketing consultant and tech company marketing VP/CMO — as the “four Cs.”

Internalize this framework, and you’ll be solidly on your way to figuring out which marketing tactics fit your situation, and which could be an off-target waste of effort and money.

Seize the Cs

No matter what a particular program may label them, the critical elements of a marketing strategy have to do with customers, competitors, core competency and course. (Math majors, as I once was, will note that is actually five Cs. But I’m counting only the four discrete C-led steps.)

Developing the information you need within each element starts with asking yourself questions. The wording of these questions is adaptable. Even if you think of your audience as something other than “customers” or “donors,” the answers can still be revealing and useful.

Customers. How do you describe the customers you’d like to attract? For a business, this goes beyond industry, title or role — what motivates the prospect, both practically (what they’d like to accomplish) and emotionally (how they’d like to feel about it)?

Defining age, geography … all of that is important. But the emotional and practical fit can go beyond demographics in helping refine your efforts.

Competitors. Who are your direct competitors for a product or service, or supporting a cause through your organization? Equally important, who are your invisible competitors — how do people accomplish their objective without you or your direct competitors?

In the early 1990s, I wrote the chapter on competitive analysis for Addison-Wesley’s The High-Tech Marketing Companion. Customers, I said, often don’t use a rigid, category-based approach to solving a problem. They tend to look at a continuum of possible solutions. A rip in chair upholstery? From the chair owner’s perspective, solutions range from duct tape or sewing needle to a professional upholstery repair service. But few duct tape or sewing needle makers likely consider the other a competitor.

Consider your competitors from the prospect’s perspective. That is a solution-oriented viewpoint, not an industry category viewpoint. In fact, I wrote back then, what might appear to a vendor to be a strange fix for a problem may be entirely feasible in the customers’ minds. Keep their solution orientation on your radar.

Core competence. What are you and your organization really good at? Not just what business or industry are you in, but what do you do uniquely well?

Odds are your organization wasn’t founded to be a me-too player. Somehow, you began with, or later developed, specialized expertise or a niche in your area. It can reflect distribution reach, technical excellence, low cost, high service, rapid response or something else — whatever it is, recognize it and determine how strongly your ideal audience cares about it.

Course. Now, triangulate. As a result of all of the above, what direction should your marketing take to reach your preferred customer set, bypass the competitors and leverage your core competence?

Finally, this is the time to consider marketing tactics. Everything from events and advertising to collateral materials and social media (plus more — this is hardly an exhaustive list) must be thrown up against the course you’ve determined to see if they move you forward along it or are simply just a time-wasting or, in some cases, ego-driven distraction.

Unique, believable and true

At this point, I’d be remiss in not sharing what I’ve found also makes up a good messaging approach as part of marketing strategy.

You’ve done the hard upfront structural work on the strategic framework’s elements. So as you spread the word about yourself, cut through the clutter by keeping three additional touchstones in mind for your message: unique, believable and true.

Unique, in that you’re positioned in a meaningful, no-one-else-could-claim-this way to your audience and against your primary competitors.

Believable, in that what you claim is, or easily and clearly can be, backed up by convincing proof.

True, in that what you say about yourself and others is factually accurate.

The last is more than an ethical consideration. If you want repeat business, you can’t mislead customers.

You also don’t get to choose just two out of three touchstones. Unique and true don’t work well if what you claim as unique can’t be believed. Believable and true in combination can be replicated by competitors. Unique and believable alone … well, that underlies many scams.

Humans first

Remember, responding to marketing is a human activity, a reality that often gets overlooked by quants fixated on manipulating data. Marketing can’t just herd. It must persuade.

That’s where psychology comes in. I never did graduate with that psychology minor attached to a math major. But I didn’t forget that the basics of dealing with thinking human beings are basic for good reason.

Understand what you offer in the context of the needs of the individual making the decision.

Refine that fit based on how you stand out.

Depending on your situation, this four-Cs framework process provides a starting point — or everything required.

It reminded me, though, that the unofficial tag line of Franksplaining is “explaining through experience.” 800 months? That seemed to be enough experience to share a few practical work and life tips I’ve gathered along the way.

In the spirit of providing useful context, let me offer this as advice I wish I’d given my 40-year-old self. Lots of people talk about what they’d tell themselves as teenagers. More interesting, to me, is what to tell someone who may think they already have it all figured out.

At 40, you’re mid-career, even if you don’t think of your work as a “career” in the traditional sense. If you’re going to develop specialized expertise, achieve peak productivity and pursue the potential for your highest-earning years, odds are at 40 you’ve got the skills and stamina to pull it off. You’ve made those early-career mistakes, grown a professional network and figured out what, to you, “work-life balance” might mean.

For example, when I was 40, I had put one brief career behind me (broadcasting) and was established in my second (technology marketing) with several executive-level staff and consulting roles under my belt, enough to give me the insight to also co-author two Dummies books on online marketing and be a busy public speaker.

What notes could prepare a 40-year-old for the next quarter century?

Time is not on your side

Tick tick tick. You are aging. While you were once part of an upstart generation thinking it could reinvent, or even newly invent, an industry, you have now just crossed the generational line into being part of the “old guard” — the generation you’d hoped to replace.

Don’t think those behind you on the career path don’t know it.

In a few years, you’ll start to be discriminated against as you visibly age. It probably won’t be overt. It’ll be couched as concern: a prospective employer wondering if you can “handle a startup pace,” a current company claiming it “needs the freshest ideas” to qualify for a promotion. Understand that ageism is real.

The first real shock will be when you find out a new boss is younger than you are. Significantly younger. Holy-crap-are-they-even-out-of-high-school younger.

At this point, your lofty title, your years of experience and your resume — by themselves — mean less than they did. What will make you valuable is what you can do directly, or make happen indirectly, by leveraging your extensive contacts and skillset (ideally, it also makes your boss and younger co-workers look good). In addition to meeting the goals the company has set.

Part of this, too, is adjusting your mindset. I learned to view every job through the lens of an outside consultant. What critically needs to get done, damn the internal politics? What approaches haven’t been considered?

Then pick the projects to pursue in spaces where no one cares, or in moments when no one is looking, and run fast to the finish line. Once it’s clear what’s been accomplished, give plenty of credit to others.

As you age, focus on your contribution, not status. The former will help you maintain the latter far more than simply demanding that you’ve earned it because of how long you’ve lived.

Experiences aren’t always repeatable

When young, it’s easy to defer personal experiences to another, maybe more-convenient or less-pressured time. Work takes priority when you want to get ahead.

But a dirty little secret of post-40 life is needing to realize you could die at any time.

A batch of studies I once collected as research for an unfinished novel found that men in their 40s were more likely to die as pedestrians or by lightning strikes than any other age group, and equally likely to die a violent death as those in their 20s. That doesn’t include medical-related deaths, such as cancer, or those taken by suicide, which sadly has claimed more than one of my close professional friends.

So treasure the few hours in an unfamiliar city on a business trip. See a museum. Visit a public market. Build in a couple of hours at the beginning, the end or between meetings. You may not be back. And you will remember it far more than a featureless hotel conference room, office or airport gate.

In the same vein, take walks. While I also advocate more intense work outs and practicing light yoga (for preventing or relieving the aches instilled by airplane seats), walking is something you can do anywhere. Do it while your smartphone is not in use to give your brain a rest and reset. A half-hour daily will actually increase your productivity, not limit it.

Both activities will freshen your perspective on work tasks and may spur a new idea or two. These brief breaks can keep you energized, productive and more resilient when facing burn out.

Be fully aware of how you treat others

One of my worst experiences as a tech company vice president was being told, by an incoming “turnaround specialist” CEO, that stiffing contractors on payments for work already completed and laying off staff without notice or severance wasn’t personal, it was “just business.”

One of my best experiences was unexpectedly being thanked by a former co-worker I ran into at a conference. She was now a C-level executive. She explained that, years earlier in a large management meeting when I had been an exec and she had a less senior title, I had asked for her thoughts after I noticed she hadn’t had an opportunity to provide strategy input because others were dominating the discussion. For me, it just made sense to get feedback from everyone who was at the table. Yet she hadn’t forgotten that request.

It’s always personal when you’re dealing with people. People want to be heard. People want to be valued. But it can be hard to practice when those around you don’t model that behavior. So model for others how you want team members to be treated. It can have positive reverberations, years later.

If, inevitably, something does go wrong and you start to lose it, don’t get angry — be disappointed. Not only is there less heat that gets in the way of light needed to resolve an issue, but you won’t waste precious energy. (Remember, you’re older.)

Finally, value your true professional friends. You will find that of all the people you work with, those who will voluntarily keep up with you across jobs and over years — when you can do nothing for them — are rare. Visit. Have dinner. Don’t fall out of touch. Even if you don’t think you have anything to talk about. You’ll find something.

Oh. And about reaching that 800-month milestone? Well, I’m not fully retiring yet. I still need more time to refine, and discover, additional work-life lessons.

I've moderated, conservatively, more than two hundred panels (I started as a teen at science-fiction conventions). Since those early nerdy gatherings, I’ve hosted professional panel discussions at events ranging from technology trade shows and summits to book and education industry conferences over several decades.

But being a good moderator requires a different skill set than being a good public speaker. Overlap? Yes. With a major difference: the audience’s attention should be focused on the entirety of the panel, not only the moderator.

I’ve seen panels go spectacularly sideways due to lack of speaker preparation, coordination or even acknowledgment of the topic about which the audience thought they were going to hear.

Ten tips

So, for the sake of a perky panel and a rapt audience, here are 10 things I’ve learned about being a good moderator (if you’re ever called to serve, for reasons personal or professional):

1) You're the glue. Your mission as moderator is to create a coherent whole out of disparate, and sometimes feuding, parts. As a result, you should be the panel's audience surrogate — even asking for definitions of terms and clarification of statements which a panelist may state as though everyone already knows. Many times, people attend panels to learn, so they may not.

2) You're the metronome. You're the panel's psychological timekeeper — you need to make sure the pace feels right to someone just sitting and listening and adjust that pace on the fly. Keep things moving.

3) You're not the star. While a well-known moderator can be a draw, that's before the event. The audience is there to learn from the panelists as a whole. That doesn't mean moderators should be passive and in the background (for your primary task, see 1). But there's a difference between creating a center of discussion and being the center of attention. Whatever attention you draw needs to be with the intent of making sure the audience gets what they came for.

4) Demand a PowerPoint-free zone. Nothing squeezes the life out of a panel more than PowerPoint (or Google Slides, or any text projected on a screen). Inevitably, panelists who don't have time to prepare rely on making minor tweaks to a canned presentation, regardless of the new audience's needs or interests. I hesitate to moderate panels if I can't ban PowerPoint and, if I'm unsuccessful, I push for no more than three textless slides (a single graphic is worth a thousand bullet points).

5) Stoke the fire. Don't expect to wing it. Prepare a thought-provoking first question and circulate it among the panelists in advance, telling them they'll have no more than two minutes to address it in their own words, sans slides.

6) Don't preview all your questions. Share areas you might like to discuss, but don't share any specific questions in advance (aside from the one in 5), no matter how hard your panelists or their handlers press. I've discovered just about every person I've ever worked with is satisfied knowing the areas likely to be covered in general terms. If you share your specific questions, you'll get boring, often-scripted specific answers — the perfect soporific for any audience.

7) Introduce them yourself. Don’t fall into the trap of asking panelists to state their background. That can be a vehicle for endless self promotion or lengthy digression. Find a copy of their bio beforehand and write up two-to-three sentences germane to the topic being discussed. You can always suggest more detail is available online.

8) Interrupt. Being overly polite and letting panelists drone on or make unchallenged assertions is surrender, not moderation. The panel is not your audience. Nicely and conversationally break in to redirect whenever necessary.

9) Touch base early. Send your panelists an introductory email outlining any ground rules, the opening question, areas of discussion, and the banning of PowerPoint-ish crutches (if you concur). Don't forget the basics like time, date and venue. Then, arrange to meet 15 minutes early so the panelists show up on time, as long as you’re not at an event when they’re scheduled back to back.

10) Say thank you. Send your panelists personal emails or paper notes thanking them for participating afterwards. Even if it's not your event or your organization, you were their ringmaster for 45, 60 or 90 minutes. No one gets upset for being appreciated.

Yes, Zoom too

And if you’re moderating virtually and not in person? This guidance still applies. People remain people, even if the discussion is mediated through technology. Considering the added number of distractions a remote audience has at its fingertips, effective moderation may be even more important to keeping their attention.

So when I say moderating is an easy job, think “easy” as in a magic trick well performed. Your goal is to make the discussion appear effortless — so the audience itself doesn't have to struggle.

I understand the business journalist’s role for the reader since I began writing columns and stories for Cascadia Daily News three years ago: to let readers know what a particular company is doing and how they might find it interesting, useful, or both.

Stuff like openings and closings. An in-depth profile with an I-didn’t-know-that “aha” moment. An explanation of a complicated economic topic, such as tariffs, commercial real estate vacancies or median home price changes, putting the latest developments in a larger context.

But why should a business that’s approached for a story agree to talk with me?

A need to educate

It’s a good question, and one I proposed to address in a discussion this year hosted by the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce in Northwest Washington state.

As recently as two decades ago, just before modern social media and smartphones saturated our daily lives (Facebook became available to the public in late 2006, and the first iPhone launched a year later), the answer was easier. Advertising cost money. Press coverage was free. Might as well reach an audience through the news media, if a business could get their attention.

Now, though, the outreach options are less binary and more of a continuum.

Thanks largely to the internet and the prevalence of social media, businesses don’t need to pay for an ad or direct marketing piece to increase their visibility and maintain control over their message. If they do want to spend cash beyond staff or PR/marketing agency services, a broader, squishier range of options exist — from pay-for-placement publications to friendly, sponsored online “influencers” — that can help get the word out. These outlets may also look a lot like journalism to the audience, even if that’s frequently a facade.

Getting a business to talk with a journalist these days might not only take convincing, it could take educating.

What a business journalist is

It helps to start with a definition. A journalist is someone who reports news of interest to their audience. Whom the business doesn’t pay. And who incorporates what the business does or says into their own story, one the journalist researches and develops.

Flags that a business isn’t dealing with a journalist?

The outlet offers to let the business review or edit the story before it appears (a good journalist pays attention, takes detailed notes and follows up to verify fuzzy facts but never turns the business into the story’s author). They ask the business to pay a fee (this can be for “expenses,” in the case of purely promotional outlets that might otherwise look like journalism). They won’t tell the business what the story they’re working on is (stories can change as facts roll in, but all stories start with the reporter having some idea of what angle is worth pursuing).

Put another way: follow the money. If the business is paying anything for the story, it’s not journalism.

Now, does that mean it’s a mistake for a business to talk with a promotional influencer, a pay-for-play outlet, or a non-journalist who agrees to share the news for free?

No. It’s not a mistake if the outlet is being upfront about what they’re offering (and don’t misleadingly claim to be a journalist). If the outlet reaches a business’ desired audience and it’s a fit, it may be worth doing a deal.

In a previous life, I was a tech industry company chief marketing officer — we evaluated every option and worked with both reporters and promoters. But I quickly shut down anyone who misrepresented what they were doing. Other businesses should do the same.

Benefits of engaging journalists

So why talk with a business journalist, if alternatives that are more under the control of the company have grown?

Simply, to reach audiences that a business can’t already reach directly: people who aren’t aware of a business, or who don’t follow it closely. Engaging can give a business a chance to be part of a bigger story, from trend pieces about industry developments to roundups of what similar companies may be doing. And, perhaps, provide the opportunity to create or solidify a company’s reputation as an expert in their field.

Journalists are not there to promote a business, but that can be a secondary halo effect depending on the news.

Good reasons exist to not engage with a journalist, too.

Most basically — and it pains me to say this — if a business doesn’t trust or respect that individual journalist’s reporting because, for example, facts were routinely wrong in earlier stories, or quotes were taken out of context, and nothing was corrected. (We journalists are human. We make mistakes. But we also have a responsibility to correct errors to maintain credibility with our audience.)

A second good reason is that a business isn’t ready to talk about a subject when a journalist calls.

The other speaker at the event, Patti Goethals Rowlson of Bellingham PR & Communications, emphasized the importance of businesses learning how to craft a message and understand its news value, especially when they are the ones doing the outreach to journalists and not only responding to reporters’ inquiries. And then decide whether they want to pitch news outlets, pay for distribution or somehow self-publish the news, such as on websites, blogs or email newsletters.

Not a one-off

Yet I’d like to believe that the relationship isn’t always a single instance of the business talking to me or me to the business about a discrete development. It’s an ongoing conversation.

The benefit to the reader of this exchange is clear. I’m not paid by the business so I don’t represent the business. I work to verify claims a business might make. I tamp down hype and puffery. I endeavor to provide context.

Readers ideally wind up (again) with new information that’s either useful, interesting or both.

Businesses benefit as well. They reach a larger, or newer, audience than they can on their own. One they didn’t pay to reach. But they have to give up control to get that reach.

Even though the continuum between traditional journalism at one end and straight advertising on the other is more crowded and confusing than it was in the pre-social media, pre-smartphone era two decades ago, no one benefits if the distinctions aren’t upfront and clear. None of the more recent or hybrid options are inherently bad. They are just different.

But every company, and every reader, should understand the role of the business journalist in the current media environment. That’s why I was pleased to take part in the Bellingham Chamber’s educational program. And it’s also why, of course, businesses should talk to me.

(A slightly different version of this essay first appeared on the Cascadia Daily News website.)

Because odds are it wouldn’t work nearly as well or raise as much money for the cause. It’s a matter of individual and group psychology.

As a favor for an organization I admire, I volunteered to emcee the Consortium for School Networking Advocacy Auction at the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle on the last day of March. I used to attend CoSN annually to speak or to represent education technology companies for which I ran marketing at the time.

But not as well known is that, for several years starting in 2003, I regularly emceed charity auctions as a feel-good sideline through Stokes Auction Group, a Seattle-area company that provides auctioneers and auction services exclusively for charities. This gave me insight into auctions for organizations including the American Heart Association, Boys and Girls Clubs and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (with its delightfully named “Tennis Ball”).

A lot of planning and psychology goes into a charity auction, from those for the smallest private school to the largest non-profit. And never underestimate the school auction: I’ve worked some that have dramatically outdrawn, in people and dollars, the most heart-rending charity. (Corollary: Never underestimate the giving, or guilting, power of a dedicated parent or alumnus.)

Seven success factors

What’s worth understanding about what happens behind the scenes? Seven items from my experience-based catalog:

Tickets aren’t donations. If you think you’re giving the charity a donation by buying a ticket, you’re not. Tickets are designed to cover the cost of food and the venue. Sometimes, charities don’t charge enough to do even that. But a ticket purchase serves a purpose: It gets you financially and psychologically invested in the event.

Minimum bids help cover costs. A few big-ticket items (from vacation trips to motorized scooters) may have been purchased by the charity with the hope that, in the frenzy of live bidding, they’ll go for much more than the discounted purchase price. That’s why an item may be withdrawn if it can’t get the minimum bid. But promoting a few good big-ticket items in advance can help raise the entire image of an auction to spur attendance and overall giving.

More isn’t always better. More items don’t necessarily make a better live auction. Some of the most successful events use a “gala” format with a few as three to no more than a dozen items. The brevity and perceived scarcity makes the items all the more desirable; you can’t hold your bidding dollars for later. Conversely, auctions with more than, say, 40 items can drag on to a point where there’s bidder fatigue and returns drop. (We had an informal rule at Stokes that auction staff couldn’t drink while working, unless the auction went into its second day.)

Seeding the live auction helps. Most auctions have a portion called “raise the paddle,” “fund a need,” or “fund an item,” during which bidders help pay for a specific charity cause (at schools, for example, it might be arts programs or scholarships). Bidding starts at the highest dollar level and works down in increments, sometimes starting with a $5,000 ask, then $2,500, then $1,000, eventually down to those donors willing to raise their paddle to give $50. Usually, a charity has already arranged to have a donor ready at the highest level to avoid deadly silence when the first amount is called out.

Pacing is critical. This isn’t just an auction; it’s a performance that has to entertain. The rule of thumb is two minutes per item. Testimonials from beneficiaries of the organization can help vary the pace so the whole event isn’t at a dead run, but if you have too many speakers or if they go on too long, the entire event can bog down, people have a chance to get restless — and may leave early.

Always say thank you. Bidder lists sorted by bid number are often given to the auctioneer and emcee just before the auction starts so the winning bidders can be thanked by name. Call it human nature: We like to be recognized for doing good, especially among our peers.

Pay is based on performance. Auctioneers and their firms are generally compensated based on a percentage of what they raise for the charity, with limits. If the charity doesn’t do well, they don’t. Unless, of course, they simply volunteer as I did for CoSN.

Not just for charities

Several of these practices also have applications in business and other non-auction settings. More isn’t always better, and may exhaust or defer a decision. Seeding helps others feel that they, too, should take part. Pacing is critical to maintaining attention. And always saying thank you, by name, tacitly recognizes our desire to be seen.

As the professionals I used to work with frequently stated, a charity auction is a fundraiser masquerading as a social event. Feeling good tends to want to make us do good. And that’s also a lesson that extends into other areas of life.

Beyond straight reporting

While I enjoy my local business contributions to Cascadia Daily News, I'm focused in CDN on straight reporting, and hyperlocal at that — if it doesn't directly happen in, or affect, Northwest Washington state, I don't write about it.

I missed writing analysis and commentary on larger issues. Still fact-based, but first-person pieces that were broader in scope about business, technology and life lessons.

So I'm launching this Substack. Named "Franksplaining."

What to expect — and an ask

Once I hit my stride, Franksplaining will hit inboxes about twice a month. At a digestible column length.

And it’s free. The "pledge" feature is turned on, but I'll provide plenty of heads up should I ever start charging (and you can just skip that step now when subscribing).

One ongoing question: What would you like me to address in these short essays?

Let's set aside the current political moment; I guarantee that will come up.

What else do you think I might uniquely have a fact-based perspective on, knowing my background in tech, education, business, broadcasting, science-fiction writing and public speaking?

Drop me a note anytime. It won’t keep me up.