Trail Coffee, a bustling café on an activated corner in downtown Stockton, has come a long way from its startup as a back-alley roaster. In the last four years, the business has moved twice, rebranded and expanded into a 3,500-square-foot roastery, café and test kitchen in the refurbished Owl Drug Store building on E. Main and California streets.

Discernment is a criminally underused tool of business owners. We often forget that the one person who knows the most about a company’s vision, mission, budget, team capacity, goals, strengths, weaknesses, projects and growth potential is not the random person who wandered into the store — but the owner of the business.

In an increasingly crowded digital space of bloggers and influencers, Melissa Johnson, founder of the Sacramento-based lifestyle blog Best Friends for Frosting, knew she had to create a thumb-stopping moment to stand out.

Once known mainly as a bankruptcy-stricken foreclosure capital with high crime rates, Stockton today is drawing national attention for its millennial mayor, Michael Tubbs, and his experiments with universal basic income and avant-garde violence-prevention policies.

The success of the film Lady Bird brought Sacramento into the national limelight and local leaders want to incorporate the creative community into its branding efforts. But artists and business leaders can be strange bedfellows. 

Women dominate the creative community in Sacramento, with a slew of advertising agencies large and small with females at the helm. The women running them say this means not only more authentic messaging, but a stronger support system for the next generation.

So you’ve got a terrific idea for a new business or product you’d like to bring to market. But where do you start?

Try these three strategies to help teenagers use their social media platforms to better prepare for college.

In recent years, with the rise of social networking, the business world has embraced a modern form of evangelism, making the word synonymous with an entirely new brand of evangelist: the influencer.