Under Vivek Ranadive’s ownership, the Kings have become a leading tech-savvy sports franchise, primarily by building the Golden 1 Center, which is considered one of the highest-tech sports stadiums in the world.

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.

Quick! What’s the next promotion, holiday sale or sales strategy you’re using in your business? If you’re thinking about Christmas or even Black Friday, then it’s time to shake up your marketing and create a system for monthly campaigns to promote your services, products or programs.

Making a career as an artist is rarely easy, sometimes impossible and usually totally worth it. Sometimes we catch a break and get to skip ahead more quickly than anticipated. Other times we have to put in (very) long hours. Here are a few pitfalls I’ve learned to avoid:

Ask any freelancer what their rates look like and you’ll most likely get hit with one of three options: hourly rates, per project rates or a mix of the two. But how do freelancers decide on these rates?

If you need a better reason than being “tired” for taking time off, here are four ways to structure your vacation time that benefit you and your employer.

For this month’s column, I thought I’d reach out to people who made multi-tasking an artform and get them to explain how they so easily “pivot” from one task to another on a daily basis. But I found out that’s only one definition of pivot, and so I pivoted this column to another, more business-oriented version. (See what I did there?)

Marketing and branding is an inevitable part of your freelance business. For a marketing person, this is the fun part. For everyone else, this is the part that’s most likely delayed (or never done at all), and thus is a missed opportunity to promote yourself and your business.

Founded in 2010, Sofar’s first shows were in London, but now includes gatherings in 333 cities worldwide — including countries like Switzerland, Azerbaijan, India, Serbia, Egypt, Brazil and Russia. It considers music and musicians as an untapped global resource in the same way that people with a spare bedroom are replacing the hotel establishment.

Sitting on the deck of his family’s tasting room, Warren Bogle looks out over the vineyard his grandfather planted in 1968 in the low-lying land of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. That first planting of 20 acres of vines in Clarksburg transformed the Bogle family from row crop farmers to one of the region’s most successful winemakers.

Studies have shown that the only thing worse than bad customer service is inconsistent service, which leaves a consumer confused and wary about what to expect when they walk into a store, call the help desk or send an email. With more choices available than ever before, we all want consistency and to know what to expect in a given situation.