About The Purpose is Profit

Ed “Skip” McLaughlin Ed is the founder of four businesses and is currently running Blue Sunsets LLC, a real estate and angel investment firm. He bootstrapped his first business, United Systems Integrators (USI) Corporation, a corporate real estate outsourcing firm, and grew it into an Inc. 500 company. In 2001, Ed earned Entrepreneur of the Year honors from Ernst & Young. In 2005, he sold USI to Johnson Controls, a Fortune 100 company, and at that point, became CEO of JCI’s Global Workplace Business for the Americas. A member of the Board of Governors for Tufts Medical Center, Ed founded its David E. Wazer Breast Cancer Research Fund. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. Active in philanthropy, Ed lives with his wife in Connecticut and has three adult children. Email: Ed@ThePurposeIsProfit.com LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/EdSkipMcLaughlin Twitter: @purposeisprofit --- Wyn is the founder of Upstart Business Planning, where she works with entrepreneurs to develop plans that answer the questions investors ask most often. Previously, she was Managing Director of Business Plans International in New York and Co-Director of the Small Business Resource Center at Norwalk Community College. Wyn has an MBA in finance and marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She serves on the board of a local nonprofit she helped found, At Home In Darien. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and has two adult children. Email: Wyn@ThePurposeIsProfit.com LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/WynLydecker

Inside Entrepreneurship

 By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Most articles focus on traditional, whole-hog entrepreneurship and sometimes about lifestyle entrepreneurship. There is, however, another style of entrepreneurship I would like to bring to your attention: “intrapreneurship,” a term that’s been in circulation since 1982. Lockheed Martin was first to sponsor in-house entrepreneurship in 1943, when it created [...]

By | May 2nd, 2014|

Writing a Book: Process

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker We can’t believe that we are actually writing and editing Chapter 9! That means we are two-thirds done with the creation of our book, “The Purpose Is Profit.” Over the years I (Wyn) have read many articles on the process of writing, and it seems that every author – [...]

By | May 1st, 2014|

The Cost of Control

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In baseball, you have two approaches to hitting. If you hold the bat at the very end, you can get a heck of a lot of power in your swing, but you'll have less control once you set it in motion. If you choke up on the bat, you [...]

By | April 28th, 2014|

Entrepreneurs, Scarcity, and Success

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker I recently read "Freeing Up Intelligence," in Scientific American, and it got me thinking about entrepreneurship and success. The article talks about how scarcity of any kind - money, time, and other resources - affects our mental abilities. In a scarce situation, when we are strapped for money, time, [...]

By | April 24th, 2014|

What’s Up With Clinkle?

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Clinkle is the name of a digital-payment app startup that has recently made a bit of a media splash. Both Business Insider and BloombergBusinessweek have covered the company not for its revolutionary product, but for a Titanic-like story of young entrepreneur who seems to be steering his brilliant idea [...]

By | April 21st, 2014|

Securing the Heart of an Enterprise

   By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The Internet is buzzing over Heartbleed this week. Heartbleed is a simple human error that has compromised millions of transactions people thought were secure because they were performed using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption. Users are encouraged to change passwords, accounts, and cards to foil hackers of affected [...]

By | April 18th, 2014|

Exercise, Productivity, and Richard Branson

  By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker One of my angel investments is with a company called Infinity Fitness. Unlike high-profile fitness chains, Infinity prides itself in bootcamp-style workouts and personal training. Exercising at Infinity is about sweat and sacrifice, not just showing up and socializing. I invested in Infinity Fitness because I believe in [...]

By | April 17th, 2014|

Writing a Book is Like Starting a Business

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker When I (Ed) first started out to write “The Purpose Is Profit,” I thought Wyn and I would be able to crank out the book in six to nine months and quickly interest a publisher. But creating a book is not quite that simple. It takes far more than [...]

By | April 16th, 2014|

Going With The Flow

   By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In What I'm Still Learning About Managing Cash Flow from the New York Times' You're the Boss blog, Jay Goltz shares his experience as a small business owner with cash-flow management challenges. He describes with some chagrin his experience of having made a shortsighted financial choice that had repercussions a full nine [...]

By | April 14th, 2014|

Who Wants to be a Real Entrepreneur?

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In the world of video gaming, there are different strata to the social hierarchy. Someone who plays a lot of Candy Crush or Words with Friends on a smartphone is considered a "casual." This is not a compliment. Real gamers, it is said, build their own top-of-the-line computers just for gaming, [...]

By | April 11th, 2014|