I've been a NASCAR fan my whole life. I've watched many years worth of highs and lows in the sport.  Avid fans surely have an opinion about the events of the last lap during the Nationwide race Saturday night at Gateway International Speedway. For those who aren't familiar here's a recap:

Brad Keselowski and Carl Edwards have a history of tangling with each other in both of NASCAR'S top two series. On Saturday night they were messing with each other all night and things got especially heated on the last lap. Brad made contact with Carl in turn 1 of the last lap. He moved Carl out of the way and took the lead. Now most fans (including myself) will tell you that "rubbin is racing" and I agree. Brad's actions did not cause any harm to any driver or spectator and those actions didn't cause any monetary damage to any other team. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for Carl.  Moments before taking the checkered flag Carl intentionally wrecked Brad's car and the resulting accident gathered and destroyed many other race cars. Fortunately no one was hurt. Carl won the race.

Three days later NASCAR responded by placing both drivers on probation and Carl was docked 60 driver and owner points and Carl received a $25,000 fine.

Now for my readers who are wondering why am I writing about NASCAR on my blog, here's why:

Let's examine the financial impact of Carl Edwards actions. The recent economic events have not been easy on this sport. It takes tens of millions of dollars per year to fund and compete in one of NASCAR's top series. This money comes from corporate sponsorships and many teams in the Nationwide series are not fully funded and some even have no funding at all. At an apporoximate value of $100,000 for each car, the intentional actions of Carl Edwards caused a tremendous amount of financial loss for many teams.  We all know that wrecked race cars are a part of this sport but with no insurance to cover the losses it must be extremely hard for a team owner to sit by and do nothing as Carl (who's team is fully funded by Aflac and Scotts) takes credit for a win that he so shamefully earned. In fact If I were the owner of one of those teams I would be demanding financial retribution from Carl personally.

Or NASCAR could have done the following:

The penalties issued were nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately the real victims are the team owners of the other cars. NASCAR should have written the following memo to those owners:

"If you have suffered financial damages as a result of the actions of Carl Edwards on the last lap of the most previous race, please submit an invoice to NASCAR for those damages including parts and labor. We will do our best to pay your invoice in full."

NASCAR then should have totaled these invoices (which I believe would easily have exceeded $1,000,000) and issued the total amount to Carl as a fine. His options would be to pay the fine in full or forfeit his participation privilages in future races. NASCAR would use the money from Carl to pay the invoices.

My takeaway? Yes, rubbin is racing, but a quality race car driver should be able to rub without causing an injury or financial loss to any other driver, spectator or team owner. And if a driver isn't capable of this, well, then they better have a fat wallet.

Currently MyRecyclingReports.com is being tested in the marketplace by a select group of recycling companies.  The following is an example of an opportunity that was shown to us:

Let's call our recycling company, "Fred's Recycling" or "Fred's" for short.  Fred has a customer that we will call the "Acme Corporation" or "Acme" for short.  Currently, here is how the application is designed to work: Fred creates a customer with a company name, "Acme Corporation".  The application requires an email address and password for Acme.  John Smith is the manager of Environmental, Health & Safety for Acme and John will be overseeing the recycling program.  Fred sets up the application so that John has access by entering his email address (john.smith@acme.com) as the login.  All is well, until...

John calls up Fred one morning and says, "Fred, your recycling company is doing such a great job and I really love using your online web application for recycling tonnage and rebate reports, and I'd like you to handle the recycling for our other building."

It turns out that Acme has another building right down the street.  John wants to be able to use the online system to manage the reports, but he wants them kept separate from the first building.  John asks Fred to create another customer account for his second building.  Again, all sounds great until we realize that our application is using John's email address as the login name and therefore we cannot use it again.  John cannot have multiple customer accounts with the same email address as the login name.

Or can he?  And that's what we're working on today!  We have figured out a temporary workaround, but on a more permanent basis we will have to change the application to allow user accounts to be assigned to multiple companies.

The above situation is real and shows how important it is to us to get MyRecyclingReports.com out in the marketplace, in the hands of recycling companies.  Their feedback and discoveries are extremely valuable to us.

Here's something I've noticed ever since the economic downturn: people who are quick to tell you how wealthy they are, are also quick to tell you how poor they are.

Like most entrepreneurs, I started my company from nothing.  I had no savings and no venture capital.  I've built everything I have (with the help of my extremely devoted partner) from the ground up.  This has made me very humble, even as I become more successful.  When I was first starting MCC Recycling Services I was very quiet about how large (or small) we really were.  I didn't feel that it was anyone's business and therefore kept the numbers to myself.  Now that I am successful and our company has grown, I have found that I am still extremely tight lipped about personal and business finances.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for many people (both wealthy and not) and the last thing on my to-do list is broadcasting my finances to them. 

On the contrary to the above description (on both before and after accounts) I have met many people who are very quick to tell how well they are doing.  When things are good, they're going to let you know it.  They'll flash cash, broadcast their wealth and basically just sound obnoxious whenever you are around.  Then, when shit hits the fan and they lose it all, they are very quick to tell you that too.  That is the surprising part to me.  I would assume that these people would be so embarrassed that they wouldn't want to talk about it.  However they're the first to tell you that their once thriving business (which was probably bullshit anyway) is now defunct and they're selling their assets to pay the bills. 

Fascinating opposite personalities.