By the time most of you read this, Cyndi and I will be enjoying a quiet lunch - complete with a pint of stout - on the patio of an idyllic pub in a small village not far from Galway. This will be our first trip to Ireland, ancestral home to my wife of 34 years and a ninth generation Canadian, as well as our first true vacation away from home in several years. Frankly, I need the break, so I'm hoping you'll understand why Home Goods Online isn't being updated regularly for the next couple of weeks.

Every business is the sum total of the performance of all the people in it. To prosper, we must achieve world-class performance, individually and collectively, regardless of the size and nature of our business.

I would like to continue last month's discussion on the growing sophistication of online marketing. As you might recall, it was the result of attending a recent seminar at High Point University featuring several top notch internet marketers shared their insights on growing importance of this relatively new phenomenon to our business. Christine Pierpoint, vice president of emerging media at IMRE (http://www.imre.com/), spoke on measuring the effectiveness of online marketing by measuring ROI (return on investment) through analytics.