Greenfield mini-golf business to offer inside entertainment for winter

Business News

When it opened in Greenfield in August 2023, Holey Mackerel became one of Milwaukee County’s newest mini-golf locations.The venue also offers features such as an arcade, batting cages and a bar with a daily happy hour.But with winter around the corner, Holey Mackerel is giving guests an opportunity to have fun by shifting its focus to indoor activities.On Monday, Nov. 4, Holey Mackerel will debut SipNShanty, a seasonal indoor adventure that will offer guests cocktails and various food options, according to Holy Mackerel’s owner, Tipper Duval.”SipNShanty is what Holey Mackerel will become all winter long,” Duval said.He said it will consist of fun nostalgic cocktails, an ice fishing/ice shanty theme, and food from Holey Mackerel’s new food truck ShortFin.”It was created because while Holey Mackerel is a super fun summer spot, we want to create a fun food and beverage-focused spot that you can only find under our roof.”Before it changed hands, the property had been closed every winter for the last 30 years, so Duval wants people to know the business will be open during the cold weather months.”We want people to know we are open, and make it worth their time to come see what we have going on,” said Duval.ShortFin food truck will provide Korean chicken sliders, steak tacos, loaded fries, cheese curds and moreIn addition to SipNShanty, guests can enjoy ShortFin ― a food truck that has permanent residency at Holey Mackerel ― named after the shortfin squid, which is known to be eaten by mackerels.”While small and adorable, the squid is known to be able to change color and adapt to its surroundings,” Duval said. “That felt like a perfect description for how our truck will operate.”While the food truck isn’t seafood-specific and won’t be serving up fresh squid, it will offer food items such as Korean chicken sliders, steak tacos, loaded fries, cheese curds and more.Duval said the food truck is in the development stages, but is hopeful to have it in full action soon.He also said there would be plenty of options for kids and that they are also developing a Friday fish fry and other unique specials that will correlate with sports and holiday-themed ideas, such as a Grinch-themed holiday pop-up that is planned to debut in December.Guests have complimented Holey Mackerel, according to DuvalDuval said some of Holey Mackerel’s best compliments from guests have been about changes they notice at the business.”Some of my favorite comments from people have been about how happy they are to see the constant upgrades, and being able to drive by and see all the changes and how hard we are working, and how good it all looks,” Duval said.He also noted that he loves to hear about how much people enjoy the drinks and food they can get at Holey Mackerel because they never expect the quality and overall deliciousness to come from “a mini golf course.”When asked how it feels to be an established business owner, Duval, who also owns the Lost Whale in Milwaukee, said he’s so busy that he never has enough time to think about it.”All I can do is be thankful that people choose to come hang out at Holey Mackerel or Lost Whale and give enormous credit to Maria and Dan at Lost Whale, the whole crew at Holey Mackerel, and (to) Jes and my kids who are beyond patient and supportive of me. It’s hard, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”Winter hours at Holey Mackerel expected to begin Nov. 6, depending on the weatherCurrently, Holey Mackerel’s hours are Tuesdays from 3 to 9 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 10 p.m., Fridays from 3 to 11 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.Winter hours are expected to begin on Nov. 6 depending on the weather. Those hours will be Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays from 4 to 11 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m.Duval said those hours could be adjusted.”If the business is there, we will consider opening earlier on weekends in the colder months so families can still come enjoy the food truck and arcade,” he said. “And of course throughout all of SipNShanty, we will have lots of family-style events for all ages and not just the grownups.”For more information on Holey Mackerel, visit their website or follow them on social media.Contact Adrienne Davis at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @AdriReportss.

Kate Bush: Little Shrew review – this devastating film will make you weep at war’s violence against children

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

All of Kate Bush’s sense of wonder, and how she tempers it with not just melancholy but outright sorrow, is threaded through her devastatingly moving new animated short film, Little Shrew.Bush hasn’t performed live in a decade, or released new music since 2011 – and there’s an initial twinge of disappointment on discovering that this film isn’t built around a piece of new music. (In a BBC Radio 4 interview promoting it, she hinted that she will begin writing new material again soon.) Instead, it’s soundtracked by an edit of Snowflake, the opening song from that 2011 album 50 Words for Snow – a duet between Bush and her son Bertie.Bush has long wrung stunning material out of family dynamics. Cloudbusting is full of the boyish admiration sons have for their fathers long after we become men; This Woman’s Work, about a crisis amid childbirth, is so stricken with awe at new life; Aerial was full of this material, from the maternal study of A Coral Room to a wonderfully guileless song about Bertie himself.Snowflake continues that tradition, as Bertie takes the form of a snowflake, whirling in the night, and Bush hopes to catch him: “The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you.” Once again it gets to the heart of parenthood: its bewilderment, and how desperate it makes us to shelter our children in the world’s blizzard, snowblinded by love. There is perhaps a hidden wisdom, too, unspoken in the song – if we grip our children too hard, they could melt away from us.It always felt bigger than Kate and Bertie, but Bush adds a terrifically powerful new dimension by making it, in Little Shrew, a lament for children affected by war, particularly in Ukraine (the film was made in collaboration with the charity War Child). As Bush says of Bertie in an accompanying essay: “I think his performance is extremely moving and although I’d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.”Bush writes and directs the film, storyboarded from her own sketches. These were drawn up by Jim Kay, the illustrator best known for Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (which inspired Bush) and pictorial editions of the Harry Potter series, and then animated with the studio Inkubus.Little Shrew follows a Ukrainian pygmy shrew, captivated by a ball of cosmic light emanating from deep in the solar system. The creature scurries out of its cosy spot in the top pocket of a coat – and the animation coolly pans back to show that this is the corpse of a soldier sitting against a tree. The shrew makes its way through a war-torn landscape, and into the melee of Russian strikes, fired from under the chillingly blank face of an unmanned drone. Bush dwells on the gaping maw of a bombed building, animated from a photo by Maksim Levin, a Ukrainian photographer killed in the conflict.View image in fullscreenBush writes that she originally considered a child as the protagonist, and some might find this exquisitely adorable mammal, nose twitching with worry, to be a sentimental and even nauseatingly cutesy choice. But for me it allows Bush to actually intensify the horror. Watching its sinewy little body, twisting in fear and rent by the force of an exploding bomb, is close to unbearable; a similar sequence of a child could have felt exploitative or overdone.And as a symbol for children caught in the conflict, the shrew has such potency: children move through wars with the confusion and vulnerability of animals, often without even having language to give shape to the trauma of hearing explosions or seeing corpses. They are as innocent as shrews, too – and, as both Ukraine and Gaza have shown, as unheeded by the aggressors.Bush undermines the sentimentality all the more by writing an ambiguous ending. She herself is perhaps that orb of light, asserting once more: “The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you” – a moving reminder to the children of Ukraine that they are not forgotten, intensified by this song suffused with such ardent, active love for her own son. But the shrew is seen tumbling through blackening space, never landing. Bush underlines there is no end in sight for children affected by war, except for an ending forced on them. This film made me weep for every one.

Make Your Next TSA Experience A Piece Of Cake With These 20 Target Travel Essentials

Travel

Promising review: “This bag has been to NYC, Boston, Rome, Sorrento, Florence, Amsterdam and London. I have had this suitcase for 3 years and carried it on flights and trains, and it has been an absolute trooper. No issues, very sturdy, the wheels are smooth. Bought my daughter one too. I highly recommend this bag!” —SFM22Price: $62.99 (originally $89.99; available in six colors)

21 “Captivating” Books That People Recommend If You’re In A Reading Rut

Arts & Culture, Books

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m adding some of these books to my TBR as we speak! Also, no shade, but Throne of Glass IS better than ACOTAR, and there’s no question about it. If you’ve gone through a reading slump, what book got you out of it? Let me know in the comments, or you can anonymously submit using this form!

Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Cooper: Sept. and Oct. slow tourism season worsened by hurricanes

Travel

September and October were underperforming months in regard to tourism visits, Minister of Tourism, Investments and Aviation Chester Cooper said yesterday, though he said the forward-looking numbers leading into the end of the year could still put the country on a path to break last year’s visitor records.He said the typical slow period that usually occurs around September and October was exacerbated by Hurricane Milton, which struck the country’s biggest source market for visitors, Florida; and Hurricane Oscar, which disrupted some travel to the southern Bahamas.“The forecast still is that we will beat the record from last year,” said Cooper.“We had some bumps in the road during the months of September and October. Specifically, we had Milton that impacted Georgia, and we had Oscar recently that would have interrupted some flow of traffic through The Bahamas.“Milton also impacted, in a very serious way, central Florida. Florida is our core market. We are still assessing the overall impact.“We are offering our support in these markets that are so important to us. Once things settle down and people are back on their feet, we know that they will travel again, and the proximity of The Bahamas is a blessing.”According to Cooper, travelers have shortened their booking windows, meaning they have become a little more impulsive in buying their travel.Shortened booking windows also lessens the amount of insight tourism officials have on future travel.However, Cooper said the country continues to have strong airlift across the Eastern Seaboard of the US, and he is confident people will begin to travel as the busy winter season kicks into high gear.“We’re very strong with direct non-stop service from more than 25 cities across North America,” he said.“And we expect all of these pieces together are going to help us to end the year strong.“We’re expecting a very strong November and December, and we consider September and October a wash, really. But, we’re we’re coming back strong. I’m sure right after the hurricane season.”He added that the ministry continues to work on airlift from emerging markets, including the Middle East, South and Central America and Africa.

Every Business’s Goal: Cut Costs And Increase Revenue

Business News

Thomas Lah is the executive director of TSIA. You can also hear his insights on TECHtonic: Trends in Technology and Services.

Growth over profitability has been the mantra of the tech industry for more than 20 years, but times are changing. The investment dollars that once motivated companies to follow this path are now being directed elsewhere. Part of this reality stems from the economy, but it’s also due to investment dollars being earmarked for AI development.

This evolution is causing aggressive changes to tech business models, directly impacting headcount.

In Q2 of 2023, TSIA Cloud 40 index reports showed tech companies’ profit margins down 12%. One year later, that measure demonstrated an enormous jump to 0.1%. The key to this dramatic change has been trimming head count. However, trimming further would cut into most companies’ functional muscle. As a result, these businesses must find a new path to improving their incoming revenue.

Employees are expensive. This is not a new revelation, but, in an economic environment where prioritizing profitability is paramount to survival, the cost of manpower will remain a focal point of leadership teams around the globe. The reality is that most tech companies don’t have a profitability model in place that will allow them to add staff.
AI is the new key to automating tasks, improving employee value and increasing revenue for most tech companies. To do this, massively evolving efficiencies and finding a path to increase revenues without adding significant expenses are required. This is why the rise of AI in the tech industry is dominating headlines around the globe.

The lifeblood of AI is data. This technology takes large sets of information and processes it to identify patterns, using past outcomes to anticipate future results. After decades of growth at all costs, most tech companies have large data sets but can’t leverage them.

So how will AI move the efficiency needle quickly? It will begin by revolutionizing the customer journey.
One of the greatest threats to any business is churn, or losing existing customers. Customer success teams are specifically charged with ensuring clients have a positive experience. Many factors influence that experience, creating hundreds or thousands of data points. For a human to process this information and get a complete picture of the potential to lose a customer would require massive amounts of time. But for AI, this work takes only moments.

Put simply, AI identifies the propensity for churn and why that potential exists and recommends areas to improve a customer’s experience. Then human beings can work with the customer to solve these challenges so their time investment focuses on the human experience, not the laborious data collection and analysis. As AI solutions grow and mature, these functions will become more efficient and effective, making human efforts more focused and valuable.
Today, 53% of tech companies have told us that they are investing in AI to help with customer success efforts, and more specifically, predicting churn. These new efficiencies will help stabilize revenue, but what about increasing revenue? Can AI play a role here?
The short answer is yes, but we’re only just starting to see examples of how.
The earliest investments for revenue growth are primarily focused on sales leads. According to our research, more than 40% of tech companies are making investments in this function. Theoretically, a larger pool of good-fit sales targets should yield more, longer-term revenue sources.
However, securing customer relationships is a more challenging hurdle to overcome.
The most valuable work by a salesperson is directly interacting with prospects and negotiating sales. You’d likely prefer a high-value salesperson to focus on person-to-person interactions as much as possible.
For every sales pitch, there’s the process of researching the prospect, creating the sales presentation, building a proposal and various other standard practices. With the implementation of AI, many of these efforts can be automated.
Those examples are just the low-hanging fruit.
In the foreseeable months and years, I believe B2B companies will increasingly adopt a digital-first approach to serving their prospects and customers. This will be characterized by simplified transactions, more manageable implementations and electronically-monitored product success.
This digital-first approach is not new. The rise of Amazon and the success of more complex sales, like automobiles, demonstrate how automation and efficiencies allow technology to drive more sales.
I believe AI will drive the B2B customer life cycle of tomorrow. The industry has operated on a high-touch, labor-intensive model for decades, but AI is revolutionizing this traditional approach.
AI’s ability to quickly consume, manage and process vast data sets will impact every aspect of the customer life cycle. In the early stages, AI-powered tools can personalize prospecting, automate product demos and even conduct sales conversations. As customers move toward implementation and adoption, AI can enable self-configuring products, self-generating integrations and autonomous customer support.
The reality is that AI is already changing how businesses operate. As B2B tech companies prioritize profitability, we will likely see AI bring more and more efficiencies. The only question is how to make the right investment early.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

TEAM Industries Audubon celebrates 40 years of business

Business News

AUDUBON

— The year was 1984, Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was dominating the charts, “Ghostbusters” was cracking up audiences and TEAM Industries Audubon was opening up shop.What do all those things have in common? They’ve got a lot of staying power.

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A TEAM Audubon employee at work on the factory floor.Tris Anderson / Detroit Lakes Tribune

It’s been 40 years since TEAM Audubon, then named Audubon Manufacturing, opened for business, and while a lot of things have changed, some haven’t. For example, TEAM Audubon still specializes in manufacturing gears and shafts for snowmobiles, ATVs, golf carts and other similar vehicles, just like it did in 1984. TEAM is also still a family-owned business.The Audubon plant was the second TEAM plant to open, following the first plant in Cambridge, Minnesota, in 1967.

“TEAM’s founder, Don Ricke, he had a dream to bring manufacturing and jobs to smaller towns,” said TEAM Industries marketing and communications manager Tammy Harstad. “He was from the northern area, up by Bagley (Minnesota) and he wanted to make sure that people in the area could stay in the area and still have a decent paying job.”In pursuit of that goal, TEAM found a piece of property on the north end of Audubon and built the plant there, where it remains today. Harstad estimated the plant was under 20,000 square feet when it first opened. Today, the plant is 110,000 square feet and employs approximately 180 people.Over the last four decades, TEAM Audubon, and the company as a whole, has grown in lockstep with the popularity of the vehicles it produces parts for.“We first started out doing snowmobiles, then we moved into doing ATVs, then side-by-sides because the power sport industry has changed so much,” Harstad said of the Audubon plant.TEAM has eight plants, six of which are in Minnesota including Detroit Lakes, Park Rapids and Bagley. TEAM also has a plant in Andrews, North Carolina, and two plants in Ramos, Mexico.

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TEAM Audubon manufactures gears for vehicles such as snowmobiles, ATVs, golf carts and more. Tris Anderson / Detroit Lakes Tribune

“If our customers are growing, we want to grow with them, hence we went from one plant to now eight,” she said.And as TEAM Audubon has grown, changes to the manufacturing process have also taken place, like the introduction of automation using robots, which occurred sometime in the early 2000s.Harstad estimated there are at least 50 robots in the Audubon plant. Those robots have changed how production flows. Where workers used to have to bounce around the factory floor during the manufacturing process, a lot of the work can be done in a singular workstation now.

That process is called “cellular manufacturing.” An employee is still involved and oversees a “cell” or workstation, but the robots allow one worker to do what would have taken 10 in the past.Automation has allowed TEAM Audubon to stay competitive with manufacturers around the world, such as those in China, and keep the plant running smoothly among worker shortages that are commonplace around the country, Harstad said.And TEAM isn’t strictly in the manufacturing business, they’re also in the business of giving back to the community. Through the TEAM Foundation, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, TEAM has contributed to building and supporting the Detroit Lakes Community and Cultural Center, the Boys and Girls Club, Detroit Mountain, Becker County Museum and area shelter centers such as Lakes Area Crisis Center.The TEAM Foundation has also contributed to, health care providers, community service programs and schools, offering internships to area students, supporting STEM events and robotics teams.

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TEAM Audubon has about 50 robots that have helped automate and streamline the manufacturing process.Tris Anderson / Detroit Lakes Tribune

To commemorate 40 years, TEAM Audubon has hosted in-plant events with games, prizes and treats. Retirees were invited for coffee, cookies and a tour to see how much the plant has grown since entering their golden years.That celebration culminates Sunday, Oct. 27, with a trunk-or-treat event at the Audubon plant from 4-6 p.m. The community is invited to the event, which will have hot dogs, treats, games, and, of course, plenty of candy ready to be handed out to kids.So, what does TEAM Audubon have planned for the next 40 years?“We plan to continue to grow, our new CEO (Micah Ricke) has some awesome ideas and ambitions for TEAM and we see great things coming up,” Harstad said.

A TEAM Industries Audubon employee checks the quality of one of the parts made in the Audubon plant. Contributed / Jeremy Albright / Team Industries

The TEAM Audubon plant opened its doors in 1984 and was less than 20,000 square feet. Today, the plant is over 110,000 square feet. Tris Anderson / Detroit Lakes Tribune

Business Expectations For The Elections Are Positive, And It Means Changes – Kunelauri

Business News

“We have no alternative but integration with European civilization. We must return to this path quickly,” – Malkhaz Kunelauri, the founder of the company “MK Development Group” told TV-program “Business Morning”.According to him, business expectation is related to the changes that should lead the country to solid and steady political and economic development.”Business expectations for the elections are positive, and positive, of course, means changes and steady and long-term solid development. We are waiting for the new parliament to return to the EU pass. This is an absolutely incredible reality in light of the aspirations that our country has, and that is why we consider this problem to be the biggest and we expect to solve it quickly.A solid and steady environment is important for business development, which will affect both political and economic issues,” said Kunelauri.