Fund-A-Need, Raise the Paddle, Cash Call, Adopt a Family are all names for the same process of simply asking the attendees for cash during a fund-raising auction. Recently one of our clients credited us here at Reynolds & Buckley with inventing this process.  I wish I could take the credit!  Rather I absconded with the […]

As a profession, auctioneering has long had performance tied to compensation. Auctioneers have based their worth, literally, on their ability to market and sell assets for their clients. This makes complete sense in the world of antiquities, fine art, liquidations, estate sales, vehicle auctions, real estate auctions and the like, but it is unconscionable in […]

At the end of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-award winning western, Unforgiven, Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman’s character) finds himself about to die at the hand of Edward Munny (Eastwood), one of the very criminals he’s spent his entire life protecting his little town from. “I don’t deserve this… to die like this,” Dagget says. Munny pauses […]

Every event I’ve done this year, except one, has started off the same way: With attendees exhibiting an almost palapable, universal apprehension during the cocktail hour. I’ve had people come up to me and ask me, point blank, “What’s going to happen during the live auction? Is anyone going to bid?” The universal unspoken question, […]

Reynolds & Buckley will be conducting a workshop entitled Fundraising Auctions in Hard Times on Tuesday, February 24th at the Volunteer Center of Sonoma County. Company founder and nationally recognized fundraising expert David Reynolds will be on hand to discuss the challenges facing anyone conducting a fundraising auction today, along with associates Greg Quiroga and […]

My first reaction on seeing that the Naples Wine Auction raised $5,000,000 this year is that every thing is a matter of perspective.  It all depends on whether you see money as absolute or relative. Naples raises $5 million sounds really good. Naples auction down by two-thirds sounds really bad. I suspect that we will […]

Colleen and I have spent the last few days in the wine country.  We have had meetings in Napa, Mendocino and Sonoma.  It has given us a chance to talk to several vintners.  They are all complaining about wine sales generally but the bright spot is that direct sales and their wine club sales are […]

Disappointing News. I just saw a depressing report from the Spectrem Group of Chicago. They spend their time tracking trends among the wealthy. This is the first feed-back that I have seen on the effects of the economy specifically on the wealthy. The first question answered is whether the rich have, through access to some […]

Who would have ever thought that I would start to think of 2007 as the good old days. In the last year the combined loss in property values and the stock market amounts to over $9 trillion, or approximately $90,000 for every household in America. I suspect that it is the secret hope of every […]

This is from today’s Wall St. Journal: “According to a new survey from American Express Publishing and the Harrison Group, nearly half of respondents with incomes of $250,000 or more agreed with the statement that “I worry that at some point I could run out of money.” That’s up from about a third in April. […]