Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed Gene Townley.

The Gene Townley Commentaries

On a recent Price of Business show, Host Kevin Price interviewed Gene Townley.

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Three different triggers put a similar squeeze on domestic exploration and production companies. Gulf Coast Western, a Dallas-based operator founded in 1970, answered each one with the same sequence: trim overhead, keep the people who know the business, and keep funding prospects.

Where the sequence started

The 2008 recession set the pattern. Published Gulf Coast Western reviews note that many oil and gas companies restructured, suspended operations, or closed during that period, while Gulf Coast Western cut overhead, kept its key personnel, and kept making prospect investments. The same reviews say CEO Matthew Fleeger has framed the company’s acquisition approach around downturn opportunities that other operators won’t touch.

A Cascade Business News profile adds detail: technology was upgraded alongside the overhead cuts, and once the economy steadied the company had become “a much stronger business entity.”

Overhead first, people last

Matthew Fleeger explained the logic in an industry interview: the way out of the low points of the business cycle is to “cut overhead without losing talent.” He also talks about wanting the “flexibility to ride the oil price roller coaster successfully and with minimal risk.”

That order shows up in CEO World’s coverage of his approach, which describes cutting corporate overhead, adopting new technology, and tightening operational efficiency, alongside cash reserves, rigorous due diligence, and transparent relationships with partners.

The Orbit purchase

The clearest payoff came in the middle of the 2015 slump. Substantially all of Orbit Energy Partners’ assets were acquired by a Gulf Coast Western subsidiary, with a production effective date of Oct. 1, 2015 and a December close. The deal was disclosed on Jan. 14, 2016. The package included working interests in 13 producing wells, a 14th well entering production, and 140 defined drilling locations carrying roughly 30 million barrels of oil equivalent in total reserve potential. The area of mutual interest covers about 1,000 square miles across seven Louisiana parishes.

Underwriting an inventory like that takes technical staff and operator relationships that are already in place. A company that had gutted its team or emptied its prospect budget in 2008 wouldn’t have moved easily with crude under $40.

The same posture, years later

The habit outlasted the 2010s. In September 2024, The Print Media reported, Gulf Coast Western’s Dallas headquarters building was bought at a foreclosure sale, a move Fleeger called a “contrarian investment strategy” at a time when many investors were avoiding commercial real estate.

Gulf Coast Western reviews from long-term investors focus on communication: one who’s worked with the company since 2012 credits it with communicating well through the peaks and valleys of the oil business. The company’s A+ Better Business Bureau rating comes up in the same reviews.

The next downturn will have its own cause. If the last three are any guide, the team stays, the overhead shrinks, and the prospect list keeps moving.

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Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed attorney, Lee Kaplan.

Kevin Price, Editor at Large for USABR and Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business show, recently interviewed Lee Kaplan of the business law firm, Murphy Ball Stratton about the politics of Texas and nationwide. Kaplan is a long time contributor of the Price of Business show and brings important perspectives on politics, business, and the law.

On a recent Price of Business show, Host Kevin Price visited with attorney Lee Kaplan.

• Law Firm Introduction: Lee Kaplan introduces his litigation firm, Murphy Ball Stratton (mbs-smartlaw.com), highlighting their work in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and mediations.
• ICE Overreach Concerns: The pair discuss aggressive enforcement tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), comparing them to extreme authoritarian methods. They point to instances of unmarked vehicles driving individuals off the road and firearm incidents, attributing the systemic issues to a lack of legislative immigration reform.
• Critique of Political Leadership: Kaplan blames congressional inaction on strategic political maneuvers intended to keep immigration as a campaign issue rather than resolving it through compromise. They also discuss administrative economic claims, dismissing efforts to deny rising living costs as out of touch with average consumers.
• Political Strategy & Elections: Price and Kaplan explore shifts in national political figures, candidate viability, and electoral dynamics, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of future presidential choices.
• Voter Call to Action: Kaplan concludes with a direct appeal to citizens across the country, stressing the necessity of individual participation in upcoming elections and urging everyone to exercise their right to vote.

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Key Provisions of the Deal

Strategic Wins and Losses

Ripped from the news: watch out for invisible text. Text you can’t see can hurt you. A professor gave the class an essay assignment. Many students just copied and pasted the assignment directly into AI. But as it turned out, the visible text was not the key; it was the invisible text that was critical.

Mixed into the visible text were additional words that blended in with the background color. While the blended words weren’t visible to the students, when the students copied and pasted the assignment into AI, the AI read the invisible words as part of the question. The invisible verbiage told the AI to add a specific nonsense word to its answer. When a student’s submission included the nonsense word, the professor could see that the student had fed the assignment into AI.

Now you may not be a student. But the impact of invisible text isn’t limited to academia. All text visible or otherwise factors into enterprise search. Enterprise search like dtSearch® enables instant concurrent multithreaded searching across terabytes. But it does so only after initially indexing that data. The indexing process recognizes all unique words and numbers and tabulates the location of these across the data. A single dtSearch index can hold up to a terabyte of text and there are no limits on the number of indexes that the software can create and make available for instant simultaneous searching.

While indexing is highly resource intensive, concurrent searching is very resource-light, enabling instant multithreaded searching. dtSearch can further update its indexes to reflect new files, file edits or file deletions without disrupting ongoing instant multithreaded searching. And while indexing will always be more time consuming than searching, a 64-bit multithreaded indexer can speed up the process a lot.

Getting dtSearch started on indexing is easy. Just point to the email archives and other folders to index and the indexer will automatically take it from there. So long as the files appear in the Windows folder system, the files themselves can be local or remote, including One Drive / Office 365 files, DropBox files, SharePoint attachments, etc.

To review a file, you’d typically pull it up in an associated application like a PDF in Adobe Reader, a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, a database in Access, a word processing document in Word, a presentation in PowerPoint, a note file in OneNote, web-ready content in a browser, an email in an email program, etc. But for the indexer, pulling up each file in its associated application would be way too slow. Instead of pulling up each file in its associated application, dtSearch heads to each file’s binary format to parse it.

This binary format approach affects the scope of enterprise search, including with respect to hidden text. To correctly parse a binary format, the indexer needs to figure out its exact right file type. Of course, it’s easy to save a file with an extension that does not match the file type, like saving a Word file with a .PDF extension or saving a PDF with a .DOCX extension. But the binary format has all of the file type information inside of it, enabling file type recognition regardless of file extension.

The binary format further lets the enterprise search indexer correctly parse not only standalone files but also nested files. An email can have a ZIP or RAR attachment containing an Excel spreadsheet with a recursively embedded Word document and the binary format will make all that available to the indexer for parsing. There is a lot of obscure metadata that is easy to miss viewing a file in its associated application. But all metadata is readily apparent in a file’s binary format, and easily accessible to the indexer.

The binary format further covers visible text that you’d easily spot viewing the file in its associated application as well as camouflaged text like the professor used, blended into the background color. In fact, all text regardless of contrast is on the same footing in the binary format. Also in the binary format are tracked changes if not fully accepted and deleted. Similarly, a black rectangle can block out text, making it appear redacted. But the text itself can remain in the binary format for the indexer to access.

For international language coverage, the binary format encompasses all of a file’s Unicode encodings. A single email or other file can go from one language to the next including English, other European languages, right-to-left Middle Eastern languages and even double-byte character Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The binary format will include all of that encoding information for the indexer to pick up.

After indexing, dtSearch has over 25 different full-text and metadata instant concurrent search types, including natural language, Boolean and/or/not, proximity, numeric range, regular expression, credit card number, hash value and other search options. Some of these 25+ concurrent search options are specifically configured to sift through common data deviations. Say you have the word invisible mistyped or mis-OCR’ed as inviNible. In dtSearch, fuzzy searching adjusts from 0 to 10 to find inviNible in a search for invisible.

Another example of sifting through common data deviations would be date and date range searching. A date range search for date(9/30/26 to 2/15/27) would pick up not only 1/10/27 but also January 10 2027 and Jan 10 2027. Similarly, concept searching can extend to synonyms from a built-in thesaurus, like unseeable for invisible. dtSearch also supports custom synonym rings. If you are working on the Tom Jones case, while Tom and Jones may not normally be synonyms, you can make them synonyms for purposes of your case.

Download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation copy from dtSearch.com to enable instant concurrent searching across terabytes of visible, invisible and even inviNible enterprise data.

About dtSearch®. dtSearch has enterprise and developer products that run “on premises” or on cloud platforms to instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails along with nested attachments, databases and online data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes with over 25 different concurrent search options, many dtSearch customers are Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. But anyone with lots of data to search can download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation from dtSearch.com

Connect with Elizabeth Thede on social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-thede-4a5a042/

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Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed Gene Townley.

The Gene Townley Commentaries

On a recent Price of Business show, Host Kevin Price interviewed Gene Townley.

Gene has been self employed all his life and has owned over 20 businesses with his wife of 26 years, Wyndee, in numerous industries. They have built several businesses that they sold and are therefore very familiar with the seller’s experience and what to expect. In this same 30 years of entrepreneurial experience they have bought numerous businesses and can help buyers through the process and emotions with ease. In negotiating a sale or purchase it is a “give and take” where both the seller and the buyer have their needs met. Gene has over 15 years in the business to business marketing and sales which has allowed him to experience and understand most industries.

Connect with Gene on social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebizbroker/

Check out more business stories here.

Explore more insights at https://usdailyreview.com/.

1. The Evolution of Professional Nail Enhancements
2. Understanding Acrylic Systems: The Industry Standard
3. The Rise of Hard Gel: Strength Meets Clarity
4. Builder Gel and BIAB: The Modern Salon Favorite
5. Comparing Durability, Flexibility, and Application
6. Identifying Your Career Path and Client Demographic
7. Essential Criteria for Selecting a Certification Program
8. Navigating the Training Beauty and Beyond Learning Experience
9. Health, Safety, and Long Term Career Sustainability
10. Launching Your Professional Journey

The Evolution of Professional Nail Enhancements

The professional nail industry has undergone a radical transformation over the last decade. What was once a niche service offered in specialized salons has blossomed into a multi billion dollar global economy. For the aspiring nail technician, the sheer variety of products and techniques can feel overwhelming. Choosing a starting point is the most critical decision you will make for your future career. The foundation of your skills will dictate the type of clientele you attract, the speed at which you can work, and the health of your natural nails and those of your clients.

Modern nail enhancements are no longer a one size fits all solution. Clients today are highly educated and often arrive at their appointments with specific requests for products they have seen on social media. As a beginner, you must decide whether to master the traditional strength of acrylic, the glass like finish of hard gel, or the natural reinforcement provided by builder gel. Each system requires a unique set of tools, chemical understanding, and manual dexterity.

Understanding Acrylic Systems: The Industry Standard

Acrylic remains the most widely recognized nail enhancement system globally. It is a two part system consisting of a liquid monomer and a powder polymer. When these two components are mixed on a brush, they create a bead that hardens through a chemical process called polymerization. Unlike gel systems, acrylic does not require a UV or LED lamp to cure; it sets as it reacts to the air and the temperature of the room.

For a beginner, acrylic offers a steep but rewarding learning curve. Mastering the liquid to powder ratio is the most difficult aspect of this craft. If the bead is too wet, it will flood the cuticles and cause lifting. If it is too dry, the nail will be brittle and prone to snapping. However, once mastered, acrylic provides unparalleled strength and the ability to create extreme lengths and intricate 3D art. If you aim to work in a high volume salon where speed and durability are the primary goals, starting with an acrylic course is often the logical choice.

The Rise of Hard Gel: Strength Meets Clarity

Hard gel is a pre mixed product that maintains a thick, honey like consistency. Unlike acrylic, it will not harden until it is placed under a UV or LED lamp. This gives the student an infinite amount of time to manipulate the product and perfect the shape before committing to the cure. This feature makes hard gel an excellent option for beginners who find the fast drying nature of acrylic stressful.

Hard gel is celebrated for its hypoallergenic properties and the lack of strong odors during application. Many modern boutique salons have transitioned away from acrylics specifically to avoid the potent smell of monomer. Hard gel provides a finish that is crystal clear and highly flexible. While acrylic can feel rigid and heavy, hard gel moves more naturally with the nail plate, often resulting in fewer traumatic breaks for the client.

Builder Gel and BIAB: The Modern Salon Favorite

Builder gel, often referred to as Builder in a Bottle or BIAB, has revolutionized the industry by bridging the gap between gel polish and hard gel extensions. This product is designed to add strength to the natural nail or to create short to medium extensions. It has become the gold standard for clients who want to grow their own nails long without the bulk of traditional enhancements.

Training Beauty & Beyond offers specialized insights into how builder gel has shifted consumer behavior. Many clients are moving away from long, dramatic extensions in favor of the clean girl aesthetic, which prioritizes nail health and a refined, natural look. For a beginner, learning builder gel is perhaps the fastest way to start earning an income, as the application process is similar to applying a thick polish, making it more intuitive than sculpting with a brush and monomer.

Comparing Durability, Flexibility, and Application

To choose the right course, you must understand how these materials behave in real world scenarios. The following list breaks down the primary differences that will impact your daily work as a technician.

1. Chemical Bonding: Acrylic creates a mechanical bond and is generally harder to remove, requiring a long soak in acetone. Hard gel is non porous and must be filed off, while many builder gels are soak off formulas.
2. Flexibility: Acrylic is the least flexible, making it ideal for very long extensions that need rigid support. Builder gel is the most flexible, absorbing impact rather than snapping.
3. Curing Process: Acrylic is an exothermic reaction that happens in the air. Gel requires specific light wavelengths to solidify, meaning you must invest in a high quality lamp.
4. Odor and Environment: Acrylic requires heavy ventilation due to the scent of the monomer. Gels are virtually odorless, making them suitable for home studios or small, enclosed salon spaces.

Identifying Your Career Path and Client Demographic

Your choice of a nail technicak course should be influenced by where you want to work. If your dream is to work backstage at fashion weeks or create avant garde editorial looks, acrylic and hard gel are essential. These products allow for the structural integrity needed for extreme shapes like the stiletto or the edge nail.

Conversely, if you want to build a loyal local clientele who visit every three weeks for maintenance and sophisticated nail art, builder gel is your strongest asset. The current market trend shows a significant lean toward natural nail care. By focusing on a Builder Gel or Builder Gel? Choosing the Best Nail technical Course for Beginners at Training Beauty & Beyond, you position yourself at the forefront of this movement. Understanding your target market early on prevents you from spending money on certifications that you may not use frequently in your specific geographic area.

Essential Criteria for Selecting a Certification Program

Not all nail courses are created equal. As a beginner, you are not just buying a certificate; you are investing in a foundation that will prevent you from developing bad habits that could lead to client injuries or legal issues. When evaluating a course, look for the following pillars of quality education.

1. Comprehensive Anatomy Training: You must understand the structure of the nail plate, the matrix, and the surrounding skin to avoid permanent damage to your clients.
2. Chemistry and Product Knowledge: A great course explains why products work, not just how to slap them on. This includes understanding polymerization and the importance of matching lamps to gel systems.
3. Health and Safety Protocols: Proper disinfection and sterilization are non negotiable. You should learn how to identify nail pathologies and when to refuse service.
4. Business and Marketing Guidance: Knowing how to do a nail is only half the battle. You need to know how to price your services, take professional photos, and manage a booking system.

Navigating the Training Beauty and Beyond Learning Experience

High quality education should be accessible but rigorous. When you enroll in a program through Training Beauty & Beyond, the focus is on precision and longevity. The curriculum is designed to take a novice and transform them into a confident professional who understands the nuances of product chemistry.

One of the greatest advantages of a structured program is the mentorship. Learning from YouTube or social media clips often leaves gaps in knowledge, particularly regarding the structural apex of the nail. Without a proper apex, extensions will break at the stress point, causing pain and potential infection for the client. The instructors at Training Beauty & Beyond emphasize the importance of structural integrity, ensuring that every set of nails you produce is as safe as it is beautiful.

Health, Safety, and Long Term Career Sustainability

The longevity of your career depends on your physical health. Nail technicians are prone to repetitive strain injuries, back pain, and respiratory issues if they do not practice proper ergonomics and safety. A comprehensive course will teach you how to sit, how to hold your tools, and how to protect yourself from dust and fumes.

1. Ergonomics: Learning the correct way to hold a file and position a client’s hand will save you from developing carpal tunnel syndrome.
2. Dust Extraction: Whether you use gel or acrylic, filing creates fine dust. You must learn about the necessity of high quality desk extractors and masks.
3. Allergy Prevention: Overexposure to uncured product is the leading cause of contact dermatitis in the industry. A professional course teaches you how to keep the product on the nail and off the skin.

Launching Your Professional Journey

Once you have completed your initial training, the real learning begins through practice. Many students choose to start with a builder gel certification because it allows them to enter the workforce quickly while they continue to practice the more complex techniques of acrylic sculpting in their spare time. This tiered approach to education can be a very effective way to manage the financial investment of your new career.

Securing your education through Training Beauty & Beyond ensures that you are recognized by insurance providers and professional bodies. This accreditation is the difference between a hobbyist and a professional. As you move forward, remember that the nail industry is constantly evolving. The most successful technicians are those who never stop learning, attending workshops and masterclasses to stay updated on the latest product innovations and art trends. Your initial course is simply the first step into a vibrant, creative, and highly profitable world. Focus on mastering the basics of your chosen system, prioritize the health of the natural nail, and your reputation will build itself through the quality of your work.

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AI is starting to reshape how a lot of that gets done. Instead of treating video editing as something that has to be entirely manual, AI can now step in and help with planning, editing, and content development along the way. What makes the combination of conversational AI and editing tools particularly useful is that it lets creators describe what they want in plain language, rather than leaning entirely on a string of editing commands.

What AI-Assisted Editing Actually Changes

Traditional editing software expects users to understand timelines, transitions, layers, effects, audio tracks, and export settings — all learnable skills, but ones that can feel like a wall to anyone just starting out.

AI-assisted editing offers a different way in. Instead of learning where every function lives, someone can just describe what they’re after, and the AI interprets that instruction. Say someone wants to turn a handful of clips into a short educational video, with readable captions, the dead space trimmed out, and everything arranged in a sensible order — that’s the kind of request AI can help carry out.

Tools like an AI video editor with ChatGPT connect conversational instructions to an actual video-production workflow. That combination makes editing more approachable for beginners, while still leaving the real creative decisions in the hands of the person making the video.

Getting From a Loose Idea to an Actual Concept

A surprising amount of the work in video production happens before anyone even opens an editor. Creators have to figure out what the video is supposed to communicate, how long it should run, and which parts deserve the most attention — and that stage alone can eat up a lot of time.

AI can help turn a vague idea into something more structured. A general topic can get developed into a rough script, a scene sequence, or a list of visual elements worth including. That doesn’t remove the need for human judgment — it just gives the creator something concrete to react to, review, and reshape.

A teacher putting together a short lesson, for example, might use AI to break a complicated topic into a few digestible sections. A content creator could do something similar — turning a broad subject into an intro, a few key points, and a conclusion — before ever touching the actual editing timeline.

Taking the Repetitive Work Off Someone’s Plate

Video production is full of tasks that are more tedious than they are creative. Cutting pauses, generating captions, organizing clips, adjusting the small stuff — all of it adds up fast when done entirely by hand.

AI-based systems can take a lot of this off a creator’s plate. Automated captioning is a good example — rather than typing out every spoken line manually, speech-recognition technology can listen to the audio and produce text that just needs a review pass for accuracy.

AI can also help spot the useful portions in a longer recording, which matters a lot when turning an interview, lecture, presentation, or event into something shorter and more watchable. Human review still counts here, though — automated systems can misread speech, miss context, or fumble a name or technical term.

Making Video More Accessible

AI-powered features have a real role to play in accessibility too. Captions make spoken content easier to follow for anyone who’s deaf or hard of hearing, and written transcripts give viewers a way to search or revisit specific information.

Translation adds another layer on top of that. A video made in one language can get adapted for an audience that speaks another one entirely. That said, automatic translation is worth double-checking — cultural expressions, technical terms, and context can get lost or twisted in ways a native speaker would catch instantly.

None of this changes what good design still requires — clear typography, decent contrast, readable captions, and pacing that actually makes sense — whether or not AI touched any part of the process.

The Creative Control Still Sits With a Person

None of this means human creativity is becoming less important. In most cases, AI works best as an assistant sitting alongside the creator, not as something making decisions on its own.

Someone still has to decide whether a scene actually communicates what it’s meant to, whether the pacing feels right, and whether the finished video lands in the right tone. AI can suggest an edit, sure — but it’s still the creator’s call on whether that suggestion actually makes the project better.

That distinction matters even more for videos dealing with personal stories, journalism, education, or anything sensitive. Context and judgment aren’t things that reduce cleanly to a technical instruction.

Where the Limits Are

AI video editing isn’t without real limitations. Automated systems get things wrong — misreading speech, picking the wrong scene, misinterpreting an instruction, or generating visual content that misses the mark. How well any of it works often comes down to the quality of the original footage and how clearly the instructions were written in the first place.

Privacy is worth thinking through too. It’s worth knowing how uploaded videos, audio, and other content actually get processed before feeding anything sensitive into an online AI service.

Originality is another thing worth keeping in mind. AI-generated suggestions are worth reviewing rather than accepting on autopilot. The results tend to be a lot more distinctive when automated assistance gets combined with a creator’s own ideas, original footage, and a genuinely thoughtful editing pass — rather than relying on the AI’s first suggestion.

Where AI Video Creation Is Headed

AI is likely to keep working its way deeper into everyday video production. Future systems may offer more sophisticated help with storytelling, scene organization, sound design, captions, translation, and content tailored to a specific audience.

The most useful path forward probably isn’t replacing creators — it’s cutting down on repetitive work and helping people move from a rough idea to a finished video faster than before.

As these tools keep developing, learning to work with them well is shaping up to be its own creative skill. The people who get the most out of AI will likely be the ones who pair it with critical thinking, real storytelling instincts, and careful editing — using it to make video production more approachable without handing over control of the final result.

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Created under the inaugural theme “Stars Beyond Borders,” the platform was established on the principle that crossing a geographic border should never render a creator’s work invisible.

Immediate Impact and Ecosystem Recognition

Rather than focusing exclusively on high-profile recording artists, DCA provides a dedicated international platform designed to discover, celebrate, and connect contributors across the entire creative pipeline. Nominees span diverse disciplines, including producers, choreographers, videographers, media personalities, and creative entrepreneurs operating throughout the global diaspora.

Public voting for the inaugural awards is currently underway, enabling international audiences to participate directly by casting votes for nominees representing their respective communities and fields.

Inaugural Event and Long-Term Objectives

The organization is currently building toward its inaugural awards ceremony, scheduled for November 21, 2026, at Atlanta Virtual Studios in Atlanta, Georgia.

Beyond the initial event, the overarching goal is to establish DCA as a permanent global institution. Future plans focus on creating multi-region partnerships, expanding career opportunities, and building a sustainable infrastructure that supports diaspora talent year after year.

Author Bio:

Onor Alofoje is the Founder and Executive Producer of the Diaspora Creatives Awards and Founder & CEO of Kreate International LLC. A creative entrepreneur and cultural strategist, she builds platforms connecting African creativity, culture and enterprise with global audiences and opportunities.

Target Link:
www.diasporacreativesawards.com