Archive for 2004
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists. Today’s show may not be big, but it’s chock full of insight and ideas for the new year. In my favorite post of the carnival, Why Aren’t There More Private Schools?, Warren Miller asks: “What other industries are there where 94% of the demand [...]
→ slimandtone.com Franchises for ladies workout express clubs are one of the most exciting opportunities in business today. More than ever, women need exercise and a refuge from the stress they face daily, a place that fits into their hectic lifestyle and provides the opportunity to do something positive for themselves. For 30 minutes you [...]
→ fastteks.com Over 6 million computers in the United States will need replacing or upgrading within the next few years. As consumers and businesses rely more on technology, outsourcing of computer specialists will continue to grow. The computer service market is estimated to be over $25 billion, with growth expected to exceed $47 billion by [...]
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Regular posting will resume January 3, 2005.
How to Sell a Piece of Wood for $1.63 Million
Marketing eYe: The baseball bat (a 34 inch piece of wood ) Babe Ruth swung to hit the first home run out of the New Yankee Stadium on April 18th, 1923, sold at auction on December 3rd 2004, at Sotheby’s in New York, for $1.63 million (Australian). Raw Materials = $ Raw Materials + Labour [...]
When to Start Looking for Venture Capital
OnlyOnce: I just received a question from a reader today about when to start looking for VC money. The answer, of course, depends on your stage of business. The general rule is that the best time to start looking for money is when you don’t need it — but not so early that a potential [...]
David St Lawrence: “You must be willing to look for another job as soon as you feel that your career progress is being blocked. Just as your company considers you expendable, you must treat your employer as expendable. If you are not being given assignments that challenge you and not being rewarded for your efforts [...]
Paul Allen: “I recently saw stats that indicated that about 12% of adult Americans would like to start their own business.”
I hosting the next weekly edition of the Carnival of the Capitalits on Monday, December 27th. If you’d like to submit a post for what probably will be a very small issue, please use the CotC Submission Page.
The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah
Amazon: “Imagine you are sitting in the good chair next to Oprah. She turns to you to ask for your expert advice in front of her studio audience and 21 million other people across the nation watching from their homes. The demand for your product skyrockets, your phone starts to ring and doesn’t stop. You’re [...]
Unique Wine Store Success Story
Business Week: During his career as an award-winning sommelier, Joshua Wesson always seemed to field the same, simple question from thirsty patrons — “What does it taste like?” So in 1996, with co-founder Richard Marmet, he launched a wine store based on that very principle. The result has been a growing, nine-location chain called Best [...]
Startup Capital Needed in Mozambique for Micro Business
I get the most interesting emails from entrepreneurs all over the world. Antonio Tauzene wrote: I’m a 44years old Mozambican looking for some help to start my business. Based in Maputo, I know that with a 15-seater mini-bus, I can make an average income of a million Meticais/day, which is about US$50. This is very [...]
Small Business Trends: Entrepreneur magazine offers its list of top 8 trends for 2005, compiled by writer Laura Tiffany. It’s very much a U.S. retail, consumer-culture oriented list, and in that sense is fairly limited, but still useful: Authenticity – Authenticity has to rank right up there right underneath “blog” as word of the year, [...]
Business Week: Most college students look forward to winter break as a time to sleep, indulge in home-cooked meals, and recover from the fall semester’s final exams. Mark Prondzinski has different plans. Over the next three weeks, the Babson College sophomore will be coding a shopping-cart software program, finalizing the technology for a new online [...]
Drive-Through Supermarkets Coming
Progressive Grocer: AutoCart, LLC, said it plans to roll out the world’s first “drive-through supercenter” format, a 130,000-square-foot facility equipped to deliver more than 25,000 SKUs directly to consumers in their cars. The first of the supercenters, designed with 60 ordering/pickup stations, are projected to open in December 2005 in Albuquerque, N.M. and Tucson, Ariz., [...]
Seth Godin: “? You start with something that does what you say it will. You add value when you provide swift support, but even better, when it becomes clear to a user that there are ways that the product can do even more than they expected. And finally, you win when you create mutually beneficial [...]
Law & Entrepreneurship News has a fantastic review of Anthony Cerminaro’s blog, Bizz Bang Buzz: What makes this blog so great is that has information relevant to an aspiring entrepreneur, a veteran business owner, and even a casual person with an interest in entrepreneurship. While one might assume that a blog focusing on subjects such [...]
Business 2.0: “The second Internet boom is quietly taking shape — and this one looks like it’s going to last. Here’s how six innovative businesses learned from the past and have begun to make the Web work for them.” via Cool Business Ideas.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at XTremeBlog.
→ careersusa.com CareersUSA has been the Staffing Industry Leader for over two decades. Starting with just one office, CareersUSA has grown to numerous locations throughout the nation. Today, CareersUSA employs over 16,000 temporary employees in a large array of skills and industries. The company is committed to providing equal employment opportunities and is positioned to [...]
American Tax and Financial Group
→ americantaxandfinancialgroup.com American Tax and Financial Group was founded in 1997 in Dallas, Texas by Calvin Dale Brown II, as a sole proprietor certified public accounting firm. Today, their firm offers a wide range of services to their individual and business clients. Because of their firm’s size, their clients benefit by getting personalized, quality service [...]
Quickbooks 2005 vs. Simple Accounting 2005
PCWorld is taking a first look two new small business accounting applications in this comparison of QuickBooks 2005 and Simply Accounting: “The 2005 releases of small-business accounting software from Intuit and Best Software head in different directions. Intuit’s QuickBooks emphasizes ease of use with a Learning Center, chock-full of useful tutorials, featured in all three [...]
Dan Sherman: “Entrepreneurs are goats and all other people are sheep… that is when it comes creating value in exchange for compensation. I don’t mean this in a derogatory fashion. The world needs sheep and the world needs goats. I’m just labelling the two. Us entrepreneurs are always in search of something that will change [...]
Fast Company is searching for the best business blogs. This month, they’re accepting nominations for the best venture capital-related weblogs. Steve Brotman, Brad Feld, Steve Hall, Jeff Nolan, Ed Sim, Ventureblog, or Fred Wilson are all great choices. They also have a form to submit the best general business blog. I’d fit nicely into that [...]
Sometimes you don’t want to burn your bridges. eHow: How to Resign From a Job.
How Do You Expect to Do Business With No Contact Info
Just For Small Business: “As I browse around the web marveling at the diversity of choices that are available, I’ve found a very disturbing trend. No contact information. No email, no phone, no contact form. What’s the logic? Do small business owners really think prospects will buy if they don’t know who they are doing [...]
It’s Now OK To Bid On Trademarks In Google
Online Business Opportunity Opportunity: Geico lost their case against Google regarding the use of their trademarked name to trigger Google AdWords ads. How can you benefit from this? This ruling by the courts opens the door for you to bid on trademarked names for your PPC ads – you just can’t use the trademarks in [...]
Don’t Do the Business Plan First
Jeff Cornwall: StartupJournal offers a review of various business planning aids (books, software, websites). Proceed with caution!! Too many entrepreneurs rush into writing a plan that rationalizes their idea. Then they launch a business that may have been doomed from the start. Before you ever write a business plan you should first take a long, [...]
Why to Shy Away from Venture Capital
The Smart Startup: “While venture capital can be a tremendous boon to a tiny fraction of the companies pursuing it, in the vast majority of cases it presents the entrepreneur with a ‘Faustian Bargain. Venture capital brings with it tremendous meddling and pressure from venture capitalists who in this day and age typically lack both [...]
Eric Sink’s article, Finding a Product Idea for Your Micro-ISV, is a great read for any aspiring entrepreneur, even one who doesn’t know that a Micro ISV is a a one person, independent software company. If you find that your brain isn’t generating enough ideas, perhaps you need something to spark your creativity a bit. [...]
Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: “A friend of ours is living in Shanghai and has learned Mandarin, to read Chinese, and to manage young Chinese computer science graduates. A bunch of us were kicking around ideas for starting businesses that would exploit this resource. One of my suggestions was a tutoring service that would enable yuppie parents [...]
Lucky or Smart? : Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life
Amazon: At twenty-seven, Bo Peabody was an Internet multi-millionaire. In the heady days of the late 1990s, though, when every cool kid had an IPO, that wasn’t very remarkable. What is remarkable is that he’s even more successful today. He has co-founded five different companies, in varied industries, and made them thrive during the best [...]
Online Businesses Are Changing Their Business Model
Business Week: In February, a cool Web startup called AllApartments changed its name. While it was at it, the company rehauled its business model. What started out two years ago as a simple online listing of apartment rentals available in the U.S. suddenly was something far more provocative. The new business, called SpringStreet, still sells [...]
Pubsub: “LinkRanks are a measure of how many pages link to each particular site, with more weight given to fresher links and to links from a wider variety of pages.” Interesting.
Fortune Small Business: “There is a young and growing industry devoted to conducting the goods of small businesses to the hands—and mouths—of celebrities.”
Where Did the Term Cash Cow Come From?
Chuck Huckaby: A single cow could transform a primitive family’s lifestyle from survival mode to prosperity. How? By turning indigestible matter (grass) into food, clothing, and money a cow was a alchemy lab on 4 legs… it wasn’t quite as good as being able to turn lead into gold, but this actually WORKS. All that’s [...]
Auctioning Off Unused Airport Wifi Access
David Weinberger: “I just paid $6.95 for a day of wifi access here in the Newark Airport. Nobody except Tom Hanks uses a full day of airport wifi access, do they? I wish I could sell off my unused hours. Someone want to set up a little airport market for buying and selling unusued capacity?”
Preparing For Your Unexpected Absence
MyBusiness Magazine: You may be the highest-paid player on the team, but if you’re taken out of the game, who could take your place? The small-business owners in this story lived through extended–and unexpected–absences. They learned why backups are not optional. Delegation doesn�t come easily to small-business owners. �No one cares about my company like [...]
Moto Photo Launches New Digital Portrait Studio Franchise
MSNBC: Earlier this month, Trotwood-based Moto Franchise Corp. opened a prototype store called Portrait Avenue inside the Miami Valley Centre Mall in Piqua. The 1,200-square-foot digital portrait studio is the culmination of a $1 million research and development study and is the first of what Moto Franchise plans to grow into its second national retail [...]
Franchising: The Business Strategy That Changed the World
Amazon: “Franchising offers people the opportunity to own and operate their own business. What are the elements of a successful franchised business? The answer may be found through an examination of several of the leading franchises. This book, by a father-daughter business-writing team, presents profiles of ten notable franchises: McDonalds’s, H & R Block, Century [...]
The Basics of Borrowing From Family
Dr. Cornwall: So you are ready to launch your new business, but need about $20,000 to get if off the ground. So you turn to family and friends to help you out. Smart choice? Maybe…. Venture Capitalists make loans based on team members of the deal, but that is because those entrepreneurs are proven business [...]
Thinking by Peter Davidson: “Ever try and get a haircut on a Sunday? It’s not at all easy to do. Most barbers and haircut places are closed tight on Sundays and many on Monday as well. Anybody else smell an opportunity?“
PC World: You’re deep in an online game, storming through a gritty urban landscape. The enemy? A gang of brawling thugs armed with baseball bats. You battle furiously, take out the last villain, and look up in triumph. And the first thing your eyes light upon is a billboard hawking Starbucks. Take note if your [...]
NY Times: “From a marketing perspective, blogs make perfect sense. They are cheap to produce, immersive and interactive. It’s easy to measure their readership and response rates. For small companies, blogs are a quick and dirty promotional tool that cuts out the middleman; for big companies, blogs are a tool of humanization – an informal, [...]
This weeks’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Rob Sama’s samaBlog.
→ babypower.com The purpose of the Baby Power program is to stimulate during the most formative growth period (age 6 months to 3 years) the intellectual, physical, and emotional development of the child. Through the unique and systemized program incorporating exercise, mini gym equipment, puppetry, stories, rhythms, musical instruments, and original songs, BABY POWER encourages [...]
→ personet.com PersoNet is an Administrative Service Organization that provides the small to medium sized business with all of the administrative support found in a larger company’s HR department. Outsourcing this aspect of the business eliminates the administrative burden that comes with processing payroll, tax filings, deductions, employee manuals and handbooks. Growing a business takes [...]
Intellectual Sabbaticals: An Entrepreneurial Alternative
Auren Hoffman: n October 2002, when I sold my third company, BridgePath, I was faced with the decision about what to do next. After five years of working 90-hour weeks to build my enterprise software firm, I knew that I wasn’t ready to jump right back in to another company. Yet a sabbatical, with its [...]
It’s time to start thinking about taxes, again. Intuit has released the 2004 versions of it’s award winning series of tax software, TurboTax. I purchased TurboTax Business 2004 the day after Thanksgiving and breezed through a rough version of my taxes in a couple hours. Good thing I did, too, because now I know that [...]
Google Suggest: “As you type, Google will offer suggestions. Use the arrow keys to navigate the results. As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google’s “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, [...]
