Archive for June 2004
Tyler Cowen: “Milton’s best anecdote concerned opposition to the idea of a free society. He sees businessmen and academics as the two biggest problems, albeit for opposing reasons. Businessmen want freedom for all other people, only not for themselves. Then they want various subsidies, tariffs, privileges, etc. Academics want freedom for themselves, but not for [...]
In Japan you can rent a dog for $25 an hour: “Each person who rents a dog by the hour is given a leash, some tissues and a plastic bag – in case the pooch has to answer the call of nature. They also get strict instructions not to let the dogs run free, to [...]
BBB: “This week Doug and David have ideas for rising to the top, supporting your non-profit, expansion, taking it to the next level, increasing web traffic, branding your services, creative packaging, and ideas for riding out the ups and downs of business.” Listen to the entire show. You will need Real Player to listen.
The University of Illinois publishes a guide to babysitting as a business. Lots of good information for the budding babysitter in your family: How do you state your charges and collect your money? The time to discuss the fee is when you accept the sitting date. After discussing the job, just say “My charge is [...]
How to Highlight Your Unique Skills
Dana VanDen Heuvel: Stop seeing yourself as a generalist and instead focus on your unique, transferable skills You must be better able to market and sell yourself (develop a personal brand, etc…) Develop a pitch that centers on your definition of an ideal job Identify those few key things that make you stand out from [...]
Another, crazy (great) idea is that of LifeGem. In a nutshell, after you’re dead, they take your cremated remains, extract the carbon and then process it into a diamond. Then, their expert diamond cutters, cut and polish the rough diamond into a unique jewel. Fast Company interview with Greg Herro, CEO of LifeGem: “We are [...]
Dan Sherman shares another of his screwball ideas for a new business: “Start a service for apartment dwellers. For $10 a month (or whatever you can get), the apartment dweller can just leave their garbage outside their door and you’ll come around and pick it up for them and take it to the apartment complex’s [...]
The Window Manager: “Most people suspected it, but today’s WSJ ‘special report’ on retirement (no direct link yet) discusses a scientific study showing that people who were working at age 70 were 2.5 times more likely to still be living at age 82 than those who weren’t working.”
Consumer Segmentation Can Be Counterproductive
Ageless Marketing: The process of segmentation is a process of exclusion. It discounts consumers who are not members of a target segment. And they might add up to being a sizeable number, even if not so similar to one another as to be neatly clusterable. Harley-Davidson eschews segmentation, or at least is so subtle (not [...]
Make Money on eBay is a weblog by Tim Gilberg that can be great resource for entrepreneurs looking for new ways to make money online. Update: This blog is no longer available, but check out our new eBay Business Opportunities Weblog. via Ernie the Attorney.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at EGO.
As if it wasn’t long enough already, I’ve added a few more of my daily reads to my blogroll at right. Few, in this case, means 68. In alphabetical order, the new additions are: A VC Adrants Ageless Marketing Angie McKaig Ardinger Authentic Boredom Biz Ideas Bplans Blog Branding Blog Brewed Fresh Daily Business Logs [...]
Serial Entrpreneur: [During] the first quarter of 2003 Nokia chose to focus on its traditional “candy bar” mobile design; ignoring the emerging flip-top or clam shell style of phones that have since taken-off in Asia – Nokia subsequently lost market share to Motorola and Samsung. It is interesting to ponder how the clam-shell handsets, which [...]
Consultants Must Be Good For Something
Dave Bayless: “As a rule, entrepreneurs are pretty good at judging when and where to spend scarce dollars. Consequently, it is unlikely that an entire generation of entrepreneurs has been systematically duped by a consulting conspiracy. Entrepreneurs must, in fact, perceive that they are getting some value from consultants and other outside advisors.”
The Small Business Start-Up Guide
Amazon: “Why do so many promising small business fail? It’s not a secret: unsuspecting entrepreneurs often repeat critical mistakes previously made by others. Reading The Small Business Start-Up Guide will teach you how to avoid making these same mistakes! The author Robert Sullivan will keep you out of trouble. Not only because he has 25 [...]
Jane Applegate’s Strategies for Small Business Success
I haven’t read this book, but the Library of Congress includes it in it’s The Entrepreneur’s Reference Guide to Small Business Information, so it must be worth reading.
Jeff Cornwall: “Even if your business is not now a family business, it may become one. Many of these companies were founded shortly after World War II and at that time had no definite plan to keep their business in the family. On the other hand, many entrepreneurs who hope to make their companies family [...]
If you answered the survey before, please ignore it. If not, I’m trying to gain a better understanding of my readers, and would really appreciate it if you would take a couple seconds and answer the following survey questions. Thank you. Age under 14 14-18 19-24 25-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71+ Gender Female Male [...]
The Entrepreneurial Mind: “Home offices are certainly nothing new. I have had one on and off for most of my career. But with the boom in business formation, more and more new entrepreneurs are following this age old bootstrapper’s tradition of starting their business out of their home. According to the Wall Street Journal’s on-line [...]
Miami Herald: “Barely a travel article about Cuba is published without a mention of the vintage 1950s Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths and Buicks that add so much color and tourist appeal to the island. But few Americans have thought of the old gas-guzzlers as a business opportunity. Rick Shnitzler, founder of TailLight Diplomacy (TLD), says Cuban [...]
The Wall Street Journal profiles a former investment-bank employee turned mystery shopper and actually tries to make the career sound exciting. Her morning jobs were equally trying. She went dress shopping, stopped into a bank to cash a check and visited a Saturn dealership to look at new cars. After golf, she was headed to [...]
I’m really behind! Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age: At age 28: The Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his revolutionary theory of the atom. French novelist George Sand published her first novel, Indiana. Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Warsaw invented the artificial language Esperanto. British physician Thomas Wakley began publishing The Lancet. Jamaican [...]
Complaint Filed Against MaggieMoo’s
A reader sent in this complaint that has been filed in the United States District Court (District of Maryland) against MaggieMoo’s International, LLC.
Steve Pilgrim just pointed out that the 2004 edition of the CIA’s 2004 World Fact Book has just been put online. I find the site invaluable when doing research on far off lands.
Deadline Looms for Feedback on Definition of ‘Small’
Inc.: “Small businesses have until July 2 to log their opinions about a proposal from the Small Business Administration that seeks to alter the definition of the word “small” when it comes to eligibility for certain types of funding.” via The Small Business Blog.
→ techzoneairbagservice.com The TechZone® Franchise is open to all kinds of people. Both, those who want a large, multi-location business as well as the individual looking to open a smaller mobile business, benefit from the experience TechZone® has gained over the past decade. Franchise owners come from varied backgrounds with varied experience and levels of [...]
Jeff Cornwall: This story is about a couple of recent graduates from James Madison University who decided to start a right-leaning business called Bush Country Ketchup. “While dunking our freedom fries in ketchup a few months ago, we came to a sudden realization. With each drop of ketchup we ingested, bottled by a company whose [...]
Dan Sherman: “Provide a service to people like me that pretty much got money legally extorted from them in the form of an unjustified ticket. Your service would pay the speeder’s ticket (after the speeder pays you, of course) but then you would pay it by sending a bucket of pennies or something highly annoying [...]
Fast Company: “A recent Gallup study suggests that just less than 30% of employees are actually engaged. 54% of respondents report being not engaged, while 17% are actively disengaged.”
http://www.comdex.com/
Network World: The goal of Gate-3 Workclub in Emeryville, Calif., is to create a new kind of community where neighborhood people can “work and network and hang out with friends,” founder Neil Goldberg says. Gate-3 (which means portal to the third place) sits just over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, a less-than-10-minute drive for [...]
From A Local Presence to National, Overnight
Brad Feld has a behind the scenes venture capital perspective on how AuctionDrop went from five local stores to 3,400 locations nationwide over night without franchising: Within a year of being founded, AuctionDrop had five stores and had run over 14,000 auctions. AuctionDrop had focused obsessively on pleasing its customers – which is one of [...]
→ learningexpress.com At Learning Express you’ll find the widest selection of toys, must-have gifts all year round and unique and innovative products that encourage learning through play, including games and puzzles, developmental toys, arts and crafts kits, science and nature products, construction toys, dolls, and much, much more. Creative thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit set [...]
India: The New Land of Opportunity
Business 2.0: “It’s a global economy — so quit whining about outsourcing. India’s booming middle class has $420 billion to spend. Here’s how to grab your share.” via Anil Dash’s Daily Links.
Fresh Inc.: “As the presidential campaign season chugs along, I’ve come to realize that the time-honored tradition of candidates kissing babies has been replaced by candidates kissing up to the small business community. Along the way, it seems, somebody realized that babies aren’t swing voters…”
Escaping Telephone Customer Service Hell
Ask Gizmodo: You did hit zero when first dialing, too, didn’t you? That’s usually a quick way to bypass all the menus and get to a human operator, which should be your first goal. Now you might think your goal from here is to talk to a manager. This is a mistake — the manager [...]
Small Business Trends: Today marked history for space travel. Planet Earth saw its very first commercial, non-governmental manned flight into space, by a craft aptly named SpaceShipOne. OK, so it did not go very far nor last very long. But that doesn’t make the flight any less momentous. What’s so special is how entrepreneurial it [...]
Gmail Invite Contest, Followup
Thanks to everyone who entered the Gmail Invite Contest. By good fortune, Google gave me a few more invites, so everyone who entered received one. If still don’t have one (and want one), I have more.
Serial Entrepreneur: “Find the customer first, discover how much the product is worth to the market, and then worry about turning it into a global business.”
Disassociative Business Planning
Serial Entrepreneur: “It is easy for business owners to fall into the trap of associating their business with themselves and invariably attempt something sexy from which they can derive intellectual stimulation and social respect. The technique of Disassociative Business Planning specifically targets this issue and brings it to the surface to eliminate alternate subconscious motivation, [...]
George Will, writing in the Washington Post, compares oil to pistachios to explain the current oil situation: “Russell Roberts, an economist, says: Imagine that you love pistachio nuts and are given a room filled 5 feet deep with them. But you must eat them in the room and must leave the shells. When will you [...]
David Bayless: One of the major obstacles to effective new business building by large companies is the “Big Opportunity” trap. To varying degrees, we are caught in it. It works like this: “We’re a $20BB company. If the new business proposal is not a $1BB opportunity, we con’t have time to pursue it. The consequence [...]
Every Business is a Commodity Business
Duct Tape Marketing: “If you can’t find a way to differentiate your business from every other business that says it does what you do. And, if you can’t communicate that difference in a way that really matters to a narrow target market, then you’re basically in the commodity business. If I can’t tell how one [...]
Building Entrepreneurship in Small Communities
EDPro Weblog: “Here’s a concise, practical guide to best practices for building entrepreneurship in smaller communities. The Kauffman Foundation drafted the report: Grassroots Rural Entrepreneurship, Best Practices for Small Communities. Download a copy. Go.” via Brewed Fresh Daily.
First private spacecraft flies into space
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/21/suborbital.test/index.html
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Blog Business World.
Customer Service Notes from MIT
A group at MIT held a series of workshops about customer service, and their meeting notes contains some very good ideas for improving how your business deals with its customers. For example, here’s a partial list of examples of good customer service: quick response to request or complain damage control: trying to make the best [...]
An Entrepreneur’s Declaration of Independence
USA Today: Independence Day — that’s the formal name of the holiday we celebrate on the Fourth of July. Independence has been a goal of Americans since the founding of our country. Those of us who’ve started our own companies tend to be particularly independent; we revolt against bosses like the colonists revolted against the [...]
I still have one more Gmail invite available and will send it to winner of this competition. To enter, make a post on your weblog about the Business Opportunities Weblog with a link back to this site. The post can say anything you like – as long as it lets your readers know about this [...]
Light transmitting concrete to go on sale later this year
http://optics.org/articles/news/10/3/10/1
