Archive for July 13th, 2004
David St Lawrence: “If a company has only one customer or only one product line, almost anyone with business experience would say that they are severely at risk, no matter how well they are doing. The same could be said for any individual, whether self-employed or not. When you put all of your eggs in [...]
How Not to Write a Business Plan
Brain Brew Blog: “Barry Moltz (of recent 30 Second Guru fame) has some amusing advice (it’s funny because it’s true) on common pitfalls to avoid when writing a business plan.”
Is A Housing Bubble About To Burst?
Business Week: How crazy is real estate getting in parts of the country? Ask Sierra and Corbin Stewart, who just bought a modest, 2,000-square-foot house in Pleasanton, Calif., for $730,000. Mortgage and tax payments will consume 55% of their income, forcing them to do without extras such as cable TV. Says Sierra, a 29-year-old marketer: [...]
Walt Disney’s Failures Should Inspire
Walt Disney wasn’t always successful. Stephen Schochet describes some of the ways Disney lost millions of dollars before making it big: Walt created a mildly successful cartoon character in 1926 called Oswald the Rabbit. When he tried to negotiate with his distributor, Universal Studios, for better rates for each cartoon, he was informed that Universal [...]
Small Businesses More Optimistic
Kirsten Osolind of re:invention: “The National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest small business advocacy group, announced today that its monthly small business optimism index reached 103, a record in the survey’s 18-year history. Nearly one-quarter of all businesses surveyed reported higher profits.”
Snark Hunting: “After years of insisting that Ivory soap’s ability to float was the product of a production error, Proctor and Gamble is now conceding that it was in fact due to a calculated marketing effort. This is just a one of the dirty little secrets revealed in Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of [...]
Creating Product and Company Names
Ignor Naming and Branding Agency: “We created the Igor Naming Guide in order to demystify the naming process. In it we show how and why great product and company names work, when focus groups and standard ways of thinking about them might have predicted otherwise. Igor’s own naming process is presented in excruciating but logical [...]
Startup Journal: The hard lessons come from not paying attention to basic items, such as having solid contracts with suppliers, doing credit checks on customers or performing due diligence on potential employees, say business owners. These are the issues that can play havoc with your bank balance and bring your company to its knees. By [...]
