Archive for 2005
Creating A Catchy Business Name
Startup Journal: According to David Burd, president of The Naming Company in East Stroudsburg, Pa., it’s common for new entrepreneurs to try to convey too much in their business names. “A name is not an ad campaign,” he says. “It allows you to write checks and do business. It’s not the end-all, be-all of marketing.” [...]
Where to Incorporate: Delaware, Nevada or Your Own State?
The Corporate Bee explains the pros and cons of incorporating in each state: For decades, many of us have heard and read about Delaware being the state in which to incorporate your business. In more recent times Nevada became another “hot spot” to incorporate. Millions of new businesses have been incorporated over the last few [...]
SBA: One of the first decisions that you will have to make as a business owner is how the company should be structured. This decision will have long-term implications, so consult with an accountant and attorney to help you select the form of ownership that is right for you. In making a choice, you will [...]
How You Can Create Your Own Charity
Startup Journal: Wouldn’t you like to start your own charity, one that would be totally efficient, effective and dedicated to the cause that concerns you most? Well, a pair of psychologists in White Plains, N.Y. did just that. They are Jane and David Eger, a middle-age married couple. And along the way, they came up [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Multiple Mentality.
Merry Christmas!
Lesson of 2005: Backup Your Data
USA Today: Reviewing events of 2005, if I were to choose the most important lesson for entrepreneurs, it clearly would be this: Back up your data. This year, hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated tens of thousands of small companies. Critical to their recovery was gaining access to their business records. Yet, roughly 60% of small [...]
Auction Bytes: Many people who surf eBay may have problems with their eyesight. Wouldn’t they instead appreciate an audio description of your item, instead of struggling to read your auction text? So with a few of my auctions last week, I inserted a link to a short MP3 file which was a recording of me [...]
Student Entrepreneurs on the Rise
Fortune Small Business: Protesting on college campuses is back. The object of this generation’s rebellion? Traditional jobs. In an era of widespread disenchantment with the often bureaucratic, scandal-ridden world of big corporations, more students believe that building a successful startup is the way to go. A recent poll of 1,155 teens by Junior Achievement Worldwide, [...]
Fact Or Fiction: 9 in 10 New Business Will Close In The First Year?
Greg Balanko-Dickson: There is a myth from the 1990’s that stated 9 out of 10 businesses close in their first year. The US Small Business Administration still gets calls every year from people looking for the unknown source of the 9 out of 10 sound bite. The myth persists partly due to a widely held [...]
Sun-Sentinel: Out-of-work actor Kevin Lowry thinks he has not only stumbled upon a holiday gold mine, but perhaps his perfect role: Santa Claus. No matter that the 27-year-old Chicagoan has nary a white hair upon his head, or that he tips the scales at a quite unjolly 145 pounds. The only appearances Lowry’s Santa is [...]
Lists to Make Before You Start
Gladys Edmunds in USA Today: First, write a list of the goals you have for the business. There are many ways to look at entrepreneurship. Do you see the business as something to build and sell? Or, do you see yourself building a business you will pass on to your children? Discuss these things with [...]
This week’s Brain Brew Radio episode is online: Follow Doug and Dave through Tempe as they head over to Cookies from Home to talk to Barry about what makes his homemade cookies better then Mom’s… The crew cruises on down to Jerry’s Audio where Michael tells them how his family has continued to grow with [...]
The 12 Step VC Funding Process
Venture Capitalist Rick Segal give his 12 steps in landing VC funding: No harm – no foul 30 minute introduction Pre-meeting information package The first meeting The Monday morning partners meeting Send more information Face to Face meeting with more partners. The second Monday morning partner meeting The Term Sheet Due Diligence – Validation time [...]
Working at Home Isn’t A Day At The Beach
Wall Street Journal: Many people seem to think that jobs that can be done at home aren’t real jobs. Never mind that home-office dwellers are their own cafeteria staff, shipping-and-receiving clerks and janitors. They never get credit for cutting an employer’s costs, or saving commuting time to do more work. Instead, managers believe that if [...]
Year-End Tax Strategies For Small Business
Rhonda Abrams: [The] basic rule is “accelerate expenses, delay income.” The concept is that it’s always better to pay taxes later rather than sooner. In essence, you delay taxes for an entire year on income you’ve put off receiving until January and get the benefit of deductions a whole year earlier for December expenses. The [...]
Don’t Exchange One Prison for Another
Kathy Sierra: I’ve seen too many startups begin with the promise of freedom, passion, and good intentions–only to end up exchanging one kind of “prison” (working for demanding bosses) for another–working for overly demanding clients. I’ve seen some companies become slaves to the client’s whims because we had “too many eggs in one basket”, allowing [...]
Startup Resources from the Boston Business Journal
Mary Sullivan: Here’s a compendium that is worth your attention. It’s a list of articles from the Boston Business Journal, gathered by Joseph Hadzima of MIT Sloan School of Management.
Why You Should be an Entrepreneur
David Lorenzo: The only security you will ever have is confidence in your talent, skills, and knowledge. If you are secure and self-aware, you will always be in demand. Even the most tenured and highest performing employee in a company faces the risk of being fired. The minute a company’s profits evaporate, so do the [...]
25 Characteristics of The Ideal Startup
Sam Decker has posted his 25 characteristics of an ideal startup: Defendable and differentiated Competitive cost structure Attractive partnership opportunities Repeat customers Word of mouth opportunity Memorable product and name Potential for PR Attractive to be bought or merged Scaleable staff and systems Scaleable product — build once, sell many times Uncomplicated Focus Niche market [...]
Jeff Cornwall: Are there other folks with the same good idea as you? Keep your eye open for potential competitors. Competition may or may not be a problem. Some products are so specialized or the customer base so small that there is only room for one or two players. On the other hand, if the [...]
This week’s Carnival of Marketing is up at Ideologic.
This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Political Calculations.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Coyote Blog.
Alex Pooley: It occurred to me while driving to work today that anyone with a job effectively has a cash cow. A cash cow being something that you can rely on to produce income. … A company that sat solely on it’s cash cow is clearly taking a significant risk. Any person relying solely on [...]
Undervalued Marketing Opportunities
Small Business Software: Marketing online has become fiercely competitive. Marketers are attempting to unravel and decipher online marketing to succeed. Some argue that there should not be a distinction between traditional (off-line) marketing and online marketing. Others feel that concepts applied to mail order work well on the web, while still others argue that online [...]
What exactly is an entrepreneur? Jeff Cornwall, the Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship, finally answers the question that may still be plaguing you: The process of innovation that goes on in large companies is not entrepreneurship. This flies in the face of what I wrote about in my first book, Organizational Entrepreneurship, [...]
You’re Never Too Old To Launch a Business
Startup Journal: Why is it that I get piles of letters from young entrepreneurs brimming with outrage that someone won’t lend a first-timer $70 million, but when I hear from more seasoned folks, they lack the confidence of their experience?
Fred Wilson: Most companies still believe that their core assets, their business strategy, their technology architecture, their key people, their customer list, etc is valuable and should not be made public. And so it isn’t. But every once in a while, an opportunity comes along that requires that the company provide someone (an investor, a [...]
The Advantages of Availability
Bizinformer: Many businesses place roadblocks and barriers to customer interaction – voice mail, call screening, auto attendants, unnamed email boxes, etc. Barriers that limit the timeliness of customer interaction and hinder quick response to customer questions and issues. Sure, a level of technology between a customer and your business is an advantage – call routing, [...]
Keith Robinson: As an entrepreneur that’s right in the middle of bootstrapping my own business together, I’ve got a bit of experience and I’m learning more and more every day. I thought it might be interesting to share some tips and some of the lessons I’ve learned so far. Make sure it’s right. Have some [...]
How His First Online Business Works
This post from Neville Medhora walks the reader (with screenshots) through his five step process for making money with his website: Inundated with emails about this, I decided to show how House Of Rave works. This is just one example of how I use a drop shipping service to make money on the internet. There [...]
growFolio has published a short interview with me and profile of the website in their December 2005 issue: But don’t think for a moment that business opportunities are the only thing you’ll find on the Business Opportunities Weblog. Quite rightly, the site is also home to a surprising amount of really interesting business and startup [...]
Working for the Education, Not the Paycheck
Business Journal: As fraternity brothers at Virginia Tech, Brett Plano and Ryan Coudon first talked about creating a company together. Like many good ideas, the initial partnership plans were scribbled on a cocktail napkin — “or something like that” — probably while shooting pool, Coudon said. “We had all kinds of crazy ideas — from [...]
Pelle Braendgaard: A mistake I myself have made as well as many other smalltime entrepreneurs is that we have wanted to appear like a business to early. Symptoms of this are things like: Incorporating Renting office space Buying a fax machine (You know a business needs one) Fancy stationary Fancy graphic designers Multiple fault tolerant [...]
The new Ask the Business Opportunities Weblog is really taking off. Today, a reader asked: I have a good job where I make a decent amount of money and have very little stress. I also have a side business that generates roughly the same amount of income as my day job. I want to do [...]
This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Wealth Junkie.
If Your Product Still Won’t Sell, Here’s What You’re Missing
Steve Pavlina: You worked hard to create a quality product. You promoted it using every means at your disposal: submitting to hundreds of download sites, soliciting reviews, issuing a press release, improving your web site, creating a compelling shareware version, and utilizing a variety of registration incentives. You thought you covered all the bases, yet [...]
The Carnival of Marketing #5 is up at MLMForums.net.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at samaBlog.
Seth Godin: I don’t get it. Companies spend a fortune to get you to call. Call 800 CLUB MED to book a room. Call 1-800-WWW-DELL to buy a computer. And it’s not just consumer marketing. They want you to call to buy insurance, business travel, hotel rooms and a new energy-efficient roof for your warehouse. [...]
The DropCast features an interview with me in their most recent episode (MP3) of their podcast. If you’re interested in subscribing to their show, you can do it in iTunes, or directly with this feed.
One Hour Parties Deliver Fun To Offices
Business Journal: The small Seattle-based company provides instant office parties — quick, customized, affordable catered events on the customers’ premises for purposes like employee or tenant appreciation. Mumm-Pardo, Hughes and contract workers — often moonlighting restaurant employees — will either come into an office themselves, set up, serve and clean up, or drop off kits [...]
BusinessWeek’s Top Young Entrepreneurs
About: BusinessWeek has just named the top 5 entrepreneurs under 25, as selected by their online readers: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook Nancy Montano of Los Angeles Pumping (need a website for all this attention you’ll be getting!) Joanna Alberti of philoSophie’s David Hauser and Siamak Taghaddos of GotVMail Anand Chhatpar of BrainReactions
Win an iPod from Business Opportunities Weblog
Just in time for the New Year, the user who posts the most helpful answers between now and December 31, 2005 on Ask the Business Opportunities Blog will win an Apple iPod Shuffle.
Ben Casnocha: People think they need to take risks left and right or bet the farm on things all the time…since isn’t that what start-up entrepreneurship is all about? No. Much of operating in a bootstrapped environment is mitigating risk, weighing costs and benefits, and acting judiciously (but quickly). Sure, there are times when taking [...]
The Entrepreneur’s Fuel: Junk Food
A local greasy-spoon Chinese buffet, that I affectionately refer to as “Scary Chinese,” has hosted some of my most productive entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions. I never realized how normal I was. Local Tech Wire explains that junk food is the real fuel of entrepreneurship: It is my sincere belief that the rapidity with which an enterprise [...]
Mary Sullivan: Maybe you didn’t start a business with a burning desire to do it your way? Susan Urquhart-Brown, founder of Career Steps Consulting, wrote a useful book, “The Accidental Entrepreneur”, for those who never expected to be self-employed. This easy-to-read book is packed with good information for new intentional entrepreneurs, too, especially for “solopreneurs”.
This week’s Brain Brew Radio episode is online: This week on School Time, Dr. Jeffrey Stamp, explains to our loyal listeners how long it takes a big idea to catch on… Ed a Professor of Law at Chase College of Law at Northern Kentucky University helps Doug look at lawyers in a whole new light… [...]
Entrepreneur: Naming a business is a lot like laying the cornerstone of a building. Once it’s in place, the entire foundation and structure is aligned to that original stone. If it’s off, even just a bit, the rest of the building is off, and the misalignment becomes amplified… To help you get off to a [...]
