Archive for May 2005
Startup Journal: Earlier this month we pondered the strange Internet phenomenon of penny-book sales via Amazon.com, and reached the conclusion that penny books might be less a business model than an unintended consequence of a business model. One reader begged to differ, contending that our argument really applied only to small businesses. And he knew [...]
Recycled Franchises – Why Buy 2nd Hand?
Franchises Solutions: Looking to start a business? Reviewing your options? If franchises sound appealing, you may have an alternative option you hadn’t thought of before: Buying an already established franchise. It turns out that 10 to 15 percent of franchise sales may actually be franchise re-sales. Franchisees sell their business for many reasons. They might [...]
Last week I was surprised to receive a coy of Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars from 800-CEO-READ. This is the first of Godin’s books that I’ve ever actually sat down and read, having based my assessments of his previous books on the covers and online excerpts. I received this book at exactly the right [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists Slacker Manager.
→ usshipit.com United Shipping Solutions is a sales organization offering transportation services to the small to mid-sized market segment through a rapidly expanding network of franchises nationwide. Reselling transportation services as a franchise system is a proven concept with an outstanding track record of success, since its inception fifteen years ago. In 2001, the major [...]
→ beacruiseagent.com Cruising has been the fastest growing segment of the travel industry for over 20 years, and it is still booming! If you’re looking to get into the cruise business, put Cruise Planners to work for you! Joining Cruise Planners is like adding 30 people to your staff! They offer you a support team [...]
Free from 9 to 5 is an interesting new blog to check out. From the about page: If someone told me 10 years ago, when I was in college, that I would be working for one of Southern California’s largest employers, doing software development and being paid handsomely to boot, I’d be ecstatic. Well, I [...]
Husbands and Wives Who Own Different Franchise Concepts
Franchise Solutions: “In August 1999, Fannie Hu opened her PostNet franchise in Bakersfield, California. Two years later, her husband Bruce opened his The Maids franchise in Bakersfield. Rewind a few years, and Fannie was a stay-at-home mom and Bruce worked for a semi-conductor company. Their lives were very different then. Why did Fannie and Bruce [...]
Better Than a Lemonade Stand: Small Business Ideas for Kids
Amazon: “The 15-year-old author assembled these 51 ideas for kids to make money; numerous adults have done this before, but this guy is organized! Some of the projects require specialized knowledge and/or equipment (computer teacher and telephone-information-line organizer), others are add-ons to other services (garbage can mover, newspaper mover), and some are just plain selling [...]
Don’t Overlook Risk Transference
National Federation of Independent Business: “One aspect many small to mid-size businesses overlook is risk transference. No major company Kuhn is aware of fails to transfer risk wherever and whenever it can. What should you do? At a minimum, ask your subcontractors to name you on their policies as additional insured on a primary/non-contributory basis. [...]
Comparing Biz Ops to Franchises
Entrepreneur: “Homebased franchises and business opportunities offer investment opportunities built on a truly irresistible principle: Own a business, be your own boss, work out of your home and leave behind that hideous commute. The basic appeal may be the same, but franchises and business opportunities are more different than they are alike. They share DNA-they [...]
What About “Poor Decision” Insurance?
A reader wrote in to Startup Journal with an interesting business idea: “I would like to set up a firm that offers protection to people making life-altering decisions. Let’s call it decision insurance for now. Target customers could include entrepreneurs or new immigrants. Is this a viable business idea? Where should I start my research?” [...]
Loyd from Yosemite Blog instant messaged me a great business idea today: Here’s a great part time business to start…. camping spot savers! On major holidays they go in a few days in advance, set up a tent, and camp there until the payee gets there. If they get a good spot the payee could [...]
Microsoft: You need to decide whether it’s worth your time to start the business in the first place. Mark Weaver, executive director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Rowan University, urges prospective business owners to analyze their financial expectations and risks by using this five-step process: Set your marketplace worth — how much [...]
Some Tips for Naming Your Business
CareerNiche: We all know I appreciate a good business name (even if I really haven’t had any to share in recent months), so I enjoyed reading these tips for naming you business. I’m not sure I agree with everything, as evidenced by the names of my blogs, but I definitely has a good laugh at [...]
How One Dry Cleaner Uses Email Marketing
Direct Marketing Intelligence: “Dry cleaning is largely a convenience business; you patronize a store because it’s on your way to somewhere,” Devaney says. “I’m interested in making my customers feel more like they’re family. Just the fact that I’m always visible, sending them something each week — that helps make me their dry cleaner.” Like [...]
The Difference Between a Real Entrepreneur and a Good Professional
CDRob: “Well, the businessman is a person who ‘smells’ a good opportunity and tries to take advantages of his skills to cash it. The highly trained professional is exactly the opposite: he is very good at his day by day job (could be a programmer, a lawyer or anything else) and his 9 to [5] [...]
Entrepreneur: Playing games is an important part of every childhood–but for sisters Callie and Pam Weiant, the homemade game their mother created for them as children inspired them to become entrepreneurs. The game had been popular in the Weiant family for years, and the sisters always thought it would make a great keepsake for other [...]
Business Week: ‘This is a career you prepare yourself in a rigorous way for,’ Spinelli says. As much as learning actual business skills, he says the real value of organizations like NFTE is helping students ‘see the world as a set of opportunities, rather than a series of obstacles.’ Barnabas Shakur, founder of New York-based [...]
Entrepreneur’s Journey: Most entrepreneurs are ideas people. They are dreamers, creative types that see opportunity in daily life. I liken the creativity of business idea generation to what an artist or a musician experiences when indulging in their craft. Thinking of new business ideas for an entrepreneur is like painting a picture or composing a [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Ideologic.
→ homewatch-intl.com Homewatch CareGivers has pioneered the advancement of home care for over a quarter century. Currently, over 65 million U.S. families are struggling with the care for a parent or loved one. The markets they serve are experiencing explosive growth and individuals opening Homewatch CareGiver businesses now are setting themselves up for a commanding [...]
HomeVestors and House Flipping
Detroit Free Press: HomeVestors has more than 240 franchises around the country. The company was founded in 1989 and started the first franchise in 1996. Last year, it made $27 million. There are four franchises in metro Detroit and there are plans to have 15 operating in coming years. The company appeals to those home [...]
The Brickkicker Home Inspection
→ brickkicker.com Existing home sales form the primary market potential for The BrickKicker franchise owners. That’s because existing-home buyers are the ones who most often want and need the added assurance that the realities of home ownership will be as pleasant as their dreams. And significantly, sales of existing homes have consistently out numbered new [...]
The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy
Fortune: It used to be that a tinkerer like Misterovich could, at best, hope to sell his idea to a big company. More likely, he’d entertain friends with his Pez-sized visions. But a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make [...]
Pricing Strategy: How Much Should You Charge?
About: “One of the most difficult, yet important, issues you must decide as an entrepreneur is how much to charge for your product or service. While there is no one single right way to determine your pricing strategy, fortunately there are some guidelines that will help you with your decision. This week we’ll take a [...]
LLC or S-Corp, Which is Better?
Jeff Cornwall: “I often get asked whether a new business should form as an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) or an S-Corp. My non-lawyer answer has usually been that, generally speaking, an S-Corp is a bit simpler and cheaper to set up, so unless an attorney has specific reasons to go with an LLC go with [...]
10 Ways to Know If Your An Entrepreneur
Tom Evslin: Here in late night talk show format are the ten ways to know if you (or a loved one) is an entrepreneur. You can’t bring yourself to call anyone “boss”. You or any of your children can incorporate a business in your state in less than four hours. Instead of saying “there oughtta [...]
The Job Blog: It’s tempting to want to work from home. I do it myself, so I know the benefits you receive from the flexible schedule and comfy environment. But, watch out for scammers. Here is a good list of some of the most common types of work-at-home scams. Beware. And never never never pay [...]
Restaurant Business Opportunity – Serving Bugs?
Ananova: A German restaurant claims to be fully booked for weeks after adding maggots to the menu. A German restaurant achieves an unlikely success by putting maggots on the menu. Dishes at Espitas in Dresden include maggot ice cream, maggot salads and maggot cocktails /Europics Dishes at the Espitas restaurant in Dresden include maggot ice [...]
→ digikids-id.com Digikids is a child ID company that offers one of the highest quality, and most useful child ID anywhere. The Digikids CD effectively replaces the traditional ID card, and gives parents the power to immediately distribute pre-formatted flyers and posters of their child – complete with last minute details, two high-resolution photos and [...]
Nine of the Most Important Provisions to Look for in a Franchise Agreement
Attorney J. Michael Dady wrote on Bison.com: One of the most important things that you can do to protect yourself, when you are planning to invest the time, money and energy that come hand and hand with owning and operating a franchise, is to carefully review your franchise agreement before signing. There are, of course, [...]
Business 2.0: In apparel, toys, sports equipment, electronics, motor vehicles — you name it — small but savvy new companies are wedging themselves into established industries, unburdened by the fixed costs of infrastructure past. They’re doing it with the help of resources never before available so cheaply to startups, like outsourced manufacturing, Internet-powered publicity, and [...]
→ duraclean.com Duraclean was founded in 1930. Irl Marshall Sr., Duraclean’s founder, answered a challenge to find a safe and effective cleaning procedure for fine rugs. Since that humble beginning in Racine, Wisconsin, Duraclean has evolved into a multi service international franchisor. The multiple services or revenue centers allow a Duraclean franchisee the opportunity to [...]
The Entrepreneurial Mind: Entrepreneur.com offers some interesting itnsights into trends related to American consumers. As I have written about related to the entertainment industry, mass marketing based on broad demographic categories is no longer the dominant strategy for reaching American consumers. We are a country of ‘micro markets.’ This plays right into the hands of [...]
Sixth-Grader Starts Business With Govt Loan
Casa Grande Valley Newspapers: A 12-year-old boy has taken advantage of a U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Youth Loans program to start up his own business. Kurtis Kelley, a sixth-grade home-school student, recently borrowed $3,600 to buy a lawnmower, power weed cutters, shovels, rakes and other items to help him cut down some of the [...]
What Can We Learn from Network Marketing?
Fast Company: “Network marketing, or multi-level marketing, is one of the fastest-growing business models of the past few decades. Between 1993 and 2003, total direct selling revenues grew by 7.1% annually, dramatically above the rate of growth of the economy — and of total retail sales (according to the Direct Selling Association)… Any business model [...]
Cool News of the Day: The idea of turning dangerous work into a tourist attraction came to Jan Jantzen while conducting horseback rides near his 135- acre ranch in Kansas, as reported by Jim Carlton in The Wall Street Journal. As he relays: “I’d tell them, ‘Everywhere we are riding, this will be on fire,’ [...]
A Happy Home Business and Kids!
Microsoft Small Business Center: consider carefully how much productivity you’re willing to give up. As a home-based business owner with kids careening about, it’s important to acknowledge that you occasionally may not get all the work done you’d like to get done. If that seems a small price to pay, fine. But if you cringe [...]
StartupJournal: “Manufacturing once seemed a more straightforward enterprise. Draw up your product idea and crank up the assembly line. But in a global economy, as technology advances by the minute and competition bears down, it’s not so simple to transform an idea into a product, and a product into a viable business.”
SmallBizBlog: Alterpreneurs are small business owner managers who went into business for lifestyle reasons, and as an alternative to the nine-to-five of a traditional job and the one size fits all lifestyle that goes with it. They are not motivated primarily by money or career. Instead, they see running a business as an opportunity to [...]
Entrepreneur Magazine is profiling seven young, and originally homebased business people, that are now millionaires — all before the age of 40.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at AnyLetter.
Allstate Home Inspections Environmental Testing
→ allstatehomeinspection.com Allstate Home Inspection and Environmental Testing, LTD (AHI) was founded in 1994 by nationally renowned author, speaker, and environmental expert, Francis X. (Rich) Finigan. Long recognized as America’s #1 Home Inspector, Rich was the first to assess the disparity between the needs of today’s investment-savvy homeowner and the limited expertise of today’s most [...]
Inc.: When Dave Morgan founded Internet marketing company Real Media in New York City in 1995, he vowed to fend off investors for as long as possible. Morgan, a lawyer, had spent several years representing high-tech start-ups that exchanged equity for financing early on, only to lose control of their companies down the road; he [...]
Not Quite Ready To Retire? Try Franchising.
Franchise Solutions: If you’re in your 50’s, 60’s, or older and you’re not quite ready to retire, franchising could hold the key to your future happiness, and possible wealth. With businesses that require part-time or full-time devotion and investments from under $10,000 to over $1 million, there’s certainly an appropriate opportunity for almost everyone. Just [...]
How to Sell at Craft Fairs and Shows
Entrepreneur: Think selling your work at shows and fairs might be for you? Follow these road-tested tips to success: Walk the show. Just because your Mom used to tack up your drawings on the refrigerator doesn’t mean your work is professional enough for people who aren’t related to you to buy it. First, attend a [...]
Don’t Let the Skeptics StopYou
StartupJournal: “Let me guess: Your idea is the best thing since sliced bread. When Otto Rohwedder dreamed up the idea of selling sliced bread in 1912, however, all he got was a lot of carping and naysaying. How difficult was it to slice bread? And everyone knew that bread, even loaves of it, got stale [...]
Real Estate: Leading Cause of Startup Death
Ross Mayfield: “I am convinced that being virtual is the best way to start a company. The benefits go beyond cost (although the culture of frugality can go a very long way). In our case, it improves the product. But generally it is more productive. When the bandwidth for collaboration is constrained at times, you [...]
→ superwash.com Super Wash, Inc. is the nation’s premier turnkey car wash company. They have built over 600 car washes from the ground-up nationwide and currently have approximately 450 combination self-serve and brushless automatic car washes operating under the Super Wash® trademark in 22 different states from coast to coast. Over the years, Super Wash, [...]
