Archive for June 2005
Most Online Franchising Directories Suck
Lance Winslow nails my reasoning for starting this site: Franchising Directory sites are not doing the industry any good. Typically they charge a fee for advertising per month or charge per sales for the lead, there must be 50 such sites. Only a few are able to generate significant leads, which you as a franchisor [...]
Law & Entrepreneurship News: “The May edition of the SBA’s Solutions newsletter focuses on the pros and cons of franchising. It is a must read for any entrepreneur looking to buy a franchise.”
USA Today: Summer’s here, and you know what that means. Everybody’s having fun except those of us who run our own businesses. The kids are out of school, the relatives arrive next week and our employees are on vacation. Meanwhile, we are still here minding the store. As entrepreneurs, no one gives us two or [...]
CNET News.com: Brad Meador’s in luck. The virtual dealer at Eurobetpoker.com has just dealt him a jack and an ace of hearts. A few seconds and clicks of the mouse later, he wins the $62 pot. Poker — Texas Hold’em, to be precise — is his game, and he nets an average of $100 to [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Byrne’s MarketView.
→ cruiseonefranchise.com Founded in 1992, CruiseOne is a home based cruise-only travel franchise and part of NLG, the world’s largest cruise retail company. Their excellent cruise line relationships coupled with progressive and innovative marketing, provide their franchise owners with a set of tools unmatched in the industry. Prospective franchisees must have a passion for the [...]
→ pressed4time.com Pressed4Time is a home based dry cleaning pick-up and delivery service. They target people at local business and office buildings and establish routes their customers can depend on. Twice weekly they pick up and/or deliver dry cleaning and shoes for repair. All dry cleaning is done by a local dry cleaning company. Many [...]
Fitness For Life / Fitness Together
→ fitnesstogetherfranchise.com Fitness For Life and Fitness Together personal trainers provide quality, private, one on one personal fitness training. Their programs offer a safe, effective way to help women and men achieve their fitness goals in a friendly, non-threatening atmosphere. Contact Information 399 Perry St. #300 Castle Rock, CO 80104 303-663-0880 Fax 303-663-1617
Food, Tires and Now Insurance at Costco
Entrepreneur: “Tired of the lack of health insurance options for the self-employed? Check out the Costco’s pilot program to offer insurance to its Executive members in Southern California. According to this article in the Los Angeles Times, the program was created in response to high demand from customers. Hoping to offer insurance alternatives to the [...]
Jeff Jarvis: I’ve been trying to figure this out for sometime: On the one hand, things in our world are getting bigger: Walmart… media conglomerates… Dell… merged airlines… megachurches… Home Depot… merged banks… Microsoft… But on the other hand, things are getting smaller: The empowered individual can create a media company, using blog software; create [...]
Marshall Brain: Yes – you need to start a business. In America, starting a successful business is the surest, most controllable path available to you for making a million dollars in less than 42 years. And really, this decision to start a business gets us to a key part of our conversation. There are two [...]
How Long Does It Take To Start A Business?
BarryBlog: “This week, USA Today had a graphic about how many days it takes to complete all the requirements necessary to start a business in various country. According to the World Bank in the US, they listed it as 5 days. The shortest amount of time? Australia at 2 days. The longest? Haiti at 203 [...]
Is anyone else tracking their Bloglines subscribers? Does Feedburner do something similar? If not, is anyone interested in how I’m doing it?
About: “Considering a franchise opportunity? Entrepreneur Magazine has just released its list of the top new franchises. These are businesses that have been franchising for five years or less, so the opportunity is wide open and they’re typically more affordable and available than some of the more familiar franchises (have you checked out the requirements [...]
Small Is Better Than Big, From a Different Perspective
The Entrepreneurial Mind: We are entering a new period of potentially major entrepreneurial economic growth. If we don’t get it right from a public policy stand point, this country will be in serious trouble within the next twenty years as entrepreneurial activity may not reach the levels we need to move the economy into its [...]
Outsourcing for Entrepreneurs: How to Get It Right
Entreworld: Entrepreneurs may be passionate about their business even while not always being sure about the direction in which they will take it. As such, they could make the serious mistake of turning to outsourcers prior to identifying strategic goals. Outsourcing professionals, being only human, are more than willing to execute in exchange for money, [...]
Another Profitable, And Tiny, Niche
StartupJournal: A publisher misspelled the word “Massachusetts” in the title of a guidebook, rendering it “Massatusetts.” A bindery glue in a nursing handbook failed to hold, and the pages fell out. Thousands of copies of a quilting book printed overseas developed an awful smell while sitting in the hold of a ship during a dockworker’s [...]
I Was Offline – Please Recommend a New Web Host
There’s nothing quite as scary as waking up to discover that your website has been offline for most of the night and that you can’t get any real information from your web hosting company. Can anyone recommend a host that when something, God forbid, goes wrong actually communicates with their clients?
How To Franchise Your Business, And What Franchisees Can Learn
The Franchise Pundit: If you want to be a franchisee, understanding the motivations and decisions made by franchisors is important. I came across this article that walks through the general considerations a franchisor must deal with when deciding whether to franchise their business. Reading the article will help franchisees evaluate whether the franchise fees and [...]
Recently, I’ve been looking for a few high quality affiliate programs to try out on the site, and out of the blue today, I received a call telling me about a new website called SurveyClub. Apparently, they hate spam and offer a directory of legitimate paid survey opportunities. I like the sound of that! Here’s [...]
Entrepreneurs Wanted For Interview Series
I’m looking for some small business entrepreneurs to interview. If you’re interested in some free exposure for you or your business, please email me.
Second Time Entrepreneurs Not As Successful
Mr. Gutman on why successful entrpreneurs are not necessarily as successful the second time around: “To win you have to submit to the lunacy of the crazy world we live in. If you won’t push the pedal to the floor, you can bet your competitors will. And while you may be motivated even with cushy [...]
New Edition of Brain Brew Radio
A new edition of Brain Brew Radio is now online. Highlights of this episode include a chat with John Acres, founder of Bigha (the company with my favorite small business website!), and some helpful advice for the owner of a health insurance company for your pet. They also have a podcast of the show available.
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Amazon: “Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only [...]
Profitable Niches Are Everywhere!
StartupJournal: Psychoanalysis, the treatment originated by Sigmund Freud more than a century ago that requires patients to lie on a couch and say whatever comes to mind, has been battered in recent years by everything from antidepressants to skepticism to managed care that doesn’t pay for such long-term therapy. So who in his right mind [...]
Business Week: “Michael Moritz, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, has made a lot of money for investors over the years by picking the right entrepreneurs to bet on. He backed the founders of Yahoo, Paypal, and Google, which so far has returned 560 times Sequoia’s original investment. He’s also had his share of dogs, [...]
Small Business Freebies From The Government
I’m normally not one to endorse government programs, but Kim Komando is right on the money in this article: If you have ever wondered why many small businesses ship using the United States Postal Service, it’s not just because its rates can be cheaper than overnight services. If you ask, the USPS will send you [...]
Creative Financing for Start-ups
Knowledge@Wharton: One way to help finance a company in the early stages is to get customers to pay up front, said Flaschen, and, if possible, get vendors to make concessions to help the company’s revenue stream. “Even before you go out and raise money, ask ‘How can I do this with as little money as [...]
Seth Godin on why small businesses are better: For the last six years, I’ve had exactly one employee. Me. This has changed my worklife in ways that I hadn’t predicted. The biggest changes are: 1. the kind of project that’s “interesting” is now very different. It doesn’t have to be strategic or scalable or profitable [...]
Assessing Business Opportunities
The Entrepreneurial Mind: A key skill that successful entrepreneurs learn is to more efficiently and quickly assess possible opportunities before they make extensive commitment of time and money. It allows them to weed out ideas that don’t have a good chance or working. In effect, it gives the entrepreneur a chance to fail on paper. [...]
Leah Maclean: If you believe that just by creating a business you will have people flooding through your doors, then get over yourself! If you believe in the philosophy of “if you build it they will come” then the only business for you is movie reviewing. Selling MUST happen in your business! Selling is the [...]
The Elements of a Good Business Plan
John Dmohowski: [Business] plans don’t have to be long but they do have to be comprehensive. Most good plans have the following characteristics: 25 – 40 pages written in a professional manner with Executive Summary, Market Assessment, Company Description, Marketing and Sales Tactics, Product and Services, Operations, Management and Ownership, Finance and Use of Funds [...]
Al Crowley: Even if you can’t find people who are willing to enter into a collaborative conversation in your business community, all is not lost! There is a wonderful organization called SCORE, Service Core of Retired Executives. SCORE is a volunteer based non-profit organization with the purpose of helping business owners succeed. I searched through [...]
You Only Have to Be Right Once
Mark Cuban: It doesnt matter how many times you fail. It doesnt matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and either should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because. All that matters in business [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at GalaTime.
Accounting for Non-Accountants: “If you are a small business owner or manager, there will come a time when you have to dispose of an asset. You may sell, trade, or discard the asset but regardless how you dispose of it you must account for it on the company’s books.” Read more.
→ ductdoctor.com In the last ten years, the Air Duct Cleaning Industry has begun to gain the recognition it deserves. As stories of “sick buildings” spread, as more people develop allergies, and as Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning specialists discover the negative effects of air ducts clogged with foreign materials, the number of people interested [...]
Quixtar’s Attempts to Silence Online Critics
Mark Glaser reports on Amyway’s online division Quixtar’s attempts to manipulate search engine results to silence their web based critics: Someone tells you they have the opportunity of a lifetime for you. A way to make money by becoming an independent business owner through Quixtar. You’re not sure about Quixtar and want to learn more, [...]
Ross Mayfield: “My grandpa taught me the difference between an entrepreneur and a businessman is the entrepreneur is in it for the quick flip, while a businessman makes a lasting contribution to the community.” via Occam’s Razor and Buyout Blog.
A long time ago my father taught me how to negotiate: Make your demands and then shut up. Whoever speaks first, loses. Tom Evslin expands on this and presents eleven other lessons to explain the power of silence in negotiation: Silence from Mr. Oak. They are beginning to squirm as both the silence and their [...]
See Compliments For What They Are: Opportunities!
Duct Tape Marketing: “If you are like most, when you receive a compliment, you look down at your shoes, shuffle your feet, get a little blushy and stammer something like, shucks, it was nothing… I believe that when a client reaches out and tells you that you did a good job for them, they are [...]
Market Watch: Ads for business opportunities often make promises of big cash benefits for very little effort. But the Federal Trade Commission has found that many business-opportunity promotions are little more than scams to take money from consumers. Read the ad carefully. If it boasts that buyers can earn a specific amount of income, make [...]
Where’s the Leverage for Entrepreneurs?
Ben Casnocha: A nice post by my Cole Valley neighbor Mark Pincus who groans about the lack of leverage entrepreneurs have. VCs and other investors can make several large bets among various companies in different market segments, hedge fund managers are pretty much guaranteed a year in year out solid return, but entrepreneurs must make [...]
CoolBusinessIdeas.com: Scott Matthew knows there’s nothing like a hot pizza delivered to your door on a January night. One such night last year, when an hour seemed too long to wait, he went to bed hungry, but woke up inspired. “If you bake the pizzas in vans on the way to you, it would be [...]
Work from Home Signs: Herbalife
Yellow Pages Commando: If you’re like me, you see signs plastered all over creation claiming that you can earn $5,000 / month working at home in the mail order business. Turns out all those signs are from Herbalife, a multi-level marketing company that makes money by signing up distributors and selling them loads of vitamins [...]
StartupJournal: After years on the corporate treadmill, Betsy Ludlow found it refreshing to work out on actual gym equipment. She had spent 18 years at American Express Co., rising to senior vice president of corporate services with 100 or so people answering to her. But nearing her 50th birthday, she grew to hate her commute, [...]
Following up on the last post I thought I’d run my reader survey again and try to gain a better understanding of my readers. I would really appreciate it if you would take a couple seconds and answer the following survey questions. Thanks! Age under 14 14-18 19-24 25-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71+ Gender [...]
29 is Perfect Age for a Big Idea
Times Online: Researchers investigating the achievements of thousands of innovators have established that 29 is the age at which you are most likely to have your first big, original idea.The age represents the optimum combination of education and energy levels required for great ideas to emerge, according to the study. Read more.
More on the Serial Startup from A VC Perspective
Fred Wilson: I posted about serial entrepreneurs last week and got some great comments. Understanding the mind of the entrepreneur, particularly the successful serial entrepreneur, is a hard thing to do. But it is one of the most important things a VC can do. To that end, here is a post from Mark Pincus on [...]
