Archive for October 2005
Entrepreneur: When your business has outgrown job lots, retailer overstock and liquidated merchandise, where do you go to find factory-fresh products with broader customer appeal? Trade shows, wholesale merchandise marts, drop-shippers, manufacturers and manufacturers’ reps are the links between eBay sellers and the goods that raise established businesses to the level of virtual retailer. While [...]
Entrepreneur Almost Daily: In Japan, where fertility rates are dropping and pet ownership is booming, the Wall Street Journal reports Honda Motor Co. is getting ready to target a growth market with a new concept car designed for pet owners (subscription required to read article). The glove compartment of the car, which will be revealed [...]
How to be a Home-Based Travel Agent
Amazon: Turn your love for travel into your livelihood with this award-winning guide to setting up a bona-fide travel business from the comfort of your own home. Learn how to research trips, make bookings, find and keep customers, maximize earnings, and qualify for agent-only benefits. This user-friendly manual includes a mini sales training program, sizable [...]
Ignoring the Competition Can Be Deadly
Jeff Cornwall: Those who read business plans on a regular basis begin to see certain patterns that immediately send up red flags. One of the most common that I see is a when the entrepreneur downplays, or even dismisses their competition. Sometimes it is due to lack of careful research, sometimes it is due to [...]
Seth Godin: Novelty for the sake of novelty is not only risky, it’s more often than not a recipe for irrelevance. A study of 1,300 publicly traded U.S. companies in fifty-five industries by Chuck Lucier, senior vice president emeritus at Booz Allen Hamilton, found that only four broad ideas, copied over and over again in [...]
The Entrepreneurial Mind: My rule of thumb is this: never let a single customer represent a percentage of your sales that is larger than your profit margin. That way if you lose one customer, even your largest customer, you can stay in business. While this may not always be possible to achieve, it should be [...]
First Customer Is Always The Most Difficult
Rhonda Abrams: Your first customer is always the hardest to get. Customers follow where others lead. Let’s say there are two restaurants on the same street; one has a line of customers waiting for tables and the other is empty. I’ll almost certainly go the restaurant that’s full even if I have to wait. This [...]
Survey: How Do You Read the Site
Thanks for your answers to the survey question on Wednesday. I’m tabulating the data, and will be posting the results shortly. In the meantime, here’s today’s poll: How do you read the site? Hosted Newsreader (Bloglines, MyYahoo, etc) Local Newsreader (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire) I visit daily. I visit weekly I visit occasionally. This is my first [...]
Moms Turn Their Ideas Into Viable Businesses
Startup Journal: Missy Cohen-Fyffe’s business began when other moms gave her unsolicited feedback as she strolled down grocery-store aisles with her son riding in blanket-like protection in the shopping cart. “I just didn’t want my son biting on the gross, grimy metal,” she said of her Clean Shopper invention. Seven years and four employees later, [...]
Taking a Job vs. Starting A Business
One year ago today: While taking a job after graduation will get you exposure to the business world, it’s most likely not the kind of experience you need to be an entrepreneur. Starting a business is all about gumption, calculating risk, and ultimately taking responsibility for your own lively hood, and unfortunately there’s no way [...]
The Seattle Times: “If you need to invest $150, you should get something reasonable in return, whether it’s samples, catalogs or training materials,� she said. “If you have to pay $4,000 just for the right to recruit other salespeople, that’s a huge red flag.� Also, make sure there’s an actual product that’s being sold to [...]
My Real Job Starts at 5 PM Shirt
Like the shirt? It’s coming soon.
How to Become a Celebrity in Your Field
Home Business Magazine: Large companies aspire to total market domination. Small businesses with a “slightly famous” strategy flourish by establishing themselves within a carefully selected segment of a market; they target a market niche that they can realistically hope to dominate. Market niches can be defined by region, by special customer needs, or by demographics, [...]
PaidContent: Weblogs Inc, the blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, is being bought by America Online, paidContent.org has learned from multiple sources. The deal is done and should be announced this week…(Updated: it might be announced tomorrow AM now.) Among the other companies Weblogs Inc talked to included the usual suspects: [...]
Ideas in Progress: Places that will sell you custom wrapped candy are common and, of course, custom decorated cakes are nothing new. The point of the M&M evolution is the change from a product that used to be a commodity into one with both a wide variety of “standard options” and that for a little [...]
One year ago today: With a thousand channels to choose from, I demand quality content all the time — especially on the radio, where the eight minutes of commercials at the top of the hour can seem like an eternity.
Business Week: Everyone feels passionate about something. For some, it might be computer games, handmade candles, or chocolate cream-cheese crunch cake. For others, it may be skydiving, scrap-booking, or just good old-fashioned loafing around. Whatever your fancy — no matter how eccentric, exotic, or mundane — you enjoy it, and that’s all that matters. But [...]
This week’s Brain Brew Radio episode is online. This week: Lorenzo with Parable Venture Partners, LLC in Florida seeks out the Brain Brew Crews advice on how to create a buzz about their children’s read along books… Aaron with Treepot, Inc. looks for ways he can raise money to take his company to the next [...]
Directory assistance calls are an expensive (over a $1 on my cell), but handy necessity when you’re doing business on the go. 1-800-FREE411 is a new advertiser supported service from Jingle Networks that provides these calls for free: 1-800-FREE411 was created to provide callers with a free alternative to the skyrocketing rates being charged by [...]
Entrepreneurs are Great Rearrangers
David Lorenzo: Most successful entrepreneurs are great re-arrangers. They take something that has been useful somewhere else and rig it so that it is groundbreaking and disruptive to a completely different industry. An example of this is the demand forecasting model that Marriott employs in its hotels. This system was originally modeled after something that [...]
StartupJournal: More than $6 billion in tennis gear is sold each year in the U.S. — a big-volume business dominated by sporting-goods giants with huge sales forces and celebrity endorsements. Then there’s Caryl Parker. She is a weekend tennis enthusiast in San Mateo, Calif., who spent 16 years calling on customers for International Business Machines [...]
Which best describes your “employment” status? Unemployed, looking for a job Unemployed, not in the job market Retired Student Part Time Employee with business on the side Full Time Employee Full Time Employee with business on the side Freelancer Full Time Entrepreneur with 0 employees Entrepreneur with 1-10 employees Entrepreneur with 11-100 employees Entrepreneur with [...]
Starting Your First Business: Gain Independence and Love Your Work
Amazon: Here’s a business start-up book that truly “tells it like it is.” Even though it’s part of The American Dream Series, author Jim Sapp “gets real” right away, urging new business starter-uppers to do some heavy soul-searching and personality assessment. Following your dreams is one thing, but owning and operating your own business certainly [...]
Starting a Business When You Retire Just Means That You Keep Working
Jeff Cornwall: However, the problem with viewing entrepreneurship as the Holy Grail for their sunset years is that it may not help them achieve wealth. Many are choosing a self-employment, consulting route to entrepreneurship. They gained significant expertise within some specific area, and they become a “free agent” selling their service to a variety of [...]
Chuck at the Work at Home Business Opportunities Blog maybe onto something: When I read this Dilbert comic strip a few days ago, it sounded remarkably like many of the “work at home� job postings I see in Monster, etc. that are really work at home business opportunities where YOU have to pay. It made [...]
One year ago today: How To Buy A Business.
7 Habits of Highly Horrible Networkers
Scott Ginsberg: Networking is a term that didn’t exist (academically) until almost 40 years ago. It’s a word uttered in and around the business world every day, yet is unclear to most as to how it actually works. Still, it’s a fundamental tool to the success of any business. By definition, the term networking is [...]
Finding the Source for Nearly any Product
Frank Ross: Have you ever been to a specialty store and seen something you thought might sell well in your business? But maybe you wondered how to find the wholesale product source for it? Here’s a way to find out the wholesale product source for just about any product. Look at the UPC Label. Nearly [...]
Small business still drives the economy, and this FAQ, a PDF from the Small Business Administration, entitled SBA Office of Advocacy 2005 Small Business FAQ really illustrates why: Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms. Employ half of all private sector employees. Pay 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll. Create more than 50 percent [...]
The Growing Marketing for Slightly Used Books
Startup Journal: The Internet is creating a new and fast-growing category in the book-selling market — the barely-used book. An increasing number of consumers are snapping up used volumes online at invitingly cheap prices. These aren’t yellowing copies of out-of-print titles but often unblemished copies of newly published books — sometimes available just a few [...]
Carnival of Personal Finance # 16
This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Canadian Capitalist.
This week’s Carnival of Debt Reduction is up at Free Money Finance..
Chris Sacca, one of Google’s business development guys, has an excellent post about how to present an idea: Email Rules. Thesis Statements. What problem are you solving? Differentiate. Follow-up. Google is Bottom-up. Meetings aren’t always necessary. NDAs aren’t a helpful start. Lead with engineering. PR is a distraction. Threats don’t work. Don’t assume we have [...]
Beating the Entrepreneur’s Curse
Business Week: Unlike many of his friends who own small businesses, Alan Tiet, 46, a Vietnamese immigrant and co-owner of Dynamics USA, a Rosemead (Calif.) startup that maintains computer systems for small- to midsize companies, regularly takes vacations. As for those friends, “I think they’re crazy,” says Tiet, who took his family — his wife, [...]
Seth Godin: Make something worth making. Sell something worth talking about. Believe in what you do because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on. Don’t listen to the first people who give you feedback. Don’t give up. Not for a while, anyway.
Use a Federal Tax ID Number Instead of a Social Security Number
Wow, I didn’t realize that sole proprietors could get EINs: An Employer Identification Number (EIN), also known as a Federal Tax Identification Number, is a nine-digit number that the IRS assigns to business entities. The IRS uses this number to identify taxpayers that are required to file various business tax returns. EINs are used by [...]
The 104th Carnival of the Capitalists
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists (the 104th!) is up at Drakeview. Wow, two years? Has it really been that long? I hosted on July 26, 2004, December 27, 2004 and January 24, 2005 and will be again on May 8, 2006.
