Archive for March 2009
photo credit: miss_rogue Twitter not only helps you connect with millions of people it is a phenomenal research tool. Businesses and organizations collectively pay millions of dollars for case studies, reports, white papers, think tanks, and focus groups in the hopes of obtain business building information on their industry and target market. One of the [...]
• Skype handles more international calls than AT&T • 20 free business iPhone apps • Blurb – Turn Your Blog into a Book • Car dealers face extinction • What would Oprah do?
photo credit: urban_data It is no surprise that today many people in the work force and out of the work force are contemplating buying a franchise and leaving their 9-5 job. The problem with this plan is that it takes money to do this and most people today don’t have that much in their savings [...]
photo credit: Heart of Oak Entrepreneurs everywhere are facing the difficult task of needing to start cutting pay roll. But many of them wonder which ones should be cut, how much should they cut and how can they make these necessary changes without too much damage in the work place. Below are a few guidelines [...]
photo credit: iBjorn Many businesses today receive some sort of contract that requires a signature to sign the deal. The signature is iron clad, binding you into ALL the stipulations of that contract. So when reviewing a contract it is important to remember some of the items below before you go signing away at the [...]
The New York Times: Just when it seemed that all the sports-licensing ideas had been exhausted — coffins with team logos, unveiled a few years ago, could have reasonably been the presumed end — along comes something that has been growing in plain sight all along. Yankees Sod. A tuft for the windowsill? A pallet [...]
Preparing Prison Inmates To Start Bizs
Inc.: Hans Becker’s company, which provides landscaping for businesses and homeowners, is less than a year old but already employs eight and logs $10,000 a month in sales in high season. Such rapid growth has tested the first-time founder’s managerial skills. “It’s so hard to get professional help, man,” he says. If Becker sounds like [...]
Springwise: From unused parking spaces to extra beds to arable land suitable for gardening, consumers are increasingly finding new, recession-busting ways to make the most of what they have. While we’ve covered several examples of marketplaces that focus on one of those sharable assets, we hadn’t yet seen Spareground, a UK-based contender that aims to [...]
Four Rules To Follow During This Economy
BizBox: While the present economy removes opportunities and resources, it has also managed to add new and different opportunities. Here are four key points: 1. There are three fundamental decisions facing any business: where to play, how to deliver, and how to win. Those are the three decisions during good times and bad times. 2. [...]
CNNMoney: Tough economic times make fertile breeding ground for scammers and this recession is no different. Since the $787 billion stimulus bill became law in February, dozens of websites have popped up offering advice for a fee on how to get government grants on everything from small business initiatives to paying off student loan debt. [...]
Mompreneurs Provide Hand-Made Baby Gifts for Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck
PR Web: Baby Swags is a well known marketing and public relations company that specializes in celebrity gifting for work at home moms and the products and/or services they create. Baby Swags along with mompreneur clients have provided mom-inspired baby gifts to actress Jennifer Garner and actor Ben Affleck after the birth of their second [...]
What Is It That Mompreneurs Need?
Media Syndicate: Running a business while raising a family can be an extremely rewarding yet challenging path for many moms. Just ask Lara Galloway, The Mom Biz Coach. As a certified life and business coach and a mother of three kids under seven years of age, Lara has been managing the same challenges other mom [...]
My second post is up on the The Small Business Marketing Guide. This one is about branding your small business. Large corporate businesses have one advantage over small businesses: they have more people and resources. Because they’re such vast collections of individuals, and it can be difficult for consumers to understand an organization that large, [...]
As Credit Cards Falter, Cash Variety Gains Popularity
The New York Times: Three small companies are playing a role in a business that has been growing as the economy’s troubles have deepened — the business of prepaid cash cards. The cards, which have the Visa, MasterCard and Discover logos, act like portable checking accounts, though they are replenished with deposits made at retail [...]
Finding Your Niche Can Lead To Biz Success
bytestart.co.uk: Can you identify your audience? One of the most important and sometimes difficult first tasks of any new business owner is to identify who will be interested in buying their products or services, who they should market to and who needs to hear from them? The classic mistake made by all too many entrepreneurs [...]
PaidContent.org: Companies can’t run ads on Twitter (yet), but in five years, a prime spot on the micro-blogging service’s “suggested users” list might be worth well over a million dollars. That’s what Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis told TechCrunch, after offering Twitter’s founders $250,000 to secure a place on the list for the next two years. [...]
Marc At MarcandAngelHackLife.com: Some people spend 90% of their time organizing their time. Some tackle to-do lists peppered with insignificance that stretch a mile long. And still, there are others who refuse to do anything at all. As for me, I am committed to doing one thing a day, and that has made all the [...]
Gov’t Takes Steps To Make SBA Loans Easier To Get
ABC News: Small business owners who have watched banks and automakers get assistance from the government can now receive some help, too. The government is making it easier for companies to get loans from the Small Business Administration. It’s eliminating fees on its most popular loans, known as 7a loans, and guaranteeing a larger portion [...]
From Web Design To Children’s Art, This Business Does It All
The next time you’re ready to buy wall art for a child’s bedroom, you might want to take a peek at Canvas Grafix. At just over 1 month old, they currently offer over 175 designs. Each piece strives to be unique and stylish, while also maintaining the ability to be personalized with the child’s name. [...]
Mompreneur Honoured For Calgary Firm's 'Organic' Growth
Calgary Herald: Calgary mom Jane Walter is ready to take her unique retail concept to the next level. Walter, owner of organic-Kidz, was named Wednesday Calgary’s Mompreneur of the Year for 2009 by Southcentre and Mompreneur Magazine. The award includes six months of rent-free cart space in the mall as well as a prize package [...]
Mommy-Owned Businesses Band Together
Highlands Ranch: A unique group has banded together to support and assist each other. Mommy Meeting is an organization that allows mom-owned businesses to benefit from networking meetings, workshops, retreats and other gatherings such as the Momporium Event scheduled for Saturday, March 28 from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Aspen Grove Shopping Center. [...]
Mens’ clothier clothier Jos. A. Bank sure knows how to sell luxury products during a recession. If you buy a suit from Jos. A. Bank during their sale from March 16 to April 9, 2009, and you lose your job during between April 16 and July 1, 2009, Jos. A. Bank will rebate the price [...]
Women Turn Their Closets Into Stores
The Wall Street Journal: When Candice Bennett lost her job selling cars in Las Vegas, she tried to figure out new ways to earn money before moving cross country. Ms. Bennett, 29 years old, who has yo-yoed between a size 6 and 22 over the years, realized she had accumulated a lot of clothing in [...]
How Two Friends Built A $100 Million Company
Inc.: Childhood friends Adam Lowry (left) and Eric Ryan didn’t set out to reinvent an industry. But the combination of modern design and eco-friendly ingredients has made Method Home, the company they founded in 2000, into a $100 million behemoth. The story behind Method’s now ubiquitous bowling pin-shaped containers of soap and dishwashing liquid is [...]
5th Grade Entrepreneur Turns Passion Into Profit
NBCDFW.com: A 10-year-old boy in Mansfield may have the right idea when it comes to making a buck in a tough economy. He took his passion for art and turned into a business. “It makes me happy. That’s why I came up with the business ‘cuz I wanted to do something I liked,” Bryce Roberson [...]
Buy Or Sell Knowledge At Moontoast
Appscout: Let’s say you’re a talented chef, but you’ve always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Or perhaps you know a thing or two about mixed drinks but always wanted to learn how to build your own computer. There are a number of places where you can look up generic video tutorials on [...]
House Suggests Bigger Tax Break For Start-ups
The Wall Street Journal: Just a few days after President Obama announced a stimulus plan for small businesses, more breaks might be in the works. Rep. Frank Kratovil of Maryland, a Democrat, and Rep. Chris Lee of New York, a Republican, proposed amending IRS code to allow new businesses to write off more of their [...]
Precision Hangers Has The Well-Being Of Your Clothes In Mind
If you own a delicate shirt and it has hung for a while, then you might be familiar with the dimples that are left behind by the hanger. Rick Muller also saw the problem they created and set out to do something about it. Inspired by an old hanger, he tweaked the actual shape until [...]
La Dolce Vita Retreats Is Empowering Women to Live the Life They Envision
BigNews.biz: La Dolce Vita Retreats offers a nurturing environment for women to gain a better understanding of their ability to relate to themselves as well as with others. The long-time dream of mompreneur and professional Life Coach, Janice Briggs, created the company to help provide women with international travel opportunities that combine experiential learning and [...]
The Top 10 Must-Have List As Noted By Successful Mompreneurs
When you’ve had the opportunity to interview as many successful mompreneurs as Lisa Druxman has, you gather quite the list of recommendations. Well, MSNBC has recently posted a list of necessities, gathered by Lisa, that some mompreneurs are unable to live without. 1.Phonetag.com It’s a service that transcribes phone messages, which are then sent to [...]
For Psychic, Bad News Is Big Biz
The Los Angeles Times: On the sixth floor of the Paddock Building downtown, a line of people milled restlessly along the hushed hallway. They paced in front of a wooden door, which looked more like the entrance to a broom closet than the law offices surrounding it. The curious leaned inside, hoping to catch a [...]
It’s A Guy Thing! – Weird Inventions
DarkRoastedBlend.com: There are over 7 million patents registered in the United States, a great number of which describe practical inventions designed for use by everyday, ordinary human beings. Then there’s the “guy” stuff. Ideas so lunkheaded and irrational they could only have come from that tiny portion of a guy’s brain not dedicated to scratching [...]
BusinessWeek: After two-and-a-half years in marketing at Yahoo!, Ryan Kuder was among the 1,000 let go in the portal’s first round of layoffs. He teamed up with Colombian entrepreneur Jonathan Tarud over the summer to work on a local social network called Neighborsville. But by the fall, when it was clear funding would be scarce, [...]
Secrets Of Marketing In A Web 2.0 World
The Wall Street Journal: Consumers are flocking to blogs, social-networking sites and virtual worlds. And they are leaving a lot of marketers behind. Millions of people have become familiar with these tools through sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Second Life, or by writing their own blogs. And a growing number of marketers are using Web [...]
Biz Poll Results: Start A Biz Now?
On Monday, we started a biz poll that asked, “If you were entering the workforce during this recession, would you still want to start a small business?” A whopping 90% of you said YES, you would start a business. Jaclyn commented, I know of a couple people who have opened up their own business in [...]
Baby So Chic Is Transforming Plain Baby Onesies Into Fabulous Day Wear
BigNews.biz: Baby So Chic, a new trendy boutique style online store specializing in onesies for baby boys and girls. The uniquely designed clothing line is adorned with beautifully eye catching Swarovski crystals, chosen for their classy and beautiful look. The high quality crystal jewelery is from the famed Daniel Swarovski collection, which signifies Baby So [...]
Looking To Move? The Recopack Is Replacing The Traditional Cardboard Box
The average life of a cardboard box isn’t very long. They can usually last through one or two uses before they end up in a landfill. When it comes to moving, they’re not very cost effective. Spencer Brown, the founder and brain child behind Rent-A-Green Box has re-invented the cardboard moving box from 100% hard [...]
Online Sales Banned For Girl Scout Cookies
Newsweek: When 8-year-old Wild Freeborn became a Girl Scout earlier this year, she had a simple goal: sell 12,000 boxes of the organization’s addictive cookies. She wanted to earn enough money to send her entire troop (all new scouts) to summer camp in Brevard, N.C. After going door to door in her neighborhood, visiting stores [...]
Biz Resource: Free Coffee Cups
Stuff Daily: Based in Washington DC, FreePaperCups.com is a marketing firm specializing in non–traditional advertising solutions. The firm specializes in handheld branding in the office – ensuring office workers see, touch, and hold advertising messages throughout the day in the workplace. Whether a company spends $100 a month or $100,000 a month on disposable cups [...]
All Kinds Take A Shot At Online Video
USA TODAY: Media companies and people with camcorders and spare time — the drivers of popular online sites including Hulu.com and YouTube— are starting to face tough new competition for the attention of Web users who like to watch videos. Businesses, colleges and institutions are leaping into online video production as the audience for clips [...]
Time Banking Takes Off In Tough Economy
ABC News: After the recession unexpectedly sent her retirement portfolio into a nose dive, 61-year-old Judy Capel found herself forced to make cuts to her budget, eliminating home repairs like fixing her leaky kitchen sink, getting her windows washed and repairing broken shelves in the living room. “Right now, they would not get repaired,” Capel [...]
On The Rebound: Chris Hutchins
BusinessWeek: Chris Hutchins was laid off in the first week of December after working for consulting company Monitor Group for just nine months. Casting around for ideas about what to do next, he decided to build an organization to connect other people who were out of work. The result, LaidOffCamp, offers informal sessions and networking [...]
Inside Entrepreneurship: What Small Bizs Need To Thrive
Susan Schreter At SeattlePI: I’m watching the new administration’s small-business initiatives closely. Here’s my short list for leveraging the innovation and drive of America’s small-business owners. • Fire up the Small Business Administration. The Bush administration demoted the Small Business Administration from Cabinet status and closed regional SBA offices that provided a broad range of [...]
Paying Entrepreneurs To Find Right Biz
The New York Times: Jim Ellis and Kevin Taweel used a search fund to acquire a $6 million roadside assistance company with 45 employees that they built into the nation’s largest provider of insurance products to cellphone companies. While most people have never heard of them, search funds are attracting increasing attention as a way [...]
How To Take On An Established Competitor
photo credit: tinou bao Finding an establish competitor is not necessarily a reason to give up on your business idea. True, in some ways, it will make it harder. But it does prove that that a market exists for your product or service. The Netsetter has detailed six strategies to take on an establish competitor: [...]
photo credit: Robber Esq Many home based business inevitably face the choice of wether they should grow their business larger or not. Many of them want to keep their small business atmosphere but at the same time want to project confidence that they are a big enough company to accommodate their customers needs. Starting with [...]
photo credit: myuibe Many small business owners ask themselves either “what is a blog”, or “do I need to blog about my business”. A blog is just writing updates about your business on an online site. To determine if you should start a blog about your business is pretty simple. Make a list of questions [...]
Study Shows Small Business Owners Turn to Accountants
photo credit: jekert gwapo It’s no surprise that small business owners rely on their accountants to guide them through the ins and outs of setting up their businesses and preparing their taxes, but accountants’ roles have quickly developed into advisors and even trainers on how small business owners can get the most out of their [...]
photo credit: F33 Most small businesses are able to have a personal relationship with customers. This is one advantage that huge corporations do not have. You need to focus on good quality products and services and aim on high customer satisfaction levels. Today there are many people contemplating the idea of starting their very own [...]
Globe and Mail: It all started over a couple of beers. Deland Jessop and Adam Cooper, classmates at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business MBA program, were out at a bar one night tossing around ideas for a business of their own. Jessop, a former Toronto police offer, mentioned how difficult [...]
