Archive for May 17th, 2010
The Amish are Great Entrepreneurs
CNN Money: Want to find America’s most successful entrepreneurs? Skip Silicon Valley and Manhattan; head to the rural Amish enclaves. Amish businesses have an eye-popping 95% success rate at staying open at least five years, according to author Erik Wesner’s new book, Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive. It’s a [...]
Street Vendors are Pure Entrepreneurs
OPEN Forum: Every day people pass this individual on their way to work, seeing them as nothing more than a poor and desperate punter. But, there are many cases where the street-stall entrepreneur doesn’t let it end here. Over time, this individual rigorously ramps up their business, with no resources but motivation and determination, into [...]
According to a story in BusinessWeek, Andre Woolery had already done a lot—starting an IT company, opening a Caribbean restaurant, and enrolling at Stanford University’s business school—before he started MagnoGrip in Menlo Park, Calif. Woolery, 32, who was born and raised in Jamaica, got the idea for his latest venture in 2005 after he helped [...]
Inventor’s Digest has posted a step by step guide for getting your product onto The Oprah Show. The bad news: Ninety-five percent of Oprah’s guests are invited, and are rarely booked because a publicist made a phone call and pitched a client. It’s rare that any of her staff even make themselves available to hear [...]
AFP: There’s no mistaking what’s in this vending machine. The well-heeled in the Gulf can now grab “gold to go” from a hotel lobby in the United Arab Emirates, when the need for a quick ingot strikes. On Thursday, a day after its inauguration, the shiny machine attracted spectators of many different nationalities who gathered [...]
Renee Wood says she’s used to weeping at work. She runs an online bereavement-gift outfit, Comfort Co., from suburban Geneva and gets calls all day from people who want to buy something special for someone who has just lost a loved one, reports BusinessWeek. Compassion comes naturally to Wood—she was a social worker in a [...]
The Wall Street Journal: The phenomenal growth of women-owned businesses has made headlines for three decades—women consistently have been launching new enterprises at twice the rate of men, and their growth rates of employment and revenue have outpaced the economy. So, it is dismaying to see that, despite all this progress, on average, women-owned business [...]
Her father, renowned linguist Dr. Paul Pimsleur, was the brains behind a language learning system that bears his last name. So when Julia Pimsleur Levine, then a documentary filmmaker, wanted to teach her first son how to speak French, she was understandably picky. According to BusinessWeek, audio learning materials for myriad languages based on her [...]
Family Launches Warm Cookie Biz
KCCI Des Moines: Lana Lewis and her son Dereck started Tank Goodness and promise they can get cookies from their oven to their customers’ offices. “The whole design of the box is to keep the cookie warm,” said Dereck Lewis. He said the concept is as simple as the recipe. “The best part is you [...]
The harmonica may seem as American as the blues. But for years, virtually every harmonica in the U.S. was made somewhere else, with Germany’s Hohner accounting for most of them. Musicians now have a homegrown alternative reports BusinessWeek. On Feb. 1, Harrison Harmonicas shipped its first batch of products from a workshop in a business [...]
Mompreneurs Split Their Time Between Two Passions
Chicago Tribune: In order to manage her business and family, Cristen Dokic has structured her work schedule to free up blocks of time for her kids. Dokic, who in November 2009 launched Language and Culture Plus LLC , which offers foreign and English language training, is up by 6 a.m. to check her e-mail. She [...]
BusinessWeek reports that Angie Onassis Parlionas admits she was “obsessed with lip gloss as a kid.” But between softball games and wrestling matches, she often ended up having to buy yet another tube after losing the one she had been using. Today’s generation of girls can be flighty, and it won’t cost them. Parlionas, 31, [...]
When Brett Stern sees a problem, he fixes it. A lifelong tinkerer, the 50-year-old inventor used his expertise in industrial design to market snack foods, so says BusinessWeek. Unable to find a beer-flavored potato chip, Stern whipped up his own batch. Within two years, he was shipping packages of aptly named Beer Chips, which retail [...]
