Archive for the 'Profiles' Category
Interview With Small Business Consultant
Yaro Starak: Today I have yet another fantastic entrepreneur interview for you in my series of small business podcasts, this time with Anita Campbell, Editor of Small Business Trends and the Small Business Trends newsletter.
Cooking up a New Biz While in Between Jobs
Startup Journal: She’d left New York to pursue a career in nutrition advocacy in her hometown of San Francisco. She thought holding cooking classes in her home would be a fun way to earn extra money as she mapped out her next career move. The Friday before Labor Day 2004, she posted a listing on [...]
Sarah Bosch continues her reviews this week with Don Soderquist’s The Wal-Mart Way. Wal-Mart is one of the most notorious companies today. Loved or hated, admired or feared, the Wal-Mart Way is an interesting look at Sam Walton (the man who started it all) and the basic principles and determination of one of the world’s [...]
Jeff Cornwall: We seem to be a little late at everything. Many Baby Boomers took a long time to grow up. Many were late to start families. Now US News & World Report reports that many of my generation are discovering the world of entrepreneurship just as they are about to enter their retirement years. [...]
Small Is Beautiful — and Lucrative
Business Week: Think small. That was the basic starting point for Mike Cayelli when he decided to open an online retail business two years ago. With a tiny house, little capital to invest, and only “spare time” to devote to the project, Cayelli knew his big dream had to stay manageable. The Washington (D.C.) entrepreneur [...]
Episode #30 of Venture Voice is online: Scott Johnson is a long-time entrepreneur on the bleeding edge of technology. He started his first business in 1987 and successfully sold it. Then he rode the dot com wave up and down with Mascot Network, a company that was trying to do what Facebook does now by [...]
Charles Kettering: “An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. [...]
Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs
Sarah Bosch continues her reviews this week with David Lorenzo’s Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs. What is it that separates the best from the rest? More importantly, how can you become the best? In his new book, David Lorenzo challenges readers to turn their passion and drive into a competitive career [...]
The Container That Changed the World
NY Times: When the first container ship set sail 50 years ago, businesses and regulators treated distribution not as a single process but as a series of distinct modes: ships, trucks and trains. Every time the transportation mode changed, somebody had to transfer physically every box or barrel. “By far the biggest expense in this [...]
Trying to Sell the Perfect Putter on a Shoestring
Fortune Small Business: Rife is the founder and president of Orlando-based Guerin Rife Putters. Until recently he designed golf clubs for other companies, such as Spalding. Then, a couple of years ago, the 54-year-old designed what he regards as the perfect putter, an odd-looking gizmo tricked out with enough physics-friendly attributes (please see box) to [...]
Columbus Dispatch: For a business created to generate beer money for college students, Ares Sportswear of Hilliard sure has grown up fast. Childhood friends and owners Mike Leibrand and Mike Campbell have turned their small Tshirt company into a multimillion-dollar apparel business. Leibrand, 37, and Campbell, 35, went from selling tees to fraternities and spring-breakers [...]
Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
Slashdot: When you read a news item about a company buyout or a two-person research project hitting big, how many times have you thought “I wonder if I could run a software company.” Apparently, quite a few of software developers are discovering the entrepreneur within, which explains the ever-increasing number of threads on the Business [...]
Business Week: David Mills knows that opportunity comes from taking risks. And he’s definitely a risk-taker. Mills is the force behind the new 1,275-square-foot upscale caviar boutique and tasting bar, Emperor’s Roe Gourmet Emporium coming to New York’s Harlem in March, 2006. Stocking his store with the finest caviar and delicacies such as foie gras, [...]
Taking the Pulse of Family Business
Business Week: Family-owned businesses continue to form the backbone of the American economy. Consider the following statistics reported by the University of Southern Maine’s Institute for Family-Owned Business: Some 35% of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled. Family businesses account for 50% of U.S. gross domestic product. They generate 60% of the country’s employment and 78% [...]
A New Spin On a Cleaning Niche
Startup Journal: When families look to have their homes cleaned in the Boston suburbs, many turn to Brazilian immigrants, part of an exploding population of recent emigres who have been arriving here since the 1980s. But the maid service is different than most. It isn’t an ad-hoc group of workers scouring for weekly gigs; nor [...]
Interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose
Web 2.0 Explorer: Yesterday I interviewed digg founder Kevin Rose to discuss digg’s popularity, its battle with spammers, the recent issues with GroupThink and digg’s upcoming personalization features. This is the first of a two-part article presenting that interview. As you know, digg.com is a technology news site that over the past 6 months has [...]
Opportunity In the New Paper Trail
Startup Journal: The surging interest in e-printers is roiling the $126 billion U.S. printing industry. According to research firm InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, print jobs that move through the Internet made up 12.5% of the total U.S. printing market last year. Charlie Corr, a group director at InfoTrends, projects e-printing will grow at a rate of 19% [...]
Startup Journal: As a vice president and corporate counsel for a New Jersey-based defense contractor, Jonathan T. Mann seemed to have a good legal gig. His earned well over $200,000 annually, more than enough for his family to live on comfortably in a suburban community four miles from his office. But all wasn’t well. Mr. [...]
Simon Cowell: Serial Entrepreneur
Business Week: British-born high-school dropout Simon Cowell is perhaps one of the most recognized figures on American TV. Best known as the acerbic judge on the Fox show American Idol (his signature phrase: “I don’t mean to be rude, but…” is also the title of his 2004 memoir), Cowell claims that at heart he’s a [...]
Fortune Small Business: Eric Shogren storms the food counter at MyMy, a cafeteria in downtown Moscow. He’s a big train wreck of a man: wild hair, half-tucked red polo shirt, blue blazer straining to contain his burly chest. Shogren reaches over the loaded trays of two tiny Russian women in line and starts criticizing the [...]
Mary Sullivan: Some sound advice from Ben for any entrepreneur: Commit to what you ought to do and always carry out your commitments. Don’t waste your money. Let your only expenses be the doing of good to others or yourself. Don’t waste your time. Spend your time on useful matters and refrain from unnecessary activities. [...]
Neville Medhora: Purpose of Experiment: To prove my make money with no money business ideas can work. Hypothesis: It is possible to take less than $10 in startup capital and make money. Experiment: Buy a 24-pack of bottled water and sell it on the side of the road. Possibly utilize the labor of pan-handlers. via [...]
How to Finance Yourself With Zip Drives
Naill Kennedy: PriceGrabber was created in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, with only about $1.5 million in seed money. The company was able to raise a sizable amount of capital using the tools it had created for the general Internet marketplace of expert users and enthusiasts. By tracking exceptional deals from merchant [...]
Startup Journal: In 1980, Patrick Martucci, just out of high school, left his hometown of Cleveland with $300, pointing his Trans Am toward Dallas. He landed a $6-an-hour job at a company that was launching an odd, new product at the time — “voice forward mail.” When he tried to explain voice mail to his [...]
Photon Courier: Red Herring, the venture capital magazine, has a piece on a company called Theranos, founded and being run by Elizabeth Holmes. The company has been developing a device which detects adverse drug reactions. It works by analyzing a tiny amount of blood from a person’s finger or arm, then transmitting the data to [...]
Affiliates Are Entrepreneurs, Too
Marketing Sherpa: Claud Dorton, a gruff white-haired gentleman who says “I’m so old I was in high school when they invented the Univac,” bought a used PC for $290 in 2000. His retirement income was too tight to stretch to a dial-up account (in fact he didn’t even have a working phone line). So he [...]
Simple Pillow A Million Dollar Baby
USA Today: If you’ve given birth or adopted in the past 10 years, chances are you know what a Boppy is. And more important, how to use it. If you haven’t, well, read on. Because this is the story of a woman who came up with one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” [...]
Private Eyes Enjoy Flexibility and Drama
Startup Journal: When the subject of work comes up at social gatherings, Gretchen Schulz is used to taking a turn as the center of attention. “People say, ‘You’re a private investigator? I can’t believe that,’ ” says Ms. Schulz, owner of Schulz Investigative Service in Ponte Vedra, Fla. The perceived glamour is part of the [...]
How His First Online Business Works
This post from Neville Medhora walks the reader (with screenshots) through his five step process for making money with his website: Inundated with emails about this, I decided to show how House Of Rave works. This is just one example of how I use a drop shipping service to make money on the internet. There [...]
The DropCast features an interview with me in their most recent episode (MP3) of their podcast. If you’re interested in subscribing to their show, you can do it in iTunes, or directly with this feed.
Business Week: There’s a lot to be said for careful planning and cautious review when starting a small business. But there’s another side to the story, say some entrepreneurs, and that’s following up a good opportunity and seizing it. Howard Melamed calls it “the science of opportunity.” In 2002, he and his wife Barbara took [...]
Entrepreneurial Whiz… or Just Another Crazy Old Man
Wayne Hauschild, the owner GameDaySigns wrote: I represent a small but growing segment of American small business, the Senior Entrepreneur. Later this year I will be 61 years old and am very excited about my new career. My company, GameDaySigns, produces licensed College spirit merchandise. Over the past several years I’ve encountered many does and [...]
Venture Voice: Derek Sivers of CD Baby
This week on Venture Voice: Many would-be tech titans dream day and night about how their hot new idea will change the world. Derek Sivers just wanted to have his independent band’s CDs sold over the Web. No one would do it, so he built his own music store. CD Baby now generates $25 million [...]
Solo Tees Interview with Dan Sherman
SoloTees, our t-shirt company, has interviewed the idea man Dan Sherman. As always, Dan has a ton of great insights and ideas: Solo: What is your motivation for being an Entrepreneur? Dan Sherman: I’m a big believer in ownership of your livelihood. If you’re working for a paycheck, in most cases, you don’t own your [...]
Shahid N. Shah on his motivation for being an entrepreneur: I like doing something useful for a customer that they can’t easily get done somewhere else. My motto is to “fear mediocrity� because mediocrity is what I feel many companies end up fostering in their employees through poor management and improper incentives. Entrepreneurs must be [...]
The Wizard, King, and Hobbit of Business
Jim Collins: The truth is, we love epic adventures that unfold gradually, allowing us to become lost in the people and their stories. From Darth Vader to Harry Potter, from Achilles to Odysseus, from Bilbo to Frodo, there is something primal in our obsession with the multivolume epic. Even in nonfiction, larger-than-life individuals just cannot [...]
Famous Entrepreneur of the Week
About: Often mistakenly attributed as the inventor of the automobile, Henry Ford was perhaps its greatest innovator. His innovations in assembly-line techniques and the introduction of standardized interchangeable parts contributed to making the United States a nation of motorists and produced the first mass-production vehicle manufacturing plant. Known for his stubborn management style, entrepreneurs may [...]
Don’t Let Ego Kill the Startup
Business Week: For nearly two decades, Jonathan Hirshon has nurtured startup entrepreneurs as a Silicon Valley marketing and communications consultant. Along the way, Hirshon has observed both sorry failures and stunning successes, and he became an entrepreneur himself — founding Horizon Communications, a Santa Clara (Calif.)-based consultancy, in 1995. Though it takes plenty of moxie [...]
Transcript of Jane Pauley’s Interview with Sir Richard Branson
I wasn’t able to attend the kickoff event for the OPEN Adventures in Entrepreneurship conference last night, so I’m really excited to finally read the transcript. If the event was half as good as this transcript reads, it was an outstanding success, and amazing time: Jackie Gleason Theater 1700 Washington Avenue Miami Beach, Florida 8:00 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Starting Small Businesses Later in Life
Small Business Trends: [There is a] growing trend of people in the United States starting businesses later in life or after retirement. And he’s got lots of company. Yahoo Small Business commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct a survey to gauge entrepreneurial attitudes back in April 2005. Of those surveyed, 56% said they wanted to own [...]
Personal Trainers Need Mental Muscle, Too
Startup Journal: About six years ago, he took a step toward a change, going back to college to study exercise and nutrition. After several months, he’d stopped working full time for the family firm and took his first fitness job, teaching group classes at retirement communities. “Once I completed that first session,” he says, “I [...]
Confessions of a Male Pampered Chef Consultant
This post has been removed at the request of the author.
Six Disciplines for Excellence
I was planning to post my review of Gary Harpst’s Six Disciplines for Excellence, but my server troubles have forced that to take a back seat. Anita Campbell, though, has done a fantastic podcast interview with Gary on SMB Trendwire. She writes: Six Disciplines is unlike anything I’ve seen for small businesses. It’s a book. [...]
Franchise Pundit: As a follow up to the previous post Is caring for the elderly a profitable business?, I’ve been looking at a few other elderly care franchises. My preliminary favorite is Comfort Keepers. All the non-medical elderly care franchises have roughly a $25K franchise fee and 5% royalties. But, Comfort Keepers sets itself apart [...]
Spotlight on the Staffing Industry
Franchise Solutions: “Staffing is a professional industry with sensible hours. It is the type of business in which franchisees go home at night and tell their spouse they had a great day, by helping both companies and temporary associates. We have extremely high caliber people that are attracted to PrideStaff as franchisees. Our reputation is [...]
Rubbish Boy Turned Junk into his Career
USA Today: Brian Scudamore keeps proving that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. The 35-year-old businessman has gone from high school dropout to CEO of a fast-growing trash-removal empire that aims to become to the junk world what FedEx has become to package delivery. His company, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, operates franchises in large metropolitan areas in [...]
Interview with Jon Gales of Mobile Tracker
Darren Rowse has a great interview with niche blogger, Jon Gales: This time I’m featuring a blogger I’ve admired a lot recently Jon Gales. Jon is one of the youngest Pro Bloggers that I’ve come across (only 20) but runs one of the best examples of a professional blog that I’ve seen – Mobile Tracker [...]
Fortune Small Business: “The origins of some companies are so familiar that they almost qualify as folklore. Everyone knows that Bill Gates left college to launch Microsoft. Or that Martha Stewart was a stockbroker before founding her media empire. We wanted less obvious choices: the visionaries behind name-brand companies such as Bose and Mag Instruments [...]
