About.com Entrepreneurs

Unique Entrepreneurial Businesses & What Makes Them Successful

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:23:07 +0000

A business school professor once suggested his students look for the best small business ideas and opportunities in "the space between the elephant's toes." He meant that the best, most profitable businesses are often ones that few people have ever heard of and that are hard to imitate. Start those kinds of ventures, the professor said, and you have a higher probability of charging aggressive prices and achieving robust profit margins -- provided, of course, that you have a legitimate niche with enough customers. So, what's your space between the elephant's toes? And how's it working out? Visit this About.com "Show & Tell" feature, tell your story, and if we select it for inclusion you'll be world famous!

Unique Entrepreneurial Businesses & What Makes Them Successful originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 18:23:07.

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If a 7-Year-Old Can Get Goal-Oriented, You Can Too

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:15:43 +0000

I have a business-coaching client, Scott, who is succeeding faster than some of my other clients in his entrepreneurial venture. The other day we were talking about how he has taken his approach to success at work and created a similar system to make his children successful (they are 5, 7, and 10).

Scott's system for his own success consists of planning out his year's goals and creating a series of spreadsheets to monitor week-by-week activity and month-by-month results. He and his assistant are maniacal about keeping the spreadsheet up-to-date-and meeting or exceeding each benchmark. So here is what he implemented with his 7-year-old son, Mark. At the end of the goal-sheet I'll tell you a bit more about what has happened as a result.

Mark's� Objective: To create a set of priorities that I will execute successfully.

School Responsibilities

Homework and projects.
Read 10 minutes alone each day.

Household Responsibilities

Monitoring the trash levels and taking the trash to the trash cans.
Creating a clean room at the end of the day.
Responsible for the playroom clean-up on Monday and Wednesday.

Athletic Responsibilities

Take one golf lesson per week.
Practice with Daddy once per week.
Develop baseball skills for 15 minutes 5 days per week.
Throw the football with Daddy (run routes).
Learn how to dribble, shoot and pass the basketball 2 days per week.
Once a month go to a shooting range to shoot my .22 rifle.
Jog down the street 3 times per week for endurance.

Hobbies

Take a guitar lesson once per week.
Practice guitar 15 minutes 5 days per week.

Bible

Read 5 minutes each night.

Playtime

WII
Nintendo DS
Play with Dad and Mom.
Jump on the trampoline with sisters.

How can I make sure my system works well and I execute?

I am responsible to execute the plan. Make Dad and Mom hold me accountable.

Here's what has happened: Mark has kept to his schedule but has also started anticipating other needs. The other day a light bulb blew and instead of asking Daddy to take care of it, he unscrewed it and brought it to Scott and together they changed the bulb. He also got to learn a new word, initiative. I commented to Scott that the list was really interesting, especially the five minutes of Bible reading a day. Why not 30 minutes or an hour? Obviously, 7-year-old boys can't focus for that long on anything except Nintendo. So Scott is already very aware of creating goals that Mark can achieve with success.

Why bring all this up on a site about entrepreneurship? Goal-setting is important for all entrepreneurs. Yet most of the ones I know don't have goals that are committed to writing, with accountability attached. Look, if a 7-year-old can be successful with a system like this, you can, too. What do you think? Please leave a comment.

If a 7-Year-Old Can Get Goal-Oriented, You Can Too originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 09:15:43.

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How to Never Get a Real Job

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:42:30 +0000

Entrepreneur magazine's Young Entrepreneur contributor Scott Gerber has a cool book in the works called Never Get a Real Job (Wiley, 2010). Scott's an energetic entrepreneur himself and he's looking for stories to include in his book and blog--success and especially failures--so others can learn how to become business owners. He's also got a daily web video show in the works coming this Spring and will be featuring interesting entrepreneurial stories. Worth a look!

How to Never Get a Real Job originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 11:42:30.

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A Mysterious Syndrome that Affects Entrepreneurs

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:11:00 +0000

Have you read the latest issue of the New England Medical Journal? If you're an executive who is thinking of going entrepreneur, you need to check it out. Turns out there's a newly discovered condition affecting entrepreneurs, and it's called ABF. Unlike Restless Leg Syndrome and E.D., there's no drug yet to treat it, so you will have to manage this condition without a prescription.

Oh, ABF stands for Accumulated Boss Fatigue. I first noticed I was developing ABF around five years before I left corporate America. I am glad to be able to share the details of my condition so that others may find relief.

Stage One - Independence Day: How do you know you may have ABF? For me, it happened like this: After years of dutiful service to various employers, I found myself forgetting I had a boss. I was routinely making decisions and taking actions that were contrary to what the boss asked me to do. Even worse, I often didn't bother letting the boss know I had absolutely no intention of following through on the ridiculous stuff she asked of me. This early onset stage is called RIS - Raging Independence Syndrome. It's curable at this stage if you get back in line, apologize, maybe take some time off to clear your head, and remember that in most companies, the nail that stands out gets hammered down. If that doesn't work, you're on your way to Stage Two.

Stage Two - Craving the Movie "Office Space": When it came out in 1999, I felt I was watching my autobiography. My job may have been bigger and less cubicle-bound than the characters in the movie, but I could relate. I must have watched it a dozen times that year. And whenever I had a meeting with my boss, I saw the face of Lumbergh in my mind and heard "Yeahhhhhh. Thannnkssss." That's stage two, and from there, you're pretty much a goner.

Stage Three - Anything but This Job: You know you've reached doneness if your juices run clear when you are poked with a fork; when any other type of work appeals to you more than what you are currently doing, like for instance, being a concessionaire at Yankee Stadium; and any face would be a refreshing change from your Lumberghian boss's. There's a danger here, though: when you decide to go it alone in business, make sure you're doing it for the right reasons, at the right time, and with the right support-and not just to run away from your battle with ABF.

A Mysterious Syndrome that Affects Entrepreneurs originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 09:11:00.

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Social Media Tips from Power-Blogger Chris Brogan

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:40:16 +0000

Chris Brogan's book (co-authored with Julien Smith), Trust Agents, should be required reading for all small business owners and entrepreneurs. As one of the top bloggers in the world (or the blogosphere, or perhaps both), Chris has mastered a medium that countless millions of people and companies are trying to figure out. He has leveraged his blog at ChrisBrogan.com into a platform for a bestselling book and a business, consulting with organizations that want to be better users of social media tools.

About.com caught up with Chris as he was battling Delta Air Lines to find his luggage in Minneapolis airport. Here's the link to our audio interview, where Chris addresses some important questions and issues for small business owners and entrepreneurs, including:

Should all small businesses have blogs?
How can small businesses use blogs and other social media tools to improve their customer relationships?
Can older business owners get into blogging, or is it a young person's game?
How to use search to find where your customers are hanging out;
How can you manage 100,000 followers on Twitter;
How to get the fullest possible leverage for your business from the Internet;
The power of "nice" on the Internet;
And why you might want to emulate P.T. Barnum, David Lee Roth or Billy Mays for your blog persona.

Listen to the audio interview here.

Social Media Tips from Power-Blogger Chris Brogan originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 09:40:16.

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3 Reasons You May Not Have Time to Grow Your Business Slowly

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:31:29 +0000

One of my favorite small-business bloggers, Anita Campbell, wrote recently that the key to being successful in your small business start-up is to be very careful with how you spend money, even if it means growing very slowly. She has some no-lose advice, including being picky about adding products and features, partnerships and employees; acting like the small company you are without faking the accouterments that go with being big; looking for discounts before you buy so much as a box of paper clips; and of course focusing on growing sales.

It's hard to argue with motherhood and apple pie, and I can think of plenty of examples that prove her point. One business I know quite a bit about, a promotional products company,� grew very fast with venture capital backing but quickly found itself in trouble when expenses got too high and sales didn't grow fast enough. Fortunately, the owner was a very tough guy. He got the VCs out, downsized, and grew organically and survived. But still, I think are some other things to consider.

About Growing Slowly: The slower you grow, the less chance you have of wasting resources. Businesses that expand too quickly make more mistakes, and in the first few years of a business one too many mistakes can be fatal. Just one problem about being in the slow lane: to quote John Maynard Keynes slightly out of context, "This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs...In the long run we are all dead." Many startups these days are owned by Baby Boomers (like me) who launch a business after a corporate career. If you're 40-60 years old, the long run is indeed no longer that long. The sand is running out of the hourglass and you can't ignore either it or the mortgage or the tuition. If you're going to gamble on entrepreneurship� rather than have a real job, you should think about how fast/slow you need to to get your business to the point where it meets your needs.

About Being Stingy. Anita writes, "Of every expenditure, I would ask myself:� how many hours would I have to work to pay for this expense? That one question brings clarity." I do that, too. In my catering business, I have often asked myself how many cappuccinos I will have to sell to make back that marketing expense. So again, motherhood and apple pie. On the other hand I sometimes wonder whether I am giving in to "scarcity thinking" when I go down that road. My coach teaches me to focus on creating an abundance of what I want, not just having enough to get by. So if I believe in a marketing concept or a new product, and that means investment, do I really want to calculate having to sell 4,265 lattes to pay for it? Maybe, but I'm not sure. (P.S. Tuition this year is costing me 11,250 lattes.)

About Acting Small: Anita writes, "Instead of the snazziest website possible, have a more informal website or blog. " Keeping it simple is definitely good advice, as is not pretending to be something you're not. But do customers want to work with a business they know is small and fragile? Isn't that risky for the customer? What if you or your business gets hit by the proverbial bus? I like my clients to feel that my business is big enough to never let them down, and it is.

Where are you on the small/big, fast/slow, penny-pincher/big spender spectrum?

3 Reasons You May Not Have Time to Grow Your Business Slowly originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 11:31:29.

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Mompreneurs Shake Up the Mitzvah Planning Marke

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:39:34 +0000

These days, there are more and more "mom.com" businesses popping up. An exceptional one is MitzvahMarket.com. Co-founder Sheri Lapidus is former a public relations executive who has worked at NBC-TV, CBS-TV, In Style and ELLE magazine. She answered our questions about her mission to shake up the bar mitzvah planning market.

What is MitzvahMarket.com all about and why did you start it?

MitzvahMarket.com is a free resource for bar and bat mitzvah planning families. We deliver clever, useful and entertaining ideas in a mom-to-mom tone via a twice weekly e-newsletter to hopefully make mitzvah planning more fun and less stressful. Our website houses all our unique mitzvah ideas and mitzvah project profiles, bringing inspiration to other families and awareness to the organizations that benefit. We have a vendor directory for one-stop shopping and fun mitzvah videos. My idea for MitzvahMarket.com began when I started planning for my daughter's 2010 bat mitzvah. It seemed my friends, who had been through the process already, were a great source of knowledge. I thought there should be a website that was organized, accessible and could feature their unique and insightful mom-to-mom advice about bar and bat mitzvah planning. We launched the website in November 2008.

With your background, why did you decide to go into business rather than get a job in your field?

I've been very fortunate to have had an exciting public relations career working companies like NBC-TV, CBS-TV, Time Inc.'s In Style) and Elle at Hachette Filipacchi But after spending over 20 years in corporate America, I felt the time was right to take all the skills and experience I had gained over the years and start something new and different. After a lot of research and sleepless nights, I realized we had found something missing in a thriving industry -- an industry that I was immersed in at the present time due to the ages of my children. One will be having her bat mitzvah in 2010, and the other a bar mitzvah in 2012.

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?

I love my commute to my kitchen as opposed to Penn Station and New York City. I'm working much longer hours than before, but I love what I'm doing and it's exciting to see the growth and live through our ups and downs.

What's a typical day like in the world of the mitzvah CEO?

Each day is completely different from the one before. We recently added a employee to our team, another real-life mitzvah-planning mom who I spend lots of time with on the phone and at meetings. On Mondays and Thursdays we are getting our weekly email newsletters out, so the mornings are spent editing and putting on the final touches. Each day I also try to spend some time on our social networks -- Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. I also answer all emails and return calls on the day they come in. Most days I have appointments with various vendors to brainstorm on ways to work together.

Do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

Martha Nelson was the managing editor of In Style for most of my 11 years. She always taught us to think about the reader first. I think about this with every editorial story we decide to run on MitzvahMarket.com. It's very helpful that I'm the perfect audience since I'm in planning mode myself. I also admire Dani Levy and all she's done with DailyCandy.com. She launched her e-mail based business in 2000 with 700 names in her database. I believe she now has over 2.5 milliion. We should have a fraction of their success.

What have you learned in the past year since launch? Your disappointments, successes?

It has been an amazing year for Mitzvah Market and one of great growth, something I try to remind myself about daily. Although we have built a business from scratch, coming from Time Inc. and In Style, it's sometimes hard to keep our growth in perspective. I know there are hundreds of thousands of bar and bat mitzvahs each year across the country and it's disappointing that we can not reach each and every family to let them know about our website. We do know that our current readers truly appreciate what we are doing and let us know through emails and in person at the bar/bat mitzvah showcases we attend. They are shopping our vendor directory and our advertisers are renewing their packages. We might not yet have the quantity of readers, but we know we have quality readers.

On the success side, this past November, one year since launch two exciting things happened. First we re-designed and re-launched our website giving our readers more functionality and the ability to search for specific things they might be looking for. We also attracted the attention of a national magazine called Bar/Bat Mitzvah Guide and signed an agreement to become their official website. We now have the ability to reach their quarter million readers across the country. We also will be providing some editorial content to the eight editions of their magazine and we are selling joint advertising packages.

How big is your audience?

We launched in November 2008 with approximately 500 registered readers in our database. We have more than tripled that number and are now reaching just over 2,000. Bar/Bat Mitzvah Guide magazine recently redirected their URL to ours, it's too soon to tell, but we are hoping this will increase our website visitors enabling us to go from a tri-state area resource to a national one. We have incorporated Bar/Bat Mitzvah Guide's vendor listings into ours and now feature approximately 400 mitzvah vendors giving our readers a chance to shop in one location for all their mitzvah needs.

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

We hope MitzvahMarket.com becomes the leading resource for all mitzvah planning. Aligning with an established national magazine will help us take our brand from the tri-state area across the country.

Mompreneurs Shake Up the Mitzvah Planning Marke originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 09:39:34.

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5 Steps to Better Advertising ROI

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:03:19 +0000

If you think that, because your business is small, you can advertise without having a defined marketing strategy, Ed Yeaker disagrees with you.

"In the acting business, there are no small parts, only small actors, and there is no small advertising plan, either," says Yeaker, president of Ed Yeaker Associates, Inc. Advertising and Marketing Services in White Plains, N.Y."No matter the size of the business, ad budget or extent of activity, the advertising investment is always huge."

Yeaker, a former adjunct marketing instructor at Pace University, offers five tips for small businesses that want to get more ka-ching out of their advertising.

1. Have a Clear Marketing Direction -- and Stick to It. "Advertising helter skelter just because of aggressive media sales reps, friends' suggestions, status and emotional appeals usually has little or no value, or even hurts the business," Yeaker says. "Every business, no matter the size, needs a planned approach to marketing-directed advertising that supports the company's goals and allows it to prosper." The key elements of a solid plan should include:

Situation analysis, including market data, consumer profiles and attitudes, plus competitive appraisal;
Assessment of problems and weaknesses along with opportunities and strengths;
Review of the overall business and its financial goals; and
Objectives, strategies and rationale for the money you're spending on advertising.

2. Distinctive Positioning.You must separate your business from competitors selling the same thing in a way that is meaningful, memorable and believable. Then you have to apply that identity consistently and visibly in every facet of your business and operation. Strong positioning is at the heart of effective creative strategy for advertising, but only if it is meaningful and memorable. Being believable is at the heart of advertising success. "The stronger the assertion, the greater the disbelief," Yeaker notes.

3. It's All About Customer Benefits. It's not what you have to sell, but what customers need that's important, even if the customer doesn't know (yet) that she needs it. And your advertising's focus doesn't end when you produce the commercial, print ad or Internet campaign. That's just the beginning. Understanding how customers use and experience your product should drive your ongoing promotion. Yeaker notes, for example, that some bedroom furniture manufacturers advertise the benefit of their materials and construction, emphasizing durability. But when he designed a campaign for a client in this space, the consumer promise was "sweet dreams," because research showed a good night's sleep was the key emotional benefit of the product. "Sure, they want a good product and a fair price, but first things first when you're trying to get their attention," he says.

4. Integrate All Promotional Activity. Yeaker suggests you take a top-down approach to your advertising strategy so you get results greater than the sum of the parts. Rather than initially focusing on the individual components of an ad campaign -- the media where the ad will run, the creative content, the price you'll pay, the number of customers you will convert, and fitting together all the different types of ads and promotions -- think first about the problem you are solving for your business. This is a typical "forest and trees" issue: if you center your attention on the mechanics of advertising and promotion and how well they look and sound individually, you may miss the opportunity (which is really a necessity) of making sure they all add up to a a well-integrated whole that delivers new profits for your business. Taking a top-down approach assures "a cohesive look and attitude so that each of your ads is instantly recognized as being uniquely yours in every application, from print media advertising to TV and radio, from mailings to telemarketing, plus sales literature and especially, Internet marketing," Yeaker says.

5. Accountable Performance. At its heart, advertising is an experiment. You can't have perfect knowledge of what will work, so it's critical to test your assumptions. There are a couple of key ways to measure and analyze advertising to make it accountable:

Creative development, with some preliminary research to confirm viable appeals and offers, followed by testing of different messages and executions;
Testing different messages within each media you use;
Testing the demographics and psychographics of the lists you use for direct mail and telemarketing; and
Testing media in print and broadcast -- each with virtually infinite variations and combinations.

While all this testing and preparation may sound complex and expensive to do, it's actually much cheaper than doing what most small businesses do: winging it.

5 Steps to Better Advertising ROI originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 15:03:19.

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Share Your Story: Strategies for Small Business Financing

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:17:26 +0000

Have you raised capital for your business? Whether you've done the bootstrapping route, friends and family, credit cards, angel funding or venture capital, About.com wants to hear from you. Why did you choose the capital-raising methods you did, and what were the trade-offs? What does the future of your capital raising plans look like? Share your story with About.com's community here.

Share Your Story: Strategies for Small Business Financing originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 10:17:26.

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Branding Tips from a Master: Johnny Cupcakes

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:08:42 +0000

How many of your customers have your logo tattooed on their bodies? Or camp out in front of your store for a week to get a limited edition product?

If you've figured out how to turn branding into an art form like Johnny Earle has done for his brand, Johnny Cupcakes, your customers are probably out of their minds for you, too. Listen to About.com's conversation with Earle on branding and entrepreneurship here.

A bit of background: Johnny Cupcakes sells t-shirts and other gear at three stores, two in Boston and one in Los Angeles, as well as online on the company's website and on eBay, where, by the way, the company has a 100% rating.

Johnny Cupcakes has been around since 2001 and last year rang up more than $3 million in sales. When you visit the flagship story on tony Newbury Street in Boston, you can't see the store from the street because it's up a flight of stairs. So you might think it's a good place to buy, well, cupcakes. A lot of people are surprised, then, that there is no food for sale. Just very cool, exclusive clothing. Some people are piping mad about the playful trick, but that's actually good news for the brand: it gets people talking.

Our interview highlights a number of important points about great branding, including:

Scarcity marketing: All shirts are limited editions, and there are only three stores (although he'd like to open one in London someday).
The importance of a great name: A name like Johnny Cupcakes has soul. It has comedy. It has attitude. It's a great illustration of why a company name is so important.
Using alternative advertising and promotions:, or "random contests" like this one posted to the company's Facebook page: "I'm going to put together a Valentines Day video filled with interviews of couples who have met through Johnny Cupcakes. If you and your loved one live in or around Massachusetts, please hit me up with details."
Great web marketing: Check out the company's blog/website, which is personally managed by Earle. The depth of content goes way beyond what you'd expect from a t-shirt company.

Oh, Johnny just emailed us with another promotional venture he's launching: "I will be taking my cupcake van across the country and literally selling t-shirts out of the back of it, which pays homage to my beginnings of selling t-shirts out of the trunk of my beat up '89 Toyota Camry. These will all be limited edition, van exclusive t-shirts." If you miss it, there's sure to be video of it on his blog. He also plans to "Tell my customers to just show up at a random restaurant with their Johnny Cupcakes shirts on, and I'll treat them to dinner."

Branding Tips from a Master: Johnny Cupcakes originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 19:08:42.

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