Entrepreneurs Face Challenges, Share Resources |  |
- Entrepreneurs Face Challenges, Share Resources
- No More Wading Through Government Websites to Identify Business Licenses and Permits, Says DocStoc
- Small Business Research: 20/20 Hindsight and the New Firm Size Numbers
- For Better or For Work is a Great Guide for Entrepreneurs
| Entrepreneurs Face Challenges, Share Resources Posted: 11 Mar 2012 11:31 PM PDT Small business owners and entrepreneurs face many challenges but also share many new resources. It’s an opportunity for your company to get ahead. Just watch out for pitfalls while seizing the latest opportunities. Challenges & TipsEntrepreneurs run risks to succeed. We’ve all burned the midnight oil and perhaps even burned the candle at both ends when necessary for our venture. But when do entrepreneurs go too far in the personal sacrifices made for business success? WSJ What are your customers saying? In the end, this should be your yardstick. It’s hard to understand why more small business owners don’t fall back on the simple adage that serving the customer is most important. You’re the Boss The Big PictureTaking sales to the next level. Boosting the sales of your small business may come down to a more detailed analysis of your business and how it works. That analysis gives us a much better view of how to change everything about your venture as a way of improving performance. Small Business Marketing Strategies Are you seeing the big picture? Entrepreneurs have many gadgets at their disposal, but sometimes a simple look at the big picture can be the best tool for any business venture. Do you take a regular look at where your business is headed? Startup Professionals Musings Tools & TechThe tumblr approach to marketing. Here’s an online publishing tool you don’t want to neglect when managing your online business presence. If you haven’t tried this new blogging option, why not give it a…er, tumble. Take a look. TheOneOfAKindPreneur Tools for lead and network building. Organizing your leads and contacts from a variety of sources is a painstaking but crucial job entrepreneurs. Here are some important tools every business owner should keep in mind as a way of staying in the game. Small Business Marketing Tools PR & Customer LoyaltyImportant customer loyalty stories. Customer loyalty is hugely important and not just for big companies either. Here are some resources for you to consider when creating the relationship with you customers that will make your business soar. Matt About Business PR tool connects you with reporters. Marketing small ventures can be a tricky business. It’s not easy to get attention for your brand in our media saturated culture where everyone and everything is clamoring our attention. Here’s a way to hook your business up with the publicity you need. Small Business Bliss Lessons from Big BusinessLessons for small business from a towering success. Entrepreneurs of all kinds can learn something from a success story, and none are probably as great an example as Sara Blakely. Read more about entrepreneurs who have succeeded big and apply their techniques to your small business today. Small Biz Diamonds Big business is thinking small. It’s a huge new move by big restaurants and chains, and it should be on small business owners’ radar screens. Smaller locations have long been the purview of small businesses, but no longer. Here’s the new playing field upon which your business will compete. GrowSmartBiz From Small Business Trends |
| No More Wading Through Government Websites to Identify Business Licenses and Permits, Says DocStoc Posted: 11 Mar 2012 02:30 PM PDT DocStoc, an online source of forms and professional documents, this past week launched a website to help identify U.S. federal, state and local licensing and business permit requirements for small businesses. Called License 123, the new site aims to be a one-stop source to identify all licenses and permits required for a particular small business. The site is designed to help small business owners and startup entrepreneurs save time, money and legal headaches. Instead of searching all around the Web on various governmental websites wading through dense legalese, DocStoc’s vision is for the business owner to be able to go to one place, insert some simple data, and find all relevant license information (see screenshot).
When you visit License 123, you enter your state, city, industry and type of business. If your city is in the site’s database, you will get a list of all required licenses for your city, county and state. For $9.95 you can download the full report including application forms, instructions, licensing authority contact information, and information about filing fees. The site is not a filing service. You apply for licenses on your own. But the idea is that by doing the searching for you, and compiling all information in one place, License123 saves you time and you don’t have to navigate the maze of legalese in most governmental websites — and risk missing licenses, thereby incurring monetary fines or other legal action. According to Mike Sheridan, Chief Operating Officer of DocStoc, ”It’s true that a lot of jurisdictions have this information online. However, to find all the information you would need to operate a food truck in Los Angeles, for instance, you have to go to 6 different websites. Being out of compliance can cost $1,000 or more.” License 123 today covers just 10 states, with the most complete information for California (in some states only one city is searchable today). Says Sheridan, “Our goal in the next two months is to include the top 500 cities in the United States. They will represent all mainland U.S. states (except for Hawaii).” After that their goal is to expand to the largest 1,000 cities. As to why all cities and states are not included today, he noted that compiling it is a labor intensive effort and technology only takes you so far today. It typically requires 3 to 5 full days of work for his team to research and compile all the licensing information for a large city like New York or Chicago. License 123 is a product offering of DocStoc, a 5-year old company with 45 employees and 31 million legal and professional documents online. The DocStoc site gets 21 million visits per month.
From Small Business Trends |
| Small Business Research: 20/20 Hindsight and the New Firm Size Numbers Posted: 11 Mar 2012 10:30 AM PDT According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) the Great Recession (as it was styled in the media) lasted 18 months, from December 2007 until June 2009. Of course, it still doesn’t feel like the recession is over, mostly because we haven’t recovered enough to get back to the point from which we fell off the cliff.
All of which becomes extraordinarily clear when you look at the newly released firm size class numbers for 2009, our big research story for February 2012. Details From the New Nose Count The firm size class numbers are a snapshot of what the business population was doing in March 2009, so technically, the recession wasn’t over yet when these data were in effect. Under those circumstances, I guess you won’t be surprised to learn that the numbers are mostly heading south. You may recall from last year that the nonemployer numbers fell 1.2%, from 21.4 million to 21.1 million. At the same time, employer dropped 162,826 firms, losing 2.7% of their population. Overall, we’re down by more than 420,000 firms (1.6%), from 27.3 million to 26.9 million. No surprises there. As usual, the devil is in the details and these details are a pretty clear indication of where most of the pain fell during the recession. Every firm size category lost establishments but some lost more than others. Nonemployers only fell to their 2006 levels, and microbusiness employers fell to 2004 levels. On the other hand, small businesses with between 10 and 99 employees saw their population dwindle to levels we haven’t seen in 13-14 years. Ouch! When the dust settled, the nation’s 24.6 million microbusinesses comprised 91.8% of the firm population in 2009, non-micro small businesses were 8.2%, and large firms amounted to less than 1/10 of 1%. Interestingly, all the nation’s small businesses (micro and non-micro combined) earned about 61.4% of what that tiny number of large firms did in receipts that year ($11.4 trillion versus $18.4 trillion, excluding nonemployers). Look for the numbers to start climbing again in 2010; we’ll see those numbers next year. Nation’s Job Creators? Maybe Not. A recent article from the New York Times reports on a different set of numbers contained within that data release, which challenges the notion that small firms are responsible for most net new jobs. This is an example of suspect mathematical reasoning. The punchline here is that small firms, which are said here to have less than 49 employees, only had a net change of 10.5% in employment, while large firms with over 500 employees, saw a 29.2% increase in net employment. You see the problem with this, don’t you? For starters, if you have 1000 widgets and you increase your widget collection by 10%, you’ve added 100 widgets to your collection. But if you only have 100 widgets and you add another 100 widgets to your collection, you’ve increased your collection by 50%! Besides that, firms with between 50 and 499 employees — which are usually included in everybody’s count of small businesses — were excluded here. If you add them back in, you get back up to 23.6% increase in employment. And, if you add the nonemployers, which essentially create a job for each of their owners as soon as they come into being, you’d likely see that small firms really do create more net new jobs than large firms. You have to wonder why that idea seems so repugnant to some people?
From Small Business Trends |
| For Better or For Work is a Great Guide for Entrepreneurs Posted: 11 Mar 2012 05:30 AM PDT
But what about entrepreneurs and small business owners? Would you call entrepreneurship a "calling?" I'm sure many of us would shout out a resounding "YES!" After all, what might have started out as a way to spend more time with family and have more control over your schedule quickly turns out to take more time and cost more money and require more patience than any job ever did. Entrepreneurship, no matter how you slice it, impacts more than the business owner, the employees and the suppliers of the business involved. It impacts families and friends in ways that few of us have ever imagined. I have to admit that while I've felt and seen the impact of entrepreneurship on my friends and family, I've never really thought much about it until I received a review copy of For Better or for Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families written by Med Cadoux Hirshberg, INC. columnist and the wife of Gary Hirshberg, Founder of Stonyfield Farm. All I can say is, "WOW!" As I jump into the book I'm overtaken by Meg Cadoux Hirshberg's (@meghirshberg) warm, friendly and understanding writing style. She's a columnist for Inc. Magazine so her style shouldn't surprise you. But there is something so warm, so committed in her prose, that I'm immediately engaged. This might be because Meg is also the wife of Gary Hirshberg, Founder of Stonyfield Farm, so she’s writing with just a few years of real life experience. You’ll be glad to know that Hirshberg doesn’t just tell HER story, she also brings other voices to the party – those of other entrepreneurs, their stories both good and bad. What you'll find in For Better or for Work is that Hirshberg is writing about the elephant in the entrepreneurial room. It's a myth that in running your business you control your life or your time. "A business is like a baby. It needs you when it needs you – and it always needs you.” A Tour Around the Book You can read For Better or for Work over the course of a weekend. It's just under 250 pages and is speckled with actual family pictures; not just for Hirshberg, but of other entrepreneurs in their natural habitats – and with their families. The introduction is worth reading. It's Meg's explanation of how the book came to be and how she got pulled into the vortex of entrepreneurship. Each chapter from that point on is dedicated to fulfilling the purpose of the book which is to give entrepreneurs and their families a "guide for navigating the emotional and logistical terrain of business building while simultaneously enjoying a fulfilling family life." There are fifteen chapters in the book and they follow a logical order. The beginning chapters are all about getting involved with the entrepreneur, followed by chapters on borrowing money, romantic relationships, children, what happens if you break up, what happens if your business dies, and just about every other possibility to strike an entrepreneur. The end of each chapter has a summary section that includes "Thinks to talk about" and "Things to do." After seeing this, I'm thinking that this should be required reading for anyone contemplating starting a business and their families with the assignment to run through each chapter section over dinner – sort of as a book club. Once you've completed that and still want to start a business, no one can say you weren't warned. On a serious note, each of these talking and doing sections is truly brilliant because they aren't just empty and vapid ideas thrown onto a page. You can see how valuable each conversation will be to an entrepreneur and his or her family. Here's just one example pulled from Chapter 4; Bed and Boardroom – a chapter about working from home:
Initially I joked about "being warned" if you still started your business after completing this book. That might have led you to believe that these discussion points are written in a way to dissuade you and that is not at all true. It's clear that each chapter brings out a reality of what to expect and asks you to at least talk about how you will deal with it. As in any other venture in life – clear and open communication is a key to success. Who should read For Better or Work? If you're just about ready to head out on your own, this is a must read for you and everyone impacted by your decision. It's not too late for those of us who already have a running small business to share this book with our spouses. I hate to admit it, but I saw myself in the chapter on technology and being forever connected at all hours of the day. We had the "talk” about conversation over breakfast the other day and I made some new commitments about when and how I interact with technology. I think my son learned a valuable lesson both about identifying a potential problem and how to talk about it and negotiate a solution. No it's not a point of resentment – it's been discussed and agreed upon. Now for those of you who are employees, don't feel left out. Today's economy asks about as much from employees as it does from entrepreneurs. Companies are doing more with less and much of that "more" has fallen on the few. This means working from home at all hours, traveling and time away from home. You, too, will benefit from reading this book and putting its lessons into practice. Now You Know If there's anything that Med Cadoux Hirshberg has done, it's brought this unspoken issue out into the open. Read For Better or Work and you'll clear out a lot of that unspoken clutter between you, your business and your family. From Small Business Trends |
There are some careers that we say are a "calling" such as teaching, being a doctor, nurse or a priest or pastor. Whenever we encounter people in those kinds of professions, we give them a little extra understanding.| You are subscribed to email updates from Small Business News, Tips, Advice - Small Business Trends To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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