September 2008 - Posts
The economic crisis is impacting businesses of all sizes, and there appears to be no end in sight. Some of the largest financial institutions in the country have crumbled, and small business owners are getting hit hard too. Find out from the experts how you can protect your small business during these volatile times.
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www.technorati.com allows you find out what blogs are saying about your company. The site allows you to type in any term of company name and it will come up with a list of blogs that have been written about them.
1. Splurge on a chair
2. Create a cordless desk
3. Buy an inexpensive desk
4. Purchase art
5. Put up a whiteboard
Source: Outlaw Design
Click here to see previous Top Five tips
"Your Business" travels to Washington to D.C. to cover Inc. Magazine's annual Inc. 500 / Inc. 5000 Conference, a gathering of executives from the fastest growing businesses in the country. Rod Kurtz, Senior Editor for Inc., moderates a panel discussion of questions from attendees. And the election is just weeks away, find out how both candidates plan to help small business owners if they are elected.
Panelists
Doug Tatum, Founding Chairman of Tatum LLC., a national organization that provides executive-level CFO services to companies undergoing rapid and significant changes.
Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, a strategic advisory firm that helps executives understand how well their sales force is performing relative to other peer groups.
Learning From the Pros
Find out the secrets of success from the CEO's of the top 3 business on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies in the country. John Baackes, CEO for Senior Whole Health a Massachusetts-based health plan for low income people age 65 and older, Brian Eliason and David Eliason, co-founders of Eliason Inc., a Wisconsin based real estate investment sponsor, and Warren Wilson, CEO of The Snack Factory, makers of Pretzel Crisps, discuss the strategies that have helped them manage booming businesses.
Elevator Pitch
Norm Brodsky, Inc. columnist and co-author of "The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up," and Sam Horn, author of "POP! Stand Out in Any Crowd" take part in a special edition of the Elevator Pitch. Find out what they think about Dave Beckham's Conservative Café, an eating establishment in northwest Indiana that celebrates the values of hard working conservative Americans. He is looking for capital to develop a franchise model.
When a big conglomerate comes knocking, it can be tempting to sell off all or part of the company you nurtured and grew.
But sometimes it can spell doom.
Whatever happened to Mad River, a tea and soft drink company that was bought by the Coca-Cola Company in 2001?
"Coke bought Mad River, put it into its distribution system and killed it," says Seth Goldman, the president of organic beverage company Honest Tea.
It's a strange quote coming from a man who recently sold 40 percent of his firm to Coke.
Goldman doesn't think his company will suffer the same fate.
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Technorati.com allows you find out what blogs are saying about your company. The Web site allows you to type in any term or company name and it will come up with a list of blogs that relate to them.
Click here for previous sites of the week
I recently interviewed a small business owner in a lavish conference room where he showed me his new idea for large screen video ads, but I kept walking into walls and the conference room's table.
No, I wasn't drunk folks. I was doing a bad job navigating my avatar.
An avatar is a computer simulation of you. I created one in the virtual world known as Second Life. I made the mistake of having my eight-year-old daughter help me design the avatar, which looks like a six-foot Lara Croft bunny rabbit.
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This week, Al Cothern watched as laid-off workers streamed out of Lehman Brothers' headquarters in midtown Manhattan with boxes in hand, and his heart went out to them.
Cothern spent 11 years working for a national subprime mortgage lender as a senior vice president and had visions of some day becoming an executive vice president before retiring from the world of finance.
It didn't quite work out that way. He was laid off from his job a year ago this week.
"It's like a slow chain of dominos falling," Cothern said, referring to the bloodbath of lost jobs in the financial sector.
"I was worried when I lost my job, but I saw it as an opportunity to make a change and get away from the things that were bothering me throughout my career, mainly the ups and downs of the markets," he explained.
And boy, did he make a change.
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Sunday night, Eduard Slinin, the owner of Brooklyn-based limo service Corporate Transportation Group, was watching television when he heard news Lehman Brothers might file for bankruptcy.
“I was afraid and worried. Lehman is one of my biggest clients,” says Slinin, whose business services financial firms on Wall Street, driving everyone from top executives to investment bankers to their destinations.
On Monday morning, Slinin’s worse fears turned out to be a reality. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy.
“I’ve been in this business for 28 years and I never would have thought something like this could happen,” he says. “We went through the ’87 crash. The 2001 crisis. This is the worst.”
The storm that’s raining down on what were once Wall Street titans is also soaking some small business owners who rely on major financial sector companies for their livelihoods.
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Hurricane Ike is pounding Texas and there’s a good chance many small businesses in the path of the storm are not prepared if major damage occurs or it they can’t return quickly after it’s over.
When David Beahm, a vice president at New Orleans-based Blachard and Company, evacuated right before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, he admits no one took the storm very seriously so there was little planning for a business backup plan.
“We packed a bag for a long weekend with the family and went to Houston and figured we'd be right back. When the hurricane went through everything looked fine,” he recalls.
Then news reports hit about the levees breaking and the city being flooded, and suddenly everything got serious.
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First it was Bear Stearns, then Fannie and Freddie. The government seems to have bailout boogie fever these days, but no one is asking small businesses to dance.
When a small business owner screws up and their business tanks you know who typically bails them out? The small business owner.
Take Maureen Borzacchiello, who owns trade show products company Creative Display Solutions along with her husband Frank.
Borzachiello's brother-in-law died suddenly in the winter of 2005 when he was 47 years old. The shock of the loss had an impact on her entire family and the business ended up at the brink of failure.
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I walked into my local butcher shop in Wilmington, Del., last week and there it was behind the glass counter -- the Biden Burger.
It's Bidenmania here in Delaware, with everything from Biden burgers to Biden childhood tours available.
But you've got to give The First State a bit of a break -- it's small, and it has a big self-esteem problem. So any Wilmingtonian that makes it big is going to get lots of attention here.
What's Chicago's excuse? A restaurant there called Juicy Wine Co. just introduced the ObamaBurger.
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Sean O'Rourke, owner of a technology consulting firm in New York called Syzygy 3, doesn't yet know which presidential candidate he'll be pulling the lever for this November.
"I'm undecided," he says, even though he considers himself a Republican.
And Rae Hostetler, who owns Zionsville, Ind., -based Hostetler Public Relations, says, "At this point I'm the skeptical voter and I can choose to skip the polls or exercise my vote. I choose the latter. My pick is with caution -- the lesser of two evils."
While you might think John McCain would be the slam-dunk choice for entrepreneurs at this November's presidential election because Republicans are often thought of as pro business, many small business owners don't see things that way.
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