• The Waiting Game=A Losing Game for Small Business

    Lisa Barone of Small Business Trends lays out some straightforward advice for entrepreneurs and small business owners: if you are waiting for the "right time" to launch a great idea, you'll probably miss your chance. Barone: We all suffer from this type of paralyzing perfection. The voice in our head that says it’s not ready yet, that it’s not good enough to go live. But at that rate, you’ll never take that next step. You’ll sit on the product until it’s not “new” anymore, you’ll suck the excitement of everything that you do. One of the great things about being a small business is the freedom you have to experiment. Things don’t have to be perfect right out of the gate. You can try things. You can launch unfinished. You can fail and you won’t be crucified for it. You may even be applauded for your efforts. As a small business owner, you need to take chances. Your whole business is a chance. Be true to that. Get rid of the negative thinking and just do it. If you wait for “perfection”, your business will never grow. There will always be enough distractions and more important work before you can launch. Iteration is an important part of a design process, and it only makes sense to put ideas forward as they are developing rather than waiting for them to be perfect. Read How To Kill Your Small Business here .

  • Dean Kamen on Failure in the Creative Process

    Dean Kamen may be best known to the general public as the inventor of the Segway , and they may not see that invention as the world changer it was cracked up to be. But some of his earlier inventions were absulute life changers for many people, especially the iBOT --an all terrain electric wheelchair--and the AutoSyringe --an infusion pump that allowed people who need regular injections of medicine such as insulin to live much more complete lives (rather than be thethered to hospitals or medical clinics). An inventor since his teenage years, Kamen knows that the creative process is rarely consistent or predictable. And it is never smooth. In this video, he speaks about the "non-linear" nature of creation, and how the entrepreneurial spirit needs to be persistent, and to be prepared for many small failures on the road to success:

  • Jon Fisher: Entrepreneurs Should 'Begin with the End in Mind'

    Ernst & Young named Jon Fisher "Entrepreneur of the Year" two years ago for his work in starting up Bharosa , a technology security firm since acquired by Oracle . Fisher says he, like other successful entrepreneurs, starts companies with the end goal always in mind. He shared his philosophy on startup success at the Commonwealth Club , where he also addressed the state of the economy, and gave his thoughts on Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Twitter (Fisher thinks they may have missed their window for making money):

  • Lessons for the Entrepreneur in the Mistakes of Big Business

    Luke McKinney of Entrepreneur says there is a lot to be learned from the recession. Big businesses have been making some big mistakes. Small businesses, McKinney writes, "can't afford errors," so entrepreneurs might as well take advantage of the big slip-ups to learn a lesson. McKinney outlines four such lessons: 1.Avoid complacency 2. Know your market 3. Move with the times 4. Accept responsibility Read Lessons from the Fall of Giants here .

  • Struggling County Calls on Small Business

    Few places in the country have been hit as hard by the recession as Merced County, California . Now, as Amy Choi writes in BusinessWeek , the town's leaders are looking to entrepreneurs to play the superhero role and save their economy: Home prices in Merced dove 42.3% in 2008 and continue to fall. The collapse coincided with a drought, forcing farmers to leave fields fallow and lay off employees. The dairy industry, another major employer, faced its own contraction because of a fall in milk prices and a drop in exports. Merced County now has a 22% unemployment rate. And despite a statewide moratorium on foreclosures—due to expire in June—it holds the dubious honor of having the nation's third-highest foreclosure rate. Local authorities such as the Merced County Economic Development Corp. (MCEDCO) and the Los Banos Redevelopment Agency, along with the local Small Business Administration outpost, are counting on entrepreneurs to help create jobs and restore the region's economic health. "It'd be nice to get a big employer, but we believe it may be more effective to provide small businesses the resources to grow," says Scott Galbraith, chief executive of MCEDCO. "The vast majority of the 5,000 businesses in the county are small companies. If we can get just half of them to hire one person, that's 2,500 jobs right off the bat, rather than working for 10 years to get a large employer into the region." It is an interesting test for small business owners. Read the article here .

  • Entrepreneurs' Effectual Reasoning

    There is one school of thought that says entrepreneurs will lead the way toward economic recovery. Whether or not that is the case, it is an interesting time to consider the entrepeneurial mind. Saras Sarasvathy of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia has made a career of looking at what makes successful entrepreneurs tick. Her 2001 paper, What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial is a must read. In that paper, she posits that effectual reasoning is a particular entrpreneurial characteristic: The word “effectual” is the inverse of “causal”. In general, in MBA programs across the world, students are taught causal or predictive reasoning – in every functional area of business. Causal rationality begins with a pre-determined goal and a given set of means, and seeks to identify the optimal – fastest, cheapest, most efficient, etc. – alternative to achieve the given goal. The make-vs.-buy decision in production, or choosing the target market with the highest potential return in marketing, or picking a portfolio with the lowest risk in finance, or even hiring the best person for the job in human resources management, are all examples of problems of causal reasoning. A more interesting variation of causal reasoning involves the creation of additional alternatives to achieve the given goal. This form of creative causal reasoning is often used in strategic thinking. And that effectual reasoning seems to create a bias toward action, or as Sarasvathy puts it, "effectual thinkers are like explorers setting out on voyages into uncharted waters." In this video at BigThink , she discusses "action-oriented" entrepreneurs:

  • App Store's Young Entrepreneurs

    Apple's App Store has provided a breeding ground for tech-savvy entrepreneurs. Inc. Magazine has a profile of 11-year-old Owen Vorhees , who studied up on the code for iPhone apps, and developed a math quiz that is now a top-15 seller in the paid, educational apps section of the App Store: The premise of MathTime is simple: It takes the old-fashioned flash-card "mad minute" drill idea and adds a new-media twist. Players can practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division on the phone by quickly solving problems with two taps of the phone: one to show the problem, one to display the answer. "I thought it would be cool," says the Hinsdale, Illinois, native. "It's really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up" on the App Store. After Owen established the basic premise of the game, his 9-year-old brother, Finn, designed the mathematical symbols in Photoshop. Once the design was done, the boys pitched the program to Apple. Read the Kid Entrepreneurs Build iPhone App here .

  • Small Business Trends Book Review: 'Escape from Cubicle Nation'

    Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends has a book tip for budding entrepreneurs who need a kick out the door cubicle. Pamela Slim 's Escape from Cubicle Nation is based on Slim's experience as a corporate trainer, and gives workers the tools for making the leap and starting their own business. Campbell says it provides the "mental and emotional fortitude and clarity needed to make the jump to entrepreneurship." One of the wonderful things about this book is its target market: it is crystal clear. It’s for those who have spent their careers in the employ of some other business, but who have secretly harbored a wish to go out on their own. If you are currently employed in a corporation somewhere, silently wishing as you sat in endless meetings that you could be your own boss but are not sure how or where to get started, then get this book. You will devour every page of it — and come back begging for more. I would even go so far as to say that if you’ve recently left the corporate world to start a business (say within the last couple of years) this book will be helpful because it will reinforce your commitment and re-energize you. It may also prove a valuable teaching aid, in that it hits key steps in potential entrepreneurs' decisions to start their own businesses. Read the full review here .

  • A Moment for Entrepreneurs

    Add Jim Spanfeller , president and CEO of Forbes , to the list of those who think the economic rebound is going to start with the little guys. "New, smaller, or growth" businesses have led the charge out of past recessions, he says. So now, as you can see in this video from BigThink , he's bullish on the opportunities for entrepreneurs:

  • Innosight's Anthony Says Innovate or Die

    Back in December, when then-General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner was apologizing to Congress for his company's failures, New York Times reporter Micheline Maynard wrote about GM's innovation problem : G.M.’s biggest failing, reflected in a clear pattern over recent decades, has been its inability to strike a balance between those inside the company who pushed for innovation ahead of the curve, and the finance executives who worried more about returns on investment. The two views were rarely in sync — in effect, fighting over the steering wheel that controlled G.M.’s direction — and the internal battles distracted G.M. from spotting shifts in the marketplace. Time and again over the last 30 years, G.M. has spent billions of dollars on innovative ideas like its Saturn small-car company in the 1980s and the EV1 electric vehicle in the 1990s, only to then deprive those projects of further financing because money was needed elsewhere or because they were not delivering enough profit. As president of the business consulting firm Innosight , Scott Anthony has become a bit of a pied piper for innovation. He says there is no choice but to innovate. In this interview with Harvard Business Review, Anthony discusses his new book, The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times , and stresses, "If you choose not to innovate, you are sowing the seeds of your own destruction": You can read an excerpt of Anthony's book here .

  • Carnegie Mellon Team Takes Top Prize at Rice Business Plan Competition

    Credit card companies have come up with various new ways of fighting identity theft through new technolgies on the cards themselves. But these new ideas haven't stuck, mainly because they require merchants to change their equipment. A team of Carnegie Mellon students who developed a way of making a credit card magnetic stripe that could change its data from one card to another, allowing for greater security and added flexibility (theoretically, a person can carry several "cards" on just the one card). And for their novel idea, the team--now a company named Dynamics --was awarded the grand prize at the 2009 Rice Business Plan Competition . CNNMoney.com Small Business has a profile of Dynamics, and other winners at the competition, here . For more background on the competition, click here .

  • Sustainability and Entrepreneurship

    In the winter of 2005, a student and professor team at Middlebury College in Vermont developed a concept for a business that would help people and companies reduce their environmental impact. Four years later, their idea is a successful business-- Brighter Planet . Professor Jonathan Isham and his former student Jake Whitcomb talk about their business and the intersection of entrepreneurship and sustainability in this lecture at Yale University:

  • Young Entrepreneurs Battle for Funding at the Rice Business Plan Competition

    The Rice Business Plan Competition gets underway today, pitting dozens of teams of entrepreneurs from universities across the country against one another as they compete for $800,000 in prize money. CNNMoney.com profiles some of the teams in this year's competition here . You can check up on last year's winners here . We'd love to see your comments on what the judges should be looking for. How much should they weigh the current economic climate when considering the viability of each plan? Click on comments and weigh in.

  • Key Characteristics for Home Based Entrepreneurs

    In the interest of helping home based business owners survive the tough economic times, Entrepreneur.com lists 25 Common Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs . It is a comprehensive list with a lot of the old standby bits of advice, like #4: "Manage your money wisely"; and #9:"Get to know your customers." But there are a few characteristics that might surprise, or even seem counterintuitive, like #23: "Take time off": The temptation to work around the clock is very real for some home business owners. After all, you don't have a manager telling you it's time to go home because they can't afford the overtime pay. Every person working from home must take time to establish a regular work schedule that includes time to stretch your legs and take lunch breaks, plus some days off and scheduled vacations. Create the schedule as soon as you have made the commitment to start a home business. Of course, your schedule will have to be flexible. You should, therefore, not fill every possible hour in the day. Give yourself a backup hour or two. All work and no play makes you burn out very fast and grumpy customer service is not what people want. Read the full list here .

  • Advice for Struggling Startups

    Jason Calacanis , founder and CEO of Mahalo.com , says it is during times like these that we find out who the "real entrepreneurs" are and who are "the folks who play entrepreneurs for some portion of their lives." He has been having a lot of covnersations with company heads who are looking at dimishing capital as they fight for survival during the recession, and he tries to pull together all the issues and advice in one place on his newsletter (which is open to the public. We found it at BusinessWeek.com). The first step, according to Calacanis, is to find out if you are really up to the challenges ahead in the coming months. Are you, for example, comfortable with laying off half your staff again and again, having clients default on their bills, and going from genius to idiot (as Calacanis did in media coverage when his Silicon Alley Reporter went from hot success to dot-com bust). He gives 12 situations, and if you can't handle them, then he says to get out now. If you are in for the short, medium, and long haul, then you are going to learn a lot in the coming months: Even if you're 100% sure your company is going to crash in the next six months, you'll learn more from staying on board than you will from running. You'll also earn the respect of your peers and you'll learn exactly how people break down and lose their cool. You'll see how certain venture capitalists screw entrepreneurs, you'll see entrepreneurs screw VCs, and you'll watch the lawyers and landlords collect their vig the entire time. Most of all, you'll realize who you are and who your real friends are. Now, Calacanis says, it is time to figure out how much time your company has left--you "runway"-- and then put every part of your business through a stress test. You will likely have to cut some staff and/or salaries, and go through some serious negotiations with your landlord, vendors, even yourself. Read What to do if your Startup is Failing here .
    Filed under: ,