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3 Deadly Business Phrases to Avoid
Tweet Share on Facebook January 29, 2009 Comment (2)Earlier today I caught the top 10 myths about small business by blogger Wealthy Bag Lady. She proves with examples that you don't necessarily need megabucks, a certain minimum or maximum age, or fancy offices, but you do need to know how to sell, and you have to keep learning, and you can't do it all on your own.
That reminded me of the myths I deal with way too often in the world of start-ups and small business. Several of them make me mad. For example:
Be your own boss ...
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Competition Good for Small Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook January 29, 2009 Comment (4)You need competition, and your business will do better if you have some competition. That was the point made by a successful entrepreneur from my hometown.
He told a local restaurant owner to quit worrying about the restaurant up the road. They aren't wasting time worrying about you, he told her, and you both benefit from putting people in the habit of eating out more often.
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Using Social Media and Crowd-Sourcing for Quick and Simple Market Research
Tweet Share on Facebook January 27, 2009 Comment (11)The Internet is fundamentally changing how market research and data collection are done. Low-cost, online survey tools like Survey Monkey make it easy for small businesses to afford, design, and conduct survey research.
Even cheaper and easier is using social media sites and tools to ask questions.
Bloggers have long used their blogs to ask questions of their audience. They simply post a question on their blog and ask readers to use comments to answer. The Small Business Trends blog does this quite often.
But even if you don't blog, you can still ask questions online.
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Job Loss in the Recession: If You Work for Yourself, Are You Worse Off?
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (4)Lately, there has been a lot of discussion of job losses. Most of that discussion has focused on people who work for others because it's easier for people to grasp the meaning of job losses in terms of company layoffs than in terms of decisions by self-employed people to shutter their operations.
Perhaps because loss of jobs by the wage employed is easier to explain, the media have been pretty silent about how bad recession-induced job loss has been on the self-employed. So, I decided to take a look at this question.
Below is a chart that I created from data downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. It measures the change in the (seasonally adjusted) number of self-employed and nonagricultural private-sector wage-employed people between December 2007 and July 2008 and between July 2008 and December 2008. I set the baseline to 100 percent in December 2007 for both groups so that the different job-loss patterns for the wage- and self-employed are clear.
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Obama Has a Message for Business Owners
Tweet Share on Facebook January 21, 2009 Comment (2)So, do you feel any different?
This week, Barack Obama took the oath of office, became the unhyphenated 44th President of the United States, and will now saddle up his Juggernaut of Change for its date with destiny.
Meanwhile, you and I have businesses to run.
But it's worth pausing for just a moment to contemplate the shift in direction that so many of us have been longing for and, thus, voted into office last November.
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Obama: Business People Could Learn a Thing or Two From Him
Tweet Share on Facebook January 13, 2009 Comment (1)People are more or less obsessed with our soon-to-be 44th president of the United States, for any number of reasons.
There's a rather large dollop of Bush Fatigue (if that's not an understatement). There's the historical significance of having elected our very first African-American president, not least of which is how much better that makes us feel about ourselves on the icky race issue.
And there's the simple fact that Barack Obama is just different. We watch him carefully because we really don't know what he'll do next.
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Helping Women-Owned Businesses
Tweet Share on Facebook January 12, 2009 CommentAccording to the Equity in Contracting for Women Act, businesses owned by women are supposed to be awarded 5 percent of all federal government goods and services contracts. It turns out that over the past few years, women-owned businesses have received only 3.4 percent of awards.
Because of the size of the federal government, a difference of 1.6 percentage points adds up to $5 billion per year. And with huge federal economic stimulus spending expected over the next few years, the difference could easily reach $8 billion by 2010.
Needless to say, federal contracting is a huge opportunity for women-owned businesses.
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Why Do People Become Entrepreneurs?
Tweet Share on Facebook January 12, 2009 Comment (7)Today is the first of what will be regular blogs of mine on this site. Because it is my first posting, I thought that I would start with a basic question: Why do people become entrepreneurs?
Researchers have identified myriad reasons why people start their own businesses, but across all of the surveys, interviews, and other efforts to understand entrepreneurial motivation, one reason stands out above all others: People start businesses because they don't want to work for someone else.
It's interesting that the desire not to have a boss is the primary motivator of entrepreneurs because "being one's own boss" appears to be the prime source of entrepreneurs' job satisfaction.
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The Hidden Advantages for Small Businesses in a Recession
Tweet Share on Facebook January 8, 2009 CommentHow many 12-year-old girls do you know who would be able to boot up a Unix system of networked computers that could lock the doors and keep the raptors out?
That's the thing about movies, isn't it? The people who get into trouble often have the precise set of skills and characteristics to get them out of trouble.
But occasionally, real life imitates art. When there's trouble, those with the right skills flourish and those without them perish. Same principle but with higher casualty rates.
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How Do I Weigh the Decision to Get a Business Degree?
Tweet Share on Facebook January 7, 2009 Comment (21)I get this question a lot, I guess because I founded a successful company and ran it for 20 years, and now I teach an entrepreneurship class. Maybe it's that I got my degrees in literature and journalism first, then an M.B.A. 10 years later. And I have mixed feelings.
And maybe it's that a lot of people are suddenly thinking about the M.B.A. shelter as a port in the storm, to hide out until the economy gets better.
So I've made you a list; that's a typical M.B.A. trick. It comes with the degree:
1.If life gives you a way to get the M.B.A. degree without huge sacrifice—like maybe you're still young and don't have a family, maybe you're having trouble with getting a new job, or whatever—and it sounds like fun to you, do it. Consider it a luxury.
