Issue 6 – Volume 1
Passion and the Promoter
I’ve been fortunate to meet many, highly successful, business operators. They have always intrigued me. Some, I’ve gotten to know well. Of others, I am more a fan. Their accomplishments fascinate me. I try to figure out what it is that makes them different from 99.9 percent of entrepreneurs? And what do these super achievers have in common?
There is one trait that I’ve found to be universally present; passion. There is a great quote in Forbes by Chad Johnson, CEO and founder of our featured business this issue: Lady Jane’s Haircuts for Men.
Issue 5 – Volume 1
The Tools of Ignorance?
I am a baseball fan. I look forward every year, to the day when major league pitchers and catchers report to spring training. For me, this event signals the end of another cold winter.
Baseball is a workaday sport. A Major League Baseball season has double the number of games as the NBA or NHL and ten times as many as the National Football League.
Baseball players don’t have many off-days and small business owner/ operators have few days off either. Both games – baseball and small business – have some similarities, I think.
Issue 4 – Volume 1
Eyeball Tech
A Google search on the term SEO reveals 217,000,000 results. No wonder marketers spend unimaginable hours and dollars chasing after the solution to the latest algorithm, seeking the right keywords to optimize their various web properties, all with the goal of driving more web traffic their way. That’s the digital business model in the lowest common denominator.
But how do you trick the algorithm of the street? Main Street, the analog, real world of walking, driving, riding, flying, talking, texting, distracted, busy people. A marketplace that is searching for stuff – maybe yours.
Issue 3 – Volume 1
Entrepreneurial Crackheads
Entrepreneurs are my favorite people. So innovative, stubborn and optimistic, they can work brutal hours on some vision that only they can see in full. No one envies the struggles of the entrepreneur, unless she pokes through the fog of failure and creates a successful enterprise.
Entrepreneurs wake in the middle of the night – if they ever fall asleep at all – terrorized by fraud and finances, failure.
And if she does fail, this time, and swears off entrepreneurship forever, it doesn’t last. Entrepreneurship is a crackish drug and the entrepreneur is hooked. No quitters they.
Issue 2 – Volume 1
Do you have the Tradecraft?
I was talking to a businessman friend of mine. This was probably thirty years ago, or more. He was a mentor, many years my senior and very successful in a business that had been started by his father. We were talking about how our respective dads had built their companies, my first serious work had been in a family business too.
I thought, and still think, that my work ethic was the main thing that I had gained from the experience. My mentor claimed the tradecraft as his legacy. I wanted to know what he meant by tradecraft.
Issue 1 – Volume 1
It’s good to be the market leader…
I think that I’m a lot like you. I have a passion to be in business for myself. For me it started when I was about ten years old. I sold lemonade, like a lot kids my age did back then. But setting up a table in my family’s driveway with a pitcher, ice and some Dixie Cups wasn’t enough. I took my setup down the road to where there were new houses being built. It was summer and the carpenters and dry-wallers that worked on those houses were thirsty. Business got to be pretty good. In fact, I dominated the lemonade biz in our neighborhood. It was awesome.