Dream Big Grow Here Blog

Link-O-Rama 3/26/12

GrowBigDan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 05:40:00 -1000

· Marty Zwilling writes some great stuff, this time on mentoring. The thing I like about this one is it starts out the right way – identify what you want mentoring for, NOT who you want to be your mentor. Starting with the person in mind first often leads to a waste of time for both parties so be honest with yourself up front.

· Deciding where to place your social media time can be a tough decision to make. This is a good take on the Facebook versus Twitter debate.

· A good checklist for putting together your social media strategy and keeping it simple.

· I’m a huge proponent of having an Advisory Board for any start up, so these articles about how to create a board are always on my radar.

· Crowdfunding bill has now become law, and with it come some great advantages for startups.

· The cash mob phenomenon is blowing up all over the place, for good reason. What retailer wouldn’t want them to stop by. For those out there thinking you will try to start your own in support of your store, not so fast my friends (channeling Lee Corso). Its more about the organic feel created by a 3^rd party that make these things tick.

Quote of the week:

"Anything that is successful is a series of mistakes”

-Billie Armstrong

Link-O-Rama for 3/12/12

GrowBigDan — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:44:00 -1000

· Some good advice here for anyone thinking of structuring there business as a partnership. When money and time are tight, a partnership always sounds like a good idea. Many times, especially if time and money are your reasons, it’s a terrible idea.

· Pinterest is growing like crazy, which means you should probably be giving it a look. While it’s a great way to express your creative talents, Pinterest is also an awesome platform for driving traffic to your business.

· Time to file 1099’s, thanks to the IRS rule changes of the last couple years, anyone you paid $600 or more to has to get one.

· Nice overview on how advertising and working with Patch can be a great way to ensure your ad dollars are hitting your “extremely local” geographic market. Patch can be a pretty effective advertising vehicle to geo-target with. We have several Iowa locations.

· Everybody loves on Apple and their success. Here is more of it, but I wonder how much ink like this they were getting 10 or 15 years ago – at least from the business perspective.

· Need some inspiration on how to sell? The Girl Scouts have developed quite the business development strategy over the years.

· S Corp or LLC? It’s a big question when you are in Start-Up land. Take the time to pick it right as you get out of the gate as switching can be a nightmare.

Quote of the week is courtesy of Jimmy Carter – “Go out on a limb, that’s where the fruit is.”

Link-O-Rama for 2/13/12

GrowBigDan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:18:00 -1000

Looking to drive a little more traffic to your Facebook presence? Try a couple of these strategies.
If those don’t trip your trigger, here are a few more ideas for getting the most out of your FB presence
If you are beyond Angry Birds and are looking for a few apps to make your life a bit more organized and productive, give these a try.
Success is always the goal, but sometimes a business failure isn’t such a bad deal
I am definitely a movie-freak, so this list combining some great flicks with an entrepreneurial bent, is pretty cool (yes, I have seen them all) The Ghostbusters tip is a sweet little gem.
I’m a Tennessee Titan fan to the core, but I will admit there is something to be learned from the Giants win for all of you aspiring entrepreneurs out there.
Having a top of FB fans for your business is great, but does nothing if they don’t come in and shop. John Jantsch over at Duct Tape put together a nice piece on using your online presence to drive traffic to your bricks and mortar establishment.
Here’s a good checklist for the basic steps involved with legal formation for your business. As part of the first step, make sure that you can also buy the domain name (url) for your business name. Marketing is always that much easier if both are the same.

Quote of the week is courtesy of Mr. Evolution himself Charles Robert Darwin – British naturalist, explorer and scientist. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Link-O-Rama for 1/23/12

GrowBigDan — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:38:00 -1000

If you are looking for cash to start your business and getting sick of hearing “no” from Uncle Larry, the bank, your mom, and everyone else you have tried – give the clouds a go – seems to be working for others.
I love these articles sharing tips on how to get your business off the ground while you get a paycheck from someone else.
Quick advice on why a business plan is still necessary, even if you aren’t going after 3^rd party financing. I wouldn’t say it needs to be a novel by any means, by a couple pages to keep you on track is going to be well worth it down the road.
barCamp is coming to the Cedar Valley in a couple weeks – www.barcampcv.com - I strongly encourage you to come- Feb 4^th. Seth Godin does a great job of explaining what its all about, via the TED imperatives
Here is a little motivation for all of you entrepreneurs-in-waiting
This is a great piece on the crowdfunding revolution, where things are at in the U.S., and why it makes sense to give it a look – mostly from a marketing/pr point of view.

Link-O-Rama for 12/23/11

GrowBigDan — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:09:00 -1000

Are you sending out signals that your business is in trouble? Customers aren’t going to flock to a sinking ship, so watch out for some of these red flags to keep your brand positive, even if your bottom line isn’t.
Starbucks and Howard Schultz are quickly becoming a new power player in peer-to-peer lending. So if the bank turns you down, stop in for coffee and a micro loan to get your ideas off the ground.
Looking to land some big VC money is 2012? Tom Kinnear has some advice on how to go about it.
A new generation of Farm-preneurs is picking up steam thanks to the popularity of organic and other food trends.
One of Seth Godin’s latest posts caught my eye on the power of specialization – “the more or less choice”
For many entrepreneur’s, sales is one of the least favorite parts of life on your own. Shying away from it because of your apprehensions is always a fatal flaw. Take a read of this for some ideas on how to make it happen.
James Altucher with some great advice on how to survive year one at your start up. Some good tips on the pecking order for raising capital and being there for your clients – all the time.
Many startups struggle with the battle between doing it yourself and hiring someone else to do it, regardless of what “it” is. This quick post doesn’t necessarily tell you how to handle those challenges as much as it does get you to think about them and realize them.
Trying to figure out why to use Twitter for your business? I think most can agree to the effectiveness of Facebook, but question “the whole Twitter deal” Here are 3 quick tips on how it can return some ROI for you.

Link-O-Rama for 12/19/11

GrowBigDan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:23:00 -1000

As an avid The Office watcher (and I know the British version was probably better), this was a good read on the lessons we can learn from Andy Bernard’s struggles in management.
Google is buying companies at a crazy clip, so if you are looking to sell out, start there.
Nice piece in the Times about the less-attractive side of entrepreneurship. If you are looking at leaving the cubicle behind, read this first.
Its December, which means year end is here (among other things), so if you want to avoid Uncle Sam in April, get your tax avoidance strategies in place now
When getting ready to start up, here is what not to do.
A little love for Iowa’s start up culture.
You can have all the drive and ambition in the world, but entrepreneurs also need these 4 things according to Glen Blickenstaff on Inc.com. I tend to agree, especially in regards to making a difference.
If you have thought about kicking off a pay-per-click strategy for your business, now is a great time as the big search firms are offering a ton of help and free trials to get you started.
For those still trying to figure out how to integrate Twitter into your strategies, here are a few examples on how others are doing it
Looking to go online with your business? Might want to watch this for a few tips on how to draw customers.

Where Have the Jobs Gone?

mcwilliams — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:03:00 -1000

Many people blame the current high unemployment rate in the United States upon the outmigration of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, where labor costs are cheaper- much cheaper. Some American job loss can credibly be attributed to this kind of outmigration but surprisingly, many more American manufacturing jobs are being eliminated because of technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

Columnist Hale Stewart wrote last year in the popular Huffington Post online magazine, that improvements in manufacturing processes- rather than outmigration of jobs overseas- have resulted in the huge layoffs we’ve experienced over the past decade. Even though the national unemployment rate is currently over 9%, Stewart notes that manufacturing productivity has never been higher; we manufacture more goods today than we did a decade ago with only 4-5% unemployment.

While looking at these numbers, I kept thinking about Chickasaw County in NE Iowa. Between 2000 and 2003 I was an SBDC director for UNI and worked quite a bit in New Hampton, watching as the region lost multiple manufacturers and hundreds upon hundreds of jobs through manufacturing downsizing and closures. Leading the exodus was a major Sarah Lee plant employing 650 workers. Sarah Lee had operated in New Hampton for decades and the closure was devastating to the residents, many of whom had parents, brothers, sisters and extended family employed there. Sarah Lee moved their Midwestern plant operations to Mexico and capitalized upon lower international wages. But soon after the Sarah Lee property became a wasteland, a Con Agra cheese manufacturing plant up the road from New Hampton announced they were closing too. At its peak, the Con Agra plant had employed more than 350 people in tiny Fredericksburg, Iowa. Rather than taking those jobs overseas however, ConAgra built the same plant on the east coast with new advanced cheese processing equipment, allowing them to produce three times the amount of cheese as the old plant with one third the employees! Ultimately, between 2000 and 2003 Chickasaw County Iowa lost nearly 1,300 jobs- in a county of 13,000 people. Many of those displaced workers- from both Sarah Lee and Con Agra- ended up in my office trying to figure out how to convert years of manufacturing line expertise into some kind of small business.

Do we really understand what is happening and what it means for the coming decade between now and 2020? We can’t just sit back and wait for manufacturing jobs to return. Child labor, weak environmental laws and other contributing factors will keep labor costs lower somewhere else into the foreseeable future; China or some other country will always have lower labor costs. If the economists like Stewart are correct, the off-shore jobs aren’t really the problem anyway- it’s technology innovation.

For most of us, innovation is a just a buzz word disconnected from our daily lives yet, in reality, innovation is all around us and sometimes it changes our lives in ways we don’t connect to jobs. Do you remember for example, when grocery store clerks hand stickered price tags on every item on the shelves and check-out clerks hand entered those stickered prices into cash registers? I do. The application of sensor technologies a decade ago was nothing short of revolutionary and the grocery industry was the first to benefit. Bar codes came imprinted on food products direct from the processor; check-out clerks simply waved those bar codes over a scanner and the price got entered into the cash register. No numeric mistakes; no time lags while the clerk tried to read the price on the tag. Those were huge changes. The grocery store didn’t have to put a price on every product and many of those stocking/pricing jobs became expendable- fewer checkout clerks were required to serve the same number of customers and the check out process became a ‘blip’ rather than a manual exercise associated with punching in $1.97. Recently, a new grocery cart developed in Indiana can be pushed past a floor standing sensor and everything in the cart is instantly scanned- no hands- no humans- at all. These technology innovations and subsequent industry changes are just getting started too; every industry on the planet is being cross-pollinated by technology innovation. Think about this: the same grocery store scanner technology is useful to libraries to check out books, in health clubs to allow 24 hour access to gyms and even in hospitals where that scanner can insure the correct leg is about to be amputated. Same technology, different industries, fewer jobs. That is our future.

The future? Entrepreneurs.

Link-O-Rama for 11/11/11

GrowBigDan — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:02:00 -1000

Link-O-Rama for 11/11/11

It’s often said, but not nearly often enough practiced that the best funding to get your business going is sales. It’s always easier to head to the bank or your brother-in-law, but sales trump it all in my opinion. Here is a pretty good primer on how to take a step back and look at your sales process to “Six Sigma It up” a little.
One thing that always amazing me when counseling with small business is their lack of process around collecting from customers. If you have a business model where you can’t get cash up front or at time of service, you NEED to have things in place to keep the A/R under control. Here is a great read on how to go about it. Waiting it out and playing nice is not always the answer. And when you’ve worked hard for the sale, the last thing you need is a deadbeat that doesn’t pay.
Jeff Haden over at Owner’s Manual always has good stuff to share. Here he delves into the world of Linked In’s Groups service. Most people end up with a profile and maybe do some reco’s and what not on there, but not enough of us utilize their Groups functionality, which is probably the most powerful piece of the whole site.
Again from Haden is a great piece for those in the customer service business, which is basically everybody but your brother-in-law the ditch digger.
With Deal Garden now in town, there are more and more options to participate in couponing websites. The perception is that they can be a dangerous way to lose money fast. Before you assume that, give this a read on ways to strategically do well on a group couponing site.
I should probably know who Neil Patel is, but I have no idea. That said his list on lessons learned in business is right on the money.
Good advice for those looking to keep their day job while also venturing out on a path with a start up business. One of the better nuggets is to take a day or two off to work on it, and on those days, books as many meetings as you can. No one wants to meet with you about your crazy start up at 7PM or AM for that matter.
I love any list of suggested reading, this one is pretty complete. At least I think it is, I haven’t really read any of them, but every list I see on this subject includes most of these. I started Zen and Motorcyles sometime in July I think. I’m about 60 pages in, so yeah, I need to turn the TV off.
For those afraid of selling, but know they need to get it down, here are some ways around selling while still selling – I think that makes sense. As a small business counselor I see a ton of people with the fear of selling thing going on, this is a good way to think about ways around that.
I should have put this one higher up for the 2 of you who actually read this, but here are some awesome quotes on taking risk for those that might need to talk themselves into it

Finally, if you made to the bottom, we’ve got a little Mumford & Sons to get your weekend rolling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZzRd3q9pEM&ob=av3n

Rural Young Entrepreneur Summit - "YES"

MyEntreNet — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:42:00 -1000

On November 9th, young entrepreneurs and small business owners from all across rural Iowa will gather for the Rural Young Entrepreneur Summit (YES) in the Scheman Building on the Iowa State University campus in Ames. The event provides an opportunity for young and/or emerging rural entrepreneurs to network and connect with resources and programs that can make a difference in the entrepreneurial culture of rural America. Governor Terry Brandstad and Lt. Governor Kim Reynolds will also be in attendance to learn from and share perspectives on opportunities for entrepreneurship in rural Iowa.

During the event, a panel of young rural entrepreneurs will be sharing their business stories and discuss with attendees how they were able to make their enterprises successful in rural Iowa. Panelists include:

Matt Russell, Coyote Run Farm (Lacona, Iowa)

Amy Strouth, Prairie Queen Bakery & Restaurant (Sheldon, Iowa)

Pat Palmer, The Computer Guy (Hampton, Iowa)

Mari Holthaus, Kymar Acres (Waukon Iowa) and Grown Locally Coop (Decorah, Iowa)

A free trade show and networking reception featuring local Iowa foods follows the program. The Summit is being co-hosted by the U.S. Small Business Administration, USDA Rural Development, Iowa State University, and dozens of other partners.

To participate: Please register online for the Rural Young Entrepreneur Summit (YES)

For More Information, Contact: Dr. Mark Edelman, Community Vitality Center-Iowa State University
Phone: 515-294-6144 Email: medelman@iastate.edu

Iowa Innovation Gateway Dream Big Top Five Announced!

MyEntreNet — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:48:00 -1000

The on-line public voting phase of the regional Iowa Innovation Gateway DREAM BIG GROW HERE contest closed on Thursday, September 15th at 11:59 p.m. Thirty different regional entrepreneurs submitted testimonies about their businesses for the contest. Over 16,000 votes were cast throughout the voting period.

Congratulations to:

These top five vote getters will now present to a panel of regional judges on September 20th to see who will take home the $5,000 regional grant. Judges will be using the following criteria to determine the final winner: the viability of the business, an effective plan for use of prize money, the ability to raise additional capital, a potential to generate wealth in the region, the business provides economic diversity to the region and there is a potential to create jobs in the region. The IIG regional winner will also be eligible for the statewide pitch-off party to be held at the MyEntre.net EntreBash in Ames in March 2012. The winner of the statewide pitch-off will receive another $10,000 to support their business.

Thanks to everyone who has helped to make the IIG Regional DREAM BIG GROW HERE contest such a success! Please also checkout our key sponsors for this contest: Iowa Innovation Gateway, Iowa Bankers Association, Renew Rural Iowa, Community Vitality Center, Iowa Department of Economic Development, Technology Association of Iowa and the Iowa Area Development Group.