Managers may call them "best practices," but employees see them as annoying hindrances to good work and desire autonomy instead.

"Best practices," as a term, should speak for itself. These rules, procedures and guidelines for how things get done have, obviously, the goal of streamlining and improving work. Otherwise they wouldn't be best, right?

But it turns out there's a chasm between how managers, executives, and business owners think of these helpful suggestions from the top and how front-line employees view them. They may be best from management's perspective, but ordinary employees, it seems, often beg to disagree. A new survey of 800 execs, employees, and educators from across a range of industries carried out by communication training company Fierce uncovered resentment and annoyance over so-called "best practices." The survey found:

• 44 percent of respondents say their company's best practices actually hinder employee productivity and morale
• 47 percent report that their organization’s current practices consistently get in the way of desired results, rather than optimize the success of the business

In short, you as the boss might just want to be helpful and supportive by offering up these best practices, but nearly half the time your employees feel they know how to do their jobs better than you and feel held back by your dictates. But, you might ask, if they don't want to be guided by best practices (or restricted by them, depending on your point of view), how do they want to be managed?

"Nearly half of survey respondents identified the most beneficial practices as those that encouraged accountability, development, and individual empowerment within the organization," according to Fierce. "Companies must foster an environment where individual efficacy is encouraged and where communication is both elicited and valued." Or to put it in everyday English, your employees want to be trusted to do their jobs properly and empowered to make decisions about how to be successful.

They also want transparency, according to the survey. Seventy percent of respondents told pollsters that if they felt a practice needed to be adjusted, they would candidly approach decision-makers within their organization if they felt their views would be welcomed and the company was willing to change these practices. But sadly, only a third of those who said they'd come forward felt their company would actually listen to them.

Fierce feels not providing the autonomy, empowerment, development and transparent organization your employees want can cost you. “These widely accepted practices are not only ineffective, they are costing our companies billions of dollars, driving away our most valuable employees and customers, limiting performance, and stalling careers,” said Halley Bock, CEO of Fierce, Inc. “This survey should encourage managers to question the practices in place.”

So, do any of your so-called best practices need a rethink?

When you're determined to make your start-up succeed, it's easy to be serious. But it's the companies that work hard to establish cultures of play that attract great people, continuously push the boundaries of innovation, and ultimately win.

I always laugh when people talk about the frivolity of start-ups. Sure, ping pong tables, electric go-carts and video games may seem more fitting for a college dorm than a start-up office, but most people don't realize that creating a culture of play can be one of the most important drivers of innovation and productivity within a young company.

So, how does play affect success in a start-up?

Kids are super creative. Why? Because when they play, there is no limit to their imaginations. So, it's not too surprising that when we're forced to grow up and leave Neverland, it becomes pretty difficult to let our creativity run wild. At Napkin Labs, when we have a problem to solve, we often try to step back and emulate a child-like state of mind, essentially ignoring reality. Sometimes that means our CPO dresses up like an old professor for important meetings, but most time it just means we let our guard down, joke about crazy new products, or share ridiculous "what ifs." Yes, many of the ideas put forward will never work, but the act of stretching our minds often times leads to a breakthrough.

Start-ups are stressful, so play is a great way to break the tension and help people get a clear perspective. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Trada, another start-up here in Boulder. Trada created a hilarious scooter race called Palio di Trada, which gives employees a chance to relieve tension and stress so they can more easily focus on their work. Fun activities like this one are also big morale-boosters, since employees are able to let loose and re-energize themselves for the work ahead.

Who wouldn't want to work at a company that makes having fun a priority? The fight for top talent in the start-up world is extremely competitive. Since most start-ups can’t compete on salary and benefits, many try and set themselves apart by offering a fun company culture. Also, emphasizing your unique, playful culture during the interview process can help you find people who are a great fit personality-wise for your company. For start-ups where employees work long hours together, seven days a week, a good mesh between personalities is incredibly important.

Many companies develop a culture of fear. Fear of appearing unintelligent, fear of not hitting numbers, etc. While fear might help drive employees to achieve results in the short term, it also can have a devastating effect on innovation. When you have a culture of fear, people will hold back on suggesting an idea for making something better. On the other hand, companies that establish a culture of play—where it's totally fine to laugh, joke, and even get crazy—will promote openness and acceptance between employees. People will become much more likely to take risks and fight for what they believe when they feel comfortable around their peers. This freedom makes your team much more willing to experiment, and will cause your company to learn and grow faster.

Start-ups require constant creativity and hustle in the face of uncertainty. When you're determined to make your start-up succeed, it's easy to get serious. But it's the companies that work hard to establish cultures of play that attract great people, continuously push the boundaries of innovation, and ultimately win.

Does your company promote play? If so, how has play led to creative solutions? Share some great examples of using play to drive innovation at your company to help encourage other companies to do the same!

Forget the long-stemmed roses and tickets to Broadway plays. I've found smarter ways to woo my company's best clients.

I'm often struck by the similarities between professional and personal relationships. In fact, I believe most of the fundamental strategies and tactics used in wooing a "significant other" hold true when one is in search of that next big customer. At the same time, maintaining a relationship with a significant other (or an important client) demands the same intellectual rigor one extends to the thrill of landing Mrs. Right (or Mr. Right, if you prefer).

Here's a list of strategies I use to ensure my long-standing client relationships never grow old:

1. I send clients a "thank you for your business" note on each and every anniversary of the signing of our very first contract.

2. I share breaking news on competitors. Nothing, and I mean nothing, motivates a chief executive officer more than beating her competition to the punch. One of the best ways to make your direct client report look good is by arming him with competitive news before the CEO knows about it. He, in turn, can then present it to the CEO and look smart (and strategic) in the process.

3. I periodically ask customers what "non-public relations" business issues are keeping them up at night. I want them to know I care about their entire job universe and, with a little insight, just might be able to help find a new partner to ease some of their non-PR pain.

4. I ask if I can shadow a client (or his sales force) for a day. Nothing delights a customer more than an outside partner's willingness to invest time in learning more about the business of their business. Sometimes, nothing comes out of it. Other times, I've been able to uncover subtle nuances that enable me to tweak the public relations program in order to make it even more effective. Regardless, the client always appreciates the extra time and effort invested.

5. I take time to periodically ask myself the following question, "What can I do to make my client look like a hero to his chief executive officer?" Again, sometimes I draw a blank. Other times, I come up with "Have you ever thought of doing such and such…" questions that show the client I'm really thinking about him and his career.

6. I put myself in my client's customers' shoes and experience the brand from the outside in. This is a game changer and never ceases to amaze a client. So, sometimes I:

• Become a mystery shopper and experience the client's product in a neutral setting such as a Lowe's or Home Depot.
• Visit the website to see how easy it to find critical information.
• Dial the client's 1-800-customer service line to see how quickly my "complaint" is handled.

I then report my findings as well as any suggestions for improvement. I've yet to meet a client of longstanding who doesn't appreciate the sweat equity involved in performing any of the above.

7. I hold periodic, internal account audits in which I invite employees who are not working on the client's business to review what we're doing and suggest alternative approaches. Once again, I sometimes uncover pearls and other times turn up nothing at all. But, I always make sure the client knows we're investing additional time in thinking through creative solutions to his marketing challenges.

There are many other ways to remind a client of long-standing how important he or she is to your business. But, I've never been one to send a dozen long-stem roses, tickets to The Book of Mormon or box seats for a Knicks game. To me, that smacks more of old school client romancing and, frankly, turns my stomach.

It's been said many times and in many ways that it's much less expensive to maintain a current client relationship than go in search of a new one. Client turnover, like death and taxes, is inevitable. But, there's a reason why we have seven or eight significant clients with whom we've partnered for 10 of my firm's 16 years of business. And, the list I've provided above is a good starting point.

Don't wait. Here are seven reasons to launch a venture today.

Now that you know my belief that starting a company is your best hope of living the life you want, here's the next logical question: When should you get started?

1. You're young

The best time to start a company is when you are young. The younger, the better. Youth is a beautiful thing. It's the perfect combination of ignorance and innocence. Stupid decisions are excused as learning experiences and the worst outcome of most youthful transgressions is a few days in juvenile prison, or, worse, going broke.

Blogger Michael Arrington recalled a conversation with a venture capitalist last year that "entrepreneurs are like pro basketball players. They peak at 25, by 30 they're usually done."

I don't agree with the blanket statement, but I do agree that it's easier to pour your life into a company when you're young, creative, fresh, and fired up.

When I graduated from Northwestern in 1996, my primary asset was time and passion. I decided to focus these assets on two goals: making money and finding women who would date a geek in glasses with crossed eyes and a bum heart.

Starting a business killed two birds with one stone. I grew my first company into what became a publicly-traded firm (University Wire and Student Advantage) and I met my future business partner, best friend, lover, and wife at a wedding at age 22.

I've never met an entrepreneur who said, "Wow, I wish I hadn't started so young." The world is full of regrets and one of the main ones is from entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs lamenting that they didn't start off earlier.

2. You're miserable at work

Life is too short to sit behind a desk and be miserable. Show me someone who makes a million dollars a year but hates his job and I'll show you an unhappy guy. Show me someone who makes a tenth of that and I'll show you someone who is 10 times as unhappy.

I've always believed that misery loves company for a reason. Look inside any company and you'll find a boatload of misery, the best fuel to start your own company. We grow up rebelling against our parents. Many grow companies to rebel against former bosses.

Use your nights, weekends, and lunch breaks to form your ideas and network and start laying the groundwork for your eventual prison break. And when you're confident you're on to something, jump. I assure you that you'll never look back, even if all you have at the end is less money in the bank and a learning experience.

3. You're out of work

There's nothing like a good ol' fashion layoff to turn you from a worker into an owner. It shocks and beats the comfort out of you. It's a mini death forcing the least introspective to examine all aspects of their lives.

Let's be clear, everyone who is laid off should not start a business. But a layoff is a great catalyst if you're already thinking about making the move.

When you're fired or let go, many fall into the trap of focusing energy on the people who "wronged" you. Just the opposite. Look at the firing as a blessing in disguise and motivation to reevaluate your life. Put everything on the table—new opportunities you have been ignoring, industries you're interested, and starting your own gig.

4. You have no responsibilities

Start-ups and life responsibilities are often inversely related, if not mutually exclusive. The more responsibilities you have, the less likely it is that you will start a business.

I have many friends who have been speaking to me about starting businesses for 15 years now. And for many, they now feel it's too late to jump in.

While age and responsibilities are often related, they aren't always. So start a company when you have the time and the energy and the freedom to do so. Don't wait until it's too late and you're trapped by a mortgage, private school tuition bills, and annual family vacations that you need to fund.

Starting your own firm has a ton of rewards—excitement, accomplishment, the promise of financial freedom, and more. But don't kid yourself, it also has a ton of downsides—you won't see your friends or family as much, your income will approach zero, the time you used to spend working out is now being spent networking, meeting, recruiting, and traveling.

Providing for others and keeping up with a lifestyle you've grown accustomed to makes it hard to start companies, especially for the first-time entrepreneur. If you are single, married without kids, or thinking about getting married and starting a family—and considering jumping on the entrepreneurial train, do it now before you decide that it's just too late.

5. You have an incurable obsession

Our great country was founded on the idea that anyone with an idea can strike it big. John D. Rockefeller, the son of a traveling salesman, founded Standard Oil, and in the process became the nation's first billionaire whose fortune swelled to more than $500 billion.

The Rockefeller story is a great one. But don't get seduced by the myth, the money, the adventure, and the allure of being a self-made person. Starting a company is the hardest thing you will ever do professionally. It's you versus the world. And the world wins 90% of the time.

Start a company after you sit on your idea for a while—and you can't get it out of your head. You're obsessed. You're incurable. No matter how much you try not to think about the business, it keeps coming back. You start working on the idea during all your free time. You can't stop talking to friends and family about it. And you feel like you will never forgive yourself if you don't take a chance.

This incurable obsession must be consistent over an extended period of at least three months. Let it sit. Let it settle. And don't confuse it with the entrepreneurial seizure, a more temporary excitement that will wane if you give yourself time to really think about the idea.

6. You are an "intrapreneur"

I am starting to spend time with more and more entrepreneurs who came to the game late but are in an ideal position to thrive. They have launched stuff inside large companies (also known as "intrapreneurs") and have put some money in the bank. Despite having responsibilities and being older then 25, they are in a position to invest in themselves.

Just look at David Rochon and Michael Libenson from SavingStar, a mobile savings company I invested in and sit on the board of directors. David had 25 years experience in the grocery industry and Michael was a former consultant who spent 20 years building other people's businesses.

The two launched Saving Star, which in December 2011 TechCrunch called the "Groupon of Groceries." The two are well on their way to creating a formidable business that will revolutionize how consumers save money through a network of 24,000 grocery and drug stores nationwide.

It's well documented that college dropouts create great businesses (Facebook, Microsoft, and Dell, to name just a few). But data also shows that age and entrepreneurial success aren't tied. The Founders Institute released research last year that shows that being older increases the likelihood of success. They theorize that the "combination of successful project completion skills with real world experience helps older entrepreneurs identify and address more realistic business opportunities."

The Kauffman Foundation reports that the Great Recession of a few years ago drove more people to start their own business than any time in the past 15 years. And the fastest-growing group of business starters? Old fogies like me (those who are older than 35)!

7. Do it today

You can try to pick the best time to start a business. When you are old, young, rich, poor, fat, thin, with hair or balding. But any attempt to do so won't make you more or less likely to succeed. Entrepreneurs come in all sizes, shapes, ages and colors. And, believe it or not, our country doesn't have a monopoly on business creation.

Great businesses have been created in times of prosperity. Great businesses have been started when we the country was facing its darkest hours and the entrepreneur was at her lowest low.

If you're reading this story, you're interested in starting your own business. And if you are reading to the end (yes, you! I'm talking about you!), you're about to jump and seriously consider it. Why else would you read 1,500 words about a topic you weren't passionate about?

So let me make it simple for you—the best time to start a business is TODAY. Not tomorrow. Not in two weeks. Not after you get promoted, pregnant, married, or your MBA. TODAY! You're not getting any younger. Your life is not getting any simpler.

See that cliff in front of you that you're scared to go over? Run up to it once again. But this time, actually jump. What you will find below is the life you wanted to live and all you need to do is get over the fear that's keeping you back.

To see more about how I decided to start my first company rather than take a job, and how fear is getting in your way, check out my talk from late last year.

I'm going to be answering questions next week in my column. So please ask anything you'd like about starting a company in the comments below.

The average legal bill even before VC financing can run more than $20,000. Why pay that when DIY options abound?

You’ve got a killer idea, a well-researched business plan, and enough capital (you think) to at least get it off the ground. Before you get too far, however, have you factored in legal expenses? It's a cost that optimistic entrepreneurs sometimes forget about or downplay.

Consider this: The average legal bill prior to Series A financing is $23,000, and the average legal bill for Series A is around $52,000. That’s according to Richard Komaiko, cofounder of AttorneyFee, a website that compares the prices charged by more than 25,000 lawyers. The company, which gleans its data using proprietary Web crawling technology, recently surveyed entrepreneurs about the costs they incurred during start-up.

Komaiko says one thing that can markedly affect those figures is deferred legal billing, a dangerous practice because it can be easy for entrepreneurs to spend more when they don’t have to pay upfront. “A lot of start-ups go legal-service crazy and lawyers know that’s the psychology.”

Komaiko says there are three things many new business owners think they need from an attorney—advice, connections, and actual services—but there are ways to get these things without amassing an onerous legal bill.

Advice – Some people hire a lawyer for business advice they could be getting cheaper somewhere else. Want to know if you should structure your company as an LLC or S-Corporation? An accountant can answer this question far more cheaply than a lawyer. There are also plenty of resources, online or otherwise, to educate yourself.

Connections – While it’s true some of the big-name legal firms in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston do have well-paved inroads to investors and others who may be good to know, accelerator programs or co-working spaces are alternatives that can get you linked to plenty of well-connected people.

Services – All new businesses need legal documents drawn up that deal with things like entity formation, raising seed round capital, creating a convertible debt note, non-disclosure agreements for outsiders, trademarks, and sometimes, patent applications. Sites such as RocketLawyer and LegalZoom have free or inexpensive templates you can download. Komaiko warns, however, using templates can be risky and sometimes they don’t fully address a company’s specific needs. If you’re unsure, you should run your document past trained eyes.

And obviously, comparing the fee structures of various attorneys is a great idea, as well. If you’re not located in the dozen or so cities for which AttorneyFee compiles data, stay tuned. Komaiko says his company has only mined about one-sixth of the pricing information publicly available on the Internet so as it continues to do so, his platform will become more robust and useful for making informed decisions about which attorney or firm to choose.

Social media is a great way to promote your business but spending too much time connecting online can burn you out. Here's how to get your spark back.

One of the best things about being an avid reader is that moment you stumble across a phrase that clearly describes something you've experienced but didn't previously have the words for. Take "social media hangover" for example. It's a phrase that appears in an old-but-good post on B2B Marketing Insider. You may have felt a certain vague, brain-deadening feeling wash over you after spending too much time promoting your business or product on social media, but Michael Brenner's description from the post nails the experience:

Last week I attended SAP’s annual conference… as a "social reporter." For three full days, I live-blogged and live-tweeted my way through almost a dozen conference sessions, I created nine blog posts, 83 hash-tagged tweets and more than a few Facebook comments and likes. When it was all over, I collapsed into a social media stupor.

I flew home after the show and aside from a few responses and notes of appreciation, I found myself suffering from what felt like a social media hangover…. For three days after the show, I felt my social media haze and headache. I sporadically checked in on my connections across the various networks but just couldn't bring myself to dive in and create anything.

Burnout is possible in many areas of business, of course, but the always on, always tempting nature of social media makes it particularly easy to get sucked in to long hours building your network on these sites. And while the brand awareness and networking benefits are real, all that time in front of Facebook and like can leave you a little woozy headed, drained and with a vague sense of being down in the dumps.

Plus, research and anecdotal evidence suggests that spending too much time gazing at perfectly curated profiles on Facebook, profiles that often eliminate all the warts and stresses of a person's real life, can knock your self-esteem. Author and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha has called it "The Feel-Bad Effect from Not-So-Close Facebook Friends" and Lijit founder Stan Jones, has described the problem of keeping up with fellow entrepreneurs online: "On Facebook they have been to glitterati tech conferences. In person they confess they haven't been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company."

Luckily, Copyblogger's Cori Padgett recently offered a handful of cures for the condition. Some, like getting away from your screen and out into the real world to see people in the flesh, are relatively obvious, but at least one is a clever idea you've probably never considered before. Padgett suggests:

Get back to basics. As the lovely James from Men with Pens and Damn Fine Words recently suggested I try, sit down with a pen and write out some "I Believe" statements on just why you started your journey online in the first place.

What was true then that still holds true now, that could possibly be a good motivator and reignite your creative spark? For me, when I started my entrepreneurial journey, I believed I had a story to share that others might relate to. Sharing my story might help someone else who may be struggling and make things a wee bit easier. It must have helped, because suddenly I was inspired to write this post!

How do you manage your social media use for maximum benefit and minimum pain?

Cash flow can be a real pain point for start-ups. These new solutions by young companies are helping start-ups scale quickly without cash infusions from investors.

Mediafly, a 22-person start-up based in Chicago, sells on-demand software and apps to some of the biggest companies in the United States. Its customers typically pay yearly subscriptions, which means each invoice is a substantive amount of money—upwards of $100,000. But those payments don't get filled immediately (some take as long as 60 days), which can be a significant pain point to the company's cash flow, especially as the company scales.

But Mediafly's CEO, Carson Conant, has found a solution. Rather than take on venture capital to stabilize the company's cash flow, he decided to sign up with Ariba, an online invoicing firm that offers dynamic discounting—a service that has existed for years, but made much easier by smart use of the Web.

"Accelerating cash collection allows us to invest earlier in innovative new features," says Conant. "New features allow us to attract new customers faster, outpace competitors and expand [services] within current customers faster." Last year, the company grew about 300 percent, and expects similar growth for 2012.

Venture capital may seem like an attractive option for start-ups, but it's still an expensive—not to mention pressure-chocked—way to take money, especially if the start-up is merely looking to cure a cash flow issue. And Ariba is just one of several young firm to offer dyanmic discounting solutions. Taulia, for instance, a dynamic discount and self-service platform for corporations launched in 2009, recently raised $8.5 million.

It's not a new trend, per se—old school receivable financing and factoring have been around for ages. Bringing the equivalent of bank factoring online amounts to a simple 2.0 refresh of an financial transaction that many entrepreneurs would prefer to not devote too much time to thinking about. "Technology makes it faster for suppliers to find cash," says Drew Hofler, senior manager of financial solutions at Ariba, which was founded in 1996 in Sunnyvale, California.

Ariba's dynamic discounting simple, but innovative. Buyers and suppliers are connected an online platform, similar to a social network. After an invoice is created, buyers can offer accelerated payment (with a small discount) and suppliers can accept the offer, reject it, or counter-offer. Using Ariba, Mediafly is able to receive payment from its biggest customer in 14 days, as opposed to a typical 30 to 60 days.

"Ariba, particularly dynamic discounting, hasn't just been an influential thing—we think it's fundamental," says Conant, noting that although the company has raised $6 million in angel funding since launching in 2006, it has yet to take on venture funding.

According to Drew Hofler, as of last year Ariba's buyers were sitting on about $2 trillion worth of assets. Because interest rates remain low, offering a discount in exchange for a shorter payment period makes financial sense for some larger firms. Credit, too, remains tight. It's a scenario that Hofler believes is ripe for innovation.

"The funny thing about the new normal for banking is that, before Lehman, it was pretty much free credit," he says. "When that happened, banks clamped down. Banks are still loaning, but when they do, the loans are restrictive and it can be more expensive. When the credit market started thawing, those who really didn't need credit were able to get it, but the smaller companies, the entrepreneurial companies, were't able to get it. For a long time they found it almost impossible to get short-term credit, and are still finding it hard to get. What I see technology doing, it's basically a matter of simply giving visibility into the opportunity to all the parties involved, new forms of commerce spring up from that."

Jed Simon, founder and CEO of FastPay, a Los Angeles based firm that Simon describes as a "a tech-enabled receivable finance business," is addressing a similar cash flow problem. Specifically, Simon founded FastPay last year to provide near-instant financing for digital media businesses, who often need to lay out significant chunks of cash when doing an ad-buy. According to Simon, cash flow can cripple a business, especially if the company doesn't have enough liquidity to make a purchase.

"Just because a company is profitable, doesn't mean a company is generating enough cash," Simon says. "Even when companies are profitable and growing, they actually require even more cash."

"Just because a company is profitable, doesn't mean a company is generating enough cash."
—Jed Simon, CEO of FastPay

For example, if a digital ad-ops firm is charged with making a $100,000 Facebook advertising buy, the vendor may be responsible for the initial outlay of the cash, and invoice the brand. But it may not get the money for up to 90—or even 120 days. In the meantime, the company may struggle with a shortage of working capital.

"A client that needs to front the money—if they don't have a large pool of capital to keep investing in media, they can't grow," Simon says. "They either grow slowly, or need to go raise a bunch of equity or other financing to keep doing campaigns. If you're looking to invest in human capital, you need even more money. Cash is king. The key to a growing company is having enough capital to win."

After a short application process, companies can enlist FastPay to essentially fund the receivables they owe for a small discount. FastPay looks to the credit of the receivables, more than the business itself.

Online content publishers are a perfect example of how FastPay's innovative approach to cash flow can help a young and growing company. Consider Destructoid.com, a video game site based in San Francisco. The company's CEO, Yanier Gonzalez, uses FastPay for this purpose.

"Our primary source of income is advertising and it took us a really long time to figure out how we were going to be able to sustain cash flow and continue to grow," Gonzalez writes in a statement. "I went to my banker. And the first time I walked in there to get a loan and had to explain what I did for a living, they were just like "What?" They didn't understand my business. Then I discovered FastPay. They got it from day one. They're like okay, now here's what we can do. And it was done in like two days. It was ridiculous. I mean it was literally 48 hours and we had our funding. They're like the best thing ever. I don't actually think I'd be in business if it wasn't for FastPay."

If you think that PR is just about the press mention, think again. A great media campaign can actually make you money. Here's how.

Done correctly, a cleverly crafted public relations campaign can help take a company to the next level in more ways than one. Great publicity is a tool that Joy Schoffler, Founder of Leverage PR, has used to help start-ups and early-stage companies raise more than $20 million in capital, make the Inc. 500 list, secure Fortune 500 accounts, and experience tremendous growth. Whether you are a marketing associate looking to make a name for yourself, or the founder of your own company looking for ways to raise capital to grow your business, PR can take your career and company to the next level—if done correctly.

"My background and experience with PR is a little out of the norm," says Schoffler. "I spent the first half of my career growing early-stage companies and raising capital. When I looked back at how these companies were able to experience such incredible success, I found the one common thread: I used well crafted PR campaigns."

Sure, seeing your name in ink is thrilling for any business owner, but why stop there? If you believe that being quoted or highlighted in a reputable magazine or on television is the end of the line for your publicity efforts, you simply aren't thinking big enough. "By understanding the business environment and investor thought process, you can craft your stories to speak to investors and enable growth, not just get your name in the papers," Schoffler says.

There's a simple way to go beyond just being quoted and tell your story: Establish yourself as a thought-leader by producing content yourself.

"Positioning yourself as an expert contributor is the No. 1 technique start-ups in development looking to raise capital should use," explains Schoffler. "At the seed stage, investors are buying into you and your vision. Positive press that positions you as an expert is outside validation that you know your stuff."

Monte Lee-Wen, president and CEO at The PPA Group, says good PR took his company to the next level. "When we started we had an impressive portfolio and a superior business model, but no one knew that and being the one to tell them tends not to carry a lot of weight. Publicity helped our business raise tens of millions in capital, make the Inc. 500|5000 list several times, close over half a billion in commercial real estate and grow from a four-man operation to over a 100 employees."

When you want to leverage publicity for growth, remember that this is not a slight-of-hand trick to make investors think you're better than you are. Publicity is a spotlight. You must know what you're talking about; find your topic and speak to it intelligently. And instead of talking about you and your product exclusively, offer facts and metrics that support your claim--then tie in your company as further evidence of your claim.

"We used our publicity to show investors our past accomplishments and highlight our level of skill and market knowledge from a third-party perspective," says Lee-Wen. "Publicity served as an outside validation showing investors that highly trained media professionals believed in our abilities enough to use us as expert sources."

So how can you get noticed by investors through your PR campaign? Here are some great tips and "PR rules to live by" from someone who has done it time and time again: publicity expert Joy Schoffler.

Pitching is sales. Pitching your story idea to a journalist is like any sales situation. Be conscious of your words and how you use them. Focus on the elevator pitch and make it compelling, memorable, and relevant. Brevity is key; journalists do not have a lot of time. You have less than two minutes, (if you're lucky) to convince them—or at least inform and interest them. And, your story needs to be compelling enough to entertain the reader because that is the journalist's goal. Don't be dull or one-dimensional! No one cares about your new product unless it's mind-blowing—and even then, when was the last time you read a 100 percent positive product-or-service review? Think instead about your company's story as a plotline: what are the challenges you've overcome? What things are interesting about your company and why should they care? How will it make their life better?

Know your media contact. Do your homework before pitching a reporter or producer. Know what the journalist is about by reading their work and engaging with them in social media. Don't pitch a business reporter who covers Microsoft if you own a social media tech company--this is one of the fastest ways to alienate a reporter! Once you have studied their work and you know you have the appropriate contact, make it easy for the journalist to use your information. Send a brief e-mail (note the word brief) as they don't need or want to know your life story. Hyperlink your data, never send attachments. Then follow up with a phone call a day or two later. Make it short and relevant to a hot trend. The more complete your idea, the higher the odds of getting noticed by your reporter.

Raising Additional Capital. For companies in the middle of raising capital, highlighting previous investments in your company can be one of the best ways to raise additional funds. In today's business environment in which companies are struggling to even get loans, the media loves to highlight a success story. You can position investment-related stories in a way that uses the larger trends of the economic downturn or other relevant topics. You can position your firm as a "beacon of light," making it seem even more appealing. If the investor is well known in the community or in a prestigious investment firm, this is a great angle to get coverage.

What to do once you have coverage. it is important to use it to its full advantage. Every piece of coverage is outside validation that your company/product is viable. Make sure you are using your success to meet your overall goals. First, let all of your target customers and investors know about your coverage.

• E-mail your database letting them know your company was featured
• Spread the word via social media adding it to your twitter inventory, post to LinkedIn and your Facebook fan page.
• Ask strong connections in your industry and your friends to share the news, as the more hits your article receives the more likely you will be to receive follow on mentions
• Mention the article and link to it on your company blog

Next, if you have received national coverage, call your local newspapers and business journals and let them know about your coverage. They will often do a follow-up story, reporting from a local level.

Additional tips:

• Build Investor and Customer Kits or add the press coverage to your existing kits. Include a press section in your investor or customer presentation and add the information to your product brochures and company and executive bios.
• Start building a News Room Section on your website including press releases, media coverage and a digital press kit. If there was a great quote from a journalist or analyst about your product, use the quote on your website and marketing materials.
• Have copies of your media coverage framed in the waiting room or lobby (if you have one) if it is a major award or significant press event.
• Measure the impact of your publicity in your investor presentations. This will serve two proposes: it will show investors that you track data and make your marketing assumptions more realistic.
• As a start-up or growth-phase company, you are often not only selling to customers, but also working to gain buy-in from new potential recruits. Good press coverage can help you negotiate better employment contract terms and lower wages if they think there is real potential. Having strong talent will make attracting attention from investors much easier.

A word of warning! If your company is not ready or your goals are not clearly defined, PR can do more harm than good. If you do not have a business plan and at least a brochure website up you could do more harm than good with a publicity campaign. Publicity is a spotlight that you can shine on your organization, and unless you are skilled at how you position it, it can have a negative effect.

Join me for in-depth details as I interview Joy on The Million Dollar Mindset podcast, Monday, February 13, 2012 at 2pm ET.

Yes, start-up life is hard on families. But do you have to be willing to give up a real bond with your kids to be an entrepreneur?

The likes of Apple and Facebook were once scrappy start-ups battling to transform how we communicate and handle information. Now, between the outpouring of grief following the death of Steve Jobs, Facebook's impending IPO, and the fact that nearly every pocket or bag in the land contains these firms' products, they're more institutions than insurgents. So perhaps now that the dream these firms were selling has become the ubiquitous present, it's time to look at what we've actually got.

This comes in the form of hand-wringing about what our digital lifestyles do to our relationships. (Here's a college kid who went Luddite for three months, deactivating his cell phone, e-mail, and social networks. Chalk, notes, and stopping by made a resurgence.) But it also comes in the form of a more critical examination of the start-up mania that these firms' astounding success have ushered in. How many young people are inspired to dream of founding businesses by the incredible success of seemingly normal(ish) Mark Zuckerberg? Do these start-up dreams have under-discussed costs?

That's what three entrepreneurs whose views were rounded up by Jason Kottke started to wonder after reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs. The short post is well worth a read in full, but the gist is encapsulated in the words of Jeff Atwood, a co-founder of Stack Exchange:

Start-up life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn't sustainable for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks. [...] Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

Designer and entrepreneur Eric Karjaluoto expresses similar sentiments. "I admire [Jobs] for the mountains he climbed. At the same time, I wonder if he missed the whole point, becoming the John Henry of our time. He won the race, but at what cost?" Kottke admits that "since Jobs died, I've been pushing a little less hard" toward a definition of success that involves insane working hours.

And it is not just Kottke and company who are wondering whether most of us really want to pay the true costs of anything resembling the Zuckerberg or Jobs-type of success. Blogger Penelope Trunk has a woman's perspective on the issue and focuses on Facebook's soon-to-be-massively-wealthy COO Sheryl Sandberg in a new post. While she has nothing against Sandberg, whom she praises as super smart and extremely supportive of women's ambitions, Trunk still has questions about whether Sandberg's success is actually an appealing option for the vast majority of women.

Sandberg wants to be a role model for women who want big, exciting careers. But here's the problem: women don't want to be Sandberg. It’s no coincidence that the number one woman on the list of self-made millionaires is Oprah. She has no kids and no husband. She’s fascinating, nice, and smart. But few of us would really enjoy her life.

Sandberg and Oprah represent extreme choices in life. The things they give up are not things that most women would want to give up in exchange for the wild career success they could have.

The bottom line for Trunk is the same as it in for Kottke—seeing your kids and having start-up success are not compatible goals. That might not often be clearly articulated in the culture but it's true, and this makes high-octane entrepreneurialism a hard choice for many. "Sandberg is not a role model. She's an aberration," concludes Trunk.

Do you agree you have to be willing to give up a certain bond with your kids to be an entrepreneur? And if so, is it worth it for you?

Thinking of starting a business, but not sure where youll find the cash? Here are a few tips on how to launch a business with little to no money out of pocket.

Just like meeting Mr. or Mrs. "Right," or having your first child, the most opportune time to launch a new product or service can arise when you least expect it. And to fully take advantage of all that comes along with the opportunity, you must hold your breath and take the plunge!

Assuming you're like most people in this world—not born silver-spoon-in-mouth—you might feel the cards are stacked against you in starting a business. How can you turn your idea into a thriving business without much, or any, start-up capital? In this era of multi-million-dollar Series A investments, is it even possible to start-up without angel or VC funding?

Of course it is. But it's neither easy nor intuitive. Here are three tips, based on my personal experience, on how to start up without hawking all of your worldly possessions in the process:

1. Don't quit your day job. At least not yet. By staying put at a 9-to-5 as you prepare for your company's launch, your salary can support the impromptu expenses (beyond the cost of your personal time) that inadvertently pop up when starting a venture. Doing so also provides the financial peace of mind to observe and learn from other people's successes and failures before diving in. This comes in the form of networking with industry players, volunteering, and researching the entrepreneurial space to get ready for what's in store! For a head start on the latter, check out The Everyday Entrepreneur. It's a quick read with easy-to-apply lessons from entrepreneurs across a range of industries who provide the advice needed to prevent costly mistakes novices might make otherwise.

2. Exercise all options—virtually. One of the biggest (and bought) lessons I learned while founding Heritage Link Brands is that not all countries, states, or municipalities are alike where setting up the physical location of a company is concerned. And some, more than others, provide incentives or tacit benefits to startups to encourage enterprise, depending on the industry, product or service provided. Since our venture of choice was wine (one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world), we took diligent notes to understand costs (i.e. annual licensing: $5,000 in Massachusetts versus $400 in California) and made decisions accordingly. With the tremendous amount of information available through the Web, take advantage of side-by-side comparisons or business indices before making any hard-core investments. Also be sure to explore services that allow you to outsource some of the minutia that comes along with administering a business, like Elance or Talent Gurus. With the support of such firms, your business can ramp up slowly as you accelerate your bandwidth to match the venture's growth trajectory.

3. Don't be afraid to accept the kindness of strangers, friends or family! Whether tapping into an alma mater network for interns or fielding volunteers that learn how special and differentiated your offering is
through word of mouth, you can expand the capacity of your venture tremendously. The easiest way to manage this low/no cost option is to introduce a trial period for these wonderful souls to gauge fit and develop systems and processes for firm hires in the future. Also be sure to align skill sets with the demands of the business. Especially when the relationships are close, make sure whoever you bring on board is capable since the ramifications of things going sour are amplified, when family or friends are involved. If you find something's not working, don’t be afraid to let go of volunteers who add little to no value to the company’s bottom line. Lastly but not least, always be thankful and appreciative to these selfless beings for the extra help! Honestly, I'm not sure what I would do without the countless people who contributed to the success of my business.

Weekly wine pairing tip: For a wine that offers no risk of disappointing your palate, try the Tupun Torrontés out of Argentina. Filled with peach flavors and hints of lemon zest and citrus, it's just delightful.

You just closed a small financing round, hired some new team members and are looking to move into a new office space. Here are seven things to avoid when signing up for your new digs.

You just closed a small financing round, hired some new team members, and are looking to move into a new office space. After finding the perfect spot and locking down a two-page letter of intent, the landlord sends over the lease agreement—and it's 70 pages long. How do you get through this massive document without delaying the move-in process? What should you focus on? Here are seven things to look out for when signing up for your new digs.

The first few sections of almost every lease agreement contain the basic lease terms—rent, start and end dates, square-footage, etc. It is definitely not OK to be sloppy or loose here. These numbers drive your move-in scheduling, monthly payment obligations, and operating expense responsibility. It is completely standard and within your rights to expect these basic terms to be explicitly and accurately nailed down in the lease agreement.

Long-term leases simply do not make sense for start-ups. Whether you're knocking it out of the park or navigating troubled waters, it is unlikely that any space will be suitable for your business for the next seven years. Even for the next three or four years. I often advise clients to keep the lease term to just a few years or less. You'd like to preserve as much flexibility as possible—and don't want to be overburdened with a ton of extra space, or stuck in a cramped office environment. You might pay a little more in rent for the privilege of a shorter lease, but any experienced entrepreneur will tell you that the added flexibility is worth every penny.

Even if you can negotiate a shorter lease term, it is really important to make sure that you have the ability to sublease your space in the event of a sudden downturn. You should expect that your landlord's consent will be required in order to sublease your space. However, the lease should specify that the landlord's consent should not be "unreasonably withheld, conditioned or delayed." Further, the procedures around subleasing should be clear and easy to follow.

Obviously, you are on the hook if you trash your space. The repair obligations to look out for relate to things that are out of your control. Unless the damage is caused by your actions (or the actions of people whom you invite into the office), you should not be on the hook for structural repairs to the building (building walls, plumbing, HVAC systems) or repairs to the shared common areas. You also want to avoid any obligations to comply with local building codes and federal laws—unless the landlord is making rock-solid representations about pre-existing compliance, or your duties are triggered only in connection with your actions (such as your renovation of the space).

This is something that landlords will often sneak into the lease. It is a provision that allows the landlord to move you to a "comparable space" within the building. Strike this immediately if you can. The landlord will typically agree to cover the expenses associated with the relocation—but that's not the point. Moving is a huge distraction for your start-up. Signing a lease is supposed to provide some level of comfort that you have established a "home" for the short term. You do not need the extra headaches from an unexpected move.

Most lease agreements will come with an attached set of building rules and regulations. The vast majority of these will be standard, with variances driven by the location, size and type of office building. The landlord will also have a unilateral right to change these rules. So why do I even raise this point? Well, it is primarily a matter of managing the landlord's expectations, particularly if your start-up has some unusual aspects to its operation that might inadvertently trip the building rules. For instance, I worked with a start-up that would host on-site training in its offices. The building had rules around third party visitors that would affect the company's ability to hold these sessions. By discussing our concerns with the landlord up front, we were not able to revise the rules, but we did get assurances that the landlord would be very supportive of our client's training activities.

Of course, because I am an attorney, you probably knew this one was coming. In all fairness, I actually do believe that lease agreements are frequently "over-lawyered" by counsel. That being said, even the most "standard" leases contain clauses that are confusing and potentially harmful to your company. It is also probably true that my list of lease traps does not address all of your start-up's unique concerns. You need a lawyer who not only has experience in reviewing and negotiating leases, but who also understands your start-up, your risk tolerance and how your specific business issues come into play.

How else did you expect the site to make money? My company uses the same business model--and there's nothing unethical about it.

How else did you think Pinterest was supposed to keep the lights on?

That was my first question after I read an article forwarded to me recently about how the visual bookmarking tool makes money off of users' pins. For anyone who doesn't know what Pinterest is, it's a site where people "pin" images and videos from around the Web to a virtual pinboard that other users can follow. It's a lovely and compelling site and growing fast. According to Hitwise, the site had 11 million visits in one week in December—a 40-fold growth spurt over the last six months. The other big news is that Pinterest is driving major traffic to retailers, which has suddenly made everyone sit up and take notice.

What they noticed this week, however, about Pinterest's business model has caused something of an uproar.

Here's what tech blogger Hillel Fuld wrote about it:

(W)hen my followers click on my photo and end up buying the product on the site to which it was linked, the site/business gets paid and you know who else gets paid? Pinterest! On my back. Without my permission. And with no transparency of telling me that they are monetizing my content.

Now, it may be due to the super simple Pinterest sign-up process (you connect through Facebook or Twitter) that makes users overlook this, but you do need to agree to the site's Terms of Use, which state:

By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.

Now, those are pretty straightforward and common terms for the Web. But even if you just checked the box without reading it, I have to wonder, why isn't this assumed?

My company Buyosphere monetizes content on our site similarly. We use Skimlinks—the same third-party affiliate network that Pinterest uses. I know from experience that even with the traffic Pinterest gets, this model doesn't add up to a major amount of money. A quick skim of pins reveals that very few of them are affiliate product links. Many of the items that Pinterest users share and re-share are images taken from Tumblr and blogs—links that do not have affiliate programs associated with them. I don't have solid numbers to back this up, but I'm assuming that a small percentage of Pinterest's content is actually monetizable through Skimlinks.

Fuld's article makes it sound like there is someone going through all of the images and changing the URLs to affiliate links, but that's not how Skimlinks integration works. Skimlinks simply detects URLs with affiliate programs associated to them and embeds the affiliate code. That's it (unless there is something deeper going on, which I don't see in my stream).

I know that Pinterest is a success because of its community, but in order to continue serving that community, it needs to make money and this just seems like the most obvious, seamless way to do so. Users wouldn't want ads messing up the interface nor would they appreciate brands taking over and ruining the community feel. And, ahem, venture capital is not a business model.

I see the Skimlinks integration as the least invasive of options to monetize the site that millions are starting to rely on. So, then, I'll ask again, "How did you expect Pinterest to make money?" I, personally, assumed they would monetize product links. What was your impression?

How (and why) to disrupt your own business before your competitors or upstarts have a chance to.

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to work on a project with one of the original Apollo 13 mission-control engineers. One day, while he was patiently answering questions from his wide-eyed colleagues about how NASA got the astronauts safely home via their Lunar Escape Module, he paused, looked down at a gadget in his hands and cracked a wry smile. "You know, this little device has more computing capacity—by a large order of magnitude—than we had to work with in the entire LEM."

No lie, that tiny anecdote still pops into my head about once a month. It reminds me how fast the world is changing. Which, oddly, brings me to the topic of cannibalism. No, I'm not speculating on what would have happened had the astronauts run out of Tang and space food packets, but rather I'm talking about product cycles and innovation. More specifically, how more businesses should be the ones to kill their own products through disruptive use of technology, rather than waiting for competitors to do the job and push them out of business.

As Clay Christensen captured so well in his classic book, The Innovator's Dilemma, it's almost unheard of for companies of any size to accomplish this. Once a product is launched, inertia sets in so hard and fast, that challenging the underlying technology, value proposition or even marketing of that product becomes counter-cultural. Native cannibals, those employees who see the potential to reinvent their businesses via new technologies, are ignored, marginalized and eventually rejected by the corporate organism's immune system perfectly designed to protect its status quo.

A very successful Silicon Valley angel investor is my favorite example of this immune system response. He worked for an industry leader in the Valley for a decade before leaving in frustration. He's since funded and sold two start-ups to his previous employer at a total price of more than $300 million. Think of how much less expensive it would have been for that company to retain him, fund his ideas internally and reap the benefits without having to compete for them in the acquisition market.

And the large and growing importance of technology, software design, physics, and statistics to all industries has introduced new potential disruptors, the foreign cannibals. These are the brilliant engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who are successfully reinventing entire industries from outside the status quo. It's not just that they have no sacred cows, it's that they are willing and able to disprove the very existence of cows. Example? I think PayPal and Square are the two most important financial innovations of the last decade. You know how many collective years of financial services experience the five co-founders behind these two companies have? Three. (Peter Thiel's years trading derivatives for Credit Suisse). Makes you wonder if American Express, Visa, and MasterCard spent the last decade playing video games and updating their Facebook pages.

Makes you wonder if American Express, Visa, and MasterCard spent the last decade playing video games and updating their Facebook pages.

So, how can you ensure that your business is a continuing source of innovation in your industry? That you remain cannibal and not cuisine? Co-opting the native cannibal can be accomplished by giving those wonderfully disruptive individuals money, space, and people to try out their ideas. But, most importantly, they need the unyielding support of a senior sponsor that will take the inevitable heat when the corporate missionaries start demanding their heads.

Leveraging the foreign cannibals is harder. You have to find them, get them interested in the problems your product is trying to solve, and then be able to identify and implement the quality ideas from among the many questionable ones they may throw out to you. Quirky, the crowd-sourced product design community, is a really intriguing example of this approach, in my opinion. I'd love to hear from others of other on- or off-line examples of collecting and leveraging foreign cannibals.

This is all top of mind for me because my company, Mindflash.com, is about to undertake its second, self-cannibalization experience. We're on a path to reinvent our technology and product experience in a dramatic way over the next year. I'm not sure whether Christensen would label our work as "sustaining technological changes" or "disruptive innovations," but we're aiming for the latter. And be sure that we've started the fire under the huge cast iron pot for inspiration.

Helping your employees set work-life boundaries is easy and prevents burnout. So why aren't you doing it?

Are you an after-hours Blackberry addict? Do you expect your employees to be e-mail addict, too? How much to keep in contact with office calls and e-mail in the evenings and over weekends may be a matter of personal choice (or business necessity) for founders, but for employees when they can switch off can be a nerve-wracking gray area, points out Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group, on Fast Company recently.

Unless you're in the psychic mind-reading business, the only way your employees are going to know how available you expect them to be is by close observation of the example you set and a stressful dose of guesswork. Unless you explicitly tell them, of course. After all, conscientious, promotion-minded workers probably won't ask if they can chuck their phone in their bag and forget about it at home, as they won't want to come off as a slacker. Williams Yost writes:

Leaders fail to clarify their personal preferences for staying connected to work with technology, and don’t share their expectations of the responsiveness with their direct reports. This leads to misguided assumptions that can wreak havoc on the work-life balance of their employees. And most leaders have no idea any of this is happening.

Luckily, there is a quick, easy and perhaps best of all, free fix to this problem. By simply specifying your exact expectations, you remove the unpleasant cloud of doubt that can get in the way of workers' peace of mind and drive them towards burnout. Williams Yost suggests you,

Have a meeting, state the parameters clearly, and then be consistent. People watch the behavior of leaders like a hawk. If there’s even a whiff of inconsistency between what you told them and how you actually behave, they will go back to assuming they need to follow your technology schedule. So if you state, "You don’t need to respond to e-mails at night; I'll call you if anything is urgent," don't penalize someone who missed an important issue because they didn’t answer an e-mail, but were never called.

Check out the complete Fast Company piece for more tips on what to consider when setting your policy and on how to revise if your needs change. There are other resources available for founders and bosses determined to tackle this issue as well. An analysis of data on how plugged in, mobile workers are coping with work demands by Dr. Carolyn Axtell of the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield offers advice for companies hoping to help workers avoid burnout. Among her tips:

• Control. The more workers get to decide how to manage their off-job time, the better so, for example, if you have a massive project looming that will require work outside the usual nine-to-five, try to give employees as long a lead time as possible to allow them to meet that deadline in a way that works best for them.
• Tools. Companies should also "ensure that employees have the right resources to do their job and have the necessary support to overcome obstacles," says the analysis. If your employees need a gadget, training or a team happy hour to blow off steam, provide it.
• Boundaries. Like Williams, Axtell suggests managers explicitly encourage workers to set firm boundaries and find time to recharge. Bosses should, "encourage employees to maintain a boundary between home and work and not work excessive hours."

How do you help your staff maintain work-life boundaries and avoid burnout?

It's no secret that great people build great companies, so it's baffling that more companies don't treat recruiting as the most important job.

A five-piece mariachi band, a cake with a hidden message, and more food than you'd believe, were all delivered to our office—resume in tow—in an attempt to help an applicant stand out from the other 2,000 monthly hopefuls who apply for a job here. People do crazy things like this because they, with all their hearts, want to work at Red Frog Events.

It's no secret that great people build great companies, so it's baffling to me that more companies don't treat recruitment as the single most important department. Red Frog has treated it this way from day one with spectacular results: We currently hire just one out of every 750 applicants.

How to attract great applicants:

How to interview them:

How to refine your process:

After the interview is over, don't stop interviewing. We hire people to a four-month contract position to evaluate how they perform in real situations, assess their cultural fit and see if they have a hint of jerk in them. After four months, we've historically hired around 20 percent of those put on contract.

It works. We don't miss. Using these hiring practices, we've yet to have someone leave.

After 6,000 cover letters and four months, Alexa, Caitlyn, Emma, Liz, Makenzie, Matt, Megan, and Terry were hired last month. I already know they're some of the most passionate and talented people in the world.

Welcome to the family.

Mistakes are a great way to learn. But why not skip the pain and suffering yourself--at least on these 9 mistakes.

Making mistakes is a great way to learn. Making mistakes is also not particularly fun.

It's a lot more fun to avoid them entirely.

Here are some of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs—and businesspeople in general—tend to make:

1. Think of a plan as an end result. Say you’re agonizing over a business plan; somewhere along the way you've forgotten your goal is to actually start the business. Establish goals, create long-range plans, make to-do lists, and get going.

Most successful people are solid planners and excellent adapters. Get started so you can start adapting.

2. Assume style indicates substance. Logos, identity packages, killer wardrobes, eccentric work spaces... none of those matter if you can't deliver. Businesses are built on go, not show. Your business or personal style will create a memorable brand as long as you deliver.

Just be you. And get to work.

3. Think of business as all-you-can-eat. Ideas are thrilling. Opportunities are tantalizing. Dreams are exciting.

Great, but execution is everything. Take on too much and you do few things well. Keep getting distracted by the latest trend and your best ideas get ignored.

Check out everything on the business menu, but only select a few items at a time. Don't be afraid, or have too big an ego, to start small. Small is almost always your start-up friend.

4. Underestimate the time required. Nothing ever goes as quickly as you predict; in a start-up, time passes in reverse dog years. Create timelines but always factor in scenarios and sensitivities. If you don't reach your estimated sales in six months, what will you do?

An estimate is theoretical. Plans are more concrete. Know what you will do if your timelines are wrong. They will be.

5. Assume perfection is required. Trying to create a product that meets every conceivable customer need? Sooner is almost always better than later, so do a Tim Gunn and make it work. Get to market and then start refining your products or services based on actual customer feedback.

6. Underestimate the money required. It’s easy to underestimate cost when you let hope creep into your calculations. A start-up, no matter how bootstrapped, always has unforeseen costs. Just because you really want something to work out doesn't mean it will magically cost less.

Apply sensitivities and create plans in case your estimates are wrong. Just like your time estimates, they will be.

7. Give up too soon. Success rhymes with excess for good reason: Entrepreneurs who succeed do so because they work harder and longer. Before you give up, take a step back and decide whether additional effort is all that's required to overcome roadblocks or hurdles.

Sometimes it's not the business or the market. Sometimes it's you. Never quit until you’re sure it’s not you.

8. Stop acting silly. If you’re like me your favorite childhood stories involve something stupid you did. (How else would I know the right mixture of sulfur and saltpeter will burn hot enough to turn a Tonka truck into a glop of metal?)

Business is serious enough. Every once in awhile, do something silly. Silly is memorable. Silly makes you feel like a kid again. Laughing at yourself will make the toughest day a lot easier.

9. Adopt expectations. We are all influenced to some extent by what other people think about us. But what do you want? What really matters to you? Live your life based on the opinions of others and you live their lives, not your own.

What matters most is what matters most to you. Always be sure you're living your life. It’s the only one you get.

Want to hire top-tier young talent for your lower-profile business? Don't think you can just show up on campus senior year and compete, warns one small company.

Everyone knows the competition for top-tier tech and business talent is intense, with some companies going to extraordinary lengths to bring the brightest minds to their organizations. So if you're not as well known as marquee brands like Facebook and Google, do even have a hope of attracting the best Ivy League-caliber grads to your firm?

Yes, answers one small, relatively unknown firm that's managed this feat. But there's one hitch: you might not like what it takes. Applied Predictive Technologies is an Arlington, Virginia-based company that that sells business analytic software to clients such as Guitar Center and Walgreens. Founded in 1999, with an impressive client list and a handful of offices scattered around the world, it is hardly a stealth start-up. But it's not exactly as sexy as the super-hyped kings of Silicon Valley, either. So how does APT mange to snag talent from MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and other top schools, talent that's also being wooed by bigger name companies?

With a whole lot of effort, says Cathy Baker, APT's senior vice president of marketing and administration. "You can't just show up on campus their senior year and hope that they choose to pay attention to you. They really are—despite the unemployment rate—being wooed by many top companies," she explained. But it can be done. It just demands a long and laborious process.

"We think of it as a marketing campaign that begins as soon as people step foot on the campuses where we recruit," she says, noting the company only targets students with stellar academic credentials who have shown clear evidence of leadership. MBAs are less in favor than exceptional undergrads. "We found that hiring straight out of undergrad we capture the capabilities that these top students have right as they're entering the workplace. It is an opportunity for us to develop them within our own walls and we feel like the payback for an undergrad is there in a way that the MBA has historically not been for us."

APT is also fussy about which campuses are worthy of its attention. "We deliberately keep a smaller focus of target schools, so that we can build relationships with students from when they enter as freshman to the point that they graduate," she says. But looking through resume books, consulting alumni networks and generally poking around to know which students make the most attractive targets for recruitment is only the very beginning of APT's efforts:

We have a series of outreach that occurs in terms of personal phone calls and other kinds of campaigns that are sent to these individuals to build awareness of who APT are since we are a smaller company. Through those points of contact we further winnow down who we think is a good fit for us and identify them to join us for internship programs in their sophomore or junior year with a hope that they then convert to join us full-time. This last internship program had a near 100 percent return rate.

We've done a bunch of things on campuses, participating in hackathons at University of Pennsylvania. We run a StarCraft tournament at MIT and Harvard. StarCraft happens to intersect a lot with top candidates on the engineering side, so that's not an overt recruiting pitch, it's more: 'Come hang out and get to know us in a more low-key way.' We hold workshops on how to conduct case interviews that appeal to business consultants. We have one-on-one coffee chats with top candidates, where our current employees in the roles that these folks would be interested in go on campus and talk about what they do on a day-to-day basis. We have dinners on campus, again for identified candidates even before they receive an offer, that are an opportunity for them to get to know us.

Think that sounds like a lot of effort? We haven't even gotten to the contact prospects get with senior executives like the CEO and CTO, or the competitive salaries and perks. All of this is designed to showcase the firm's competitive advantage to candidates—the fascinating work and the ability to make an impact straight out of school.

"There are different reasons why each of them find a place like APT attractive, but I think not wanting to be employee 10,001 or whatever the numbers are at Google and McKinsey, is clearly part of it," she says. "They have a chance to help drive the success of our company in a way that's just not feasible at a larger organization."

Recently recruited staff members agree. "The prospect of being able to make important product design decisions early on in my career was enough to sell me," says Briana Whelan, a University of Virginia computer science and mathematics major who joined APT as an associate product manager despite being recruited by Google, Microsoft, and KPMG. She also greatly appreciated APT's willingness to move interviews to accommodate deadlines set by other firms. Greg Siegel, another recent grad who was also in the process of being recruited by Google, agrees that the work was more important to him than name recognition.

"The minute you walk in the door, you're encouraged to think about these high-level issues," Siegel says of APT and reports that when it came to recruiting him, "the amount of effort was staggering in comparison to other firms." More well known companies, he was frustrated to find, "assume you’ll join based on name brand alone."

"You should be thinking about this year-round," concludes Baker. "It's not: 'Oh my gosh! People are graduating from school. Let's go up and try to extend some offers and it's going to pay off.' You really have to get to know who those top talent individuals are and invest in a way that involves the entire company, not just a couple of HR or recruiting professionals. My advice is to really put the time in because the pay back is certainly there."

Researchers offer strong medicine for those who are too scared to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, finding evidence that, in the long-term, we regret actions not taken far more than failed attempts.

So you have dreams of starting a business. You also have a long list of potential downsides of following that passion, including perhaps significant financial and personal costs and a lizard-brain terror of failure and rejection. Poverty, divorce, and shame are hardly small fears, so let's be realistic, after you have your financial ducks in a row and sit down for a heart-to-heart with your spouse, what can you set against your remaining doubts to balance out your terror and actually make a move towards your entrepreneurial dream?

How about research? Each of us only gets one life's worth of experiences to learn from, but luckily we don't have to arrive at the end of our years in order to learn what we're likely to regret. A professor at the Kellogg School of Management has rounded up the wisdom of others to determine which regrets haunt people the most and which failures end up bothering us less in the long run.

The research team polled nearly 400 Americans about their regrets and found some startling patterns, a couple of which are relevant to entrepreneurs and a few which are not. Romantic regret was the most frequently cited, which may be a healthy reminder around Valentine's Day but isn't exactly pertinent to your start-up dreams. Another broad pattern very much is, however. In the long-term, what you fail to do bothers you far more than what you tried but screwed up, it seems. Kellogg Insight reports:

Research by Victoria Medvec, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, had previously established a connection between time and regret: The more time that has passed since an event, the more likely people are to focus on what they failed to do, rather than what they actually did. "Lost opportunities linger in our memory longer," [Neal J. Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management] puts it. That is because people can quickly rationalize their actual actions, even when they went wrong. But for a possible action that was never taken, "there are so many ways in which you can see different things you could have done," he explains.

He illustrates the concept with a romantic example—asking someone for a date. In remembering an unsuccessful attempt, an unlucky suitor might think, "I asked this person out on a date, she shot me down, it's done." But if he never even tried, the suitor might ponder all sorts of scenarios: "What if I had asked her when I saw her in the hallway? What if I had phoned right after we first met? What if I had sent flowers?"

The lesson clearly extends beyond daters to entrepreneurs. The evidence suggests that eventually you'll be far more troubled by not having given your entrepreneurial dreams a go than by your any imperfect efforts to start a business.

And if you're looking for more big-picture thinking about what's truly of value in life, be advised that meditations on regret are somewhat in vogue at the moment with big name media outlets from the New York Times to the UK Guardian running stories on what other people's regrets have to teach us. Pondering people's painful but unfixable errors may not be cheery, but if you have the stomach for it, reading about mistakes made by others could help you avoid similar regrets later down the line.

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Packing, labeling, shipping, handling: It's all really expensive. Here's how one designer tackled shipping costs...by continuing to outsource its logistics.

An award-winning designer of cat litter boxes, ModProducts, needed to make a major decision—outsource its shipping and fulfillment, or move to a warehouse space and do it themselves. This build vs. buy decision is something that many start-ups and small firms will deal with during the course of their business' growth. The challenge is logistics, which comes from the Greek logistikós meaning "skilled in calculation, rational" the planning, implementation, and coordination of the details of a business or other operation. Should designers concentrate on those details, or let someone else handle them?

ModProducts (now rebranding as Modko) partner Rich Williams was moving to a new place with his pregnant wife. He took over litter box responsibility for their two cats, and didn't like the way the box fit in their entranceway. His wife said, "You're a designer, design one!" Partner Brett Teper had some industrial design experience, and the two worked on an idea for a modern litter box. During 2007 and 2008, the graphics business was a little slower since their financial industry clients were asking for less work, and it gave Williams time to create the ModKat. With a manufacture's agent in Taiwan they had met on a previous job, the team at Modko contracted to create their product and have it shipped to the United States. But the minimum order was 1,500 units, but they had nowhere to store extra product. Teper had researched ecommerce solution Shopify, and found Shipwire as one of their integration partners.

We profiled Shipwire last year in this column. It is an outsourced logistics firm that has now spent five years building up capacity to help companies from the smallest Kickstarter project or Amazon store to much larger enterprises. The company has grown from 2 to 7 warehouses spread across the globe, and will receive goods on behalf of a company, pick, do light assembly, pack and ship them according to instructions from a customer. In addition to the Shopify connection, Shipwire has over 50 connections to ecommerce software and website APIs, according to Vice President of Marketing and Business Development Nate Gilmore.

Teper said "We called and spoke to Shipwire, and in the end we went with them. We liked their site, and how it integrated from Shopify to Shipwire. There's a dashboard, alerts, and tools to manage inventory. They set up a tutorial to show us how to manage and input information and manage billing."

The ModKat won an award for design at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in 2009, which gave Modko press exposure and started a demand cycle for their product. They started doing outreach to press, design blogs and pet blogs, and got more interest at the Gift Fair in New York. The product was picked up for sale by design stores and national chains in the past year. This led them to think about moving to their own warehouse space.

"We looked at some Brooklyn warehouse space and we loved the concept. We had a few slipups with Shipwire, though they were quickly fixed. But now we're getting into production of two new products, which are considered "pick and pack," not the "lick and stick" products like ModKat (which comes in its own box, and only needs a sticker to be shipped out.) The new product has a base that nests inside the main area of the product, and the base and main part are coming from different sources," said Teper. This means there are separate packages that have to be opened and combined, which is a "special project" with charges. "We considered bringing it in-house. We could control all aspects of the packing, packaging, and more. But, we had never packaged and shipped ourselves. We looked at warehouse space again, but we walked away and decided we want to do design, we'll let professionals do the shipping. Once we decided this, we worked with Shipwire to create some custom procedures. Even though it seems like we're paying them a lot of money, it will be cheaper than managing this ourselves. "

For start-ups looking to do some of the calculations that Modko did, Shipwire makes the process pretty transparent. Its pricing calculator is right on the site, and customers can drag slider bars and see pricing change per their specifications. It has also made an Amazon-like experience available for any size of company. "For someone who wants to communicate a brand experience through the mail," said Gilmore, "They can connect an order to a customer while it's moving. We can use specific packaging, put in a packing list, put on stickers for branding, and provide targeted e-mails from the warehouse every time something happens. Customers are alerted: 'your order was received, it left the warehouse, here's a tracking number, your order is coming, did you get it, and are you satisfied? This is giving someone who has a hit on Kickstarter the same potential as someone who is an established business."

"Businesses are selling through Fab, Ebay, Amazon, webstores, and flash sale sites, and sometimes they'll liquidate via Woot or similar sites," said Gilmore. "They may sell to small retailers, or directly at wholesale." Shipwire recently relaunched their website, bringing many tools that were on the site but hidden to the forefront. "We looked at value proposition for merchants, and we wanted to show we can help small business, the mid-size market, and even the enterprise that they can go brand direct."

Have you had a different experience than Modko with your logistics? How do you deal with launching a product, storing and shipping it? Share your experiences with others in the comments below.

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To grow, your business needs to reel in the big fish. Here's how I transformed my tiny business into one of the best-known PR firms in the United States.

Nothing serves to legitimize a fledgling business faster than winning that first, name-brand account. But, the Catch-22 facing any entrepreneur trying to do just that is formidable: how does one free up one's time to land the big fish without taking his off the ball and losing the few small-but-beloved clients who have chosen to hire him?

Here's how I managed to do just that and, in the matter of a few years, transform my business from a two-man enterprise operating out of a squalid, one bedroom apartment into one of the best-known public relations firms in the United States.

I began with two fundamental strategies that continue to serve me well to this day:

• Create a unique and sustainable positioning that immediately differentiated my firm from the thousands of other PR agencies with whom I was competing.
• Maintain a maniacal focus on always putting my firm's best interests above those of my clients. That may sound heretical to some, but it's my belief that my firm is my firm's most important client (because, sadly, clients come and clients go). As a result, every one of my actions in the past 16 years has been predicated on always doing what's best for Peppercom.

Now, back to the strategies needed to landing that first 600-pound marlin.

To accomplish the first goal, I took a cursory look at what the major players in my field were saying about themselves in their marketing. I also carefully examined how other boutique firms positioned themselves. What I found surprised me. The big firms touted their size. So, each and every print advertisement boasted about the number of employees, the number of offices and the number of awards won. As for my fellow fledgling PR entrepreneurs at the time, they always opted for the most obvious message: a smaller agency will provide more senior-level attention and cost-effective results.

I spotted two immediate positioning opportunities:

• First, my business partner and I had been trained at large agencies and had mastered one of the most important service offerings the big guys could provide: a strategic process for determining how to differentiate their clients from the completion. We already knew how to do what the Bursons, Edelmans and Hill & Knowltons did best.
• Second, every one of the start-ups focused on providing tactical, media-by-the-pound publicity for their clients. In fact, I'd heard many stories of competitors walking into new business presentations and literally dropping a two-pound stack of clippings on a conference room table to demonstrate their media relation prowess. I'd always seen quantity as far less important than quality: I don't care how many times your firm's name appears in print; if the article doesn't also explain your point of differentiation and key value adds, it's worthless.

Armed with what we saw as our white space opportunity, we immediately began setting ourselves apart in interviews, case studies and bylined articles with the following brand proposition: "What separates Peppercom from our competition is helping set clients apart from theirs."

Once an article ran, we ordered immediate reprints and began peppering (pun intended) our mailing list of chief communications officers with our unique message: Here are two guys who not only can do what the mega agencies can do, but they also understand how to set you apart and generate publicity that will positively affect your bottom-line. It wasn't long before we began getting calls from the likes of Aon Insurance, Duke University, and, believe it or not, G.E. Capital. The latter was so taken by our value proposition that they included us in a significant pitch for their insurance divisions.

By once again demonstrating our core competence in the new business presentation (along with the passion and enthusiasm that should pervade any entrepreneur's mindset), we were able to convince GE to take a risk. They hired us and allowed us to announce the win in every single one of our trade journals.

Suddenly, we'd arrived. And, just as suddenly, the phone began ringing off the hook (note: this was before the advent of e-mail). Within three years, our billings had skyrocketed to $10 million, we'd attracted many other blue-chip clients ("Hey, if they're good enough for GE Capital, they're good enough for me") and were being feted with one industry award after another.

Looking back, I still believe my two fundamental strategies are rock solid for any small start-up trying to attract that first big account. You must figure out what sets you apart from everyone else and you must treat your own brand as your most important client. Do both and I can assure you you'll be well on your way to receiving that once-in-a-lifetime call from a G.E. Capital executive asking, "So, how would you like to pitch our business?"

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These hot new companies are looking to change the way we eat, and are bringing in lots of dough from investors.

Cookbooks are passé, delivery menus are boring, and even Yelp reviews are starting to look a little ragged these days. A new wave of apps and start-up websites want to improve your everyday dining experiences by bringing intuitive searching, trusted recommendations, and even home-cooked options from neighbors into your kitchen. Here are some of our favorites.

How it works: This recipe finder works on intuitive browsing, so it's less like you're researching an exact set of instructions and more like you're curiously surfing based on items you have in your fridge. The goal is to bring you fresh and interesting recipes through a simple interface that emphasizes attractive pictures to whet your taste buds. You make the recipe browsing even more personal by telling Gojee what ingredients you don't like and favoriting the things you do. You can even link your loyalty card from some grocery store chains and download your purchases straight into Gojee. The recipes come from writers selected by Gojee. "It adds a layer of delight to how people navigate the Web," co-founder Michael Lavelle says.
Business model: Gojee raised a venture round led by Kapor Capital, but it's planning on teasing out the revenue strategy over the next six to 12 months. "The experience will be evolving a lot so it's a bit early to pick a clear direction," Lavelle says.
Fun fact: The site is full of unlockable Easter eggs: search a term of favorite a certain item and you might be treated to a unicorn driving a Cadillac singing a Snoop Dog song.

How it works: This app lets you choose what to eat, read, or do based on the recommendations of your friends. There's no complicated rating system here: a stamp means full-out enthusiasm, and you get a limited supply of stamps, which helps keep each member discerning (but you can earn more if your friends double stamp you). When looking for something yummy to eat on the go, you'll no longer have to rely on the muddled ratings of anonymous strangers. That is, if you trust the pallets of your friends.
Business model: The app is integrated with the ability to make reservations through OpenTable, purchase movie tickets through Fandango, books through Amazon, and songs through iTunes, all of which kick money back to the company.
Fun fact: The app was backed by Google Ventures, and with good reason: four of its head team members worked at Google. The company's advisors are name-grabbers too: celebrity chef Mario Batali and Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Instagram.

How it works: This is a crowd-sourced foodie website showcasing local and sustainable eating options based on location, including a farmers market finder and a restaurant locator to help track down eateries that source locally. You can also search by ingredient to see where it's available nearby. The site takes the guesswork out of eating sustainably and aims to let you trace your local food chain from source to plate. "I believe that when people know more about where their food comes from, they are led naturally towards choices that are healthiest for themselves and the environment," co-founder Karl Rosaen says on the company's website.
Business model: Real Time Farms calls itself a "for-profit social enterprise" with a scalable business model that will allow it to grow. The site charges restaurants $40 a month to have a menu listed.
Fun fact: Co-foudner Rosaen was on the team that launched the Google Android platform in 2009. The site also launched a Food Warrior Summer Internship Program who go out and collect data in prime regions of the country such as New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

How it works: Somewhere between Meetup and OpenTable, Grub With Us lets you find dining partners based on meals, location, or common interests. For instance, you can find a group of fellow hackers you might want to meet in real life, reserve a spot at the table and pre-pay for the meal. And then you have a family meal with a new group of friends you just met. You might discover interesting new foods too.
Business model: Grub With Us came through Y Combinator's start-up incubator program. Grub With Us charges restaurants a fee for the bookings. It works with restaurants to coordinate a meal for the group, but, unlike group deals sites, the meals are not heavily discounted.
Fun fact: Grub With Us started with the desire to return to real-life socializing through the Internet. Co-founders Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano started it when they had trouble making friends upon moving to Chicago to start a cream puff business.

How it works: Gdine seeks to eliminate that arduous intern task of calling around every restaurant in the city to see if they have the size and time to accommodate the large office party. You search by day, number of people or size of your party and narrow it down from there. It even has a Split the Check feature that lets you sort out the bill right through the site.
Business model: Gdine negotiates special rates and fixed-price menus with businesses to offer a group deal for booking a meal. It launched with $500,000 from an angel investor, and it takes a percentage of the pre-paid business. The goal is to save you money—and hassle—when trying to find somewhere that can fit the whole office.
Fun fact: The site only covers Chicago now, but it has stated plans to move into New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington D.C. It provides tips too: its guides section includes posts on "places to impress the client" and "girls night out."

How it works: For when you want a restaurant-quality meal without leaving the comfort of your own home (or having to cook yourself), try Kitchit. Like TaskRabbit and other similar collaborative consumption models, chefs on the site offer their services on profile pages, which include rates per person, different menus they prepare, and detailed user reviews. The list includes renowned executive chefs, restaurant owners, and up-and-comers, but each chef is pre-screened by Kitchit. The chefs do all the work, just like a traditional caterer: shopping, prep and cleaning.
Business model: Once you've selected a chef to hire, Kitchit takes a 10 to 20 percent fee out of the price.
Fun fact: Limited to the San Francisco area right now, the site's founders have said they plan to expand to other major cities within the next year. If drinks are more your thing, additional services such as bartending duties, wine pairings, and even a vodka ice luge, can be ordered through chefs on the site.

How it works: A step down from the intense super-chef level of Kitchit, Gobble focuses on good old-fashioned home-cooked meals from chefs in your own neighborhood. Gobble prides itself on all-natural home cooking of fresh, healthy, and authentic meals from a cadre of pre-screened moms, dads, sisters, brothers, uncles, grandmothers, and others who specialize in different cuisines from around the world. It's a peer-to-peer take on take-out. The meals are often cheaper than a restaurant: a current bid offers Tofu Pad See Ew for $12 per person. Users can either pick up their meals or have them delivered for an extra fee.
Business plan: The site has raised more than $1.2 million in angel investors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Once a chef sets a fee, Gobble collects a percentage on top of the amount.
Fun fact: The company was founded by then-24-year-old Ooshma Garg (a previous Inc. 30 Under 30 honoree) who was tired of the lack of healthy, authentic meals in the busy start-up world. She based the site on a memory of how her parents would order meals from friends when they didn't have time to cook.

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Here are five reasons that VCs don't trust anyone over 30 and why all of them are wrong.

Sometimes it seems like there's a sign hanging over the doors of some top venture capital firms reading, "No Old People Need Apply." It's not hard to understand why. Investors are looking for the next big thing, and the truth is that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all were in their late teens or 20s when they launched their companies.

But is that the end of the story? If you've passed the age of 30—or God forbid, 40—without launching your first wildly successful venture, is it too late? Are you condemned to the cubicle life forever? True entrepreneurs leverage their attributes and experiences to develop unique insights and build their ventures. But it's still worth exploring whether younger entrepreneurs are better positioned.

In researching our new book, Breakthrough Entrepreneurship: The Proven Framework for Building Brilliant New Ventures, here are the most common arguments we heard suggesting that younger entrepreneurs have all the advantages:

Did Brin, Page, Zuckerberg and those other young entrepreneurs have their youth to thank for their insights? The honest answer is, "Sort of." Great ideas can come from anyone who truly understands a market and its customers’ needs. Those founders all applied their talents in the application of emerging technology to consumer markets, where youth can indeed help.

Still, regardless of your age or background, if you examine a market critically, you can develop insights into what customers in that market truly need. Who knows better: a 50-year-old product manager at Cisco Systems Inc., or the customers who have grown up using Cisco products? Trick question. Either can develop an insight that could lead to an amazing entrepreneurial idea.

Is inexperience an advantage? Younger entrepreneurs often don't have the disadvantage of having to outgrow too-small expectations. But they also don't have as many experiences of living through dynamic change, which can inspire older entrepreneurs to contemplate with awe what comes next.

Believing in a Quixotic idea is kind of romantic—until it actually fails. We'd rather see entrepreneurs who are naturally inclined to test, test, test good ideas and learn with as much certainty, and as little initial investment, whether they're likely to succeed or not.

Two 20-something Silicon Valley entrepreneurs we know told us about their setup when they launched their company. They rented a house, moved in beds so that the entire staff could live on site, and packed the place with tables and computers. "It was the perfect house to start a company," said co-founder Darian Shirazi of Fwix. "We were breathing more of the product than we breathed air."

Maybe it's easier to care about only one thing—your new venture—if you haven't taken-on other commitments. But, really, how long can anyone keep up that kind of pace?

The ability to quickly learn and pivot is a critical entrepreneurial skill. But do younger entrepreneurs truly come by it more easily? Robin Chase was a 40-year-old mother of three before she launched her first successful company, Zipcar. It was a difficult first year, and Chase realized she needed to increase prices to simply break even. It was a setback, but having had more than two decades of career experience, Chase viewed the change with perspective.

Sure, some older people can become set in their ways—but if you're reading this article and considering launching a new venture, chances are you're not one of them.

This might in fact be true. At 22, for example, a budding entrepreneur likely hasn't established himself or herself in a career, and probably doesn’t carry a lot of financial overhead.

But the truth is low overhead is a good thing regardless of your age. Save some money, don’t indulge on too many unnecessary expenses. Happiness in life comes from relationships, doing something meaningful and other mostly intangible things. Whatever your age, avoid the trap (and expense) of consumerism.

Harlan Sanders turned 62 before he opened the first Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sam Walton was 44 when he started the first true Wal-Mart in 1962. Don and Doris Fisher founded The Gap when Don was 41. He left a $3 billion estate when he died including one of the world’s most important collections of post- World War II art.

What did they all have in common besides their relatively older ages? They built great, lasting companies after years of experience in their industries. Look to them for inspiration, and realize that anyone, young or old, who can develop a unique insight has a shot at building an amazing new venture.

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There's one simple way to make your customers trust you: be open and honest with them from the start.

My co-founder Bill Haney said recently, "In an age where you can look up the top nearby Indian restaurant on your phone, order at a fixed price, and have your food delivered within a half hour to your doorstep all without even talking to a live person, it's insane that for the largest expenditure most Americans make, our homes, we have so little ability to make the building process transparent." He means transparent in terms of cost (building on a fixed price), customization options, and building schedule.

Admittedly, Indian food is probably not life changing in the way a home purchase is (unless it's the Palak Paneer from Kabana in Berkeley, California). But in this day and age, why shouldn't customers expect the same kind of convenience, transparency—and delight!—when buying a home, which is arguably the most important purchase of their lives?

Today, everything can be looked-up, fact-checked, verified—anywhere, anytime. We're speeding into a world where nothing is hidden, and business will need to keep up. People want and expect as much transparency as possible. More and more, it is the companies that don't provide information up-front who stand out, creating headaches for the customer who is forced to do extensive research on their own to get what they are seeking.

But just as the owners of Kabana may be reluctant to provide the recipe for their Palak Paneer for fear of imitators, the idea of sharing proprietary information, partner pricing, and other sensitive material can understandably make business-owners uneasy. The good news is that even small changes to the amount of information you share with the public can make you feel like a more honest and approachable business, which can lead to big payoffs. Start with developing a friendlier, more accessible, and less corporate-feeling blog or customer conversations on social media channels. Or, on a bigger scale, you might find ways to more deeply involve your customer in the product-development process with online tools or more visible channels for input.

More and more, it is the companies that don't provide information up-front who stand out, creating headaches for the customer who is forced to do extensive research on their own to get what they are seeking.

One of my favorite recent examples of a company using innovative technology to this end, and thereby revolutionizing a traditional industry, is Virgin America. It has totally refreshed customers' flying experience by introducing Red, a new in-flight customer interface. Red lets passengers order whatever they want—food, drinks, movies, TV shows—at straightforward prices, with a "real-time" understanding of what is available, the ability to customize, and therefore the bonus of receiving your order more quickly and with less effort. With this, the company is responding to macro trends toward giving customers more control, transparency, and convenience. But this system also improves back-end operations for Virgin, reducing wasted time and providing a platform for future learning and improvement, thanks to the consumer data that can be collected through this tool.

The end result as a customer? Whenever possible, I choose this airline. I will pay more to fly in an environment where my first thought is: "What will I choose to order and watch via that cool, game-like screen?" (Rather than, say, "How can I fit two suitcases worth of stuff into this tiny carry-on to avoid paying $30 for checked luggage?"). In other words, I am made to feel like I have some element of control in an industry that famously makes the consumer feel powerless. Transparency does not need to mean full disclosure. It should mean giving customers a feeling of involvement.

With home-building (also famously opaque, traditional, and unpredictable), we've tried to take a similar approach. At Blu Homes, we use a consumer interface called the Blu Configurator that aims to make the up-front client experience much more convenient, satisfying, and transparent. But just as with Virgin, what makes this so valuable is that this tool not only functions to give the client control and a feeling of being involved in the process, it also makes that process far more efficient for us. In turn, it results in lower selling costs and a more convenient shopping experience for the customer. We think this is a true win-win.

Make no mistake: this transparency thing can be a little daunting. For us, up-front publishing of fixed costs is particularly scary, as commodity prices are in constant flux. The result: we manage our back-end very carefully. But the rewards far outweigh initial concerns, because customers come to know us—and talk to others about us—as a company that is open and honest from the start. Clients tell us time and again that they are thrilled to see prices right there on the screen. A willingness to be completely forthcoming can establish strong relationships of trust with potential customers, and has proven in many cases to be the key differentiator when they are choosing between companies that offer similar products or services.

For you, bringing transparency to your business might mean starting out with a very small window into the processes or technologies your business uses. It might mean making a little less work for your potential customer by adding more in-depth information to your website. Regardless, at a time when consumers are increasingly looking for more control, and open, easy access to information, it's worth taking the plunge…or at least dipping a toe in.

A communication coach offers a bevy of tips on how entrepreneurs who don't naturally excel at self-promotion can shed their cloak of invisibility and get noticed.

Introverts, due to their reserved nature, step out of the shadows less often than the more outgoing. But thanks to a new book by Susan Cain titled Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, the quieter folks among us are having something of a moment in the sun. From a Time cover story to a New York Times Sunday Review piece by Cain, the topic of how our society undervalues introverts and the needs of those with a quieter disposition has been making frequent appearances in the media lately.

But while Cain does a great job of advocating for introverts and shining a spotlight on their strengths and preferences, for entrepreneurs in the world as it exists now, extroversion still has plenty of obvious benefits. The ease of networking and comfort with self-promotion that come with that 'E' on the Myers Briggs assessment, make it simpler to publicize and fund your venture, But that doesn't mean introverts are shut out of the start-up game. Far from it, as the head-down, detail-oriented nature of introverts gives them a leg up when it comes to withdrawing from the world to cook up new ideas.

Once you have that amazing innovation though, you need to get it out there, which is where Nancy Ancowitz comes in. The author and business communication coach was recently interviewed by Tahl Raz on the myGreenlight Blog, offering tips on how introverts can lose the cloak of invisibility that often prevents the gregarious from noticing their accomplishments. Ancowitz explains:

The way that [introversion] would hurt you the most is in the invisibility department. So if you tend to believe that you're accomplishments should speak for themselves that can hurt. Don't expect that other people are going to promote you and your work, just because you're sitting there working really hard and creating great things all day.

Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping your industriousness and innovation speak for themselves, in the 30-minute audio interview Ancowitz gives business owners a bevy of practical bits of advice on how they can use their shy nature to their advantage (and fight back against a business world that's often biased towards extraverts). These include:

• Get out there… in writing. Many introverts are naturally good writers, says Ancowitz. If you struggle to make a good case for yourself or your product in person, put yourself out there in writing instead through blog posts, white papers or whatever means is available.
• Forget winging it. Extraverts excel at thinking on their feet but introverts need to ponder before they speak. Make your life easier by thoroughly preparing a few talking points before meetings and networking events.
• Videotape is an introvert's best friend. If you're the type that cringes when you hear your own voice on your voicemail greeting, this may sound like a terrible idea, but Ancowitz suggests getting a coach, friend, or mentor to film you in a social setting or large meeting. This often quickly reveals off-putting body language or annoying verbal ticks that can cause others to view you as aloof or anti-social and which are simple to correct.

Ancowitz's chat with Raz is wide-ranging and lasts just longer than a half an hour, so there are far more tips and tricks available for those looking for a deep dive into the subject. Download the complete audio file here.

Yes, producing a podcast is a lot of work, but you are missing a major revenue driver if you don't. Here are six ways to make money broadcasting online.

I began podcasting several years ago, and like most people I didn’t fully understand what podcasting was all about. It started as a benevolent gesture to share knowledge with small business owners, but I wasn’t prepared for what this little adventure would do for my brand, and for my own business.

Many podcasters still enter the world of this digital broadcasting medium simply because they have that undeniable entrepreneurial spirit; they are people who love to jump into something new and open themselves to a world of possibilities. But some of these producers are learning how to monetize their efforts as they share their passion and knowledge with the masses—and you can be amongst them.

“There are about 30 million active blogs on the Internet, but only about 200,000 active podcasts,” says Rob Walch, vice president of podcaster relations for Wizzard Media's Libsyn platform. It hosts more than 12,000 active podcasts, including some of the top downloads on iTunes. With such a comparatively small number of podcasters on the Internet, there is plenty of room for more.

But why produce a podcast? A smart business owner may consider it imperative for his or her brand, but a smarter business owner will gather solid metrics to quantify their ROI. If you are considering sponsorships as your revenue driver, remember that your advertisers are smart too. They will want those stats as well, and they will want to see traffic to their website that converts.

“Advertisers look for niche podcasts that match up really well with what they sell,” says Walch. “They will want to see the proof that the podcast’s audience matches up with the demographic or psychographic that they are targeting. You wouldn’t want to advertise Omaha Steaks, for instance, on a vegan podcast.” Wizzard uses a double opt-in standard when they match an advertiser to a producer. Each party must agree on the arrangement so that everyone is happy.

But all of this talk of advertising may be premature if your podcast doesn’t boast at least 10,000 downloads per month. And if you don’t have a strong following via your blog or other platform, building to 10,000 and beyond may not be easy—not even in social media. “We find that a large number of twitter followers doesn’t really correlate to how many listeners a podcast has,” Walch says. Interestingly, while Twitter followers don’t appear to be fans, Facebook fans and friends do. And, according to Wizzard Media and Libsyn’s preliminary research results, Pinterest and Google+ connections seem to correlate as well.

Social media involvement isn’t the only way you will want to market your podcast. “Reach out to other podcasters and network with them,” Walch advises. “Interview bloggers that have great audience numbers—especially strong connectors in your niche.” Your time is well spent when you become active in groups and forums that are related to your niche. Relationship building seems to be the key to building a loyal fan base. “Get your audience involved,” Walch advises. “Have them promote your show. And get listener feedback to play or read on the show. If you get them involved and they will spread the word.”

To increase visibility, make sure to list your podcast in all of the podcast directories, including iTunes. Another powerful consideration is the use of a smartphone app to increase your following. Wizzard Media's Libsyn platform offers the smartphone app as a part of their hosting package.

Once you have built a following, there are other creative ways to monetize your podcast. Here are a few. If you have found another way to generate dollars via your podcast, I’d love to hear from you!

Sell Your Products or Services: Convert loyal listeners into paying customers who want to learn more from you and your information products. If you have a tangible product your listeners may prove to be great consumers for you as well.

Paid Podcast Model, or Premium Content Offer: Some popular podcasters offer a few free episodes and listeners pay to access the library to hear the rest. Combining this model with sponsorships can generate a solid revenue stream.

Repurpose Your Content: These podcast recordings are yours to do with as you please. You have some outstanding content here and you can create audio products with it. Get over your hang-up of repurposing free content for sale. You are enhancing your fans' experiences.

Affiliate Sales: If you don’t have products of your own, you can find affiliate opportunities in your niche and push traffic to your landing page. Remember to create your own affiliate offerings once you do create your information products.

Paid Placement: A sponsor may be interested in a guest interview on your podcast and will sometimes pay for the time. Of course, your numbers must be strong (with verified stats) and your listeners must fit the sponsors target audience.

Funding Platforms: Put your new project on Kickstarter or another popular funding platform. How much does it cost you in time and money to deliver your amazing content to the world? Your listeners may want to support you by contributing and spreading the word. “Fans want to support the producers,” Walch tells me. “Help them and they want to help the producer back. They like to pay back for all of the time and effort that the producers put into their work.”

So, yes, podcasting can be a great addition to your business or even a stand-alone revenue model. But there is much more to a great podcast than the hour that you spend on air. “For every minute you spend producing your podcast you have to spend at least the same amount of time marketing it,” says Walch. Passion for your niche is important to success, but time is critical to success.

As our business grew, I started neglecting my family and friends--and no advice seemed to help bring balance. That is, until I read this passage.

Is attaining balance really possible in an entrepreneurial environment? Over the past six years I have struggled to achieve some semblance of balance when it comes to managing both my business with my personal life. I have read several books, and sought counseling from wise sages. None have been able to provide me with a sound strategy to achieve some semblance of balance in my life.

This got me thinking, is balance in a start-up entrepreneurial environment really possible?

The reason why I bring this up is because one of my good friends from childhood has cancer. I went to see him a few months ago and he had just finished chemotherapy, and was recovering. Prior to that meeting, I hadn't seen him for about a year.

As I spoke with my friend and reflected on how short life is, I began to think about that factors that caused me to not contact him in the last year. What it came down to was myself becoming so immersed in the success of my business that I completely lost touch with him. This got me thinking: With all of the technology we have today to simplify, streamline, and generally make our lives easier, why I can’t achieve some semblance of balance in my life?

First let's consider: what precisely do I mean by balance? In my case, it's managing the growth and success of my business alongside my relationships with my wife, kids, family, and friends.

With a good deal of self-reflection I can honestly say that I am not successful in achieving balance. I always feel like I should or could be doing more with my business, my family, and my health. Is this just the plight of the entrepreneur, to constantly become so focused on something such that you lose sight and interest in all other things. This can't be it.

After researching the subject and looking at strategies ranging the gamut from dedicating specific times out the month to family, friends, and health, to performing yoga three times a week, the best advice I read came from a book of fiction, Suzanne's Diary to Nicholas, by James Patterson.

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. I you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.

That's outstanding advice. Most entrepreneurs are deeply passionate about their work and vision for their companies. The reason why we work so hard is to be able to share it with our loved ones. If we do not take the time to cherish those relationships then all of this hard work will be for naught. As you focus on growing your business and the everyday challenges that come along with that goal keep in mind the phrase above.

For my foodies and wine lovers thinking about how to better balance career and personal life, try one of the most well balanced red wines I've ever had in my life, the Lions Drift Pinotage. It's clear, bright ruby red color encourages reflection while its full body and long finish, that includes hints of blueberry pie sprinkled with cinnamon, inspires enjoyment and a sense of balance.

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A five-time entrepreneur makes the case for launching a company in Silicon Beach. He's not the only fan.

Los Angeles is the capital of small business in the United States, according to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Ramon Villaraigosa, at a reception earlier this month for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalists. L.A., dubbed "Silicon Beach," has become a breeding ground for successful Internet and advertising companies. I have a theory about why.

I moved to L.A. (from Chicago) 13 years ago, in the midst of the dot-com boom, to build an online advertising company, L90/adMonitor. In addition to warm weather and beautiful beaches, I found a very creative, innovative talent pool of agile thinkers. I think it was behavior bred from Hollywood, an industry that's highly competitive and constantly innovating. We had a great ride with the company. And we didn't raise venture capital money until our IPO.

A huge contributor to the company's success was the wealth of creative and innovative talent in L.A. While during the dot-com boom there was a lot of competition for talent and people tended to job hop, I didn't find that to be the case in L.A. The loyalty and consistency of the team created a culture that was hard to beat.

For my next start-up, I tried Northern California. I started StrongMail Systems, an enterprise software company with very different engineering, sales, and marketing talent needs. Enterprise software requires longer-cycle, hard-core engineering rather than dot-com development, which is more creative, and has quicker cycles. After raising money from Sequoia Capital, I decided to move the company to Silicon Valley, to be closer to the resources and partners we needed. But I found a very different, and less conducive culture in Silicon Valley. One that was filled with a lot of talent, but also was highly-competitive, less loyal, and focused almost exclusively on technology. Everywhere I'd go, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, I heard people talking about starting new companies or technologies. It was quite the bubble.

For my fifth start-up, I chose L.A. After hiring a management team and CEO to run StrongMail, I moved back to L.A. to start the Rubicon Project, an advertising technology company. My vision was a perfect mix of Silicon Valley technology and Silicon Beach creative advertising thinking. Why'd I pick L.A.? First, I learned that because of Hollywood, Madison Avenue has spoken the same language as those in L.A. for many years. The industry, by contrast, doesn't speak C++, Java, or SOA.

In addition, it turns out, venture capitalists are more active in L.A. than ever before. Venture capitalists often tell me they spend one-third of their time in L.A. As a result, the area (also including Orange County) is the fourth largest recipient of venture capital in the U.S. after Silicon Valley, New England, and New York; it had nearly $2 billion invested in 2011, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

No wonder. There have been a lot of hugely-successful exits in L.A.: Overture's $1.7billion sale to Yahoo!; MySpace for $580 million to News Corporation; Business.com to R.H. Donnelly for $345 million; Shopzilla to E.W. Scripps for $525 million; and LowerMyBills.com to Experian for $330 million. Now, IPO rumors surround eHarmony. These companies created an entrepreneurial ecosystem of talent and capital.

And many of these companies survived the dot-com bust. I believe it's because, like Chicago, my hometown, there wasn't initially easy access to venture capital in L.A. and entrepreneurs had no choice but to build profitable business models from the start. That discipline is still ingrained in L.A.'s entrepreneurial culture. It's about businesses that work, not businesses that venture capitalists will buy into.

Last, but not least, are the people in L.A., the ones I noticed when I first got here. I'm a strong believer that team and culture are what make the difference between a good company and a great one. The talent pool in L.A. is deep, creative, agile, well-balanced, and loyal. Oh, and I am writing this at the beach in January…

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As part of Facebook's IPO filing, founder Mark Zuckerberg praised the concept of the "hackathon." Could something similar benefit your company, even if you're not in tech?

Welcome to 2012, a time in which hacking is praised in S-1 filings. Facebook, you may have, just maybe, heard, is going public. The IPO has set off a flurry of interest among investors and the media. Meanwhile, the company's youthful founder took the occasion to pen a letter about the fundamental mission behind his multi-billion dollar brain child. "The Hacker Way," he writes is central to how Facebook does business:

The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done…. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.

How does Facebook put this hacker ethos into practice and instill these ideals in its employees? Hackathons, says Zuckerburg. "To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler."

A hackathon is an intriguing idea to drive talent towards risk taking, experimentation and, dare I type it, even fun. But can it work in firms that lack hackers, meaning those in older school industries that produce physical goods or analog services rather than code? Sure, says writer and entrepreneur Glen Stansberry in an American Express OPEN Forum post recently, explaining that a "hack day" might be a great idea for your business as well for several reasons:

• It's exciting and morale boosting. "The event itself was far more exciting than I thought it would be," says Stansberry of his company's hack day.
• It teaches the skill of shipping. "Shipping–as defined by Seth Godin–is defeating resistance and delivering a product, even if the product isn't perfect."
• Having a hack day project "out there" gives you something to start improving. "When our Hack Day was done, we had something that was, in all honesty, pretty terrible," Stansberry admits. "But that's not the important part. The important part was the psychological boost of knowing that it was out there, and it's driven us to improve it daily."

If you think you need to be in the tech biz to reap these same benefits, think again. Nearly all business have a problem or project that you team could tackle for a hack day, according to Stansberry:

Most likely there's a new idea, or some aspect of your business that needs some serious work. A hack day is a perfect opportunity to tackle it. The important thing is that you take a day to make a minimum viable product and release it. So the question for you is this: what can you do to improve your business in a day? What can you build or re-work in a day that will allow your team to feel the success of shipping?

Could borrowing the concept of Facebook's "hackathon" benefit your business?

In the race to get Internet TV shows and movies into the living room, Boxee co-founder Idan Cohen notices unanticipated advantages of being the (much) smaller player.