Category: Op-ED

5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Selecting A Location (part 2 of 2)| Lydia Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

downloadA third mistake entrepreneurs make is falling in love with a particular location.  “That historic Victorian is great.  It will be the perfect frame for my antique clothing business.”

Looking at the space itself, what will it take to make the improvements you would need?  Does the building need repairs?  Is it up to code?  Is the existing lighting, heating and cooling sufficient or will you need electrical or plumbing work?  Is the ventilation adequate for your needs?  How much will it cost to ready the location for your business?

Money spent to prepare the property is money you won’t have to run your business.  Set a budget for yourself, before you start looking, and stick with it.  If the estimated improvements to the property exceed your budget, keep looking.

Continue reading “5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Selecting A Location (part 2 of 2)| Lydia Mehit” →

5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Selecting A Location (part 1 of 2) | Lydia Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

downloadLocation, location, location, that is the mantra that you always hear.  Your location is a critical part of your retail business success, so you must choose wisely.  But, how do you choose the right location?

One common mistake is to select the least expensive place available to keep overhead costs low.  Containing costs is important, but remember, no amount of advertising dollars will make up for a bad location.  If people can’t find your business, they can’t spend their money with you and this will be even more expensive for you in the end.  Think of it this way.  What you don’t spend on rent you will spend in advertising.
A second mistake is using a retail location for offices and storing inventory.  Retail space is expensive and the vast majority of the space should be used to display your merchandise, not house your bookkeeper.  Put your back office staff in a different, less expensive location.

Continue reading “5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Selecting A Location (part 1 of 2) | Lydia Mehit” →

Internet Slander Machine | Peter Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

downloadI admit it.  I was under a rock.  I hadn’t heard about Peeple until I watched John Oliver’s hysterical send up of it on Last Week Tonight.  Touted as Yelp for people, the application would have allowed you to create a profile for someone you wanted to rate (without their consent) and then rate them using 1 to 5 stars along with comments.  If you posted something negative, the subject had 48 hours to talk you out of posting it.  If negotiations didn’t work, the posting went up and you could engage in rebuttal on the site.  And all of those comments would stay up forever because you couldn’t delete your account.

What could possibly go wrong in this scenario?

The Washington Post saw the possibilities for abuse and slammed the site as it was coming out in its beta launch to a limited number of opted-in users.  Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough pitched Peeple as a ‘positivity app’ designed to ‘lift up people’.  To be fair, they also limited profanity, sexism and discussion of private health conditions.  But the fundamental premise, that others have the right to rate you on a public platform without your permission and that you are reduced to a star rating was what the Post found most disturbing.

Continue reading “Internet Slander Machine | Peter Mehit” →

10 Things I Learned from ‘We Are Anonymous’ | Peter Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

downloadI read Parmy Olsen’s ‘We Are Anonymous’ over the weekend. It is the story of the infamous hacker collective that brought down the Church of Scientology, Pay Pal, Master Card, Visa, Sony, the FBI and CIA among their numerous conquests. It’s a fascinating read about a culture based on a contradiction: A few very talented, capable, creative people performed truly heinous acts because of their belief that their lives were pointless. Their nihilistic perspective drove them until they were caught.

The participants were young. The oldest was 28, the youngest 16. Uniformly, they were the socially awkward. They were bullied and marginalized for most of their lives. Most left the education system in middle school because they were bored or mistreated. All of them lived with parents or relatives, reeking havoc on some of the largest organizations in the world from their bedrooms.

Continue reading “10 Things I Learned from ‘We Are Anonymous’ | Peter Mehit” →

Bright Angel Within | Peter Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

imagesIt doesn’t matter the time of day; the view from Bright Angel point on the Grand Canyon’s north rim is breathtaking. From rust, to red, to pink and metallic green, the weathered rock presents history itself at the boundary of each color. Millions of years laid bare for the eye to see, for the mind to imagine, the timelessness of the earth. The insignificance and interconnectedness of a single person is instantly apparent.

I’ve had this same experience walking the streets of New York among the massive buildings and crowded streets. The insane energy of that place, always in motion, penetrates my psyche. In both places I am awake and connected. I hear everything clearly. My eyes are open and receiving. Most importantly, my mind is quiet.

That is what inspiration is. It is simultaneous connection from deep within our selves to the world that makes us awake and aware. When we are inspired, we are present and invested this moment, the only place we actually live. This connection shuts down the nearly non-stop self talk we engage in. It opens us up to messages from our environment and the thoughts of others. That is why inspiration is so important, because it gives us a way to get outside of our own boundaries, if only for an instant.

Continue reading “Bright Angel Within | Peter Mehit” →

Get Serious! Get a Team. | Peter Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

downloadEntrepreneurship is a process and not a goal; a journey, not a destination. Being a successful owner requires you to think about the future and manage the present at the same time. It means you need to take concrete steps to secure that future as early as possible while being willing to change your plans as opportunity dictates.

One of the first things you need is a plan. You should take the time to develop a formal business plan with realistic financial projections, but any plan that maps out your objectives and gives you a way to measure your progress toward them is better than no plan. Just as it’s difficult to build a house without blueprints, it’s even harder jumping into business without an idea of where you want to end up. The beautiful thing about plans is you can fix them if they’re not working. Without a plan, you’ll be left wondering what happened.

Continue reading “Get Serious! Get a Team. | Peter Mehit” →

Until We Meet Again – Final Part | Peter Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

imagesEver drive to a mall and park your car and then after you finish shopping, you come back and you can’t find it?  This gets worse if you own say a white Honda Accord, or a brown Camry. You look and look and look. And after all that searching and frustration, where do you find it? Exactly where you left it.

But parking lots can be a good thing too, especially if you can use them to park items that are going to crash your agenda. Here’s how it works:

You’re having your weekly status meeting. It used to cost $322. But because you started keeping time you were able to get the meeting to run and hour and ten minutes (about $250). Then we were able to save about $40 a meeting more by having people show for their part of the meeting and leave when they were done. We’re down to $210 per meeting (saving $112). How can you get that last ten minutes back?

Continue reading “Until We Meet Again – Final Part | Peter Mehit” →

Until We Meet Again Part 4 | Peter Mehit

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

imagesWhere does the time go? No seriously, why can’t you store it up? Why can’t you borrow it from the future? Probably because we’d all be dead, having spent our future in replays and do-overs.

But fortunately, you can’t store or borrow time. You can only spend it. Instead of launching into a piece on the nature of man and time, I’ll instead supply you with some ideas on its wise expenditure when it comes to meetings.

You’ve done your agenda and selected the right participants, sending them the agenda early so they can have time to look at it. What’s next? Actually, we’re going to look at your agenda again.

Continue reading “Until We Meet Again Part 4 | Peter Mehit” →