Deadline or Alive Entrepreneurfail | Getentrepreneurial.com

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Ravaging through the rough, grunting and seeking out the next victim….Scavenging anyone and anything that comes in the way…

No, we aren’t describing the latest wildlife channel special about predatory beasts in the jungle.  We are referring to the angry, stressed, tense new entrepreneurs on a tight deadline.  At this stage in the startup journey, fresh-faced founders may get a little anxious, as the viability of their new startups is dependent on each deadline.  Sure, you could argue that it is just the passion coming through, but this attitude could cost a new entrepreneur his/her business.

If your actions are making your employees cower in fear of being the next stop in your slaughter trail, these are a few pointers to help you:

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One Fugg Luggage for All Sizes | Coolbusinessideas.com

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Meet Fugu Luggage: the only suitcase that has the ability to adjust from the maximum carry-on size to the maximum check-in size. It also has features like a built in laptop case and foldable shelves to make travel as easy as possible for today’s traveler.  Its two shock-absorbent side walls inflate through utilizing either the built-in electric pump, breathing into a collapsible tube, or by attaching an external pump. Live on Kickstarter now.

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Megan Hyman – Overcoming Challenges – Pawfection | CBPS

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Our client, Megan Hyman, opened her dog daycare, grooming and boarding facility in 2013. She took a huge bet on herself in which she wagered an inheritance to pursue her desire for a new future.  Nearly two years in, she’s winning, but not without some serious challenges that we went through together.

In this video she discusses the difficulty of finding the right location and how she got out of her own way to fill her business with enthusiastic clients.

Count Your Eaches | Peter Mehit

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question markIn the pursuit of multi-million dollar outsourcing contracts, the company I worked for required me to defend my financial projections.  The auditor who usually ran these reviews, was one of the kindest yet toughest auditors I’ve ever worked with. He’d always start with the same question, ‘What are the eaches?’ He wanted to know how many hours, square feet or cubic yards of something we had to sell to reach a specific revenue or profit goal. This experience taught me that looking at a business in terms of units made or sold provides critical clues about the viability of it.

Many projections and budgets lack any real precision. Typically, a desired revenue number is plucked from the air, or other suitable location, as a starting point. Some ‘standard’ percentage is applied to this number for cost of goods to arrive at gross profit, which then has some ‘standard’ expense number applied to it to determine at operating revenue and so on, all the way to the bottom line. If the profit number isn’t satisfying then lather, rinse, repeat.

Continue reading “Count Your Eaches | Peter Mehit” →

Here’s How One New College Grad Made $66,000 In One Month–Without A Full-Time Job | Forbes

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After his junior year at Brigham Young University, Nick Walter, now 25, landed a great summer internship in the Seattle office of Pariveda Solutions, a Dallas-based tech consulting firm. Though he enjoyed the work and liked his clients and colleagues, he felt stifled. Used to jeans and t-shirts, he didn’t like wearing khakis and polo shirts and most of all, he says, “I hated that I had to be at this office every day for X amount of time doing what they said I had to do.”

So instead of heading down the career track he’d always expected of himself—he’d envisioned the security of a steady paycheck and benefits—he decided to go to BYU part-time for the next two years, while hiring himself out as a consultant and developing his own apps for the iPhone including seven how-two apps he wrote with a friend. One of them, called simply Weight Lifting Videos, has helped net $1,200 a month.Then he stumbled on a more lucrative possibility.

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How to Make Your Seasonal Business Profitable Year-Round | Business News Daily

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sand-snowmanWhen you’re running a seasonal business, it’s often difficult to stretch the profits you made during the height of your sales throughout the rest of the year. But with the right tactics, you can make sure you stay afloat — and maybe even turn a profit — in your off-season. Whether you’re gearing up for your holiday season peak or slowing down after your summertime rush, here’s how you can keep your business in the black all year round.

Minimize your expenses in the off-season

If your business shuts down completely during your non-peak seasons, then it’s unlikely you’ll have to worry about many overhead expenses eating into your profits. However, if you’re open for business all year, the easiest and most obvious way to stay profitable when sales are slow is to cut down on your bills.

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Ampy Is A Wearable Spare Battery That Charges As You Move | TechCrunch

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It was surely only a matter of time before someone thought to capitalize on the current trend for wearables with a battery designed to charge via kinetic energy. And so meet Ampy: a spare battery pack, currently bidding for crowdfunds on Kickstarter, that straps to your person and, its makers claim, charges up from human movement, such as walking, running and cycling. So instead of just quantifying the number of steps you’ve taken you could convert those steps into stored charge in a lithium-ion battery pack to help juice up your mobile devices via USB.

It’s a nice-sounding idea in theory — if you don’t mind the thought of strapping a rather chunky battery pack onto your person and running around the streets — but, as with all crowdfunding projects, it pays to be a little sceptical of how effective it will prove in practice. And indeed whether it will make it to market at all. Hardware is always hard.

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Wall Street firm pushes for student loan forgiveness | Money Cnn

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One Wall Street firm has an idea that’s raising eyebrows: forgive some student debt for first-time homebuyers.

It’s too early to say exactly how the stimulus measure BlackRock BLK suggested would work, but it would take Congressional action because the federal government administers the majority of student debt.

The move could be a creative way to ease student debt, which has quickly become a $1.2 trillion Achilles heel in the American economy.

Millennials aren’t buying many homes. Mounting student debt may be part of the problem. “Fiscal policy initiatives targeted at young workers with high levels of student indebtedness might, perhaps surprisingly to some, have an outsize impact in supporting the housing recovery and financial markets,” Rick Rieder, co-head of Americas Fixed Income at BlackRock, wrote in a recent commentary.

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Once and for All: Is It Duck Tape or Duct Tape? | Adweek

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If you happen to be working on a Halloween costume this week, remember two things: Nothing beats duck tape when you need to fashion a quick coffin or a knight’s shield, and if you do a really good job of it, you can enter the annual Stick or Treat contest first prize: a thousand bucks, which crowns the most innovative use of duck tape.

Wait—or is it duct tape?

Ah, yes, this time of year often gives voice to one of the world’s great unanswered questions: Is the proper term for America’s favorite waterproof, polyethylene and fabric-mesh strip adhesive duct tape or duck tape?

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