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Frank Lavin is a guy with lots of guanxi—which loosely translated means “connections” in Chinese. The Ohio native has served as U.S. ambassador to Singapore, led trade negotiations with China while working at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and held senior posts in the Asian offices of Bank of America (BAC), Citibank, and public-relations firm Edelman. When Lavin published a business guide on how to conquer overseas markets last year, his friend Karl Rove blogged a positive review.
Lavin is using those contacts to build an unusual type of export business. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Akron, Export Now’s 15 employees handle customs clearance, trademark registration, order fulfillment and other back-end tasks for 24 U.S. companies. Rather than negotiate for shelf space with Chinese retailers as a traditional distributor would, Export Now runs its own virtual storefront on Alibaba Group’s Tmall.com, an Amazon.com (AMZN)-like e-tailing colossus with nearly 500 million registered Chinese users. “China is the fastest-growing consumer market in the world, but it’s still viewed as largely inaccessible for all but the top-tier U.S. companies or global [multinationals],” says Lavin, whose outfit also has an office in Shanghai. “We have a department store in the shopping mall, and any U.S. company can have shelf space in the department store.”
Created by Burden in 1979, the Flaming Carrot has no secret identity, no superpowers, and is not particularly intelligent. After reading 5,000 comic books in a single sitting to win a bet, a man was driven quite mad and was permanently transformed into the orange superhero.
Crowdfunding is the latest buzz to hit the entrepreneur community, but no one really knows how it is going to work. What we do know is that it will allow people like you and me (non-accredited) investors to use our money to help small businesses to start or grow. The problem is that the funding entrepreneurs need to prove, start and grow their ideas into companies has been at a premium since 2008. The question now is whether the excitement will translate into a meaningful solution.
The turn of the century already saw a slow down from the tech investing of the 90’s, but when the recession hit, bank funding ground almost to a stop. Where could the entrepreneur go to seek funding for their idea or startup?
Continue reading “Crowdfunding: What’s All The Noise About? | Lydia Mehit”
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I have been always providing “great content” and got myriads of natural organic links plus all those things Google demands you to do. All that white hat SEO stuff people recommend to you. It doesn’t work though. Yes, I said it.
White hat SEO does not work.
You can be the whitest hat alive like I was on this blog and in the end you get a kick in your guts. Black hat SEO gets you penalized even faster but white hat SEO does as well.
The only thing that works is SEO 2.0 as in my original concept. You have to become independent of Google. You need to establish an audience on social media and direct traffic alias subscribers and returning visitors. Google is not a reliable traffic source whatsoever.
New business owners might feel the world has all gone online in recent years and that the high-tech landscape has changed the very nature of the entrepreneurial game.
While there is some truth to that, the old adage that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” also applies to hooking new customers.
Winning customers for your business is an art that requires a deft hand. It demands market research, sensitivity, and effective decision-making to lure new customers and keep them coming back. The same applies whether you’re operating an online marketplace or a storefront, Martin Lehman, a retail clothing industry veteran, told BusinessNewsDaily.
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Business bankruptcies swelled by more than half in the depths of the recent recession, a statistic that masks a world of heartache for the owners of businesses that didn’t make it. Many still struggle to hang on as the fledgling recovery strengthens. Some will survive, while others will be forced to close their doors, absent some last-minute miracle.
When your company faces an uphill battle that seems almost insurmountable, it can be hard to choose between reviving it and closing it for good. But if you follow these steps for small business CPR, you’ll at least know you did everything you could.
1. Find the Problem
Once-thriving businesses can fade away for a variety of reasons. Sometimes competitors take their customers. That’s what happened to U.S. automakers when foreign brands arrived. Other times, markets change but the business doesn’t. That’s what happened to buggy-whip manufacturers when people turned to cars.
Dispatches From The Front 