Articles on: Small Business

Business Lessons from “It’s a Wonderful Life”

Next year will mark the 75th anniversary of what’s become a holiday classic. It’s a Wonderful Life is the story of George Bailey, a middle-aged man who in spite of working tirelessly in his family business experiences a calamity of events right before Christmas, that causes him to wish he would have never been born. […]

Business Success: Hurts so good…

  If you want to keep building a great business, you have to be on the lookout for new ideas and different ways to succeed. One of the best ways to do that is finding local business success stories. Why are they succeeding? What can you learn from them? All of the ideas won’t always […]

Business from a bug’s perspective…

Chris is spending a couple of weeks with family in Montana – which inspired this week’s blog post. In a bug’s world, the Pine Bark Beetle may be considered a larger insect. But when you compare them to the great pine tree forests out west, at best, they are minuscule in size. Considering the size […]

25 Great pieces of Advice for Start-ups

From the Kauffman Foundation’s Sketchbook – Three Things! This week we are celebrating the 3rd annual Global Entrepreneurship Week, started by our hometown Kauffman Foundation.  With all the focus on generating great ideas and starting up businesses, I wanted to pass along some great advice from business owners and entrepreneurs who made their jump in […]

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

photo by Tub Gurnard  I came across three different blog entries today that loosely (alright…very loosely) fell under a convenient category of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD – which according to Wikipedia here was first coined by Gene Amdahl after leaving IBM to describe the Big Blue sales approach.) Anyway, as someone that’s observed a […]

Are you on the Marketing Fast Track?

photo by Amnemona There are a lot of great ways to market your business, but a lot of really effective, inexpensive marketing ideas are related to networking. In the book Endless Referrals by Bob Burg, Networking is defined as follows: The cultivating of mutually beneficial, give and take, win-win relationships. The first couple of steps […]