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The American Dream may seem very far these days for the average American struggling to get by. But behind all the mushy idealism, the truth is there are those who live a real rags to riches lives. The following are ten famous American entrepreneurs who left their poor beginnings behind to become some of the richest people in the world.

1. Sheldon Adelson- Sheldon Adelson, the CEO of Las Vegas Sands is best known for his efforts to bring a little of Las Vegas to the rest of the world. The son of Ukrainian immigrants, he grew up in the poor Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. His entrepreneurial beginnings included selling toiletry kits to motels. Sheldon attended City College in New York, majoring in corporate finance and real estate, but later dropped out to join the U.S. Army. He achieved millionaire status while working as a financial consultant advising companies how to sell shares of ownership on Wall Street. Today, he is listed in the Forbes 400 as the eighth wealthiest American with an estimated personal wealth of $24.9 billion.

 

2. Jay-Z- Today, rapper Shawn Carter, known by his stage name Jay-Z, is one of the wealthiest music artists and entrepreneurs in America, with a net worth of over $450 million. He has sold 50 million albums worldwide, 11 of which went platinum, has received fourteen Grammy Awards and is considered one of the greatest rappers of all-time. He has also started his own clothing line, Rocawear; created a record label, Roc-A-Fella records; a management, publishing and entertainment company, Roc Nation and is even part owner of the New Jersey Nets. But before all of this he was living in the Marcy Housing Projects in Brooklyn and selling crack.

3. John Paul DeJoria- The beginning of John Paul DeJoria’s life didn’t look too promising, even at one point prompting one of his teachers to proclaim that he would “never succeed at anything in life.”

DeJoria was the second son of an Italian immigrant father and a Greek immigrant mother growing up in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. His parents divorced when he was two years old. At nine he began selling Christmas cards and newspapers with his older brother to support his family. When his single mother could no longer provide for both children, they were sent to an East Los Angeles foster home.

 

DeJoria spent much of his youth in a street gang in East Los Angeles, but his teacher’s comments motivated him to become successful. After graduating in 1962, and a stint in the U.S. Navy, he moved between various odd jobs including a janitor, encyclopedia salesman, a gas station attendant, and insurance salesman. Eventually he landed in the hair care industry and in 1980, he secured a $700 loan together with Paul Mitchell to found John Paul Mitchell Systems. Today the company has annual revenues exceeding $900 million, and DeJoria is worth an estimated $4 billion.

4. Oprah Winfrey- Oprah Winfrey rose from a life of hardship and adversity to become one of today’s most influential TV hosts and media moguls. The daughter of an unwed teenage mother from rural Mississippi, Winfrey had to overcome poverty, sexual abuse and her own teenage pregnancy. Today, she is considered one of the richest African Americans of the 20th century, and one of the most powerful celebrities in the world. In addition to publishing two magazines, she runs her own production company as well as the television network, Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) in collaboration with Discovery Communications.

 

5. Howard Schultz- Howard Shultz is the founder and CEO of Starbucks. Today, he has a net worth of $1.1 billion, but he spent his childhood in Brooklyn, New York in the Canarsie Bayview Housing Projects. The son of a truck driver, Schultz’s first big break came with a sports scholarship to Northern Michigan University where he earned a degree in communications. After graduation, he took a position as the director of marketing at a small Seattle coffee bean shop called Starbucks. But Shultz left in frustration after they failed to share his vision of opening cafes that would serve coffee, espresso and tea. Instead, Schultz opened his own coffee shop, Il Giornale in 1985. Just two years later he was able to purchase Starbucks from the original owners and start building the ubiquitous coffee brand that we know today.

 

6. Larry Ellison- Larry Ellison is the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corp, a leading enterprise software company. His current wealth is about $36.5 billion, making him the third richest person in the United States. That’s not too shabby for a college drop out who was adopted by his aunt and uncle after his single teenage mother decided she could not provide for him.

 

7. Steve Jobs- Steve Jobs, will probably be remembered both for his mysterious, almost mystical air as well as his visionary approach to technology that forever changed the computer, music, film and mobile computing industries. As the co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc, Jobs not only had a heavy hand in pushing the personal computing revolution that began in the 1980’s, but he again turned the tech world on its head in the 2000’s with a series of iconic Apple products and services including: the iMac, iPod,iTunes, iPhone, and the iPad. At the time of his passing he was worth an estimated $7 billion.

Most are aware of Jobs’ background. He grew up in San Francisco and was adopted by a working-class couple after his parents decided they didn’t want him, and grew up in nearby Santa Clara, California. He later dropped out of Reed College when he couldn’t afford tuition but continued as a drop in student. Jobs started Apple computer in his parents’ garage in 1976, but was then fired from the company after power struggle 1985. Over the next few years he founded  NeXT, a computer platform development company as well as the computer animation company, Pixar which was later sold to Disney. In 1996, Jobs returned to Apple and initiated one of the greatest company turn-arounds of all time.

8. David Geffen- David Geffen is an American record executive and film producer, most known for creating a series of record labels including: Asylum Records in 1970, Geffen Records in 1980, and DGC Records in 1990. Geffen was also one of the three founders of DreamWorks SKG in 1994. He has signed some big-time acts, such as Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bob Dylan and Nirvana.

Geffen grew up with little money in Brooklyn, living in a one-bedroom apartment with his family. He dropped out of college, but a mail room job in the talent agency WMA opened the door to his successful career in the music and entertainment industries. By the age of 26, Geffen was already a millionaire, and today has an estimated net worth of $5.5 billion.

9. Stephen King- Perhaps part of the inspiration for Stephen King’s works of horror, suspense and science fiction, filled with psychologically complex characters and situations can be traced to his difficult childhood. Stephen King’s father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving King’s mother alone to raise him and his adopted brother. King mentioned later in life that his family lived off handouts from relatives. After publishing his first best seller, Carrie, in 1973, King went on to publish 49 books and collections of short stories, and is now worth an estimated $400 million.

Coming up against an unhappy customer can be unpleasant at best and downright damaging at at worst- threatening to drive away other customers and derail your efforts to run a successful business. But it is an inevitable part of doing business. You just can’t please everyone all the time.

That said, there are many ways to bring the majority of your disgruntled customers back over to your side. Here are five steps to diffusing even the most toxic of customer service snafus:

Step 1: Listen to your customer. The very first step to turning an upset customer to a happy one is to stop and listen to what he or she is saying and get the information you need to offer a solution. It’s also important that you understand how the customer sees the problem. If you do speak at the beginning it should only be to ask clarifying questions or to make statements of empathy and understanding. It is usually a mistake to open the conversation up with an apology since you generally will not even know what to be sorry for, and your apologies will come across as insincere anyway.

Step 2: Analyze the problem. Once you make the effort to listen you will be able to discover the reason behind your customer’s unhappiness. At that point you need to assess who or what was the cause. Was there some mis-communication between the customer and one of your employee’s? Was there a logistical problem? Is the customer upset about the quality of your product or service?

Step 3: Decide what actions to take. Once you understand what went wrong and why the customer is unhappy, you need to come up with a strategy to make rectify the situation. Vague assurances are exactly that- vague. You stand a greater chance of winning over upset customers if you present them with a specific solution to the problem at hand. Just a caveat: make sure the solution matches the level of discomfort or money lost.

Step 4: Address the problem sincerely. When you communicate the solution to your customer, remember attitude is everything. If you try to rectify the situation with an air of disdain or in a condescending way then even if the solution is appropriate, you will only end up doing more harm than good.

Moreover, if you are not a solo operation then you may be able to pick someone who is naturally good at identifying and defusing a dispute, and being sensitive where needed, yet being able to set boundaries, and make this person the go-to customer service rep for difficult customers. I once was in a store where an employee stepped away from a disgruntled customer and called in a co-worker. The co-worker swiftly and skillfully handled the situation that involved a considerable amount of discomfort for the customer with little recourse.

Step 5: Evaluate your response. One of the biggest mistakes that a business can do when dealing with an unhappy customer is to walk away from the situation the minute it is either solved or deemed unresolvable. Doing this is like leaving money on the table. You have a lot to gain from evaluating how the issue was handled, how long it took to deal with it, and how successful you were at resolving it. Where possible, you should even turn to the disgruntled customer for feedback. By doing so you’ll be in the best position to learn from any customer service mistakes, identify areas in your business that are constantly drawing negative responses, and know how to bring that unhappy customer back in the door.

Given the way people use the Internet to make purchasing decisions these days, if you own a small brick and mortar business you really need to invest in your online presence. Just make sure that investment includes Google and it’s social network G+.

So I’ll stop here and say that this is not a post about why this particular social network is good for your business or why you need to be spending “x” amount of hours per week on the platform. Whether or not using Google Plus by itself will bring tangible benefits to your business is debatable. There are some pretty strong opinions on both sides of the fence.

Rather, this post is about the way Google has come to both define and control the way people create, share, and engage with the web’s content. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s very hard not to see the real monopoly Google has over Internet search as well as the company’s almost compulsive need to unify the web’s functionality into one massive, interconnected service. Recently, another brick was put in the wall with the launch of Google + Local pages- a kind of Internet portal for your business that includes customer reviews, photos, and other vital information about your business, such as location, hours of operation, and even a Google street view.

So what does all of this mean for you and you and your business? It means that in order for people to find you on the Internet the vast majority of the time they will have to go through Google- its self-made gate keeper. It means, playing by Google’s ever changing rules- whether you like it or not, agree with it or not. And unless you know how to get people to click through, your presence on Google may actually end up taking away from your business website.

So where does all of this leave you, the small business owner? It means that you need to start thinking about your overall web marketing tactics, including finding multiple sources of traffic so you can at least reduce your reliance on Google, keeping an eye on Google’s movement, and either hiring a qualified web marketer to help you with your online marketing or educating yourself in order to position your business in the best places online and learn how to convert that traffic into sales.

Bottom line: even if Google is the Internets gatekeeper, you want to still make sure that you’re the one left holding the keys.

Unless you live under a rock, it’s hard to escape the buzz surrounding Facebook’s recent IPO. Unfortunately for the social media juggernaut most of this attention has been negative. A simple search online for the phrase “Facebook IPO” brings up a whole roster of unflattering expressions, such as “horrendous,” “fiasco,” “disaster,” and of course, “flop.”

Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I think it may be too soon to tell if the company’s offering was truly a flop for the average investor (even if it was over-valued). There’s just too much potential, and too many “what-if’s” to discount the company so soon. I guess only time will tell.

And it could be that one of the real, almost subliminal reasons for such a strong backlash is that from the outside Facebook’s IPO resembles several notable IPO flame-outs that have occurred in recent years. In case you don’t remember, I’ve brought a few examples below. The following 13 IPO’s were real doozies, and it says countless volumes about the underwriters and inside investors involved in those deals as well as the fast lane to riches culture that has become the new American Dream.

1. Wired Ventures The IPO flop of Wired Ventures is a classic example of the over-inflated self-importance and heady speculation that characterized the dot com frenzy of the late 1990’s and eventually caused many companies to fail. The pioneer of new media, Wired Ventures was built around its award-winning print magazine Wired. But the company later expanded to include the online magazines HotWired and Wired News, the book publishing company HardWired, and an MSNBC show called Netizen.

 

By 1996, the company had about 340 employees and was losing almost $8 million a year total from each of its ventures. However, Wired executives maintained that the company would be in the forefront of a new media wave that would eventually carry them to profitability.

They hired big gun investment firm Goldman Sacks to assess its value for a planned IPO in 1996, but together with company executives, they came up with an outrageously high valuation of $447 million. In the face of tepid investor reception and a temporary dip in Internet stocks, the company eventually called off the IPO. Another failed IPO attempt would happen in 1998 before the company was sold to Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc., the parent company of Condé Nast.

2. TheGlobe.com Before there was Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, there was TheGlobe.com. The online company got its start in 1995 as a social networking service where users from all over the world could create, customize and share content. Three years later the company went public. The IPO stock was offered at $9 a share and skyrocketed to $65 by the end of the trading day- the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date. But when the online advertising market went bust, the company soon followed. TheGlobe.com’s stock price plummeted the next year. The company limped along for several more years before it was finally laid to rest in 2008.

3. eToys.com In the late 1990’s, eToys.com seemed to have everything going for it as a dot com: a recognizable, well-liked brand, a catchy series of advertisements that pulled at the heart-strings in just the right way and had parents around the country nodding their heads in understanding, a well-designed website, and an apparently strong market demand. But much like Webvan and Kozmo, what was lacking was the kind of logistical genius that has made the likes of Amazon.com such a huge success. It also planned a costly expansion at a time when demand had flattened due to cooling economic conditions and a much publicized miss-step during the ’99/’00 holiday season. In May 1999, eToys went public at $20 a share and watched its valuation jump to $76 a short while later. But, it was forced to declare bankruptcy less than two years later in February, 2001.

4. Webvan.com It seemed like a good idea at the time: provide Internet users with a convenient way to get their shopping done by ordering their groceries online and having them shipped right to their door in 30 minutes or less. Indeed, many investors agreed. When Webvan went public in 1999, the company was promptly valued at $6 billion (even though it only had slightly less than $5 million in revenues) and saw its stock price double on the first day. In the end, Webvan raised a cool $375 million.

 

But this good idea quickly lost its luster amid the costly logistical realities of providing such a service: it cost the company $27 to process and deliver each order and required a sophisticated system of warehouses and delivery vans. In 2001, just 18 months after its flaming IPO, the company declared bankruptcy.

5. Pets.com Getting customers to like your business won’t do you much good if your business model is fundamentally flawed. That is essentially what happened to Pets.com. The company was able to create a buzz with its cheeky advertising campaign that featured a wise-cracking sock puppet and the slogan, “Pets.com. Because pets can’t drive.” It even attracted some big time investors, such as Amazon.com. But in the end, Pets.com had a hard time generating a profits in online pet supply sales. Customers were not willing to wait for their pet food and other supplies, and shipping costs for the heavier items chipped away any profits. Pets.com went public on February 9 of 2000 and declared bankruptcy within the year.

6. Kozmo.com The story of Kozmo.com’s rise can be filed under the category of “things that make you go hmmm…” The company’s claim to fame: a promise to deliver your DVD movies and munchies in less than an hour with no minimum purchase. It’s trademark fleet of orange scooters could be seen out and about in 10 major cities throughout the U.S.

 

Unfortunately, making such small deliveries was not such a profitable proposition. In March 2000, Kozmo made a much publicized attempt at an IPO, but later postponed the offer when the market started to collapse. It never did make an offer. Instead, it started a round of layoffs that led to its eventual demise.

7. Vonage From its inception in 2001, Vonage quickly became one of the largest VoIP providers in North America. But in 2006, after suffering $310 million in total yearly losses, the company decided to go public to raise some needed extra capital. Shares were offered at $17 a piece but quickly plunged 12.7% within the day to close at $14.85. It was one of the worst IPO performances in 2006.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Vonage decided to offer 13.5 percent of its IPO shares directly to its customers. But in a strange twist of fate, when interested customers went to the designated website to make their purchases, a number of them received the message that the purchase orders didn’t go through. Then, several days later, with the stock trading at a 30% loss, these same customers were told that their purchases had indeed gone through, but now they owed the original stock price of $17 a share!

8. Refco In August 2005, when Refco went public to the tune of $3.5 billion, it was one of the largest brokers of commodities and futures contracts in the country. But two short months later its stock value took a nose dive amid allegations that its CEO, Phillip R. Bennett, had concealed $430 million in bad debt for over a decade.

 

On October 17, Refco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and two years later Bennett pleaded guilty to 20 charges of fraud and was sentenced to 16 years in a federal prison.

9. VeraSun In 2006, when the ethanol boom was in full swing, several companies rose to prominence on the promise of producing a cleaner, greener source of energy that would reduce the nation’s dependency on oil. Many investors wanted in on the action, and that is how VeraSun, one of the top producers of ethanol, was able to raise $420 million when it launched its IPO in June 2006. But, its flame burned out quickly. Not only was the market for ethanol production saturated with competitors, the subsequent surge in the price of corn coupled with the decrease in the demand for ethanol due to the recession, provided a one-two punch that ultimately pushed the company into bankruptcy two years later.

10. The Blackstone Group Steve Schwarzman, the notoriously larger than life billionaire, is the co-founder and CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone Group. Infamously narcissistic, for his 60th birthday party, the “King of Wall Street” threw himself multi-million dollar party featuring Martin Short, Rod Stewart and Patti LaBelle leading a church choir singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

Much of Schwarzman’s wealth came from the use of cheap debt to leverage the buyouts and hostile takeovers of countless struggling companies. In 2007, Blackstone announced plans for an IPO, and many failed to appreciate that the deal was a bit too good to be true. In their rush to capitalize on Blackstone’s average 23 percent annual return, many investors overlooked the fact that the company being offered was a spinoff of the Blackstone Group, called Blackstone Holdings. Though the company was valued at $40 billion, Blackstone Holdings only had revenues of $2.3 billion a year.

 

Moreover, Shwarzman and his associates no doubt saw the upcoming collapse of the credit markets which would effectively decimate the cheap debt needed to support the buyouts. The result: Blackstone raised $4.1 billion with the IPO, allowing Schwarzman and his co-founder Peter Peterson to earn a cool $2.6 billion, while investors ended up with a stock that lost 42 percent of its value during its first year.

11. Groupon Looking back, there were plenty of red flags suggesting that Groupon’s IPO would flounder. Before the IPO even hit Wall Street, Groupon, the site that made daily deals famous, was already reeling from a series of PR snafus that included questionable financial accounting and reporting and the defection of two COO’s within six months. After making the biggest IPO since Google and raising $700 million, Groupon watched its value plummet about 40% a mere three weeks later.

12. Imperial Holdings In February 2011, Imperial Holdings a company that makes lump-sum payments to buy life insurance policies and structured legal settlements, raised approximately $179 million. Though it claimed to be a profitable business, reports show that the company consistently posted quarterly losses of many millions of dollars. An FBI probe quickly followed, the climax of which was a raid of Imperial Holdings’ offices in September of that year. Attention was then also given to suspicious investor activity that occurred immediately following the raid, but before the New York Stock Exchange could suspend trading on the stock. Predictably, Imperial Holdings’ shares quickly took a nose dive as much as 75 percent.

13. BATS It seems Murphy’s law was at work when BATS, the company that operates the third largest stock exchange in the U.S., experienced a malfunction of its software system on the very day of its own offering in March 2012. The “glitch” not only caused BATS to withdraw its offering, but even resulted in a well-publicized 9% drop in Apple’s shares. That same day, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was in the process of investigating the alternative exchanges, including the BATS on the grounds that high-speed trading can cause problems.

 

Sources:

http://www.investopedia.com/slide-show/biggest-ipo-flops#axzz1uEPocEdG

http://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops3.htm

http://www.cnet.com/1990-11136_1-6278387-1.html

http://www.billshrink.com/blog/4698/15-companies-whose-ipos-were-complete-flops/ http://www.inc.com/multimedia/slideshows/content/ipo-disasters_pagen_7.html

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/others-in-the-i-p-o-hall-of-shame/

http://www.investorplace.com/ipo-playbook/bats-wins-the-gold-for-ipo-disasters/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/28/us-imperial-idUSTRE78R3TE20110928

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-04/groupon-ipo-scandal-is-the-sleaze-that-s-legal.html

With the rising costs of health care and the tangible benefits that come with living a healthy life style, it’s almost a no-brainier that implementing a wellness program in your small business can offer a potentially big payback. And don’t think that it will necessarily cost you big bucks. Just because you can’t afford to sponsor an expensive spa or gym membership for your employees nor provide extensive health-related workshops and other services, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a wellness program in your business.

 

 

You may be surprised by how far a little thought and creativity can go. If you are considering building a wellness program in your business, but need to do so on the cheap, then here are some tips to keep in mind:

First, take a look around. You need to take a real good look at your business and your employees and identify those key areas that need to be changed. Are there a lot of smokers in your business? What do break times look like? What do you and your employees eat, drink, or snack on? Does you business involve long periods of sitting or standing in one place? Pick one or two areas to start with.

Create space. Before you introduce any changes in your business, make sure that you prepare your employees and ask for their input. Having a discussion about some possible options for your wellness program is definitely a start. There are two main benefits to starting things in this way: first, your employees may offer many ideas for the wellness program that you could not have come up with on your own, and second, you want to get your employees excited about the program. If they “own” it, then there is a greater chance of it being a success.

Be flexible and creative. With a little flexibility and creativity, there are many healthy activities you can introduce in your business, and the best part is that these activities can also be great team builders. Some free or low-cost ideas to consider include:

• Starting a walking, hiking, or biking group
• Cooking healthy lunches together
• Going as a group to a health fair
• Setting fitness goals, such as losing weight, running a certain distance, quitting smoking

Be patient. Rome wasn’t built in one day as they say, and neither will your business’ wellness program. Old habits and patterns are typically the hardest to break, so make sure you introduce any changes slowly and deliberately.

Communicate and evaluate. If you really want your wellness initiatives to have a positive, lasting effect, then make it a point to both communicate with your employees and evaluate how the program is going. This will allow to tweak things along the way. If, for example, you started putting out healthy snacks, but these items aren’t being eaten, then find out why and see if there are alternatives. If you set group fitness goals, but your employees are having a hard time sticking to them, then maybe the goals were set too high.

In short, if you would like to start a wellness program in your business, but are afraid of what it might cost you, don’t sweat it. Those little, healthy changes can really go a long way.

Despite an urge to paint email usage as out-dated and irrelevant compared to all the popular, fast-paced social media platforms out there, small business owners should not discount email as a primary marketing medium. The fact is that email marketing just works; whereas the jury is still out when it comes to leveraging the surge in social media usage. According to the ForeSee Results Report on Social Media Marketing (US Edition), 64 percent of consumers prefer to receive promotional information for retailers via email instead of social media.

That said, social media has still left it’s mark. To be effective, an email marketing campaign really involves not only intelligent analysis of consumer behavior and demographics, but also savvy social media integration. Spamming current and potential customers with your promotional emails won’t cut it these days.

So how do you get your email marketing efforts to convert into some real sales? For starters, you need to get a good email marketing software solution. If you are now just starting your foray into email marketing or your previous efforts to market via email have been unsuccessful, then here are five top, reasonably-priced email marketing solutions to consider:

MailChimp. Though MailChimp may lack some of the robust features mentioned with the services below, if you are looking for affordable, easy-to-use email marketing solution, then go no further. MailChimp offers a, simple user interface with a host of tools for creating, managing, and tracking your email campaigns. It also supports most mobile platforms and integrates well with many third-party apps. The free version supports up to 2,000 subscribers with up to 12,000 emails per month. The paid versions are reasonably priced, ranging from $15 to $240 per month depending on the number of subscribers your business has. The major downside is that there’s no phone support.

iContact. iContact is an inexpensive, feature-rich email marketing solution. The service comes with a lot of valuable functionality, including an HTML editor for email newsletter templates, Google Analytics and social media integration, and list segmentation. Like MailChimp, iContact offers a free version for up to 500 subscribers and 2,000 total emails per month. The paid version is also reasonably priced starting at $10 per month for up to 500 subscribers, and all the way up to $699 per month for 100,000 subscribers. There is a lot of DIY support available if you want it, but here live phone assistance is also an option.

AWeber. AWeber is an affordable email marketing platform that supports several robust features, such as comprehensive reporting and tracking, an easy-to-use, intuitive WYSIWYG editor, and great customer support right from the beginning. Prices range from $19 per month for lists of up to 500 subscribers to $239 per month for lists of up to 25,000. The downside to AWeber is that it doesn’t support mobile platforms and there is also no image hosting or surveys.

VerticalResponse. VerticalResponse has many things going for it: a FreeForm web editor that allows you to upload your own HTML, a feature-rich image editor and 25mb of image hosting space, support for online surveys and real-time reporting, as well as a quick and extensive customer service setup. Their pricing plan is also attractive to budget-conscious small business owners. They even offer a “pay-as-you go” option with a price per email sent that ranges between 1.5 to .75 cents. Monthly plans start as low as $8.50 per month.

Campaigner . Campaigner rounds out this list of affordable email marketing solutions for small business owners. Aside from the competitive pricing, Campaigner offers an easy-to-use template builder, a large library of pre-made templates (currently there are over 500 to chose from),10mb of image hosting space, and solid integration with social networks. They have a good reputation for customer service as well.

Conducting an online survey is a great market research tool that can give you invaluable insight into your target market’s attitudes, behaviors, and make up. But creating an effective online questionnaire or poll (even a short one) involves much more than just throwing together a few of your burning questions. It is a thought-out and thorough process at the end of which, you not only need to know what to ask, you also need to know how to attract quality participants and keep them from abandoning the survey mid way through.

 

So, before you go about creating your next online survey or poll, you should keep in mind the following points:

Keep it short and simple. Unless you are offering some phenomenal incentive, you stand a better chance of keeping potentially click-happy respondents from abandoning your survey if it is brief and to the point. Make sure your respondents know in advance how long the survey will take to complete. If your survey involves several questions then you should consider adding some kind of progress bar. Generally speaking, however, you should try to keep your survey completion time to no more than ten minutes.

Keep it clear. If your participants cannot understand what you are asking them, then you’re results will be worthless even from those who forged ahead and completed the survey anyway. Make sure that each question is worded in a clear and concise way. You should also pay attention to the flow and consistency of your questions- is there a logical “thread”? Finally, make is a point to define the purpose of the survey, how long you will be running it for, and what you hope to accomplish with it after you get the results.

Provide an incentive. One way to get people motivated to take your survey is to offer them a “prize” for doing so. This prize can come in the form of a free give-away, such as an ebook or a free class in a workshop series, a discount, or an exclusive offer of any kind. Alternatively, you could hold a drawing among the respondents to win either cash or prizes. Keep in mind, however, that the incentive should match the effort expended.

Keep it anonymous. There are two main reasons why should generally refrain from asking for names, email, or any other identifying info. People may be wary about giving you their personal information since they don’t know what you will do with it. Second, your respondents may be more open and honest if they can hide behind the veil of anonymity.

Post the results. Your visitors will be more motivated to complete your short survey or poll if it is something that interests them and they can see the real-time results. Where that is not possible, you could mention that you will be writing a post or a press release about your findings. If even this is not an option then it is a good idea to explicitly state why you are giving the survey and what you hope to accomplish with the data you collect as mentioned above.

If you are thinking about starting a small business, then chances are you are going to need some outside advice, training, and other various forms of support along the way to get your venture up and running. Luckily, there are many, many organizations and individuals you can turn to in order to get the support you need, and the best part is it’s all for free. The majority of these organizations are non-profits or government-run initiatives, while the individuals are typically retired professionals who are committed to volunteering their time and expertice to help small business owners run successful ventures.  

So, you may be wondering how to locate all of these free resouces. I recently stumbled on a great site that allows visitors to search an extensive directory of business mentors as well as government and nonprofit small business assistance organizations on a local, regional and national scale. The site, Buzgate.org, is a public service intiative that allows you to search for all these resources by location and type of assistance needed. It’s definitely worth a look.

 

As the economy continues to huff and puff along, many would-be entrepreneurs and professionals may be debating the value of investing in a business-related degree as opposed to making their way in the working world or taking an entrepreneurial route without that big, framed certificate hanging on the wall. After all, there are countless people out there who managed to be successful, sometimes outrageously successful, despite having not attended college. A few well-known examples include: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, and Richard Branson.

 

 

Even if you already made the decision to attend a business school, be aware that the reality in the world of business is often at odds with the picture painted in your text books or course work. That said, here are six points you won’t learn in business school, yet they are fundamental to achieving business success.

1. You don’t need to be an expert in management, finance, and marketing to run a successful business. Possessing a fundamental knowledge of management, finance, and marketing is always a plus, but the majority of what you need to know you don’t need to get from a formal, business school curriculum. In fact, there are many, many workshops, seminars, webinars, and other programs that can give you enough business acumen- those business basics 101’s- and often this information is for free.

2. Financial models and formulas often fall away. These days with so much emphasis being placed on data collection and analysis, this point may seem counter-intuitive. Where the standard financial formulas and business models are used in real-world business, most of that process is automated. Businesses, especially the bigger ones, aren’t stupid (sometimes anyway). They’re going to assign you to those tasks that can’t be automated, and you may be surprised by how much energy they put into getting you to think outside of those very models and formulas you worked so hard to learn (or at least memorize for the test) while you were in school.

3. EQ trumps IQ. For those who don’t know what EQ stands for, it’s emotional intelligence. Basically, how much do you get people; how much do you understand yourself; and how do you act on that knowledge? A perfect 4.0 from the best business school by itself won’t get you very far when it comes to working with people, and today, in the golden age of Web2.0, relationships matter more than ever.

Which brings me to the next point…

4. It’s not just about who you are, it’s about who you know and what you’ve produced. It used to be that having the name of a prominent educational institution on your resume would turn heads and open doors. While this still happens today to a certain extent, it’s influence has definitely declined in recent years as employers focus more on other factors, such as a candidate’s reputation. Personal branding is where it’s at. What is your “personal brand”? It’s a blend of who you know in your social networks, and how you interact with them as well as what, if anything you’ve produced, such as the content in a blog. All of this is combined with your skill set and experience to create a picture of who you are.

5. Processes and rules will be broken. Though it’s important to have a sense of how things should go when it comes to the rules and processes of running a business, be ready to be flexible. There will be a lot of tweaking along the way. Individual businesses breed individual circumstances that need to be considered. So, go ahead, write that business plan, but realize chances are pretty good your business will evolve so much that it may look very different from the one you envisioned at the beginning.

6. It’s all about the sale. If you want to be successful in business, then you need to hone your sales abilities, and I am not talking cold-calling or being able to single-handedly create professional marketing campaigns. What I mean here is the ability to give over some of the enthusiasm you have for starting and running a business or working within a particular industry. It’s that enthusiasm, coupled with the ability to win people over to your side- whether those people are your employers, employees and co-workers, or customers- that can be a primary driver in your career.

All of the above are so fundamental and vital to running a successful business or catapulting your career to the next level, yet these very points are left out of the curriculum. If you do attend a business school, then look at your lessons with a grain of salt.

When it comes to marketing a business the frequent complaint from small biz owners is that marketing rarely works or just isn’t worth the expense. For those business owners I offer the reasons below as to why that may seem to be true.

 

1.) You Try to Do It Yourself.

Yeah, I know, you’d get marketing help if you could trust it, or afford it. Yes, it’s true that many marketing firms are beyond the financial reach of many small businesses. However, if you truly believe in the benefits of smart marketing there are professional resources that your small business can afford. You just may have to invest the time to find and qualify them. And, the better you’re able to qualify them, the more you’ll be able to trust them.

 

One business owner who knew the value of investing in marketing expertise was Steve Jobs. Apple incorporated on January 3rd, 1977, and within the year was running ads created by an outside agency. Great, creative marketing has been a driving force behind Apple’s stellar success ever since. As Anita Campbell, Founder of Small Business Trends, says:

 

“Business success is all about finding the right outside service providers

and using them wisely. You can’t do it all yourself.”

2.) You Hire Marketing Help, But it’s the Wrong Marketing Help.

Unfortunately, most small business owners don’t know what they don’t know, which makes it easy for them to be misled. It’s kind of a Catch 22. Because while they may be smart enough to know they’re not marketing experts, it’s very tough to be smart enough to know who is. Getting referrals helps, but it’s not enough. So, to know how to qualify marketing help, read this.

 

3.) You Don’t Have a Realistic Definition of What Success Is.

“Success” can mean a million different things to a million different people. Plus, every situation is different. For example, if you’re offering a coupon or running a sale it’s easier to define success than if you’re rebranding your business with an upgraded logo, tagline or website. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that an upgraded logo, tagline or website is any less important.

 

My point is that the idea of “success” is something to be discussed upfront. This is where an outside professional perspective will definitively help. Because not only will they know more about marketing than you, but they’ll also have a more objective perspective. And, that objectivity is key. Assuming you’re able to come to an agreement about what a successful effort might look like you’ll then be in a much better position to move forward with confidence and try to achieve it.

 

It’s unfortunate how often business owners and outside marketing resources move forward without doing this and then end up equally disgruntled.

 

It truly kills me to see frustrated and jaded business owners struggling because they’ve never figured out how to resolve their marketing issues. Hopefully, this will help.

Author Bio:

John Follis is a business owner and nationally respected marketing exec profiled on Wikipedia. His successful campaigns have been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USAToday, Forbes and two college textbooks. He’s also author of “How to Attract and ExciteYour Prospects” a guide to getting the best marketing results. His innovative “Marketing Therapy” program helps businesses around the US achieve their marketing goals faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively.