Raising Equity and Venture Capital on Main Street

You may not have heard of Gurbaksh Chahal, but any 27-year-old who has already started and sold two companies for a total of $340 million, and has just secured more than $12 million in venture funding for his third, deserves the attention of all entrepreneurs, current and aspiring.
"G," as he's known, was born in India and came to the United States at age 3 with his parents. His father was a police officer and his mother was a nurse at a large hospital. They came to the U.S. virtually penniless. His father took a job as a security guard and his mother as a hospital orderly. To help out his family (he has three older siblings), G dropped out of school to start his first company, Click Agents, when he was 16. He sold the Internet advertising company two years later for $40 million. Then he started BlueLithium, another advertising […]

The Los Angeles Times reports that many small business owners aren't sitting idly by hoping for the economic recover to save them. They're saving themselves through innovation.

One bookstore owner is switching from its standard inventory of books to bargain titles to lower inventory costs.

A commercial bakery cut salaries across the board by 10 percent, even as it continues its expansion plans to hire more workers and add trucks.

A 33-employee manufacturer of stage drapes for touring bands, schools and religious organizations is using teleconferencing instead of a showroom to keep expenses down.

A fitness studio added a line of DVDs since some customers can afford to come less frequently.

What are you doing with your small business to stay competitive — or even just to survive — in a period of recession? Leave a comment or take the poll.

In the small business I own, I've noticed an ebb and flow through the years — periods when I am really "on it" and other times when I am either coasting or not as engaged as I need to be. Fortunately, I've been very much on my game for the past three years (thanks in no small part to my collaboration with my coach).
For a couple of years prior to that I was up and down and, no surprise, my results were erratic. I have been thinking about what's different now compared with then in terms of my activity and attitude. I bet that anyone with a small business goes through the same cycles. Maybe if you read this you'll snap out of a down cycle and get back on your game. I am not going to to focus on what to do about each factor, basically because just […]

I just recorded a 20-minute podcast with NY Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk. I hope to figure out how to get the MP3 file to appear here, but meantime you can dial in and listen to it: 1-219-509-8113, Playback Access Code:956701
Questions Gary answers:

How do you start a business if you're currently working?
What's the most important success factor for startups today?
Can you scale a business built around your own personal brand?
In what year will Gary buy the New York Jets?
And a lot more….

Gary's an inspiration to entrepreneurs. He walks the talk. Hear what he has to say.
Interview with "Crush It" Author Gary Vaynerchuk originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 13:17:19.
Permalink | Comment | Email this

To the tens of thousands of potential entrepreneurs interested in starting an online business, there are lessons aplenty to be learned from Paperlesspost.com.
The roughly one-year-old New York-based company allows consumers to send elegantly designed virtual invitations and greeting cards through email and keep track of responses. In itself, that doesn't sound so gee-whiz. And it's not. The barriers to entry in this market are almost non-existent and the competition is considerable. Aside from Evite, the granddaddy of online invitations (and acting its age), there are online companies like Smilebox.com, MyPunchBowl.com and Socializr.com that are in the online invitations business, not counting the greeting card companies that have online tools for virtual card-sending.
Paperlesspost.com, whose customers sent about 1 million email cards in the company's first year from November 2008 to November 2009, sent another million in the single month after that, according to James Hirschfeld, 23, who co-founded the company with […]

Readers are starting to tell us their entrepreneurial stories and it's really very cool! We heard from Jeff Bruce, a reader in the midwest, who started his second entrepreneurial venture in a business he knew well: meat distribution, but adding special expertise to differentiate his company. You'll love his "lessons learned," so check it out. Then take a look at what reader Lloyd Wales has to say about listening to naysayers. And then, add your own story.
Readers Adding Entrepreneurial Stories originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 10:41:34.
Permalink | Comment | Email this

A few weeks ago I was thinking about writing a piece on Entrepreneurs of the Decade. I posted on the wonderful resource HelpAReporterOut.com asking for nominations, and got tons and tons of them. Too many in fact to sort through. I still want to celebrate entrepreneurs but have another way I'd like to go about it. Please note on the right side of this site's home page there's a box that says, "Discuss" and "Tell Your Entrepreneurship Story." I invite the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who read this site to tell us what you've done, how you did it and what you learned. Let's get the conversation started. Who's first?
Tell Your Entrepreneurship Story originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 15:08:21.
Permalink | Comment | Email this

If you're a small business owner, you can spend an awful lot of time in the muck of collecting, or trying to collect, bad debt. There's a good piece about this on the New York Times site today in which Jay Goltz, an owner of five businesses in Chicago, explains his experience in collections.
Goltz notes correctly that the biggest trap most small businesses fall into is extending credit when a client already has a significant balance due. You don't want to lose their business, so you let them have another $5,000. And then, surprise! They don't make any payments.
A business I know very well extended over $200,000 to a food service company, whose ethics were non-existent. The CEO had a meeting with the CFO of the debtor client and asked him how he could run up such a huge tab and then keep asking for more credit, and even discounts […]

Which demographic group has a lock on entrepreneurship? Is it the Gen-Y/Millennials, which has grown up with social media, group dating and an ability to leverage technology and get products launched fast? Or it the Baby Boomers, who are graduating for corporate life and taking the lessons of decades as they invest their equity in themselves? The answer is "Yes."
The New York Times today checked in on Ernie and Maggie Doud, a middle-aged Missouri couple it had profile about two years ago. A decade ago, the Douds started a company to cure dog breath (in dogs, not people) so they could live more happily with their own mutt. They came up with a kind of doggie Altoid called "Greenies" (maybe Major League Baseball could be a customer?) and sold it to Mars Inc. in 2006 for "a small fortune." Since then they've started 12 other companies. Judging from the photo of them […]

Which demographic group has a lock on entrepreneurship? Is it the Gen-Y/Millennials, which has grown up with social media, group dating and an ability to leverage technology and get products launched fast? Or it the Baby Boomers, who are graduating for corporate life and taking the lessons of decades as they invest their equity in themselves? The answer is "Yes."
The New York Times today checked in on Ernie and Maggie Doud, a middle-aged Missouri couple it had profile about two years ago. A decade ago, the Douds started a company to cure dog breath (in dogs, not people) so they could live more happily with their own mutt. They came up with a kind of doggie Altoid called "Greenies" (maybe Major League Baseball could be a customer?) and sold it to Mars Inc. in 2006 for "a small fortune." Since then they've started 12 other companies. Judging from the photo of them […]