Raising Equity and Venture Capital on Main Street

Is there a contest somewhere for Really Bad PowerPoint?  The Pentagon's entry appeared on the front page of today's New York Times. It depicts….well, I don't really know. Something about the war in Afghanistan.  Now, don't get smug. Your PowerPoint is probably not much better.  For business owners and entrepreneurs who want to make sure their  "decks" (the word alone sends shivers down the spine) can be understood, make a stop at our 7 Deadly Sins of PowerPoint page. And keep in mind that PowerPoint, even a great one (and there are not many) won't save you if your content and message are wanting. For some help there,  we've prepared an article on 7 Steps to Being a Great Public Speaker. After that, hop over to  Seth Godin's classic blog post on the subject of really bad PowerPoint and his handy e-book on the subject.
Have a really bad PowerPoint slide […]

Author John Warrillow explains how merchandising the sale of your service business as if it were a bottle of Tide detergent could be the key to finding a buyer and getting your price. Read more….
5 Secrets to Make Selling Your Service Business Easy originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 20:01:16.
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Why is it that many businesses still fail to respond to customer emails, even when they have forms on their websites inviting inquiries? I think generally this is more true of big companies than small ones. When my small company gets a lead through our website or from one of the sites on which we advertise, or on our voicemail, we are on the phone to that prospect literally within seconds, or minutes at the latest.
Here's a quick story of how putting a nice application on a website and then ignoring customers who use it is deadly for business and often typical of big organizations: I needed new tires for my Ford Explorer (133,000 miles on it and running nicely). I went to the site of my local Ford dealer, queued up a request for an appointment on a particular day about a week later, and made a note […]

John Jantsch, author of the best-selling business book Duct Tape Marketing, has a new book coming out May 13:  The  Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself. Get your highlighter ready–there is a ton of information you can start using immediately to build your referral business. You can read my review of the book here and listen to my interview with John here.
Entrepreneurs, Start Your Referral Engines originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 09:33:39.
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Great story on the Today Show this morning. (I watched it as my coffee was brewing so forgive me if I get one or two details wrong, but the gist of the following is accurate.) A guy (let's call him Al) in his fifties, who was in a corporate sales career and hating it, walks into a marine store one day to get some boat supplies and hears another guy talking about his alpaca. So he goes home and asks his wife (let's call her Alison) what an alcapa is, and presto (not quite) they are alpaca ranchers in Oregon and loving it. Alison still works full-time as a technical writer working from home while she does her other full-time job with her husband. The sunset view from the porch is amazing.
Good for the Today folks for spending a few moments on Al's decision-making process to take the […]

I've started coaching for Keith Ferrazzi's Relationship Masters Academy, a new program that coaches people on how to completely redefine their goals in life and business. It's a pilot program right now but will be expanded after the initial 10 weeks. I'm taking the course as well as coaching it. It's a great opportunity to work through some mind-expanding ideas. Like BR=PR. Business Relationships are Personal Relationships. The most successful business relationships we have are not transactional; they're built on trust, generosity — even love -  and other attributes we usually associate with personal relationships. So I and my fellow RMA classmates are "making a choice" to connect with our business colleagues on a personal level. Sounds simple but it's easy to overlook unless you focus on it.
How do you treat your business relationships? Like a "take a […]

Zeke Camusio is head of The Outsourcing Company, a consulting firm that helps small businesses develop search engine optimization (SEO) programs and social media marketing strategies. We asked him to explain some SEO basics that can help small business increase their profits. Read his tutorial here.
SEO Tips for Small Business originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 14:27:04.
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Gregg Murray,  a web marketing strategist and Google SEO expert who heads up Website Blueprint, a firm that helps small businesses design and improve their presence on the web, offers tips on how small businesses can use social media sites to boost the size of their email lists. See them here.
How to Build Your Email Marketing List Through Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 09:04:35.
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John Warrillow, the author of Built To Sell: Turn Your Business Into One You Can Sell, knows about selling businesses: He has started and exited four companies. His new book is a compact and essential guide to anyone who plans to sell their business. Suggestion: buy the book a couple of years before you plan to sell, because you have a lot more work to do than you realize. Warrillow put together a handy tip sheet on the top five mistakes to avoid when trying to sell your business. Read it here.
Top 5 Mistakes Business Owners Make When Trying to Sell Their Companies originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 22:54:08.
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"A.S.A.P. is poison. Underdo the competition. Meetings are toxic. Fire the workaholics. Emulate drug dealers. Pick a fight. Planning is guessing. Inspiration is perishable."
And that's just the back cover of Rework, the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. The two founders of Chicago software firm 37Signals turn Management 101 on its head, where it gets a well-deserved headache. Their book is a manifesto for the new way work is getting done by small businesses, combined with a manual on how to do it.
And it's really a relief. When I was in corporate America back in the day, we spent most of our time working brutal hours so we could be seen working brutal hours; obsessing about our competitors (I never really cared what they were doing but everyone else did, so I feigned equal paranoia just to get along); piling meetings on top of useless meetings, […]