Dr. Jeff Cornwall is the inaugural Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Dr. Cornwall's current research and teaching interests include entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics.
A study by Henry Beale published and funded by the SBA Department of Advocacy reports that the IRS and local zoning laws create major headaches and hurdles for home-based businesses (thanks to the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship for featuring this study).
Continue reading government stifles home-based business development
In addition to the reverb story, which is being featured at this site, we have a group of students who just launched an art gallery and graphic design business as part of their studies on campus. Here is a recent article about this business.
Here is the next installment from our students starting up their business. After successfully bidding on E-Bay, they now are waiting for the truck to arrive with their equipment being shipped from Colorado. Catch the entire reverb story at this link.
Here is the second installment from our student entrepreneurs:
After deciding on a name and color scheme for reverbmedia, we turned our attention to one of the most important aspects of any business?the equipment to run it. The kinds of equipment we would require could easily eat up our startup budget, so we began brainstorming ways to acquire it cheaper. We thought of contacting various warehouses and CD stores that had recently gone out of business, but pinpointing those proved to be harder than we expected. Several members suggested scouring the internet for equipment. One that was mentioned was E-bay.
Continue reading reverb off the wall: bootstrapping with e-bay
Although exit planning is important for all entrepreneurs (every good thing eventually must end), too many entrepreneurs view their business like a publicly traded stock. Jeremy Wright offers an example that is so common among many entrepreneurs: get in, get out, move on. Not only is this often financially unwise for the entrepreneur, the impact extends well beyond personal finances. Free enterprise involves a social contract that requires some level of responsibility by entrepreneurs to their communities. The quickest road to increased regulation of business is to ignore the role of stewardship that all entrepreneurs have in our economic system. And quick exits that focus only on short term financial gains move regulation and government scrutiny into the fast lane.
HobbsOnline offers more evidence for our current entrepreneurial recovery. He reports on data showing that the formation of LLC’s (one of the most popular type of business entity for new ventures these days) hit an all time record in 2003 in Tennessee. This is not some statistic that has been steadily going up year after year. After peaking in 1998, the formation of LLC’s in Tennessee plunged as a result of the Clinton recession in 1999 and did not really begin a robust recovery until 2002 under the current entrepreneurial economic recovery. We must be very careful not to become as myopic in our interpretation of the current economic conditions as most in Washington and Wall Street seem to be. This is a main street recovery, and is creating true economic empowerment for many new entrants into our free enterprise system.
HobbsOnline has a link to another piece supporting the real story of this entrepreneurial recovery. This one is in the New York Times. There is hope….
Entrepreneur.com continues the discussion of whether branding is a strategy that makes sense for entrepreneurial ventures. The article offers some pros and cons of branding that are worth consideration.
An old adage in business is to make sure that you are dealing with the cause of the problem and not just its symptom. This article at INC.com applies this wisdom to entrepreneurial ventures. The author offers some great examples that should help any entrepreneur think hard about how she deals with problem solving in her business. Management by treating symptoms can become disastrous during periods of rapid growth. For example, cash shortages are a constant struggle for many growing companies, but many entrepreneurs simply try to find short term ways to raise more money, speed up receivables, or slow down payables. The root cause may be much deeper. It could be a pricing problem, inventory control problem, staffing problem at the root cause. Don?t just treat the symptom. Dig deep to find the root cause. Are you simply putting out fires?