Alumnus Blogger

One of our MBA alums from here at Belmont, Charles Hagood, has set up a blog for his newest business venture Healthcare Performance Partners. It is a great example of how a blog can be used to keep connected with customers. Lean Healthcare Exchange is the name of the site. It offers a good model for those of you thinking about using blogging as a tool for your business.
Here are a few tips to help make sure an investment in time and money is worth it for your business:
– Provide meaningful and useful content. This cannot just be a billboard for your business. Blogs are best when they are forums for discussion.
– Keep it current. Take it from me, blogging on a regular basis can become a bit of a drag some days. But your readers are looking for regular new posts, so be ready to blog at least a couple of times a week if not daily.
– Make it look professional. Although there are cheaper ways to set up a blog, spend a little money to make it look good and function properly. People will not stay long nor come back to a cheap looking site.
– Keep up with maintenance. Spam is real, and you need to monitor and set up systems to keep in under control.
– Break a few rules. This is blogging, so it should be fun and a little more informal. Blogging is one big conversation.

Small Business Optimism Remains Steady

From the NFIB:

Confirming their view that the nation’s economy is moving solidly ahead, small-business owners nudged the February NFIB Small-Business Optimism Index up four-tenths of a point to 101.5 (1986=100), reinforcing the positive-growth message that they have been signaling for some time.

Small Business owners’ optimism is supported by their plans to increase inventories and capital outlays. They also are forecasting stronger sales and earnings.

Stop That Hovering!

We did not enter adolescence and early adulthood quietly in the 60s and 70s. We made a big splash into the job market in the 70s and 80s. We have made advertisers rich for decades as they try to coax us to their clients products. And now? We are front stage once again, but this time for how poorly we are handling our own children’s journeys into young adulthood. We have come know as “helicopter parents.” From the Tennesean:

Universities and colleges are coping with a growing number of these well-meaning yet hyper-involved parents. They jump to the rescue whenever their kids don’t like roommates, struggle in a class or can’t get along with a professor.
Some parents are calling deans of students, advisers and residence halls. Some fill out applications. Others try to go to class registration, dominate school visits or even complain about grades to professors.

My concern with this is less about how it impacts my life as a professor (but believe me, it does sometimes). I am more concerned to what we are doing to one of the most entrepreneurial generations to come along in many, many decades.
I remember how my father told me that when I went to college I would learn more outside the classroom than I would sitting in my classes. I didn’t understand this at the time, but as my own children went off to college I remembered his words and how true they were. I learned how to get along with people. I learned how to solve my own problems. I learned how to make my own decisions. My parents were there as a safety net, but they no longer held my hand.
I also remembered his words when we were building our businesses. I appreciated how the successes I had, and more importantly the mistakes I made while in college helped in so many ways to prepare me for the challenges of being an entrepreneur. Two of the greatest lessons I learned were to be confident in myself and to learn from my mistakes, and these lessons served me well.
If I had had helicopter parents I really believe that I would not have been as successful in life, or at least as an entrepreneur. I would have sought security in my career, looking for an employer that would protect me like my parents did. Instead, because of the freedom to succeed and to fail, my independence was made firm and it helped to shape my character and my career.
Our economy is relying more on our entrepreneurial spirit than it has in over a century. But if we continue to hover over out kids, that is our young adult children, they will never be ready to become true leaders in this entrepreneurial economic era in America.

Entrepreneurial Proverbs

Need something to read this weekend? O’Reilly Radar has a long, but very good post titled Entrepreneurial Proverbs.
Here is one of my favorites:
Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible — small budgets give big focus (probably another line I’m stealing from Jason Fried: it sounds like something he’d say…) Don’t go out and raise a ton of money right away. Instead, give yourself just enough to get going, and use the limits that imposes to motivate yourself.
Worth a visit and worth your time reading.
(Thanks to Pablo at the World Bank for passing this along).
Off to one last Spring Break round of golf…..

Study on Women Entrepreneurs from Around the Globe

Based upon survey data from more than 107,400 respondents in 35 countries, today’s GEM Women report, prepared by scholars at the Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College, gives a clear indication that while women entrepreneurs often exhibit patterns of behavior similar to those of men, a gender gap nonetheless exists for entrepreneurial activity across the globe.
Women most likely to be entrepreneurs are those who hold jobs, have higher levels of household income and education, and have confidence in their level of skill and in the possibility of their success.
For the first time, GEM divided countries into middle- and high-income clusters, on the basis of per capita gross domestic product (GDP), and identified entrepreneurs by stage of business process. The report found that women’s businesses in high-income countries are just as likely to survive and thrive as men’s. It;s a different story in the middle-income cluster where the survival rate is significantly lower than that of a man’s business. Also, young women (25 to 34) are more active in ‘early-stage’ enterprises in middle-income countries while women 35-44 are the most likely to lead ‘established’ businesses.
Despite these encouraging signs, a gender gap nonetheless persists. On average, men remain nearly twice as likely as women to start a new business. In high-income countries, the gender gap is greatest, while in middle-income countries it narrows somewhat.

When Government Fails, Where Does it Turn?

Time after time governments look to the private sector to bail them out of financial and performance failures that are a result of their own incompetence.
The No Child Left Behind legislation established performance standards for public education. Many of those schools that cannot meet these standards are looking to privately owned educational businesses to improve their performance. In Memphis, privately owned tutoring businesses have become a growth industry with the public school system becoming their biggest customer.
One irony of such privatization efforts is that the same government agencies that cannot perform in the first place, often serve in an oversight function over the private businesses they hired to pull their bacon out of the fire.

Spring Break

One of the benefits of working at a University is Spring Break. We will be starting our spring break this weekend here at Belmont. Although we will be hanging around Nashville, my blogging may be hit or miss this next week. I have business plans to grade and golf courses to conquer……
shula's 2002.JPG