Utah’s Student Venture Fund

Newsweek reports on the University of Utah venture fund that was set up by students in their business program. They have recently closed the million venture student run fund that will invest in high growth start-ups. Investments for the fund were raised from private investors looking for traditional high VC returns. The fund has already gotten active in doing deals, including this one involved in VoIP.
(Thanks to Bruce S. for passing this along).

Bill Proposes to Strengthen Regulatory Flexibility for Small Business

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) has introduced a bill that intends to make it easier for small businesses to comply with complex and confusing federal regulations. From the Office of Advocacy of the SBA:
The Small Business Compliance Assistance Enhancement Act of 2005 amends the 1996 Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA), a law that bolsters the Office of Advocacy’s ability to reduce regulatory barriers that can stifle entrepreneurial growth. It will place new emphasis on compliance guides that agencies are required to write, so that small businesses can better understand complex rules and regulations. It also requires agencies to report annually on their efforts to comply with this law.
“Senator Snowe’s bill helps ensure that federal agencies issue compliance guides that are helpful for the small business community,” said Thomas M. Sullivan, Chief Counsel for Advocacy. “The bill recognizes that small businesses often need compliance help before new rules go into effect.”
This law would be another important step forward in improving the regulatory environment for entrepreneurial ventures.

Thomas Merton on Overwork

Thomas Merton is one of my favorite writers, so when Prof. Harry Hollis passed this quote along to me I had to share it here:
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence (and that is) activism and overwork….The rush and pressure of modern life are a form of violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our won work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. (Thomas Merton)

Angels Looking for Deals

StartupJournal reports that angle investors are “dusting off their calculators and starting to get serious” about doing deals. They are coming together in increasing numbers in both formal networks and informal investment clubs to find good deals to invest in. They also seem to be branching out in the types of deals they are considering. Many angels now seem to be interested in more localized long-term investments in local businesses, including “restaurants, roofing companies and the like.” This is a change from their typical focus on high growth, technology related deals.
This is very encouraging for our entrepreneurial economic growth over the next several years, particularly when coupled with the recent reports of the excess of cash that is sitting in VC funds ready to invest in new deals.

Teach a Man to Fish….

The Shell Foundation has issued a new report titled Enterprise Solutions to Poverty: Opportunities and Challenges for the International Development Community and Big Business in which they argue that simply dumping aid into developing countries is an ineffective strategy to combat poverty. It is a strategy that does very little to improve conditions over the long term. They also assert that there could never be enough funding to “make an appreciable dent on the scale of poverty that still exists.”
They argue that the money that is available should be targeted toward initiatives that stimulate local economic development that relies on developing local entrepreneurs. And in addition to funding, business know-how should also be provided to assure long term success. They call on large corporations and their foundations to support these efforts to generate entrepreneurial economies all over the world.
While philosophically I agree http://laparkan.com/buy-tadalafil/ with the premise of this report, I do have some worry of their intended strategy. They link their proposal explicitly to the UN’s Millennium Project, which will do little more that create another huge rat hole that we pour well-intended money into with little chances of it really doing much good.
We don’t need this money to go into national governmental agencies, or even worse a new UN agency, that will apply very little of the funding to its intended purposes of spurring entrepreneurship as a tool to reduce poverty. Such agencies create a huge bureaucratic overhead that does no direct good for the poor. As any bootstrapping entrepreneur will tell you, overhead is money that does nothing to produce product or provide a service for the customer.
(The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship provided the link to the Shell Foundation report).

Customer Newsletters

An age old bootstrap marketing tool is a customer newsletter. NFIB gives several tips for developing an effective newsletter as part of your marketing tool kit. Here is a summary:
– Set up a template with a good design.
– Write articles based on specific topics that you know are interesting to your customers.
– Ask for contributions from your customers.
– Hire a freelance writer to edit the text before flowing it into the columns.
– Always proof the newsletter in a printout, not merely on your computer screen.
– Set the newsletter aside overnight and review it again in the morning.
– Using a printer is usually worth it because the quality will be higher, especially when using color.
– Create mailing labels using your customer list.
– Consider creating an electronic version of your newsletter.
One additional idea that I would suggest is to write articles that highlight your customer’s businesses.
Many businesses are taking their newsletters onto the Internet. Here is an example from one of our alumni, Charles Hagood of TAG.
One important piece of advice that I would offer is to make sure that this is something that you have the time, interest, material, and resources to continue over time. If it is an interesting and useful newsletter they will notice if you give up on it and stop sending it to them. And that will send a negative message to your customer base that could hurt your sales.

More on What is a Small Business

The SBA has another interesting twist in their definition of what is a small business. If you were a small business in the past you might still be considered a small business as it relates to government contracts and programs. The SBA “grandfathers” businesses for up to five that used to be considered small businesses under their vast array of categories and criteria. Small business owners have voiced their displeasure with this rule as reported at NFIB.