The Miami Herald ran an interview this week with Treasury Secretary John Snow (thanks to RM Cornwall for the heads up on this fascinating article). In this interview, Snow gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, someone in the federal government actually is beginning to understand that our hope for the future lies in the entrepreneurial economy that has emerged over the past twenty years. This economic transformation has created the first entrepreneurial recovery we have experienced in modern American history.
New feature: reverb “off the wall”
I have had the pleasure to work with a group of staff, faculty and students to plan a new program here at Belmont to enhance the study of entrepreneurship. The university has generously provided us with three prime retail spaces in our new Curb Center building. One space will open this Friday. It will house Boulevard Art and Design, which is a cooperative program with our Art Department. It will feature a retail art gallery and a graphic design business. The second business, opening around March 1st, will be reverb media. reverb will feature new and used CD’s and DVD’s, with a focus on music produced and/or performed by Belmont students and alumni (which includes Trisha Yearwood and Brad Paisley, just to name two). The students launding this business have decided to chronicle their story for you in my blog site. Click on the “Continue reading…” below to see their first installment.
Strategy and Entrepreneurship
BusinessPundit (Go Wildcat’s, indeed) has a great discussion on the role of strategic decision making and entrepreneurship. He hits it right on the head when he says that for the entrepreneur, strategy and execution must be linked together as one. That has been my experience as well.
What is “Bankable”?
The most confusing and frustrating relationships for many entrepreneurs are those with bankers. It can seem like banker speak a completely different language to many entrepreneurs. In fact, it is not so much like a language difference as it is a difference in culture. To understand bankers, entrepreneurs must learn about the norms, customs, and values that are part of this banking culture.
Visit Carnival of the Capitalists
Carnival of the Capitalists is up for this week. Visit it here.
Entrepreneurship is like….
Entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that lends itself to metaphors. The experiences can be so overwhelming, so new and so complex that it can be easier sometimes to think about it all using a metaphor. As I?ve written about before, I like to think about the experience in terms of golfing. Others have compared it to marriage, a chess game, or being ping pong ball in a game of table tennis. During the growth period in our business, I often likened the experience to that of the life of heavy weight boxer. There were months of boring preparation and conditioning followed by minutes of adrenalin, rush, and terror when the actual match occurred. Here is a comparison of entrepreneurship to surfing that someone recently shared with me. Whatever your metaphor, it can help create sense out of a life that can at times feel like chaos (yet another metaphor!).
Top 10 Reasons To Love Small Business
WASHINGTON, D.C. ? “Just in time for Valentines Day the Office of Advocacy of the SBA offers the top 10 reasons to love small business, the heart of the American economy.
Top 10 Reasons To Love Small Business
10. Small businesses make up more than 99.7% of all employers.
9. Small businesses create more than 50 percent of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
8. Small patenting firms produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.
7. The 22.9 million small businesses in the United States are located in virtually every neighborhood.
6. Small businesses employ about 50 percent of all private sector workers.
5. Home-based businesses account for 53 percent of all small businesses.
4. Small businesses make up 97 percent of exporters and produce 29 percent of all export value.
3. Small businesses with employees start-up at a rate of over 500,000 per year.
2. Four years after start-up, half of all small businesses with employees remain open.
1. The latest figures show that small businesses create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy.”
Source: Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA)
Positioning versus Branding
At his blog, CRM Mastery E-Journal, Jim Berkowitz discusses the differences between positioning a product in the market versus the ever popular notion of branding. Branding is making customers aware of a product name so they grab that product based on this name awareness. Positioning entails making customers aware of the attributes of your product during the actual decision making process for a purchase. Positioning is usually much less costly and works much more quickly.
Program supporting immigrant entrepreneurs
The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship has a link to an article in the Washington Post about a new fund that supports first and second generation American entrepreneurs. Hats off to Blue Water Capital for taking the risk of creating this fund (specialized funds like this do not have a stellar track record). If successful, this could be a model for other parts of the country with large groups of entrepreneurial minded immigrants who recognize the power of free enterprise in this country.
Belmont’s Entrepreneurship Program in the News
We are beginning to roll out some of our new programs in entrepreneurship here at Belmont. Here is a link (here is the continution of that article) to one of these programs in which students will be starting and running real retail businesses as part of a living lab. These projects involve students from our art, graphic design, music business and entrepreneurship majors all working together to start and run two new ventures.