Creating Great Workplaces

One of the reasons that many entrepreneurs go into business is to create great places to work.  They want to create an environment where people are treated well and allowed to excel.

Winning Workplaces is a nonprofit committed to helping small and midsize organizations create high-performance workplaces.  They offer many good ideas on how to improve the work climate and culture in entrepreneurial ventures.  In addition to their website, they have a very good blog and a monthly on-line newsletter that you can subscribe to here.

Losing Hope?

If the results of a new survey from Junior Achievement are correct, the youth of today may be losing hope in entrepreneurship as a career path.  From Independent Street:

A poll released yesterday by Junior Achievement USA, a Colorado Springs, Colo., organization that hosts after-school programs for youth, found that fewer teens surveyed were interested in eventually starting their own businesses than just a year earlier. It found 60% of the 712 13- to 18-year-olds surveyed indicated they’d be interested in becoming entrepreneurs, compared with 67% in 2007.

While this percent is still very high historically speaking, the downward trend is alarming.  Entrepreneurship is the hope for our future growth and we need this generation to be ready to lead the way.

Go Pack!!

We have had the pleasure of attending two Green Bay Packer games over the past few weeks. 

Here we are this past Sunday at frozen Lambeau field in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

 

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And here we are from a couple of weeks ago at the Packer game in sunny and warm Nashville.

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Real Estate, Like Good Bread, Takes Patience

One of our favorite entrepreneurs at Belmont is Cordia Harrington, a.k.a. “The Bun Lady.”

She has had a successful entrepreneurial career first in real estate, then as a McDonald’s franchisee, and now with her commercial bakeries that are suppliers of buns and other breads to companies such as McDonald’s and O’Charley’s.

She gave a talk in York, PA and touched on the current real estate market.  From Today’s Financial News:

When Harrington started her real estate business when mortgage rates were 17%, they called her crazy. When she bought her first McDonald’s restaurant, a dilapidated low-volume franchise, they called her crazy. When she sold those businesses to build a state-of-the-art bakery from the ground up, they called her crazy.

But Harrington took advantage of fear in the markets to create a small fortune. Now she sees the current financial calamity as another fantastic growth opportunity. And she is urging entrepreneurs to follow in her footsteps.

With the real estate industry in the worst shape we have witnessed in decades, this is an opportunity to make investments that have the potential to pay of for years to come. Just as Harrington’s bread takes time to rise, so will the real estate market.

With the right ingredients, this market has the potential to rise into a fantastic wealth-generating opportunity.

Turning Cell Phones into a Business Platform

Belmont alumnus Colin Polidor and his brother Parker Polidor run a business a called Cell Journalist, which connects media outlets with their audience by providing a platform for sharing citizen journalism.  The Cell Journalist platform is an integrated turnkey solution that allows users to submit images and videos directly from mobile phones or upload from the media outlet’s website.  Features like rate, tag, share, and the contest engine continually drive traffic back to the media outlet’s website.  

 

Recently, Cell Journalist released an iPhone app that will allow each of its clients to have their own branded iPhone app for users to submit images quickly and easily from their iPhones.  Clients include E.W. Scripps Company, Raycom Media, Young Broadcasting, GateHouse Media, and several more independent print publications.

 

Cell Journalist’s technology helped KPLC-TV win the big story during hurricane Ike.   

Get Honest with Yourself

During the recent robust times of economic boom we can all think of entrepreneurs who succeeded in spite of themselves.  Even with a marginal business model and mediocre talent, these lucky entrepreneurs benefited from an economic tide that seemed to float a lot of boats that seemed to be less than seaworthy.  

Now it is time to get realistic and be honest with yourself as you launch and grow your ventures.  I like the words of advice offered by Nathaniel Whittemore at the blog Social Entrepreneurship: 

To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to know not just what you’re good at, but where you flop. Whether your enterprise is social or financial, you need to have a level of self-awareness that demands you surround yourself with folks with complementary strengths. In today’s world especially, there’s nothing more important than the team. Lose the pride, figure out what you suck at, build from there.

Marginal, Indeed!

Dawn Rivers Baker, the editor and publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal, has joined her voice to my debate with Professor Shane in her blog The Journal Blogger.

Here is part of what she writes:

But there’s something else about Professor Shane’s position that bothers me — something I’ve said before in this blog.

It may be true that policy makers seek to create jobs and promote growth but it’s worth considering why policy makers do that. Isn’t the point of jobs and growth supposed to be their ability to allow people to achieve financially sustainable and comfortable lives so that they can live happily?

Is making people happy something to be sneered at?

A great point!  Success for entrepreneurs is almost always so much more than the financial outcomes of the venture.

SBA Backed Loans Dry Up

The Wall Street Journal reports that credit is getting even tighter for small business:

When entrepreneurs can’t get conventional loans, they traditionally turn to loans backed by the Small Business Administration. But in recent months — as many banks turned away businesses and slashed credit lines — SBA lending also has dried up substantially. The retrenchment has become especially pronounced in the past couple of weeks.

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Although some of this is due to decreasing demand, tightening credit and standards seems to also be behind the steep drop in small business lending.

When corporate America is lining up for help we seem to be ready to bail them out no matter how bad their prospects.  But, it seems that at the same time we are turning our backs on small business.

“If Anything Matters then Everything Matters”

If you recognize the quote in the title of this post, then you have probably read The Shack, by William Paul Young.

If you have not read this book I highly recommend it.  It is not a book about entrepreneurship, per se, but it is about life and what is really important in our lives.  So I guess, in a way, it is about how we choose to conduct ourselves as entrepreneurs. 

One of my favorite quotes from this book comes from a conversation between Jesus and the protagonist of the book named Mack.  Jesus says to Mack the following about why we work:

Men, in general, find it very hard to turn from the works of their hands, their own quests for power and security and significance, and return to me.

Thanks to Robin Anderson, Dean of the College of Business at University of Portland, for handing me a copy of The Shack when I was there to give a talk on our new book a couple of weeks ago.  I recommend you order a copy of your own.