Urgency Flow

Two years ago, Eli Reich was a mechanical engineer consultant for a Seattle wind energy company when his messenger bag was stolen. The environmentally conscious Reich, who rode his bike to work every day, decided that instead of buying a new one, he would simply fashion another bag out of used bicycle-tire inner tubes that were lying around his house. Soon compliments on his sturdy black handmade messenger bag turned into requests. “That was the catalyst,” says Reich, who obtained a business license, gave up his day job, and quickly launched Alchemy Goods in the basement of his apartment building. The company’s motto: “Turning useless into useful.”

When Marty Metro and his wife added up the number of times each of them had moved over the years, it came out to an astounding 29 times. Metro knew they weren’t alone in using massive amounts of cardboard boxes and was convinced he could help movers, businesses and the environment by creating a solution to the cardboard quandary. For now, BoomerangBoxes.com offers an online exchange for those outside the delivery area to link up and exchange boxes with others for a nominal fee. With annual sales projections exceeding $750,000, the company boasts 75 percent-plus gross margins.

Read the whole story on nichegeek.com

With ongoing, rampant unemployment, owners and managers of companies large and small might be thinking they don’t need to do much to keep employees happy. With so few options out there, employees should be happy to have any job, right? Wrong!

Why? Because experts say that unless companies do what they can now to keep employees content, there will be a huge exodus of talent once the economy turns.

One strategy to keep employees satisfied and motivated is to create a bonus program targeted at generating new business. “It is a prime time to utilize bonuses to improve productivity . . . and be a boon to employee morale,” says Christina Stovall, director at Odyssey OneSource, a human resources outsourcing firm.

Paul Gavejian, managing director of Total Compensation Solutions, which works with many small- and medium-size firms to design incentive plans, says he’s seen an increase in the use of these plans as companies try to minimize fixed costs. “By motivating professional staff and managers to modify their behavior in some way–do more sales calls, increase hours worked, generate more news and strategies, achieve higher profit, or reduce operating costs–then a company can increase revenues and profits,” says Gavejian. “The increased profits become the funding mechanism for the bonus program.” Read more

This article was originally published on entrepreneur.com

To the best of my knowledge, the drive-up service window belonged to the banking industry before anybody else latched on to it. But it sure does account for a lot of the fast-food industry’s sales. It is also used by dry cleaners, beverage stores, video rental stores and florists. In Las Vegas, one casino has a drive-up betting window for sports bettors. There are probably others using it that I haven’t noticed and still others who could and should be using it.

Somebody in the fast-food business “stole” this idea. My vision is of a McDonald’s executive sitting in his car in the bank drive-through line on Friday afternoon when it hits him–”Hey, I don’t think we can fit the milkshakes in the little tube, but outside of that, this could work for us!”

Just about every great idea came from something already created or used. The enormously valuable Batman® franchise–made into money via blockbuster movies, cartoons, comic books and merchandise–exists because a couple guys borrowed pieces and parts from predecessor characters, notably The Shadow and Zorro. An entire genre of highly successful TV infomercials and direct-response commercials merely moved carnival, boardwalk, and country fair pitchmen and demonstrable products to television. QVC is a Tupperware® home party conducted on TV for a million people in their own living rooms–and Tupperware® is even sold on the home shopping channel. Fractional jet ownership came from timeshare real estate. On and on and on. Somewhere, right now, outside your business and its industry and industry norms, in an apparently unrelated business, lies the moveable idea that could revolutionize your profits. Read more

This article was originally published on entrepreneur.com

Urgency Flow is inspired by the Theory of Constraints, Getting Things Done, the Four-hour Workweek and visions like this. The common denominator is focus and awareness of the present moment, being as agile and virtual as possible. So we try to find a link between our vision and our daily tasks. And that may be hard sometimes. Of course, it’s not always possible to live according to the principles of a theory or concept; the point is you do this as much as possible. I found a nice story on the Microsoft website dealing with the ‘vision for business’ problem.

Q: I went to a seminar recently and the speaker talked a lot about the importance of having a “vision” for your business. I don’t really get this. I thought that as long as I created a good business that paid people fairly, offered exceptional service, and made a nice profit, I was doing OK. Right?
— Bob, St. Lake City

A: There is nothing wrong with what you are doing, and you certainly do not have to create a vision for your business if you do not want to. Many businesses do just fine producing their product or service, having a good time working together, and making money.
That said, I must admit, however, that I am partial to idea of creating a vision for your small business. What I know from my own experience of working with small businesses is that the best ones, the exceptional ones, are guided by an owner’s vision of what the business is — and should and could be. These are visionary businesses. Read more

If our business is going to achieve what we want it to achieve, it has to be fit. Not necessarily lean and mean, but strong and healthy enough to run efficiently and tackle new challenges. Our business finances are the underpinnings of our business’s strength; as they go, so goes the business. Follow the steps in this business finance makeover, from separating your personal and business finances through financial statement analysis, to make sure that your business finances are in good shape.

1) Separate your personal and business finances.
As I say in 7 Ways to Make Record Management Easy, a business bank account is absolutely necessary for good business record management. If you haven’t done this already, you need to get a separate business bank account and make sure you use it only for business purposes. The cost of a business bank account is nothing compared to the time and trouble you might end up spending trying to unsnarl your books or figure out a paper trail if you were ever audited. Read more

This article was originally published on about.com

“Being a home-based business owner is not for everybody. Focusing has never really been my problem, but some people physically need to drive away from their house to find structure. The first part of starting a home-based business is recognizing what kind of personality you have. If you need someone else to give you that structure, or if you are a procrastinator, a home office is probably not the best thing for you.”

–Jim Anderson, LeadDog Consulting

Check out the full slideshow here.

The new year is a great time to take in new ideas for growing your business. Here’s several intriguing books that recently hit my shelf–in some cases, my virtual shelf. Here’s an upcoming book, due out next month, that sounds really useful for today’s economy: Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones by Joseph Jaffe. Retaining customers is the new customer acquisition, Jaffe says. The marketer and author of the Jaffe Juice blog offers his tips for how to keep existing customers and grow your relationships with them.

Is your business going south? Author Gary Brose, also known as The Small Business Sherpa, believes you can turn things around with the right employee bonus program. He describes his system in Bonus Your Way to Profits!His bio says he is the president of four corporations, so here’s hoping he’s got some time-management tips for us as well.

If you want to learn more about how to ride social media to business success, you can read how 15 of today’s social-media stars leveraged their blogs to build consulting businesses, land book deals and more in the lengthy e-bookBeyond Blogging by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe Jones. Among the profile subjects are Mashable’s Peter Cashmore;uber-blogger Chris Brogan, the co-author of Trust Agents;and wine-Web-video sensation Gary Vaynerchuk, whose blog led to publication of his business book Crush It!(Full disclosure: I was sent a complimentary download of this book.) Read more

This article was originally published on entrepreneur.com

What do we think of when we think of fiscal year end? Taxes! What else? That’s why for businesses, year end is the perfect time to do your business planning for the following year. You’re already dealing with the books so why not do some analysis and make some decisions to ensure that your business prospers over the coming year?

From getting your financial books in order through setting business goals for the coming year, this year end checklist for small businesses will help you get your income taxes in order and get your business planning off to a good start.

This article was originally published on http://sbinfocanada.about.com

Triathlon participation is at an all-time high, according to USA Triathlon. A recent study the organization commissioned noted that a large number of triathletes are business professionals who have a passion (or, in my case, an addiction) to the multi-sport life, with hundreds of CEOs and business leaders actively participating in triathlons each year.

A former competitive swimmer and avid runner, I started participating in multi-sport endurance events in late 2008 as way to cope with the loss of my father to heart disease. Prior to this, I had long and religiously adhered to a fitness regimen that I found to be highly beneficial to both my physical and mental state, but I didn’t expect that my newfound pursuit of performance-based fitness would also help me perform better as a business owner, industry leader and entrepreneur. Read more

This article was originally published on entrepreneur.com