Small Business Essentials

Hello, and welcome to the Carnival of the Capitalists for Monday, July 23rd, 2007. I, Nikole Gipps, am your host for today. I maintain 2 blogs: the one you are reading this on, Small Business Essentials, and another one, Web Technology for Entrepreneurs, which is hosted at StartupNation. I also run a web design and marketing firm, NHG Consulting, which mainly works with small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Two notes before I get started:

• If you like this Carnival, you can see others at the CotC homepage. The founders of the CotC have also taken this "best of the best" concept one step further, creating the site MBA by Blog, which showcases the most educational posts of all time. I’m very excited about this concept, and I invite everyone to contribute to the project so that we can truly reward those who are making some really great content out there.
• Continuing on with our "best of the best" theme, I invite you homepreneurs out there to check out and enter the StartupNation Home Based 100 Contest. This is an annual ranking of the best home-based businesses and a great opportunity to show everyone how great your business is!

And now, on with the Carnival!

MANAGEMENT

Adam Pieniazek provides us with a terrific academic case study of Intuit as a shining example of good leadership and strong corporate culture. I had to call the TurboTax people once for an issue with their online small business product. Their customer service really did exceed my expectations, and now I see that my experience was a reflection of their internal culture and goal to put people first.

Rob May wanted to tell us all that he got an A on his paper, so he wrapped it in a great story about separating personal views from facts in making business decisions over at Business Pundit.

Inspired by Rob, Jim Stroup wants to remind us to Avoid Group Think at Managing Leadership.

Ann Bares gives us insight on Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, and offers her own take on poorly conceived rewards systems, at Compensation Force.

I started working for myself so I didn’t have to deal with all the managers I once hated—and then I became one of those tyrants myself. If you need a little improvement yourself, check out Wally Bock’s How the Great Supervisors Do It.

Pawel Brodzinski offers us 20 quick pointers on how to build a team.

BUSINESS

Fuqua is a funny name, but I am hoping they can help those Duke boys out with their football program. It’s funny how we all quickly forget that sports is a business, even in college—and that it sometimes takes solid business knowledge to get a team back on track. (Just look at what businessman and lawyer Theo Epstein did for the Red Sox!)

Charles Green shares with us some interesting statistics on trust and how people view certain professions. I didn’t see "web designer" on his list, but from the horror stories I hear from clients about their previous experiences, I’m pretty sure the profession will be in there with "psychics, car salesman, and politicians" soon enough. I’ll have to be careful though—he also mentions that there are consequences to changing perception too quickly.

I wrote an article a while back called Saying No to Non-Ideal Clients. Matt Crandall at Voodoo Turle takes you that next step by telling you to get rid of those current clients that are bringing you down.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

We can learn 20 ways to finance a business startup from Raj Dash at the Bootstrapper. A client of mine, Mark Bebout, recently mentioned that most startups fail from a lack of funding—something I can completely agree with. So when you are bootstrapping your new business venture, finding creative sources of funding is a MUST!

Life Learning Today asks "Should You Start Your Own Work at Home Business?" For me, the answer was a really obvious YES, but you can make this call for yourself after reading these pros and cons.

As a mother, I often give thought to how I can encourage entrepreneurial spirit in my own child. This is why I have included the entry Kids and Entrepreneurship, to remind us all to encourage entrepreneurship in our children. This also seems like a good time to plug Entrepreneurship USA for their contributions to encouraging entrepreneurship in young people across the country.

ACHEIVING GOALS

I know personal issues are often excluded from the CotC, but as I’m a homepreneur myself, business and personal achievement are often one and the same. That is why I have chosen to include these select few off-topic entries:

When my daughter was born nearly 2 years ago, I pretty much had to give up TV because she would never let me make it through a single show. I thought I would miss it, but I haven’t—and now I feel so much more enthusiastic and product. Apparently Jeffrey Strain over at the Saving Advice Blog would agree with me—although I doubt he still manages to watch 42 minutes (no commercials!) of Grey’s Anatomy online every week at ABC.com.

Over at Free Money Finance, we learn that "soft" skills are sometimes more important to learn in college than actual book knowledge. I’d agree that a lot of the technical knowledge I use now was learned outside of the classroom during my college years—but I’m still trying to justify that $120K price tag to myself! This may be something you’d want to take into consideration before heading back to school, although I am the last person to discount the value of a good education and the opportunities that are presented to you while you are there.

This is an article I found while looking through today’s submissions, and it is good advice that I really should be following up on: Optimize Your Work-at-Home Time With 22 Simple Schedule Tweaks So read up all you homepreneurs, and be more productive!

Thanks to the Millionaire Mommy Next Door, I feel richer already. I think her commenters took the exercise a little too litteral though, as I understood it to be just a simple exercise in dreaming big and visualizing your goals. Not a crafty person? You could probably just write your business goals on paper and tape it to your wall.

THE MARKET

Dax Desai gets the award for the most creative investment tactic I have ever heard of. You can learn about it in How to earn 12.28% in a 4.5% World.

James Hamilton at Econbrowser asks "Is OPEC Relevant?" (He thinks not.)

Michael Dawson is going to help you offset the increasing price of food by investing your money wisely in 100 Stocks to Combat Rising Food Prices.

BOOK REVIEWS

Blog Business World offers this interesting review of Funny Business, an even more interesting-sounding book. Thanks to Wayne Hulbert for that one.

LEGAL / GOVERNMENT

Now there’s a public perception problem I wouldn’t want to tackle: Leon Gettler has a terrific article on how government bureaucracy is creating a PR nightmare for some US companies thanks to outdated information at Sox First.

John at QueerCents would like us to Save Internet Radio. Quite honestly, the royalties they are trying to charge are insane for what those stations take in for advertising. The math just doesn’t add up!

AN INVITATION TO READERS

Have you read anything great in the past week that you thought should have appeared here? Feel free to add it in the comments below!

If you would like to be considered for future carnivals, you can submit your entry here.If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please link to it!