In 2005, I took the plunge from climbing the corporate ladder to entrepreneurship.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. More done out of frustration with the way communication results were handled (or not handled) inside agencies.

I thought I had a better way.

I did have a better way, but it took me five years to get the business to a point that we could do things differently. To the point other business leaders would listen to something so radically different than what they were hearing from other PR/marketing/communication firms.

It wasn’t because we couldn’t prove it worked. We could. It was because I had to learn how to jump from big budgets, big funding, and lots of resources to, well, nothing.

This is a point made in a recent Forbes article, “Confessions of a Successful Entrepreneur.” Continue Reading »

I’m baaaaack!

I hope everyone had great holidays. I did…and I’m dragging a bit this morning because of it. I was getting used to sleeping until 7:30 every morning!

Because it’s the first day back for many of us, this isn’t going to be a heady blog post.

I have a feeling. I think 2012 is going to be a very good year. It’s going to be a good year for the economy, for business, and for a lot of us personally. Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is by Molli Megasko.

It’s Facebook question of the week time.

I hope I don’t disappoint anyone, but I’m replacing Gini Dietrich this week.  She asked me to help her out as she actually is taking some vacation days, believe it or not.

Her question to me was…

“Molli, you’ve worked at Arment Dietrich for nearly six years. During those six years, what are the top three accomplishments you’ve seen the firm achieve?” Continue Reading »

Today’s guest post is written by Lisa Gerber. 

My first real job in the PR industry was working with downtown Seattle retailers assisting them with cooperative branding and marketing initiatives.

Right away, I noticed two types of business owners: The type who are passionate about their business and curious about how to apply new ideas to their models; and the victims, who blame outside sources for everything. They looked to their landlord and their neighborhood association to bring them traffic.

To the latter, I wish I could have said then, what I’m about to say now: You shouldn’t be in business.  Continue Reading »

Last week I was on the west coast speaking with a group of senior leaders who are interested in using the web to grow their businesses. The topic was generating leads through inbound PR and marketing.

As I do, I was showing real-time analytics for Arment Dietrich, Spin Sucks, and some of our clients. I am, after all, a business owner who wants to see how all of our online efforts contribute to the growth of both the traditional PR firm and the online business, Spin Sucks Pro.

About halfway through the three hour workshop, a gentleman raised his hand and said, “How do you do all of this? When do you find the time and run two businesses?” Continue Reading »

Up at 5 a.m. Check email, Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn groups and discussions, text messages, blog traffic, web traffic, and PostRank analytics all while brushing your teeth and feeding kids or pets.

Make time to exercise, do some writing, get ready for work.

Work a full day.

Rush home to make and have dinner with your family.

Check email, Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn groups and discussions, text messages, blog traffic, web traffic, and PostRank analytics.

Sleep by 11 p.m. Do it again the next day.

How familiar does this sound? Maybe there is a tweak or two in there, but if you’re an entrepreneur, your days are long, your weeks are long, your months are long, and your years fly by while you’re left wondering where your time went. Continue Reading »

This first ran on DIY Blogger, Dino Dogan’s blog, during his Fear of Marketing week. If you don’t know Dino, DIY Blogger, or what he and Dan Cristo are doing with Triberr, I suggest you check it all out! And, if you read this over there, just move to the comments. We all know that’s where the real action is anyway.

I spend a good amount of my speaking time with Vistage groups across the country.

Vistage, if you don’t know, is a CEO membership organization. Which means, in order to join, you have to be an entrepreneur or professional manager. Every month you sit around the table with 15 of your peers to discuss issues and challenges you can’t discuss at work.

One of the things they recognize in their members is they do not, in fact, know everything. So they bring speakers in every month on different topics: Leadership, communication, financials, HR, unions, law, etc.

My topic is doing business on the web through marketing, communication, advertising, HR, sales, and customer service. Continue Reading »

Barbara Weaver Smith is founder and president of The Whale Hunters, a strategic sales coaching company that helps small businesses grow fast by selling bigger deals to bigger customers.

What are you doing to be a post-recession winner?

Historically, we know that recessions spur innovation, big ideas, new products, and new services that propel small companies to greatness.  Small companies benefit more than larger companies, simply because many big companies survive by cutting costs and dismissing personnel–not great innovation strategies.

So, if you’ve survived and (I hope) thrived during the recession, you should be poised to take your company to a much higher level of performance in 2011.

But it’s not automatic.  It’s time to adopt a whole new perspective on business development.

First,  three key pieces of investigation to complete: Continue Reading »

This ran in the January issue of Franchise Times so it’s franchise-specific. But I think you’ll really appreciate the case study that comes from building a business through Facebook ads.

Think you can’t have an ROI from Facebook? Think again. Wholesome Tummies, a franchise out of Florida, has used Facebook (and Facebook alone) to gain five new franchisees since February of 2009.

A business started in order to change school meal plans from high-fat and processed foods to more fresh and natural selections, they began using Facebook because as Samantha Gotlib, co-founder and president, says, “I love Facebook!” (And really, who doesn’t?) Continue Reading »

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Christopher Burgess in person. He is a senior security advisor at Cisco and we had a delightful debate about social media, networking online, and location-based technologies. A blog post with his advice on keeping yourself safe online is forthcoming, but today I want to talk about the discussion we had around paying employees for innovative ideas.

Though I don’t have all of the details, the gist of this program is that Cisco pays $500 to every employee who comes up with an idea, a few thousand for those whose ideas are good, and a few thousand more if a patent is sought and the company uses that idea. Cool idea, right? So, why then, other than the person who sends in several hundred ideas a week (known as internal spam), is no one taking part of this program?

While I rode my bike the next morning, I was thinking about that and about Daniel Pink’s philosophy in “Drive.” If you’ve not read the book, I highly recommend it, but if you want to get the Cliff’s Notes version, watch this 12 minute video clip, “The surprising truth about what motivates us” (though, I warn you, it may make you car sick – it did me). Continue Reading »