Radio Free Enterprise

I’ve never heard of Todd Brown before. Now that I have, I’m not sure that I’ll buy what he’s selling when he gets around to trying to sell it to me.

But there’s one thing that I know Todd Brown and I agree on: giving away free information is a great way to build your book of business. He and I both believe in and are practitioners of Education-Based Marketing.

Todd has put together a page full of nine free informational videos entitled Habits Of The Top Internet Marketers. I watched the first and second - and half of the third - before I decided I had had enough.

But that’s okay because a great maxim of Education-Based Marketing is that you want your audience to either turn up the volume or change the channel. I chose to do the latter for a number of reasons including the green-screen background effect he’s using, the tone, volume and tempo of his speaking voice, and because I didn’t find myself learning anything new or interesting.

Others will find great value in his message and turn up the volume to 11 by opting into his email list.

The primary point I want to drive home is that Todd is reaching a huge new audience of potential customers by casting his bread upon the waters in the form of potentially valuable information available for the asking. If you’ve watched or listened to any of my information on Education-Based Marketing, you’ll know that I believe he’s onto something.

People often ask me about my background - where I cut my teeth in business. In this podcast you get a pretty clear peek at my entrepreneurial roots in the printing business.

This week I was invited to speak to the Franklin Technical Society, a group of folks involved in providing printing and information services to government agencies, corporations and other large organizations here in the Washington, DC area. It was quite a trip down memory lane.

In attendance were executives from the American Red Cross, Library of Congress, Government Printing Office, United States Army and large local printing companies including Stephenson Printing and our hosts, Goodway Graphics.

Though I spent over 25 years in the printing industry, it had been at least six since I last addressed a room full of printers and their clients. This industry has been enduring wave after wave of technological onslaught for decades. And, every time they think they can come up for air, another unforseen marketplace upheaval rocks their world.

Well before desktop publishing, optical disks, the Internet and sub-$100 desktop inkjet printers with photographic quality, printers have dealt with revolutions like the Linotype in the late 19th Century and offset printing in the mid-20th Century. The pace of change only seems to accelerate over time.

If you’d like to hear me tell some stories on myself, and learn about how one industry has continually adapted to change, give a listen to this week’s podcast. And post a comment to let me know what you think.

In just our third year on the list, owners of small businesses topped the Harris Interactive poll of most trusted leaders of societal institutions in America.

In 2007, over half of U.S. adults (54%) polled expressed a great deal of confidence in leaders of small business, followed by the military at 45%. University and medical leaders tied for third at 37%.

Other institutions such as Congress, religious leaders and law firms did not fare so well. The White House has dropped from 50% to 28% in just five years. OUCH!

I am very pleased to learn of these results as they support my experience that the vast majority of business owners are extremely hard working individuals whose high level of personal and professional ethics are manifested in a superior customer experience.

The fact is, that’s what business owners have to do to succeed. Today’s consumer is not only smart - but well informed. They have access to almost unlimited information and innumerable options when making their purchase decisions. Their belief in small business owners is based on their experience, not on some idealized notion of the The Great American Entrepreneur.

Congratulations.

Business owners have it all: wealth, power, prestige, a life of ease.

Now they even have their own feature film: The Call of The Enterpreneur.

According to the Acton Institute (producers of the film) PowerBlog:

The Call of the Entrepreneur tells the stories of three entrepreneurs: one a farmer in rural Evart, Michigan, another a mercantile banker in New York, and finally an entrepreneur in Hong Kong, China. The film examines the drive behind what these people do: Why are they driven to create wealth? Why do they produce? Who does it benefit?

The film premieres May 17 in Grand Rapids, Michigan and will probably be available on DVD shortly after that.

I’ll bring you a review of the film once I’ve seen the whole thing but a quick “Ah Ha!” moment I got from the trailer (which you can watch below) is that primitive farmers may have been the first entrepreneurs, risking resources today in the hope that their crop will pay dividends a few months in the future. And their willingness to risk it all to bring a steady supply of food to all of their customers was the foundation upon which all civilization was built.

The film argues that this same cycle of entrepreneurial risk driving societal advancement is at work today. Watch the trailer and tell me what you think.

Entrepreneurs take risks, right?

But the question of how much risk to take always hangs in the air. The answer depends on the calendar, the business model, the competitive landscape, the resources being put into play (and at risk) and the risk tolerance of the entrpreneur in question.

Would you invest in an entrepreneur whose risk tolerance was sufficient to allow him to negotiate his own ransom with armed kidnappers - and then renege on the deal?

If you’re a stockholder in the venerable 121-year old retailer Sears, that’s just what you’re doing.

Edward S. Lampert has never been one to shy away from risk - if he’s convince the potential payoff adds up. He left Goldman Sachs at age 26 to start his own hedge fund. Now 45, worth an estimated $4.5 billion and Chairman of Sears Holdings, he is using his considerable business savvy, experience, war chest and moxy to transform Sears and Kmart into properties which can compete with the 800-pound gorilla of global retailing, Wal-Mart.

According to this article in the Washington Post he appears to be succeeding - at least on Wall Street if not on Main Street.

I don’t know about you but I like this guy Lampert. He’d make for one heck of an Entepreneurial Success Story Interview!

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has gotten onboard the podcast train.

Their Small Business Resource Library now includes nine downloadable audio seminars and interviews (along with their transcripts) on topics ranging from Check List for Starting a Business to Selecting a Business That Fits and even Disaster Preparedness for Business Owners.

Most are relatively short overviews of the topics addressed, targeted at folks just starting out or just thinking about starting a business. But they still give you plenty of food for thought and may well make for instructive listening for those whose business isn’t serving them personally the way they thought it would.

Give a listen and let me know what you think.

Many entrepreneurs dream of raising millions of dollars in venture capital.

What most don’t realize is that achieving that dream may actually mean creating their own nightmare. You see, closing a VC deal for millions of dollars is not a destination at the end of a long hard journey. It’s the beginning of an even tougher road that most business owners have never traveled before.

If you are an entrepreneur dreaming of raising your first round of venture capital, let me give you five reasons you don’t want to see your dreams come true.

1. You don’t know what you’re doing: Raising venture capital is a difficult, complex, time-consuming process best left to those with years of experience. You need to find investors who specialize in your industry and your stage of development. They are going to want to see tightly-written business plan with credible, detailed financial projections that tell a tale of 10x ROI along with a believable exit strategy. They want you and your management team to have a great depth and breadth of experience in your industry and be willing to hang in there through thick and thin until the company either folds or achieves a liquidity event.

2. Things will never be the same: As soon as the deal is struck - but before the money hits your bank account - you have just switched into overdrive. Expectations will skyrocket and failure will not be an option. What may have been a very profitable lifestyle business is now a fast-track growth business at its earliest stage of development with no guarantee of success.

3. You just lost control of your business: You will now report to a board of directors which will probably be dominated by your new partners, the VCs. Your vision and direction may well be altered along the way or thrown out altogether when and if the board feels a change needs to be made. How you react will be up to you.

4. Everything you do will be scrutinized and second-guessed: While your investors won’t be there working shoulder-to-shoulder with you, making critical decisions and ensuring that the trains run on time, they will be reviewing every action, expenditure and hire, asking questions that you may feel have no real bearing on the success factors underlying your business model.

5. They want the money back: Landing millions of dollars in venture capital means you have a big problem on your hands: how are you going to pay it back? While a huge infusion of capital does present a wonderful opportunity, it also represents an enormous responsibility. The VCs and their investors want the money back - in spades. They are looking for ten times their investment in just a few years. So along with a $10 million asset, you’ve just created a $100 million liability.

Obviously, many companies have done very well by working with venture capitalists, creating billions of dollars of wealth for everyone around the table. Unfortunately, many more have seen their dreams crash and burn by getting in bed with outside investors.

Here’s the bottom line: don’t even consider raising outside capital - from VCs or anyone else - until you have thoroughly thought the process through to all of its possible ends. And understand that by bringing in ambitious, high-maintenance investors, you may lose - or at least lose control of - a great business that took you years to build.

Don’t you just love it when someone else tells you what you’re feeling and thinking? I know I do.

So I was especially pleased to learn that Wells Fargo Bank and the Gallup Organization have just released their latest Small Business Index, a survey of 600 business owners nationwide conducted between November 9 and November 29, 2006.

Based upon that survey, here’s what we’re all thinking:

1) We are optimistic about 2007. The Small Business Owner Optimism Index is up to 69 points, equaling its highest level since the survey began in late 2003.

2) Our Top Five Concerns are: the cost of insurance (64%), taxes (62%), energy prices (54%), government regulations (45%) and finding qualified employees (42%).

3) Our Five Biggest Priorites for 2007 are: generating stronger revenues (90%), cutting operating expenses (63%), reaching more customers (57%), more advertising (42%) and investing in technology (37%).

I could swear they’re reading my mind! Maybe those people who say the government has bugged their brains aren’t crazy after all.

Seriously, I’m sure this information is useful for guaging how you’re doing and what you’re feeling relative to your peers, but it’s probably more beneficial to those who market to business owners than it is to the business owners themselves.

What do you think? Post a comment or leave me a voice mail message on the toll-free listener line at 866-690-4747. Great voice mails are always candidates for inclusion in future podcasts.

Intuit (the folks who bring you Quicken and QuickBooks) have joined with The Institute For The Future (wow!) to bring you The Intuit Future of Small Business Report.

A blog posting is not the right medium for an in-depth explanation of a document this weighty. So let me just touch on a couple of highlights and let you decide for yourself whether you want to download and read the 20-page first installment of this report.

1. The Social Transformation of the 1960s and 70s have combined with the Technological Transformation of the 1980s and 90s to foment an Economic Transformation which is already underway and will continue into the foreseeable future.

2. Small Businesses play a key role in the Economic Transformation because of their ability to leverage the societal and technological changes quickly, nimbly and creatively.

3. The Face of Small Business is changing rapidly to include people at either end of the age spectrum as well as an increasing number of women and formerly dispossessed members of society from around the world.

4. Many more “solopreneurships” (one business owner with no employees) are arisinig, fueling an upswing in the use of contract and virtual employees.

5. Entrepreneurial Education is being adopted by - and in some cases outpacing - more traditional formal education resources like universities and technical schools.

This is fascinating stuff. I can hardly wait to read the second installment!

I know you’re busy, but if you are serious about growing your business into the future, this is one document you should not only read, but study. I thank and congratulate the folks at Intuit for putting their resources behind its creation.

Post a comment after you read the report and tell us all what YOU think about The Future of Small Business.

What is your reaction to that headline?

When I first read those three words (a book title and keynote speech from a guy name Stephen Shapiro) I thought “That’ll never work.” For me at least.

But as I read and listened to the information on Shapiro’s web site, I began to reconsider. And I’m still doing so.

I have always been very goal oriented. But I have known many very successful people over the years who have admitted to me that they had no specific goals in mind. Until now I always thought that they were succeeding in spite of themselves.

Visit Shapiro’s web site and listen to the short audio message at the top of the page. Take his Goalaholic Quiz and consider his concept of Compass-Driven Strategic Planning.

Then come back here and post a comment on your reaction. I’ll be very curious to hear what you have to say.