This JUST in: the internet is not “stealing” readership from traditional newspapers!

Ad revenue, yes, but readers, no.

And if your business is online - and please tell me your business is online, at least in some shape or form - you know what a fresh and exciting challenge it can be to manage revenue via the internet.

Security is of prime concern, and recently fraud has also become an issue of major import, as well.

And before we get too far ahead of ourselves, by chance do you have the time and skills to build a proprietary web system that is reliable, trustworthy and fast, too?

The answer may very well be “No,” in which case online payment resources can make it easier for you to process online sales and collect payment.

Now, I say “resources” plural, but honestly, other than PayPal and now Google Checkout, that’s it.

No doubt you have used or at least have a passing familiarity with PayPal. But having personally utilized PayPal to receive payment for goods and been frustrated with this eBay system more than once, I welcome Google’s entry into the online payment fray.

While I have yet to use Checkout, I am excited by the potential. Why? For the same reasons that I was excited when Google Maps and Gmail showed up. Better online productivity products, now. Yes, please.

Need a second opinion?

(And, no, the sky isn’t falling after all…)

The fact that Checkout is also cheaper percentage-wise and per transaction out of the gate than PayPal’s structure is a big bonus, the size of which is limited only by the amount of business you do online.

Plus, Checkout works with AdWords to help you generate even more marketing value! Take advantage of the most internet’s most revolutionary development in advertising while simultaneously streamlining your online payment processing? Pinch me, it’s the small business owner’s dream.

With more and more people choosing to start new businesses every day, doing anything but equipping yourself with the best possible tools is akin to being asleep at the wheel. Google, once again, has developed a tool that looks to be a smash success, and it falls right in the crosshairs of small business need.

What do you think? Have you used Checkout (or PayPal) with any success or failure? Share your input and ask your questions at the Grow My Business Forums, intended to make it easier for entrepreneurs to share ideas and opinions about what it takes to succeed in today’s markets.

On that note, you do have your own blog already, right??

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Looking for some more small business tips, advice, and encouragement? GrowMyBusiness is THE home for starting, managing and growing a small business.

“Roll model”…not?

Today’s blog comes a bit late, as the original post on online payment systems, especially the new Google Checkout (stay tuned!), is delayed on the heels of today’s shocking news: the subject of last week’s blog, Floyd Landis, tested positive for drugs after his historic Tour de France victory.

This is America, of course, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty. The jury is out, but Landis’ secondary blood test is coming in later this week. Be great if it comes back negative and the controversy can die off, and some experts say there are scientific and medical explanations to justify his positive result. Wait and see.

Either way, when an individual breaks the rules to get ahead, it is disappointing. In the case of drug abuse, it is also illegal. Still, let’s not let it outshine the larger lesson, covered last week, of not giving up when faced with adversity.

But let’s also talk about ensuring that your company isn’t in the unfornutate position of Phonak: in a PR crisis of epic proportions over an employee who may have used drugs.

“Epic proportions,” you ask?

CNN
FOX
The Guardian
The Los Angeles Times
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Post

Epic proportions.

Phonak, Landis’ sponsor, is not throwing him to the wolves, but they’ve also made it abundantly clear that if his second test comes back positive, they will fire him. Smart. And necessary.

I’d like to think this goes without saying, but you never know, so let’s just come right out with the obvious: If you tolerate drugs at your small business - you’re doing them, or you’re turing a blind eye to employees who are - you might as well count out the register one last time and board up the windows. It won’t last.

But let’s assume that all the time, effort and energy you have put into your business venture is not being squandered by your reliance on drugs. (If this is not the case, I suggest spending more time on a blog like this.)

Now we ask: “Is it OK to test your employees for drugs?” This is a highly controversial issue, and something every business owner needs to decide for him or herself. When hundreds of millions of sponsorship dollars and TV rights are on the line, it’s a pretty easy decision to make, and the shareholders have spoken.

Of course you don’t have this same scale of business, but that means your margin of error is much, much smaller. Ask yourself if your small business could stand up to even a small, localized version of this type of crisis. You can’t risk it.

One thing every entrepreneur committed to success can agree upon is the value in establishing codes of conduct for employees, hiring the right people, and making sure they understand their job.

At the end of the day - and at the beginning - it’s your business, your bread and butter, your family that’s on the line. When someone who works for you threatens it all because of their selfishness or addiction, a zero tolerance policy ensures that you don’t waste time doing something other than running your business. Sure, everyone needs help with a problem from time-to-time, and there’s nothing preventing you from steering someone on the right track. But you don’t have to employ them.

An important part of the Human Resources process is to make it clear before your employees start making calls and interacting with customers on your behalf - actually, before you offer them a job. If they do drugs, they are gone.

It’s competitive enough out there as it is. Don’t hobble yourself with chinks in the armor.
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Looking for some more small business tips, advice, and encouragement? GrowMyBusiness is THE home for starting, managing and growing a small business.

for small businesspeople? Let’s examine Floyd Landis, winner of the 2006 Tour de France.

The implications for growing your business? Well, none that have to do with his physical ability or chosen profession. There are lots of talented athletes from all manner of sports with no bearing here.

No, what makes Mr. Landis a topic of particular interest to us is simply that he embodies the kind of motivational and inspirational personal business philosopy that is not only important to winning worldwide sporting events, but just as key to evolving from an aspiring to a successful small business owner.

It is, thusly: “Never give up.” (Or, as I personally like to punctuate/capitalize for extra special emphasis: “Never. Give. Up.”)

Not sure if you know the backstory or not, but in a nutshell Landis went from leader of this massive 3 week bike race to an also ran in a single day. Although he was leading and dominating and pretty much favored to win, in one of the Tour’s hottest and toughest stages he simply couldn’t handle the pressure.

In other words, he fell apart. He had a major setback. Like the power in Queens, NY, or Albertson’s online delivery biz, he failed miserably. So everyone wrote him off. In fact, his performance was so bad, he said that he even wrote himself off for about an hour after his disastrous stage, too.

But then, something happened.

Landis decided that, as leader of Team Phonak, he had something to prove. Basically, that he deserved to be the leader and was going to show everyone why.

And show them he did, accomplishing a comeback of epic proportions that is already recognized as one of the most heroic, herculean and defining efforts of this 100+ years old international event.

Where’s that leave us? Right here at this Very Important Reality Check: Even when you try as hard as the next guy, you can still end up dead last. Customers will avoid. Profits will elude. Cash flow won’t.

And that periodic, foreboding sound you hear sneaking around your stoop is the sound of failure’s RSVP. An inviation to fail is often beckoning, always looming.

But resist the temptation to give up, call it a day, throw in the towel. (Sure, there’s always Mechanical Turk, but you and I both know that .50 cents per project ain’t gonna pay the bills.)

Indulge self-doubt if you must, but only briefly. Then, get back in the ring and show ‘em - and yourself - what you know you’re made of. Tell yourself that you’ll go down swinging and, like this year’s winner of the Tour de France, there’s a very good chance you won’t go down at all, but will instead find yourself in the leader’s jersey.

(Landis can keep yellow, though. Small business owners prefer green!)

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Looking for some more small business tips, advice, and encouragement? GrowMyBusiness is THE home for starting, managing and growing a small business.

When it comes to running a small business, bling is not king. I say again, bling is not king.

“What? Bling is the enemy? How can this be? Bling is money! Bling is success!”

Clearly, an explanation is in order.

Personal sense of style aside, bling has come to mean much more than just fashion. Bling now connotes the best, highest quality, most luxurious and most exclusive. Blinged out cars, houses and persons are intended to indicate to others how successful one is, whether that is the reality or not.

But, hey, who doesn’t want the best, right? The best business means the most cutting-edge computers, right? The $1100 nouveau office chairs, right? The yellow Hummer with your business name on the side, right?

Well, maybe not.

In California, rents have suddenly skyrocketed. This is a recipe for disaster for a small business owner. Negotiate an office rental at the upper limits of your budget to impress customer, clients or potential employess, and then face a rent increase and it’s game over.

Still, at first it might be seductive to consider upgrading the look of your business. After all, many are attracted to flash, and impressed by the characteristic trappings of perceived success.

However, unless you are a hip hop producer or a jewelry designer to the stars, chances are the best bet for you, small business owner, is to keep things running smoothly and pretense free.

Here’s a good example: have you ever seen a flashy Google ad? Or an ad for Google, period, that wasn’t part of their business model as a sponsored link? My friends, that is smart business.

Don’t blow your profits on flashy tools. Of course, don’t get lazy with the research and buy junk, either.

Be practical, be smart. Make sure the tools you need to do your business are reliable and sensible, and always, always, always make sure you are paying attention to what consumers are clamoring for (iPod® stuff, anyone?)

Want to treat yourself for a job well done? Hey, that’s what ice cream parlors are for! Want to show off? Practice profit sharing and take the entire staff. After all, the Jack Welch era is over, so why not?

Just remember: If you think your business has what it takes to go the distance, by all means don’t squander your precious, limited resources trying to impress others. And if you just have to spend, take a cue from Toyota and use profits to make your business better, not glitzier.

Make no mistake. Bling is the enemy of ka-ching.

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iPod® is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.

Looking for some more small business tips, advice, and encouragement? GrowMyBusiness is THE home for starting, managing and growing a small business.

You know the story. Everyone knows the story. And, of course, everyone knows the moral of the story.

But what if - now, just hold on a second, here - but what if the story went the other way…what if the rabbit won?!?

It’s not inconceivable, you know. True, the race isn’t always to the swiftest or the strongest…er, I mean, yes it is! Turns out the race goes to the swiftest and the strongest pretty much every single time.

(Not the biggest, though. Take GM, for instance. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.)

Unless you are having a race for last place, in which case the fastest and toughest will likely fail miserably, can you think of an example where speed and strength aren’t preferred for a favorable outcome? The 50 yard dash? Nope, speed and strength needed. Baseball? Speed and strength, check. Running a small business? I’ll take speed and strength, thanks.

Even if you are quick and pumped, clearly break the tape way out in front, and your name is Apple, the instant replay can make for a loooooooooooong day.

Exhibit B: web sites #1 and #2 were not so long ago small businesses in their own right (crazy!), yet they continue to face major, major issues with click fraud. How will Yahoo! and Google deal with the situation? Not sure, but I can promise you it won’t have anything to do with resting by the side of the road knowing full well that the slower competitors are slowly chipping away at their lead.

Oh sure, speed and strength don’t always guarantee victory. Hence our well-known parable. The rabbit didn’t lose because he was slow and weak. But strongest can also mean smartest, and if there’s one thing we can say about the rabbit, it’s that he wasn’t the smartest.

And if there is something else we can say about the Rabbit - and smarts - it’s that VW finally figured out Golf isn’t as good a name for a car…finally!

But I digress. The point of today’s blog – and it’s a fairly recurrent theme in anything you devote yourself to – is that, with rare exception, victory truly does go to the best-prepared and the best-trained; also known as the most deserving.

OK, so it’s inaccurate to say that the tortoise doesn’t ever have a chance. Plus, who doesn’t love the underdog, right?

Cue my favorite Small Business Made Big this week, the venerable ant farm. Turns out a 40 year run on the toy shelves is nothing to sneeze at.

So it’s possible for slow and deliberate to pull it off after all.

I didn’t say slow and distracted, note.

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For insider tips and tricks on starting, managing and growing a small business, check out GrowMyBusiness: THE home for Small Business.

So you want to start a small business…

What’s the big deal, right? Seriously, how many small businesses are there out there already, all over the place? Coffee shops, dry cleaners, convenience stores, bike shops, etc, etc, etc. It can’t really be all that tough, can it?

Actually, it can. Let’s just skip the obvious things you might be taking for granted: Creating demand, maintaining supply, coordinating vendors, securing credit. Oh yeah, and lets not forget keeping the lights on and taking out the trash, of course. 

But ask yourself this question, because it’s an important one: are you a people person? If you want to succeed at small business, you better be. Doesn’t matter if you want to work on cars, walk dogs or paint houses. Cars, dogs and houses aren’t your customers: people are.

And customers aren’t the only reason you need to be a people person. An equally, if not more important reason, is your workforce. With the exception of any head butt-prone employees, the most valuable asset of any business is its workforce.

So ask yourself not only what are you are like face-to-face, dealing with a customer. Ask yourself what you are like shoulder-to-shoulder, in the trenches with your staff, making sure those all important customers are being satisfied. Are you professional? Are you courteous? Are you patient? Are you fair? Are you honest? Are you respectful? A people person is all these things and more.

However, a successful small business owner is all these things PLUS passionate about and good at what they do for a living. And a really, really successful small business owner makes sure that employees feel respected, valued and engaged in business success. (Of course, the UC loans scandal is an example of going a little bit overboard.)

If you’re hiring someone to represent you and your business, you better feel confident enough in their abilities to respect them and engage them. If you don’t, it might be time to reveiw your interview and hiring process.

At the end of the day, you want to be able to feel good about your business. But the most important aspect of any business venture is not goods and services and accounts payable and receivable, it’s the customers who keep it open, and the employees who keep it running.

In the case of your employees, you don’t have to let them nap on the job, but make sure you are treating both your coworkers and your customers the same way you want to be treated, and you’ll have lots and lots of continued success to look forward to.

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For insider tips and tricks on starting, managing and growing a small business, check out GrowMyBusiness: THE home for Small Business.

The key to starting a business is staying focused.

Know what you want to do, know why you want to do it, and have a plan for doing it very well. These three deceivingly simple concepts will unlock barriers to funding, infrastructure and - most importantly - customers.

So let’s say you get it right, right? You do your homework, line up the partners and get things off the ground. Your find a market niche, and it responds favorably. Profits! Growth! Success!

Now comes the hardest part: sustaining your good fortune. Also known as growing your business. Focus is critical to getting things off the ground, but it is absolutely essential to keeping them there. Without focus, there can be no growth.

Perhaps the best, recent real world example? Italy’s World Cup win. Italy and France were evenly matched, but the French team leader’s unsportsmanlike conduct was a shocking example of how quickly a moment’s lack of focus and loss of perspective can destroy years and years of hard work.

Curious also that Google, of all businesses, should be taking heat for its perceived lack of focus. Just goes to show that even vaunted and seemingly faultless Google is not immune to potential consequences of taking an eye off the prize. Still, Google is amazing at what it does, and better than many others at their core businesses. Case in point, “google” is officially a verb.

Not long ago Google was on no one’s radar screen, but the internet economy has hyper-accelerated business evolution. Remember when eBay was the poster child of business success, and the media darling of all? Things change quickly at the speed of broadband - suddenly eBay is pulling down some seriously negative publicity. Some of the reasons why? Executive shakeups, and the $2+billion purchase of Skype.

Of course, being focused isn’t the same as putting on blinders. Amazon has held on to its decade-old model of subscription based email for, oh, about 5-years too long, meaning tough times lie ahead for the seminal web company and smart decisions need to be made, and quickly.

The moral of the blog? Staying focused doesn’t mean getting lazy. It means doing what you do better than anyone else, and making sure you stay that way. The iPod® wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it is now 75% of all MP3 players.

That kind of success doesn’t happen without vigilant focus, and lots of it.

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iPod® is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.

Check out GrowMyBusiness.com, THE home for small business.

Running a business can be like riding a roller coaster. By yourself. At night. With no lights.

On the one hand, exhilarating. On the other, terrifying.

The point being that while often a thrill-a-minute, succeeding at business means thinking ahead of the curve, and being able to handle the peaks and valleys that get thrown you way just to make things interesting and help ensure that you haven’t stopped hyerpventilating.

Which is almost certainly how the top brass at Coke reacted this week when they found out that their secret formula was not only stolen, but offered to arch-competitor Pepsi.

But what did Pepsi do? Why, what any self-respecting business would do…the honorable thing. They refused to traffic in stolen goods, and notified their #1 rival Coke about the security breach.

And perhaps the best business-related quote of the week - maybe the year? - came from Pepsi Spokesman Dave DeCecco: “We just did what any responsible company would do. Competition can be fierce, but it also needs to be fair.”

Which brings us back to the exhilirating part of the Free Market roller coaster ride. Few things are more satisfying in business - and in life - than healthy competition. Measuring oneself against others, certainly, is the truest test of the power of one’s ideas, and one of the most rewarding activities known.

It’s when the business landscape reveals itself as unfairly tilted in someone else’s favor - and it effects your bottom line - that the valley turns to peak and exhiliration turns to terror. Because when others cheat, everyone loses.

Take the Tour de France, for instance. Just last week, some of the top competitors in the sport were kicked out of this year’s Tour after it was discovered that they may have used illegal, performance-enhancing drugs. Fortunately, the business of sport recognizes the importance of preserving healthy, fair competition.

Which, by contrast, is exactly what it seems like we had on July 4th for the International Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island in New York. Many entered, but only one could win. And 53 3/4 hot dogs later, he did – for the 6th time in a row!

Not sure if the sponsoring hot dog company is offering any kind of reward for their champ, but I can imagine sales are way up for hot dogs as a result of the competition. So there has to be an angle here for Frequent Flier Miles/rewards, right? Turns out they are giving away everything else for miles programs these days - all part of being creative in business.

But hot dogs might very well be the only product not yet included in the airline rewards program.

I said “might.”

Hot dogs and airplanes…starting to remind me of that exhilarating/terrifying roller coaster ride again.

Back to work!

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GrowMyBusiness: THE #1 destination for starting, managing and growing your business. Visit www.GrowMyBusiness.com.

This is the week we celebrate America’s Independence! Of course, that means traditions of fireworks, hot dogs, baseball, apple pie…in other words, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Fourth is also an excellent reminder to take stock of what it truly means to be a small business owner in America. After all, independence is a big reason many small business owners do what they do.

There’s something to be said for being one’s own boss, and getting the job done the right way the first time. But, when you’re your own boss, that often times means you’re someone else’s boss, too. Are you the kind of boss you’d want to work for?

For instance, how would you react if one of your staff showed up wearing flip-flops tomorrow? Come on, don’t come down too hard. It’s a short week.

Something else to celebrate this Fourth, and a rare occurence at that: the Space Shuttle is rescheduled for an Independence Day launch.

The shuttle program has not been without its share of major challenges, yet this massive test of innovative and collaborative genius remains an inspiration to all. (On that note, so does anything that figures out how to make a better cubicle.) 1776 wasn’t all that long ago, but I can’t imagine the Founding Fathers could ever fathom that we’d be jetting off into space just a few generations later.

Also hard to believe that they could anticipate the global phenomenon of World Cup Soccer! I know a local fishmonger - a Frenchman - who is particularly ecstatic that France is still in the running. It is with no small amount of selfishness that I hope they can clinch victory again as they first did in 1998 - mainly because I recall the week-long celebration sale he held last time.

And, actually, it is somewhat fitting that France gets a nod at July 4th. After all, the French played no small part in helping us acheive Independence in the first place.

So, here’s to being independent, celebrating that Independence, and to the defenders of truth, justice and the American Way that got as all here in the first place.

Have a Happy Fourth, and keep up the Good Business.

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For insider tips and tricks on starting, managing and growing a small business, check out GrowMyBusiness: THE home for Small Business.