Some of you, and you know who you are, tend to put off one of the single most important business tasks: invoicing. You probably beat yourself up over it, too. But there is a simple reason you procrastinate on invoicing: it’s not fun. We like to work on the parts of our business that are…
Small towns lose too many of their high school graduates: they drop out, they move away, they leave for college, they get involved in drugs, they vandalize, or they are just lost. What can you do? Read “This small town nurtures its teenagers,” a success story from Canada. Here’s the end of the story: The…
When you invest your time and money to go to an event, you want to get the most out of it. But just as soon as you get home, you have to get right back into the thick of everything that needs doing. If you are lucky, you’ll find time to do a few critical…
Common small business mistakes have become a regular series here. Here’s the example of the day: Feel bad after suggesting that daughter buy shoes in downtown Oakville rather than at a chain. Now store won’t accept return. @DonnaPapacosta, via Twitter Ouch! You want to gain more business; you want to beat the big chains. In…
Now is a great time to be growing your business. Really! Most other businesses, big and small, are still hiding. That means it’s time for contrarians like you and me to move ahead. I talked about this at the Oklahoma Entrepreneurs Conference, so I’m glad that My Venture Pad contracted me to help promote SAP’s…
People trust other people, much more than they trust you. That means your potential customers trust the semi-anonymous reviews written on online review sites more than all that great text on your own website. Do you regularly monitor what is said about you on TripAdvisor, VirtualTourist or Igougo? How about mainstream booking sites like Hotels.com,…
Con Pekrul knows how to keep it simple. He owns the Plain View Winery, in Lahoma, Oklahoma. Let’s look around the back room. All the equipment is simple. Barrels and buckets, second hand tables, a used refrigerator. Here’s Con’s father Hart, filling bottles by hand. An automatic bottler would be too expensive, Con said. And…
New ideas are changing rural tourism. Now it is possible to reach more people, more places than you could ever have afforded to before. But it’s also more complex, with more complicated choices, and a faster pace of change. Recognizing that tourism is a huge segment of rural small business, we want to put a…
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