The average customer visits their local Costco 22 times a year. The company has become one of the largest in the U.S., with 473 outlets and more than $50 billion in sales, and is also the largest membership warehouse club chain in the world. Its founder and CEO, Jim Sinegal, has been called the Sam Walton of the 21st century for his low-key style and seeming defiance of all things Wall Street. But, whether investors like him or not, America – and much of the rest of the world – has fallen in love with his discount depots.

When Sinegal’s college presented him with its Most Distinguished Alumnus award, the Costco founder was almost left speechless. “I’ve never been told I’m a most distinguished anything,” was all he could say. With his poor grades and lack of focus in high school, it is doubtful that Sinegal’s teachers ever thought he would amount to much. But, today, with a billion dollar corporation under his belt, Sinegal remains not only one of the most accomplished, but also one of the most admired and liked CEOs in the industry. How did this once reckless young boy become the success he is today?

“My test scores were good, but my grades weren’t that good, because I needed focus. It was at San Diego Junior College (now City College) where I regained that focus, and paid attention, because deep down I knew education was important. I’ve never been told I’m a most distinguished anything.

Our business was founded so that small businesses could come in and buy essentially everything they needed for their business under one roof. Café owners could purchase all of their food and drink, cigarettes and candy, cleaning supplies, pots and pans, toilet paper and towels, pads and pencils, and so on.

One time [customers] may come in and see that we have some Coach handbags and they come in the next time and the Coach handbags aren’t there, but perhaps there are some Fila jackets. The attitude is that if you see it, you have got to buy it because it may not be there next time.

Technology has made us much more productive. With computers, fax machines, and cell phones we have more productive time during the course of the whole day and can react to situations more immediately. Sometimes we have so much information it’s more than we can deal with. Our web site and our e-commerce business are also profitable on a fully allocated basis, and that is somewhat of a milestone.

The reason that the dot-com companies didn’t succeed is that they were very good at the science end but they didn’t understand anything about the art of buying and selling merchandise. They thought that was the easy part but it turned out to be the most difficult. If you don’t have the right merchandise in the right place at the right time you can forget about everything else. All the satellites in the world aren’t going to help you. We only have one bullet in our gun, the right product at the right price.

We have said from the very beginning. We’re going to be a company that’s on a first-name basis with everyone. Imagine that you have 120,000 loyal ambassadors out there who are constantly saying good things about Costco. It has to be a significant advantage for you.

Our attitude has always been that if you hire good people and provide good wages and good jobs and more than that – if you provide careers – that good things will happen to your company. I don’t see what’s wrong with an employee earning enough to be able to buy a house or have a health plan for the family.

I think the biggest single thing that causes difficulty in the business world is the short-term view. We become obsessed with it. But it forces bad decisions.

You have to plan the opportunity to think about your business and plan what you’re going to do. You have to schedule it. Otherwise you’re just a hamster running on a treadmill; you’re never going to get anywhere. You’ve got to schedule it. Strategic planning is an important part of running any business and the more so for businesses that operating in multiple states and countries. If you’re a big-picture guy, you’re not in the picture. Retail is detail.“

Every week I’ve done a new post in our Entrepreneur University section of the blog.

It’s always done on a Monday morning to give you some ideas to help give you a new idea or strategy (or maybe some extra motivation) to help you build your business.

I’ve featured experts from around the world who have given their best advice on how to help a surging new business.

As I prepare the next round of Entrepreneur Univeristy posts I wanted to get your feedback with a simple question: What do you want to learn?

I would love to better target your problem areas and give you specific answers to your questions from leading experts.

To give you a sense of what popular topics have been, the top 5 posts (by page views) in 2008 so far are:

1. The 6 Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make – Entrepreneur University
2. 11 Ways To Find Products To Sell On eBay – Entrepreneur University
3. Starting An Online Business on a Shoestring Budget – Entrepreneur University
4. How To Motivate Employees – Entrepreneur University
5. Write A Business Plan In 10 Seconds – Entrepreneur University

Let me know what you want to learn more about by posting a comment to this post and I’ll try to feature your topics more prominently in future Entrepreneur University editions!

Our 26th Review our Blog entry comes thanks to Deb Halmay from AskMax. You can read what she had to say about us in her blog post: YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog.

AskMax provides the support services that entrepreneurs need to start up and run their small business. Some examples of services we provide to our clients are:

• Marketing materials: including web sites, pamphlets and business cards.
• Research projects: helping our clients prepare business plans, identify new markets, find suppliers and product lines, and source the best places to advertise in order to reach their target market.
• Administrative support: organizing events, creating documents and presentations, and book-keeping.

Thanks for the review Deb!

If you are interested in doing a review, check out our Review Our Blog initiative for instructions.

Are you spending too much time on the “busy work” of setting up a company and not actually getting out there and selling? So far the number one response from our Young Entrepreneur Poll on What’s The Best Way For a Startup To Earn Revenue is: nothing happens until somebody sells something. Stop wasting time figuring out your business cards and other spending endless hours planning and go out and sell something.

This makes me wonder again if young entrepreneurs are afraid of selling?

Some of the other responses so far have been:

• Don’t borrow money until you have customers
• Rent adspace on your website with tools like AdSense
• It’s easier to earn money online than offline
• Cut expenses, spend less on everything
• Put back any profits back into the business
• Use a business plan to give solutions to what people need
• Launch into marketing as soon as your business plan is done
• You have to spend money – Advertise!

What do you think?

Is the best way to earn revenue to forget everything else and just go out and start selling?

Have your say by replying to this post or replying in our forums at this post: New Poll – What’s The Best Way For A Startup To Earn Revenue?

This week Google discussed in their blog the difference between dynamic URLs and static URLs.

What is a static URL?

A static URL is one that does not change, so it typically does not contain any url parameters. It can look like this: http://www.example.com/archive/january.htm. You can search for static URLs on Google by typing filetype:htm in the search field. Updating these kinds of pages can be time consuming, especially if the amount of information grows quickly, since every single page has to be hard-coded. This is why webmasters who deal with large, frequently updated sites like online shops, forum communities, blogs or content management systems may use dynamic URLs.

What is a dynamic URL?

If the content of a site is stored in a database and pulled for display on pages on demand, dynamic URLs maybe used. In that case the site serves basically as a template for the content. Usually, a dynamic URL would look something like this: http://code.google.com/p/google-checkout-php-sample-code/issues/detail?id=31. You can spot dynamic URLs by looking for characters like: ? = &. Dynamic URLs have the disadvantage that different URLs can have the same content. So different users might link to URLs with different parameters which have the same content. That’s one reason why webmasters sometimes want to rewrite their URLs to static ones.

Why does this matter?

It used to be difficult for Google and the other search engines to crawl dynamic URLs. Early on in my web career I had to painfully rewrite my site code to make the pages static so they could be picked up properly.

The good news is now Google can pick it up properly. There still are, however, a number of downsides with using dynamic over static URLs including:

• Lower click through rate through search engine results (and other campaigns like newsletters, emails, etc)
• Not usable in branding campaigns as people won’t remember the link
• Lower relevancy scores because your keywords are not in your URLs
• Lower likelihood that you’ll get linked to with the anchor text you’re looking for

Many content management systems like the forums software phpbb automatically create dynamic urls and changing them to static can be quite challenging. Google is recommending that you not change the links because it won’t make a difference because they can still crawl your pages.

My recommendation would still be to move to static links but make sure you do it properly and don’t crash your pages. Hire someone to do it for you if you don’t know what you’re doing. It may be true that Google can crawl the pages but without your keywords in your urls you won’t rank as prominently and you won’t get as many clicks on your links if you’re using a dynamic structure.

Adam put me on to a new website called BizEquity.

It’s a company that helps you determine how much your (or your competitor’s!) business is worth.

Here is what BizEquity promises to give you:

• Easily search approximately 10 million estimated business valuations.
• Get valuations based on publicly available data and industry-specific rules of thumb.
• Compare how companies stack up against their competition.
• Get helpful reports and charts on industry trends.
• And it’s free! (the best part for entrepreneurs)

You can search for an industry, a category, or a company in a given geographic area (choose your city, state, zip code). You’ll then see a Google Map which shows you a list of all the potential businesses that meet your criteria. From there you can click through to see a detailed valuation about that business, its location and the industry.

On top of the free public valuation service, the company also offers a custom valuation tool where you can enter in specific financial information about your business and receive a custom valuation report telling you how much your business is worth.

I can see this being a useful tool to:

1. Figure out which industries are making money and are worth starting a new business in
2. Look for local competitors. Do you have an untapped opportunity or are competitors all around you?
3. See how your industry is doing. Is it profitable? Which geographic markets are making the most?
4. Know who are the top dogs in your industry and how close are they to your location
5. Understand how much is your business worth if you’re trying to sell it or raise equity capital
6. Determine how much is a business worth if you’re trying to buy it from someone else

What do you think of this service? Has anybody used BizEquity before?

At 74 years old, he is still busy making people look good. Giorgio Armani is one of the preeminent Italian fashion designers in the world, still going strong after 33 years in the industry. Known for his classically tailored, sleek power suits and clean, high quality fabrics, everyone from the who’s who of Hollywood to the bankers on Wall Street have fallen in love with the Armani brand. Now, with over $1.5 billion in revenue and a retail empire that extends to more than 35 countries, Armani himself continues to maintain full control over his business. However, it has been a long, uphill journey for the designer to get where he is today.

“In this business you can’t have a destination, an arrival point,” says Armani. “Otherwise your competitors will overtake you, or you become complacent.” With over $1.5 billion in revenue, Armani remains Chairman, President and CEO of the company he started over thirty years ago. The mere mention of the designer’s name – first or last – and consumers the world over know not only who you are talking about, but also of the luxury product lines for which he has become famous. How did this once-poor boy, hiding from war bombs in a small town in Italy, go on to become one of the world’s leading and most successful experts on fashion and design? 

“Our house was bombed and destroyed and my father didn’t make enough money to support us. There were five of us. Looking back, I realize that we didn’t even have enough to eat, just like many Italian families back then.

My mother was the main reason I developed an interest in fashion. Though we grew up in post-war Italy and were very poor, she always ensured that my brother, sister and myself were immaculately dressed. She was herself an innately elegant woman. In memory of her I named my yacht Mariu, which is the southern Italian dialect for Maria.

My mother dressed in her best clothes, which were always simple but so elegant and sophisticated There were planes flying over us and we were under bombs all of the time. Our parents used to wake us up at night to take us to the shelter.

Remain true to yourself and your philosophy. Changing in the face of adversity will in fact diminish your credibility with your customers. You have to think of the future. If not, we would close down!  My work is my life. Even though it is good to take a holiday, after two vacations it is boring.

The long and short of it for me is that the entrepreneur is the one who at the end decides yes or no and I like that even though it’s a lot of responsibility. It would be very hard for me to do things somebody else’s way. At this point I think of myself more as an entrepreneur than a designer. This is my life’s work and I’m more passionate about it than ever.

Remember that, in the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization – she or he only focuses on the garment hanging on the rail in the store.“

This week’s Entrepreneur University comes thanks to Stephanie Calahan. Stephanie L.H. Calahan of Calahan Solutions, Inc. is a dynamic entrepreneur, nationally known speaker, media personality, author, publisher, productivity/ organization consultant, & business start-up coach. She focuses on conducting presentations, personal coaching, productivity assessments & organizing services.

Stephanie shares her advice on how to organize your business:

“According to the Small Business Administration small businesses make up more than 99.7 percent of all employees. Add to that the latest figures that show small businesses create 75% of the net new jobs in our economy and you can see how important small businesses are.

Small Business Owners have a very challenging job. Many small business owners go into an industry because it matches their passion or is something that they are really good at. What many start up business owners do not realize is that it takes a LOT more than being good in a particular industry to successfully run a business.

Most of the time, small business owners need to wear many hats – visionary, product developer, marketer, bookkeeper, secretary, janitor and more! Overwhelm is easily around most corners!

Develop a Team!

Even the most organized business owner needs help. That help can come in the form of employees or other outsourced help. You cannot be an expert in everything, and if you try; you will loose focus on why you started your business in the first place! Make sure that you have a team of knowledgeable people to help you run your business. It is worth the expense to have it done right the first time.

If you are not sure how to figure out what you need, start by listing the activities in your business that you

* don’t want to do
* don’t know how to do
* know how to do but don’t have time to do

Yesterday I asked you how organized your business was. Did you consider your answer? Today I’ll share a thought on how you can move yourself to a business more organized. Write Your Processes Down!

Write Your Processes Down

Small businesses can sometimes turn into BIG business. Did you know that Ford and Apple both started out as small home-based businesses? Make sure that you are ready for any growth that your company may experience.

Review the processes and procedures that everyone in your organization performs and then write them down. By writing them down, you will

* be able to see any gaps or improvement areas that need to be addressed. Also, having written procedures and policies ensures consistency.

* have the ability to manage someone that leaves when you least expect it.

* be able to cross-train people to strengthen your business

* grow the value of your business. Did you know that most business investors do not want to purchase a business if all of the information is in the head of the owner? If you have solid systems that are written down, you significantly increase the value of your business.

Take Care of Yourself

Burn out is easy to achieve when you run a small business. Make sure that you take time for yourself. The most successful business owners ensure that they take vacations and time off to “recharge.”

Are you saying to yourself “How can I take time off? There is too much to do!!” True, every business owner has more than enough things to do and the list never ends. However, do you get the feeling that things are stagnant? Is output the same all of the time or is it growing?

As a recovering work-a-holic, I have had hard times taking vacation time or relaxation time myself. When I left my corporate job (before Calahan Solutions) I had over 2.5 weeks of vacation that had rolled from year to year.

A good friend and mentor, however, told me that I was not going to be able to grow my business if I kept up that “crazy” timing. He reminded me that my business was largely creative and involved out-of-the-box thinking. If you don’t give your brain and body time to recharge, the things you come up with are not nearly as good.

Since I received that hard message (essentially he said that I was not as serious about my business unless I gave everything I could for great ideas — including rest) I have practiced what I was taught and have taught it to clients too. Some of my best ideas pop into my mind when I am either relaxing or have come back from a break. By giving my mind time to focus in a different way, it energizes and inspires me!

So how do I take time for me? I do a lot of different things. They are things that work for me. I suggest that you find what works for you too!

* I play with my son and read to him – we laugh a LOT — laughter is a great de-stress for me.

* I play with my puppy (he turned 2 this month) I get really excited when I see that he has been able to complete a new trick successfully.

* I go to my NAWBO activities — the National Association of Woman Business Owners. I build relationships with other woman business owners that are there for me when I need help.

* I go fishing with my dad.

* I read a great book.

* I go on weekend trips.

* etc.

When was the last time that you took time for yourself? What do you to recharge? Do you agree with what I said? If not, why? Let us know by commenting below in the blog comment section.”

Our 25th Review our Blog entry comes thanks to Chris Palko from YoungBusinessOwner.com. You can read what he had to say about us in his blog post: YoungEntrepreneur.com Review.

YoungBusinessOwner.com was established in 2008 in order to provide aspiring entrepreneurs the information they are looking for without all the extras.

The information provided on Chris’ site is not like other “business” sites. Other business sites talk of $100,000 business loans and leasing giant warehouses and office buildings. This kind of information is simply out of the question for the majority of those looking to start their own business. The information Chris provides is exactly what the young (and not so young) entrepreneur is looking for; simply how and where to get the appropriate licenses, low-cost start-ups, cost-effective advertising strategies, and much more.

Thanks for the review Chris!

If you are interested in doing a review, check out our Review Our Blog initiative for instructions.

We recently had a request to do a sponsored review of BPOVIA, a Virtual Assistant Service. Their main selling point is the ability to cut your costs by 60%. How do they figure?

They assume that an In House, Full Time Employee will cost:

• $30,000 base salary
• $6,120 benefits (15% of salary)
• $5,304 vacation, sick time (13% of salary)
• $4,896 payroll taxes (12% of salary)
• $2,856 administrative costs
• $3,600 equipment, maintenance
• $2,100 space and equipment

The total therefore is $54,876 to hire a full time employee in house.

By comparison, their full time virtual assistants cost $950 per month. There are no benefits, vacation or sick time, payroll taxes, admin costs, equipment or maintenance costs, or space and equipment costs. The total you would have to pay on an annual basis is therefore $11,400.

More on BPOVIA:

BPOVIA is the largest virtual assistant service provider in China.

BPOVIA’s primary business objective is to provide small and growing companies with an on-demand and one-stop solution of essential business services varies from data entry, word processing to the tasks require more advanced skills like website design, graphic design, internet research, etc.

BPOVIA believes tapping into cheaper labor overseas isn’t just for large companies, but for mid-sized and small companies as well. Smaller businesses can achieve the same benefits from outsourcing as larger ones. BPOVIA’s major target customer is small and medium sized companies.

I’m not sure how they justify putting maintenance in the cost calculation twice and if all the additional cost assumptions are actually fair representations but even if you cut those extra costs in half, you’re still experiencing significant savings.

This is the first I’ve heard of Chinese virtual assistants – most of the companies I’ve seen are from India or other Asian countries – but it only makes sense that the service would expand to China.

Depending on the task I believe you can hire workers outside of the office to work remotely. I currently have two people (Americans) who work for me on a part time basis every month who I’ve never met before and I found through elance. It’s been a wonderful experience working with them but there are many tasks I would never outsource.

If you are considering outsourcing, make sure that:

1. The tasks are clearly defined and easy to do. If it requires your constant input and having to explain things dozens of times then it’s going to be very difficult to make it work.
2. They can communicate properly in English. I once called one of the largest virtual assistant companies in India and I couldn’t understand the person who picked up the phone. She couldn’t understand my questions either and ended up just telling me to email the company’s help line.
3. They are responsive. With that same Indian company, I did email them thinking that perhaps my experience with the woman on the phone was not necessarily representative of what their other workers were like. I never got a response from my email. Needless to say, I didn’t hire them!

BPOVIA looks ok on paper. The real test will be if they can actually deliver on their promises like the other virtual assistant companies are failing to do.