How often have you visited a store and found that the customer service assistant knows less about their products than you do? As a business owner, how much are you paying for “customer service” employees who add little or no value to the customer’s experience in your store? Let me begin with a couple of [...]

Maintaining an effective and friendly staff is one of the most complicated challenges I’ve encountered as a young entrepreneur. As Chief Operating Officer of AKT Enterprises, I oversee the coordination and collaboration of over sixty employees spread over five departments and three facilities. With an average employee age of twenty-four years old, the company falls [...]

When a new product is introduced to the market, what do you think the chances are that it will be a success? We’re not talking a “Silly Bands” or “iPhone” type success – just that a product actually enters the market and is a profitable venture. Do you think a new product has a 20% [...]

Darien Brown thought he had a good idea for a business when he came up with a way to connect English language students in South Korea with conversation pals in the US over social media. He had studied in Korea as an undergraduate and made some money on the side as a conversational tutor to [...]

If you’re in the process of building any kind of tech startup, you’ll be very interested in today’s interview with Haig Kayserian. Haig has founded a very unique New York-based angel investment group, focused on helping startups in the web and mobile tech sector. He has some great advice for startups, as well as some [...]

My grandfather was a farmer. Before that he was an airplane mechanic for the United States Army during World War II. Then he bought a little land, and started growing some cotton and soybeans. He bought more land, then some cattle, then some pigs, then got rid of the pigs. He got older and started [...]

Life presents us with conflicts of interest and ethical dilemmas all the time, does it not?  The business world is no different.  Depending on what stage your business is in, I am sure you have faced a number of challenging situations, where ethical questions come into play.  Typically, the more opportunity and money is on [...]

The word “innovation” is thrown around a lot, and a lot of entrepreneurs are called innovators or think of themselves as innovators. But what does that really mean? Is anyone who comes up with a new idea an innovator? If that’s the case, few entrepreneurs aren’t innovators. And in fact, to some extent every true [...]

If you really want to impress a startup founder as a potential employee, or you want to be a smart investor, you need to know the right questions to ask. These are the questions that get past the hype of a founder’s “vision to change the world,” and into the realm of real business strengths, [...]

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you have a ton on your plate at all times. Running and trying to grow a business is not easy work, and it often leaves room for little else. The danger in that is when we get so caught up in all we have to do that we lose sight [...]

Our company is in the fortunate position of growing at a significant rate. We have more than doubled in size in the past year and anticipate the same rate of growth over the next year. Not a day goes by when we don’t have at least one candidate in the office seeking out a job [...]

Businesses are a lot like nursery rhymes. For every over-worked, shoe-dwelling old woman, there’s another who’s prepared to eat cats, dogs, and horses (whole, presumably) in order to catch a fly. Apparently this second old lady didn’t hear that honey is the thing you need to catch flies. Strange as it may sound, there’s a [...]