Jeff Morin is a Classic Small-Business Entrepreneur (CSBE). Here’s how I define CSBE: someone who has deep knowledge of a market segment that is inefficient or poorly served and develops a way to correct the inefficiency — preferably without too many competitors even noticing — thus assuring higher-than-normal profit margins. That’s Jeff and his Stafford, Va.-based business, Coins for Anything.

A brief background: Jeff is a 27-year-old former Marine sargeant who, at age 19, became interested in something called “challenge coins.” If you’re in the military, you know what challenge coins are. But most people don’t. A challenge coin is a collectible coin that commemorates service in a particular military unit or mission. Jeff noticed that most of these coins were poorly designed and made and so he did what anyone would do at age 19 — not! He borrowed $500 from his mother to start a business to design and make really nice challenge coins. Read more…

Tags: Entrepreneur, small business

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I just recorded a 20-minute podcast with NY Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk

Questions Gary answers:

• How do you start a business if you’re currently working?
• What’s the most important success factor for startups today?
• Can you scale a business built around your own personal brand?
• In what year will Gary buy the New York Jets?
• And a lot more….

Gary’s an inspiration to entrepreneurs. He walks the talk. Hear what he has to say.

Tags: Crush It, Gary Vaynerchuk

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To the tens of thousands of potential entrepreneurs interested in starting an online business, there are lessons aplenty to be learned from Paperlesspost.com.

The roughly one-year-old New York-based company allows consumers to send elegantly designed virtual invitations and greeting cards through email and keep track of responses. In itself, that doesn’t sound so gee-whiz. And it’s not. The barriers to entry in this market are almost non-existent and the competition is considerable. Aside from Evite, the granddaddy of online invitations (and acting its age), there are online companies like Smilebox.com, MyPunchBowl.com and Socializr.com that are in the online invitations business, not counting the greeting card companies that have online tools for virtual card-sending.

Paperlesspost.com, whose customers sent about 1 million email cards in the company’s first year from November 2008 to November 2009, sent another million in the single month after that, according to James Hirschfeld, 23, who co-founded the company with his sister, Alexa, 25. That’s a hockey stick growth chart to be reckoned with. The company gives consumers 25 free “stamps” when they open an account, then charges them from $5 for 40 stamps to $25 for 500 stamps. The company is private and doesn’t reveal its revenues, but if it mailed 1 million e-cards in a month, it could have seen revenue for the month of $50,000+.

So what are some of the tips you should pay attention to about this blossoming company? Read more…

Tags: entrepreneurship, Gen Y, James and Alexa Hirschfeld, paperlesspost.com, small business success

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As you prepare your business for the next year, how do you make sure it isn’t a rerun of the past year? Even if this year was a great one for you, there’s no reason to do things the same way, and you’ll probably want to take your small business in some new directions. Maybe you’ll fix some nagging problems, or finally seize on an opportunity that’s been there for a while but you haven’t gotten around to tackling. Read more…

Tags: Entrepreneurs.About.Com, entrepreneurship, small business, strategic plan

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If you’re a small business owner, you can spend an awful lot of time in the muck of collecting, or trying to collect, bad debt. There’s a good piece about this on the New York Times site today in which Jay Goltz, an owner of five businesses in Chicago, explains his experience in collections.

Goltz notes correctly that the biggest trap most small businesses fall into is extending credit when a client already has a significant balance due. You don’t want to lose their business, so you let them have another $5,000. And then, surprise! They don’t make any payments. Read more…

Tags: bad debt, cash management, collection agencies, credit, debt collection, small business

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Which demographic group has a lock on entrepreneurship? Is it the Gen-Y/Millennials, which has grown up with social media, group dating and an ability to leverage technology and get products launched fast? Or it the Baby Boomers, who are graduating for corporate life and taking the lessons of decades as they invest their equity in themselves? The answer is “Yes.”

The New York Times today checked in on Ernie and Maggie Doud, a middle-aged Missouri couple it had profile about two years ago. A decade ago, the Douds started a company to cure dog breath (in dogs, not people) so they could live more happily with their own mutt. They came up with a kind of doggie Altoid called “Greenies” (maybe Major League Baseball could be a customer?) and sold it to Mars Inc. in 2006 for “a small fortune.” Since then they’ve started 12 other companies. Judging from the photo of them in the Times, I’d say they’re in their mid-60s. And they look very, very happy. Read more….

Tags: Bo Peabody, Donna Fenn, entrepreneurship, Seth Godin, Upstarts

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Michael Hanley, author of Effective Tax Planning for the MicroBusiness, is a CPA specializing in small business. We asked him for year-end tax planning tips that can help entrepreneurs and small buiness owners. Michael gave us his top five action items.

1. Analyze You Business Structure

Are you operating under the best structure for you business? Various items such as how much tax you will pay each year, your risk of being selected for a random IRS audit, and the level of protection of your personal assets are determined by the type of entity you operate. If you operate as a Sole Proprietor, DBA, Partnership, LLC, or C Corporation, this should be Priority #1 in your life. You could be overpaying your taxes by $10,000 if you are not operating under the best business structure. Read more…

Tags: C Corp., IRS, LLC, Michael Hanley, Microbusiness, Sole Proprietorship, Tax Savings

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When it comes to research on entrepreneurship, few organizations do more of it than the Kauffman Foundation. For a  just-released study called Making a Successful Entrepreneur, Kauffman surveyed 549 company founders of successful businesses in high-growth industries to determine the factors that influence the success or failure of startups. The key success factors, it turns out, are “prior work experience, learning from previous successes and failures, a strong management team and good fortune.” Read more….

Tags: Entrepreneurs.About.Com, entrepreneurship, Kaufmann Foundation

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