Business project 5

Send us your project here.  ¶ 1:52 PM 1 comments

  Business project 4

Jeff Fluhr, 32
StubHub
San Francisco
Projected 2006 Sales: More than $200 million
Description: A secure online marketplace for the resale of live event tickets

That’s the Ticket: A void in the market for a reliable, one-stop shop in the secondary ticket market prompted Jeff Fluhr and a former partner to start StubHub in 2000. “We felt there were a lot of problems with the options that were available for fans,” says Fluhr, who wanted to transform secondary ticket sales from back-alley deals into secure transactions. So he pioneered a system that allows sellers to list tickets at www.stubhub.com for a 15 percent transaction fee, and buyers to purchase tickets for a 10 percent transaction fee--guaranteeing the safety of the transaction for both parties. “We provide an escrow-type service,” notes Fluhr.

Safety Dance: Security is the number-one priority for StubHub. The system allows sales only after both buyers’ and sellers’ credit cards are fully vetted, leaving nothing to chance. StubHub also has a direct partnership with FedEx to generate the shipping labels for sellers, so the company can monitor delivery at every step.

Teaming Up: While the core of the business is based on peer-to-peer sales, Fluhr has found it helpful to build partnerships with venues and teams nationwide, including the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers. Such alliances help market StubHub’s services to season-ticket holders who might want to unload a few tickets during the season.

Fan Focus: Constantly improving StubHub’s customer service is key for Fluhr, who is also a fan of the music, theater, comedy and sporting events that are his company’s bread and butter. In fact, a phenomenal Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Garden was one of his most memorable “product testing” outings. And Fluhr’s not just trying to win fans on the spectator side of the stage--while starting his business, he recalls working to convince “old-school businesspeople in the music industry that the secondary market is a huge opportunity for them, not a threat.” Fluhr admits it’s an ongoing challenge for StubHub.

Follow His Lead: Give your customers peace of mind while providing a valuable service in a specialized niche  ¶ 8:10 AM 0 comments

  Business project 3

Thomas Gorny, 30
iPower
Phoenix
Projected 2006 Sales: More than $40 million
Description: Web hosting and services

Across Countries: Thomas Gorny spent the first 14 years of his life in Poland. A move to Germany found him attending a prestigious business college and running his own PC hardware business. Then, two months before graduation, he dropped out and sold his business for very little money to seize an opportunity to immigrate to America. The risk paid off not once, but twice.

First Time Around: Gorny joined one of the very first web hosting companies in 1996 and earned 20 percent ownership. The company was sold in 1998, and when Gorny left in 1999, he was in the money. “I never thought I’d go back to web hosting,” he says. So he jumped into marketing and real estate, but when the bubble burst in 2001, his stocks dropped and his real estate projects suffered. “I just got involved with the wrong people in business,” says Gorny, who lost everything.

Second Time Around: “Being on an investor visa, I couldn’t even go to work for somebody because I didn’t have a work permit,” Gorny says. After re-examining the hosting market, he realized there was room for a company offering web hosting and site building for nontechnical users. Armed with his American Express card, Gorny willed iPower into existence in late 2001. “I said to myself, ‘If we can acquire 10 customers a day, I’m going to be in heaven.’” The company garnered 60,000 customers in its first year. Now with more than 500,000, iPower recently moved its headquarters from Santa Monica, California, to Phoenix.

No Exit: “One thing I said at the beginning is that I do not have an exit strategy, and I’m holding to [that]. That is a powerful thing,” says Gorny. His business is now the world’s fourth-largest website hosting company, thanks in part to Gorny’s vision of offering feature-rich but also easy-to-use hosting packages. Phoenix may be a long way from Poland, but Gorny has definitely found a place to call his own.

Follow His Lead: Turn adversity into opportunity by revisiting your business strengths and taking cues from your past successes.  ¶ 8:10 AM 0 comments

  Business project 2

Predrag Djokic, 35; George Lipordezis, 28; & Leon Yohai, 32
QMobile
Reston, Virginia
Projected 2006 Sales: More than $24 million
Description: Mobile phone content provider

Bigger Than the Wheel: Working in the family’s optometry business in his home country of Greece, Leon Yohai felt his future was going nowhere. That is, until the internet came along—and suddenly, Yohai knew where to look. “It was the biggest discovery, even bigger than the wheel,” Yohai laughs. He taught himself how to write computer code and, in 1999, started his own business, InternetQ. The company started out building websites but eventually switched to the telecom industry. By 2003, InternetQ had become the largest mobile content pro-vider in Greece.

Coming to America: That same year, Yohai sold InternetQ and decided he should introduce the technology overseas. Living and working out of a friend’s home in Virginia, Yohai started Qmobile with two friends from Greece, Predrag Djokic and George Lipordezis, who were also former InternetQ employees. Together, the trio secured $6 million in venture funding and was able to negotiate a deal with their first client, T-Mobile. “We were lucky enough that our billing platform was made by the same manufacturer as their billing platform, so it was easy to connect,” Yohai says. By 2004, the company had moved into a proper office in Reston, Virginia, and has since grown to 25 employees.

The Next Big Thing: With all the capabilities mobile phones have today, wireless content may not seem that original, but Qmobile was one of the first to introduce the possibilities of SMS text messaging technology to the U.S. Qmobile, the parent company of Qtones.com, provides content such as games and ringtones to customers from all major carriers, including Sprint and Verizon. Customers order content via SMS text messaging or online and are billed through their phone service.

A Different World: Yohai says the differences in business practices between Europe and America are startling. “To create a company from scratch in Greece, you need to wait a good three months from the day you file papers, and it costs you a bunch of money,” Yohai says. “Here, you can start the company the same day, and you pay a tenth of what you pay [in Greece].”
Follow Their Lead: Follow your passion wherever it takes you—even if that means relocating with good friends by your side for support.  ¶ 8:09 AM 0 comments

  Business project 1

Andrea Lake, 32
Stickerjunkie.com & Delinquent Distribution
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Projected 2006 Sales: $5 million
Description: T-shirt and sticker manufacturer and online retailer

You’re Fired: At one time in her life, Andrea Lake tossed fiery sticks through the air at concerts to help her pay rent. Now she makes her living running several different businesses, but the balancing act is just as impressive. Delinquent Distribution, which she started in 1999, sells T-shirts and stickers printed with hip phrases in bulk to large retailers. StickerJunkie.com, started in early 2001, lets customers order small batches of stickers and T-shirts printed with any phrase they want. Between the two intentionally different business models, Lake covers all the bases and can ride through business upturns and downturns in style. StickerJunkie.com alone is on track to sell more than 3 million stickers this year.

A New Attitude: You’ve got to have a bit of your own ’tude to think of selling shirts that say “I’m not a stalker, I’m just persistent” and “I used to have superhuman powers, but my therapists took them away.” Lake hearkens back to her teenage years to explain her company’s hip edginess. “I was your typical suburban girl [who] was mad at the world for no good reason,” she says. Now in her early 30s, she’s happily settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s not the first town you’d think of as a hub of industry. “For my own personal quality of life, I wanted someplace cool and laid back but also very creative.”

As Seen on TV: You might recognize Lake from her appearance on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice earlier this year. She didn’t win, but that doesn’t bother her in the least. Says Lake, “It was the most fabulous experience for me in that I realized how lucky I am to be doing exactly what I’m doing.”

Taking on the World: These days, Lake is hoping to get funding for her companies, including a new venture called Luxury Wedding Packages. With so much entrepreneurship going on, the best way to keep up with her is through www.andrealake.com. “One day, Andrea Lake Enterprises will dominate the world!” she says, perhaps only half-jokingly.

Follow Her Lead: Young entrepreneurs can let their businesses mature along with them without losing their youthful energy and creativity.

Nina Vaca, 35
Pinnacle Technical Resources
Dallas
Projected 2006 Sales: $60 million
Description: IT consulting and IT staff augmentation

Family Matters: Family is serious business for Nina Vaca. The list of key employees at her IT consulting company reads like a genealogy. Freddy Vaca, senior vice president of professional services, is her brother. Vice president of human resources Jessica Narvaez is her sister. And president Jim Humrichouse is her husband. Says Vaca, “I absolutely love it. We’re cut from the same cloth, and we all have the same work ethic. I’m just really lucky to have such a talented family.”

Born to Run a Business: Entrepreneurship runs in Vaca’s family. Her parents emigrated from Ecuador, and she grew up working in her father’s chain of Los Angeles-area travel agencies. “I quickly understood that my parents made their future and didn’t just collect a paycheck,” she says.

Boom to Bust: Pinnacle had its beginning in 1996 when staffing firms were booming; it soon specialized in system administration. The dotcom bust of 2001 came down on Vaca’s business like a ton of hard drives. She found herself facing a hollowed-out business with a handful of employees and uncertain prospects for the future.

Bust to Boom: Failure is not an option in the Vaca family. “I used it as an opportunity,” Vaca says. “I aligned myself with my family, leveraged their talents and we came together.” She followed the market, diversified Pinnacle’s portfolio and rebuilt its customer base with Fortune 500 clients. Pinnacle now employs 700 people across 30 states. “I see no reason why we can’t get in the billions in terms of revenue,” says Vaca. That’s some recovery.

All in the Family: The future of Pinnacle is about more than revenue, employee growth, new contracts and new market areas. It’s about a sense of dedication, civic responsibility and family strength that goes back to Vaca’s parents’ first travel agency in California. “I hope to fulfill a family legacy,” says Vaca. “I hope my daughters are in the business someday, and sons as well.” With her track record, look for Pinnacle to be a source of family pride for generations to come.

Follow Her Lead: The people you surround yourself with in business can be your greatest source of strength.

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  Young Millionaire

If you were like most teenagers, it was all you could do to survive the trials and tribulations of junior high and co-existing with the opposite sex. But Jennifer Kushell had more than boys and school on her mind back then. At 13, she started her first small business-creating and selling hand-painted T-shirts. By the time she was 19, she'd started three other businesses and had just launched the Young Entrepreneurs Network, the first online network for young people trying to start their own companies. Now 30, Kushell is the author of Secrets of the Young & Successful: How to get everything you want without waiting a lifetime. Drawing on both her personal experience and the experiences of the hundreds of young entrepreneurs she's met in the past 10 years, Kushell offers some words of wisdom to help you get off your duff and get your business started now!

Entrepreneur: Why did you decide to write this book?
Jennifer Kushell: Three years ago, my husband, Scott, and I were sitting on the beach in Belize [and] we came up with the idea for this new company called the Young and Successful Media Corp. This company does what we call "educaiment," a cross between education and entertainment, and the point is to take all the intellectual property we've been developing over a decade now and create the tools and resources young people need as they go out into the real world, picking up where parents and school leaves off, [and help them] establish themselves not only in their own businesses, but in life in general. This book was the first project.

Entrepreneur: Your book is really interactive and included exercises for readers to work on. Why did you choose to do it in that format?
Kushell: We really wanted to get people to start thinking about what their opportunities are and how far they can go with their lives and really start questioning how much more they can accomplish if they think strategically about it.

Entrepreneur: Although it's not written specifically for entrepreneurs, what do you think the most important lessons are for young entrepreneurs reading this book?
Kushell: I'd say the most important thing in the world is to be able to clearly articulate what you're trying to do, or what you're interested in. You don't have a lot of time to pitch yourself and to pitch your ideas to people out there, and the more clear, concise and sophisticated your answers can be, the more people will pay attention to you.

I think you have to start working very early on to build your own credibility and your respect in the professional workplace or in your industry. The younger you are, the more people question what you know and what you're capable of and if you go in knowing that, you can start to join organizations, you can volunteer, you can maybe even sit on boards. You can start to build up your bio early on and do research; you can hire interns; you can start to establish yourself in your community and your industry and become someone people know and respect. When your knowledge base and your expertise overshadows your age, that's when you're in a position where you can truly do anything and not be limited by how young you are.

Entrepreneur: What other important lessons are there for young entrepreneurs in your book?
Kushell: Young entrepreneurs must understand and be able to clearly articulate both their history and where they're headed. We like to ask the question "What's your story?" because it's very important that young entrepreneurs can effectively communicate their story to others, especially in business. In order to have customers, vendors, potential investors, employees, etc. to buy into your vision, you must know how to communicate what both you and your business are all about.

With "Real World University," we provide a concept of continued learning and sculpting an environment to efficiently and effectively learn what you really need out in the real world. Unfortunately, the education system and parents can't prepare everyone for what they really need to know once they're out on their own-everyone learns differently and has different knowledge bases they need to be successful in life. By identifying the areas you need to become an expert in business or industry and designing "classes" for yourself, an entrepreneur will set up a system to continually obtain new knowledge and wisdom over time. Attend Real World University, and your knowledge base and success will jump right past your competitors who think they know enough. Great entrepreneurs know that learning never stops!

The metaphor of "the house on the hill" is one we created to [help young people learn] about power players. Power players exist in different industries and areas of society. Young entrepreneurs need to learn early who the people are in these influential power circles that directly affect them and how to gain access and build relationships within "the house." It takes just one of these "homeowners" to take a liking to you and want to invite you in to their house to transform your business and opportunities.

Entrepreneur: How did you come up with the "young and successful" character traits you describe throughout the book?
Kushell: From people we knew, people we'd researched, and people we'd read about. From having the Young Entrepreneurs Network, I was dealing with tens of thousands of people who were doing amazing things with their own businesses. And we travel all over the world, we speak to huge audiences all the time, so we've come into contact with thousands of young people.

What we tried to do was figure out the key attributes that separated the people who are going about their lives and are maybe not so happy with everything but don't really know where they're going or how they're going to accomplish what they want-and [determine] what separates them from the people who have what they want-[those] who are totally focused, totally on the right track. That's where we came up with those attributes and said, 'OK, these people have taken control, they've taken ownership, they've said, "It's up to me to make the right decisions to get where I want to go." ' They don't wait for other people to hand them things and they also have a remarkable ability to spin challenges and disadvantages into the most powerful motivators and most powerful advantages, which was a very interesting thing we saw over and over and over.

I'd describe young and successful people like this:

* They display high levels of optimism and confidence.
* They possess vision and passion in their dreams and convictions.
* They ensure that they surround themselves with other like-minded people.
* They're highly resourceful, creative and inventive.
* They seize opportunities and create their own whenever possible.
* They know what motivates them.
* They have a strong sense of personal identity.
* They have spent a substantial amount of time on introspection and self-discovery.
* They refuse to let other people dictate how they should live.
* They take responsibility for their happiness.
* They spin challenges into their greatest motivators-and sometimes biggest advantages.
* Most importantly, they take control and ownership of their lives and careers early on, and never let go.

Entrepreneur: How did you develop TAPPS, the Four Rs and the personal balance sheet?
Kushell: [Scott and I] have always been very introspective and very intuitive, and part of our pact with each other as a married couple and as business partners is that we're constantly analyzing the way each other operates and [trying to] improve ourselves. You can't really do that unless you can be very candid with yourself and other people about what your strengths and weaknesses are.

TAPPS, which stands for Truth, Awareness, Preparations, Prevention and Survival, is an advance planning process that takes people through five simple steps to uncover how they might best approach a major challenge that could threaten to knock them off their path to success. It helps you identify the best possible approach to take to overcome the challenge, prior to the challenge occurring! For entrepreneurs, there's no denying that the path to achieving their dreams will inevitably have some bumps along the way. By applying TAPPS to a few of the top scenarios and mishaps that could potentially have the biggest impact on your life, you can rise to and overcome most challenges with great strength and clarity of mind.

The Four Rs is a tool we created to help people measure the level and kinds of returns they can expect from their investment of Risk, Effort, Sacrifice and Time in their major life decisions. For entrepreneurs, this is a critical tool to use, as it enables them to think clearly and analyze if and why they should plow everything they have into a new idea or business. By determining the returns on each of the 4 Rs, they'll be able to rest comfortably and confidently as they forge forward (or not), knowing that they've carefully thought through all they could in advance and not second guess themselves.

The "personal balance sheet" is similar to the process of a balance sheet used by a company to take a snapshot of their financial health on any given day. It's a terrific self-assessment tool that allows people to take a snapshot of their personal skills and abilities, as well as their current weaknesses and disadvantages, and then put this information to great use.

Many entrepreneurs tend to undervalue or overlook their assets and over exaggerate their liabilities, which can be detrimental to the success of their business. If you can be fair and honest with yourself when putting together your personal balance sheet, you'll develop a keen awareness of both your personal strengths and weaknesses or personal "assets" and "liabilities." This will enable you to better focus on and learn to minimize your liabilities and increase the strength of your assets so they can best be leveraged for success in both your business and personal lives.

Entrepreneur: In the book, you emphasize the importance of having a balanced life, a balanced and strong support structure with your family. Why is that so important to success?
Kushell: I've always said when it comes to entrepreneurs, I think more young people are put out of business by emotional issues than by financial issues. But people are always surprised when I say that. It's not money that puts young people out of business, it's the fact that people don't believe in them, that people are criticizing them or ostracizing them. I think when you're young, you're trying so hard to build a foundation for yourself, to get comfortable in your own skin and build your confidence, and people are always going to be chipping away at that, no matter you are, whether you're the most successful person in the world or you're homeless.

We have to become comfortable with who we are, and the only way I think we're gonna do that is by doing something we call 'sculpting a more perfect environment.' None of us has an absolute perfect environment to live in. Whether we're in school or at work or whatever we do, it's critical that we surround ourselves with people who understand us, who love us, who support us, and then also that we have a strong mentor mix. It's not a matter of finding one or two mentors. You need to have many different mentors, and that's [why we recommend] having a board of advisors.

You don't have to have a business to have a board of advisors, but it's critical that you have people who can support you in all different ways: people who are going to watch out for you and your health, people who are going to watch out for your finances and your money, people who are going to watch out for your education, your relationships, your social life and your lifestyle. There are a lot of different people we each need, and if you're not surrounded by people who motivate you, you're just not gonna go as far as you could.

Jennifer Kushell is the founder and president of The Young Entrepreneurs Network as well as the author of several books on entrepreneurship, including her most recent release, Secrets of the Young & Successful.

How Can You Become a Young Millionaire?

Find out from author and young entrepreneur Jennifer Kushell, who explains how to get everything you want without waiting a lifetime.
By Gisela M. Pedroza  ¶ 4:59 PM 0 comments