BusinessWorld

Small business owners are putting less on the line, but feel more optimistic about the future. Are they seeing through rose colored glasses? Small business owners say things are looking up, according to the latest Citibank Small Business Pulse survey. This year's query of 750 respondents revealed only 14 percent feel business conditions are poor--the lowest level since the survey launched in 2010. Nearly half of the small businesses (48 percent) say conditions are good or excellent, up 24 percent since 2010. Fifty-four percent say they expect 2014 to be even better. A possible cause for the shift might be that fewer owners are having to bootstrap, or finance their venture out of pocket. While fewer business owners fund their ventures with personal savings--37 percent compared to 62 percent in 2012--about a third mix the two together. Nearly 14 percent of all business owners say they use personal credit account for their business, the survey found. But the past year has also been...

The start-up acquisition madness continues, this time with Twitter buying Spindle, a location-focused social discovery engine. Yahoo isn't the only tech giant going on a shopping spree this summer. Twitter announced Wednesday it acquired social discovery start-up Spindle. Twitter will shut down the service and Spindle's team will relocate to San Francisco. No terms of the deal were disclosed in either company's press release. In case you're unfamiliar with Spindle, All Things D's Mike Isaac, who broke the story, calls it a "social startup (sic) focused on the location and check-in space, and discovering local places of interest nearby." Put simply, Spindle hyperactively filters useful data streamed through sites like Facebook and Twitter to make local discovery quicker and more intuitive. Rather than simply display where you are, Spindle shows you what's happening where you are, using data such as the time of day, points of interest like restaurants, and actual keywords found in a...

Greatness doesn't just happen. The best leaders take steps to ensure that when they do something, they do it better than anyone else. You're good. You wouldn't be where you are if you weren't. But you know you're capable of better than good. You're capable of achieving truly great things. Problem is, days go by, then weeks, months--maybe even years--and you're still cranking out good. You've yet to design that unbelievable product, write that great novel, dominate that market. Everyone admires you, but you've a growing sense of disappointment in yourself. How do you change that dynamic? How to you move from delivering good, to delivering Holy Cow! every time? Try these five steps: 1. Prioritize. First things first. If you want to achieve something great, best decide what it's going to be. This may seem like a flash of the blindingly obvious, but I've noticed an interesting and consistent positive correlation between those who know what they want to achieve and those who achieve great...

The only way alliances will strategically grow your business is if you pay attention to the details on an ongoing basis. Business partnerships offer unparalleled opportunities to build your business with the strength of others. They can be low-cost, high-yield, and therefore smart strategies. But only when you work out the specifics and you can be confident the brands fit. Plenty of people are puzzled that Oprah Winfrey's network OWN is partnering with actor Tyler Perry whose trademark humor regularly mocks and denigrates assertive black women. Partnerships are great but they also produce enormous opportunities for phenomenal brand conflict--and not only the obvious ones between Winfrey and Perry. Any seasoned marketer will tell you that all brands must conform to the three 'C's: consistency, consistency, and consistency. So if you want to wreck a brand, it's simple: just be inconsistent. A Case Study in Partnership Wreckage If you want a master class in how to do this, look no...

The key to outstanding customer service? Don't just listen--take action, says White House Black Market president Donna Noce. The key to outstanding customer service is listening to your customers--and acting on their feedback, according to Donna Noce, president of the retail chain White House Black Market. The upscale clothing and decor company--an offshoot of women's fashion retailer Chico's FAS--operates 351 boutique stores and grew 40 percent in the last year. Noce attributes much of the brand's success to its close-knit relationship with customers. She explained White House Black Market's strategy for quality customer service in a video interview with the Wharton School of Business earlier this month. Here are four tips to improve your customer service--and develop a loyal fan base--from Noce's interview. You can also watch the video in its entirety here. Be authentic. Don't use privacy settings as an excuse to distance yourself from customers. "If your customer is your top...

A recall is never good news for a car company. But founder Elon Musk has handled the situation with smooth moves. On Tuesday night, electric car manufacturer Tesla announced it is recalling a slew of Model S sedans manufactured between May 10 and June 8. The cause, according to a blog post by founder and CEO Elon Musk, is a faulty mounting bracket in the car's backseat. "This reduces our confidence that the left hand seat back will be properly retained in the event of a crash," Musk wrote. Musk didn't specify the exact number of cars being recalled, but a filing with the National Highway Safety Administration reports that 1,228 vehicles could be affected, though Tesla estimates only about 20 percent actually are. (Telsa forecasts selling 21,000 vehicles by the end of 2013.) Requests for comment by Tesla were not immediately returned. A recall is never good news for any company, but I suspect this particular one will hardly slow down the car manufacturer. For one thing, the number of...

Sometimes, words are not enough. Rather than talking in circles around your client, use visuals to recapture their attention. There is an old saying that a picture is worth one thousand words. Most people consider sight to be the most important of their five senses--so it seems logical that visual aids are more likely to hook your customers' attention than words alone. Indeed, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter has stated that fundraising projects with videos are 20 percent more likely to succeed than those without. And according to Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation: Making Your Ideas, Products and Services Easy to Understand, visual aids become especially important when you're dealing with a potentially confusing service or product. In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, he explains: We're communicating in the YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram era to audiences who are more visually literate than ever. Though often more difficult and expensive to produce,...

Now more than ever before businesses have tons of data on what customers want. Too bad they don't have a clue what to do with it. Compiling massive sets of data and analyzing them--so-called big data--was supposed to be a boon for business. (And a PR nightmare for the NSA.) But according to a survey from digital marketing software company Lyris and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, many companies are well behind the curve, as well as national spooks. According to the survey of 257 marketing executives, 45 percent said that they lacked the capacity to analyze big data, while a full half didn't have the budget to pay for digital marketing and database management. A lack of competence in analyzing data was cited as a major obstacle to implementing more effective strategies according to 45 percent of the executives. Those who could afford the analysis and had the skills to pull it off, at least in theory, found that, in fact, they didn't get much bang for the buck. Only 24...

There's a big difference between somebody who runs a business and a true entrepreneur. Three factors to help you tell the difference. A few years ago, I went on a date with a girl I'd met online. She was nice, but there was no romantic chemistry, and our talk turned to Internet dating war stories. She shared a hard-won insight: Just because a guy says he's an 'entrepreneur' doesn't mean he actually owns a business. Truer words were never spoken! It also goes the other way: Just because somebody owns a business, doesn't mean he or she is actually an entrepreneur. This exchange leaped top of mind this week as I've followed the SBA's Small Business Week events. Small businesses make up a whopping 99.7 percent of American firms, and account for 64 percent of net new private sector jobs. It's an important topic. But so often, people use words like "entrepreneur," "business owner," and "founder" interchangeably. I think we might be losing something and giving aspiring entrepreneurs some bad...

Even the most successful leaders get stuck in their careers. Here's a surprisingly simple way to break through and achieve your goals. It happens all the time: you're trying to solve a tough problem and you get stuck. You rack your brain but the answer just won't come. Asking around doesn't help. Neither does the internet. Bummer. We all know what that's like. It's damn frustrating. But when it happens to your career, it's far worse, especially if you're one of those people who expect a lot of themselves. I'm like that. I live to accomplish things and I always want to know I'm going somewhere. So when I get stuck, it really weighs on me. Perhaps the biggest problem with getting stuck in your career is the time factor. It can go on for years. After you've exhausted every source of advice, you get that sinking feeling like you're just spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast. It can really get you down. So quit wasting time searching for a magic solution to your problems and listen...

You can learn a lot from this employee's awful experience with her manager. "We're pressed to do more with less, compete globally, and meet ever-rising expectations against shrinking deadlines." --Stephen Covey Sometimes we're also burdened with extremely difficult bosses--people who can make going to work a daily combat zone instead of a pleasant, productive work environment. Yet even the worst bosses can end up teaching valuable lessons that can boost careers. RELATED: 7 WAYS TO FIX YOUR BIGGEST MANAGEMENT MISTAKE Monica Jones (not her real name), a journalist in New York City, had an experience early on that she still draws on. "I wrote an important process memo at my manager's request," she says. "I worked really hard on it, making sure all critical points were included--and went out of my way to solicit input from senior team members who had more experience than I did." Jones spent days refining her memo, on top of her regular duties. "I wanted it to be as clear and instructive...

Users don't want to go through training, read a manual, or figure out your jargon. They want to get going. I recently spent some time with the very talented and thoughtful team at Pathful. They are developing analytical tools to help non-technical website owners determine which parts of their sites are effective (driving engagement, conversion and ultimately sales) and which parts of the site either aren’t as successful or, worse, are actually damaging their business. While everyone tells us that we need a website, regardless of the type of business we may be in, no one ever tells the site owner with any precision whether the website is working and whether it’s worth continued investment. If you call your website developer, provider, or host, and ask how your site is doing, at best you’ll get some up-time data and maybe some traffic information. But you won’t get anything that deals with the real metrics and ROI of the site. One very appealing aspect of Pathful’s service is how highly...

With his Dorm Room Fund, the serial entrepreneur is putting more cash in the hands of college start-ups--and that's a good thing. By his sophomore year of college, Josh Kopelman was a full-fledged entrepreneur. Not that his alma mater--the University of Pennsylvania--understood him. "When I graduated they sent around this form," said the First Round Capital partner during his talk at the Venture Forward Conference in New York City Tuesday. "The only box I could check at the time was unemployed. There was no entrepreneur box." Needless to say, times have changed and Kopelman is helping the next generation fulfill their start-up ambitions. His Dorm Room Fund, launched last September, helps students start companies. It started with $500,000 in Philadelphia, expanded to New York and San Francisco, and now has plans to open in Boston later this fall. "While the cost to start a company has come way down, funding sources for these dorm room entrepreneurs haven't really changed," Kopelman...

There are many types of small business opportunities available to ambitious buyers. Here's how to choose the business that is right for you. There are tens of thousands of small businesses available in today's business-for-sale marketplace, representing dozens of industries and a multitude of market sectors. But not every type of small business is right for every buyer. Before you start looking at possible businesses to buy, it's essential that you think through key personal and market factors. These are the key factors that should drive your selection process and define the types of businesses that you will evaluate. Getting this right--i.e., finding the right business for you--will be a big determinant of your success as a new business owner. Getting this wrong can quickly turn your dream of owning your own business into a nightmare. As such, in addition to the thoughts below, it's also a good idea to talk with a qualified business broker whom you trust. They will help you answer...

These five elements of big data analytics will help you make the smartest decisions for your business. In today's hypercompetitive, real-time marketplace, where customers demand personalized solutions to their specific wants and needs, CMOs need a bird's-eye perspective to leverage their resources. And savvy leaders who know how to align departments and integrate consumer data can achieve operational efficiencies that lead to cohesive multi-platform messaging, meaningful customer engagement and greater profitability. But how can advocates of big data solutions earn the internal buy-in needed to streamline data collection and assessment and ensure that marketing communications are hitting the mark? Here is a process, based on the free guide Be A Big Data Marketing Hero: An Enterprise Guide to Ruling Your Customer's World, for earning organizational buy-in on big data solutions. No matter how well you may understand the rewards of integrated strategy, explaining it to others throughout...

One lender uses sophisticated algorithms--and any online dirt it can find about your company--to determine credit risk. The amount of stored digital information that companies, researchers, and others can mine is growing exponentially and is nearly impossible to fathom. In the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Change How We Live, Work and Think authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier maintain that in 2013 the world's collection of data amounts to around 1,200 exabytes. "If it were placed on CD-ROMs and stacked up, they would stretch to the moon in five separate piles," say the authors. "The amount of stored information grows four times faster than the world economy, while the processing power of computers grows nine times faster." What does this have to do with you and your company? A great deal if you want to get a loan. The Big Data Back Story Every digital act you make is stored--think Tweets or Facebook likes or what you buy on Amazon or what you search for on...

Most small business owners believe digital theft won't happen to them. They're wrong. Could your company be putting customers and employees at risk of identity theft? Most small business owners would answer no. They'd be wrong. "In general, we see a sense of invincibility among small business owners," says Matt Cullina, CEO of Identity Theft 911, which provides identity theft prevention and recovery services. "They know data breaches are happening, but they don't think it's going to happen to them." Of course, small business owners also face another challenge: With money tight, and simply keeping the doors open a top priority, many feel they can't afford to invest in data security even if they want to. That's a perfectly legitimate concern. But the good news is there are things small businesses can do to up their data security without much expense. Start with these four steps: 1. Don't store more personal data about employees or customers than you need. Most companies view data as an...

We all need to reinvent ourselves regularly. Here's how I suggest new grads--or anyone--go about it. On May 23, I had the honor of delivering the convocation keynote at my alma mater, San Jose State University, for the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications. Unlike most graduation speeches, mine wasn’t esoteric or philosophical. I didn’t tell the graduating seniors to follow their dreams. Nope. I told them what they--and their tuition-paying parents--really wanted to hear: how to get a job. I shared practical job and career strategies I’ve seen work thousands of times. The full transcript, and a video, of the speech is here. My tips aren’t just for college grads. We all need to regularly reinvent ourselves, no matter our industry or level of experience. Best of all, these tips come without a tuition fee. 1. Go out on a limb In my college senior seminar class, we prepared for the real world by writing a cover letter and resume for a hypothetical job. I found a marketing...

Of course you put your best foot forward when courting investment. But there are good reasons to be a bit more transparent, too. I suppose it’s only natural for an entrepreneur to be a little nervous before meeting with a potential backer for his or her company. But the result of that nervousness, often, comes off as fairly unnatural. Many times, when entrepreneurs begin meeting with investment partners, they feel inclined to display a certain bravado that they think conveys confidence -- confidence they don’t necessarily have. The hope, I suppose, is that doing so will maximize their valuations. The reality, however, is that most VC firms are made up of former entrepreneurs who are empathetic to the development that first-time founders naturally go through as they build their companies. And, contrary to popular belief, we’re often open to, and excited about, helping advance that development. That help often takes the form of operational value-add services aimed at helping a company...

Bossholes drive away talented employees and cost your company money. A bosshole is a combination of a boss and, well, an anal sphincter. Bossholes are workplace bullies who yell at the drop of a hat and generally make their employees feel tired, lousy, and unappreciated. For entrepreneurs, the primary danger is that you might be a bosshole but not realize it, according to Robert Sutton, author of the bestsellers Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No A****** Rule. Here are his suggestions to ensure your inner jerk isn't making you (and your team) less effective: 1. Understand the Financial Risk Bossholes cost companies revenue and profit--big time. "Bossholes drive away talented people and force otherwise useful folk to follow around after and clean up the emotional messes they leave," explains Sutton. 2. Monitor Your E-mail E-mail is what Sutton calls an "emotionally thin" media that tends to magnify negative emotions. In an e-mail, anything you write that's insensitive or seems angry is...

A new study suggests that negative emotion may actually be a pretty good launching pad for creativity. Creativity is mysterious and difficult. If you have tasks on your to-do list that require a creative spark, perhaps you’ve been putting them off, waiting to get in a mellow mood or for inspiration to strike. But a new study suggests you may have been making a mistake waiting around for the right mindset to start your creative project. Bad moods can actually improve creativity, the series of studies by three European professors suggest, at least if the negative emotions come at the start of a work session. The trio took two approaches to come to this conclusion. First, they asked around 100 creative professionals to keep diaries of their emotions and productivity. While happiness at the end of the day was linked with increased productivity (who wouldn’t be happy after getting a ton done?), being in a bad mood at the start of the day was associated with even higher productivity. Why...

What began as a social gathering for like-minded entrepreneurs and VCs has evolved into one of the Valley's most dynamic accelerators. Meet the man with the connections, Saeed Amidi. When international entrepreneurs want a shot at Silicon Valley stardom, they call on Saeed Amidi. The angel investor is the son of Amir Amidi, who owned the Medallion Rug Gallery where fellow VC Pejman Nozad famously built up his contacts. And his ties to the tech hub span 35 years. As co-founder of the investment firm Amidzad Investments, Amidi has the expertise and deep pockets to show for it. Since 2006, Amidi's passion project has been Plug and Play, an international network that's accelerated 1,200 start-ups and collectively raised more than $1 billion in venture capital. Last year, the organization made 62 investments, while helping 150 start-ups from Silicon Valley and another 100 from abroad find resources and make connections. Helping foreigners get their foot in the door is perhaps what Amidi,...

Marissa Mayer is on the verge of completing 14 Yahoo acquisitions in just six months. Will she reinvent Yahoo? With Marissa Mayer at the helm, Yahoo is on an acquisition tear. One month after the company's $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, AllThingsD reported yesterday that Yahoo is in talks to purchase Xobni, an address book app, for $30 million to $40 million. And today, news surfaced that the company is also about to acquire Qwiki, a popular video sharing app, for close to $50 million. If the two deals go through, Yahoo will have publicly acquired 14 companies in 2013; by comparison, last year it bought only two companies, and, in 2011, three. No Surprise, But What's the Strategy? When Marissa Mayer took over as Yahoo's CEO in late 2012, one of her first stated missions was to sniff out potential acquisitions in order to turn Yahoo back into a growth company. And with $1.2 billion in cash on hand--even after the Tumblr acquisition--she has room for several more big purchases...

The one thing your sales team needs to improve? Explaining, says Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft. Here's how. People rarely buy products they don't understand, so it's a salesman's job to explain them. But what if your explanation is so organic it's pointless? Perhaps you suffer from the curse of knowledge--knowing so much you explain things in ways no one grasps. Revisiting the basics of explaining can help, writes Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft, in The Harvard Business Review. Here's an overview: Focus on why. Make sure your team knows exactly what your product or service does for customers. "By answering the "why" early on , you create a foundation for understanding on which to build more complex ideas," says LeFever. Simple trumps clever. "Fancy vocabulary and extensive background information might impress customers--but, more likely, will just confuse them," he says. Instead of trying to impress people with how smart you are, make them feel smart by building their...

The NSA isn't about to stop snooping on you anytime soon, but there are ways to throw them off your trail. Here are some tools to help you go private. Revelations of NSA surveillance have shaken the nation, but while many of us would love nothing more than to toss our phones out the window and avoid well-trafficked search engines like Yahoo and Google altogether, the government seems intent snopping on Americans whether they like it or not. Sometimes that's not a bad thing--but often it is. As blogger Sarah Downey writes, one of three things can happen when your data falls into a corporation's lap: Your privacy may be breached like the customers of LivingSocial; the company might use it in a way that makes you uncomfortable and/or violates your privacy; or the government may use it, courtesy of the NSA and PRISM. To help you sleep better at night, here's a roundup of tools that can help you go private. Mobile TextSecure TextSecure is an open source app that encrypts text so that no...