Archive for April, 2007
The Top 7 Reasons to Write a Business Plan
Lots of business owners skip a crucial step to ensure the success of their companies – writing a business plan. This detailed overview of your company and its future is commonly overlooked – often because it’s a lot of work. However, it’s some of the most valuable work you can do when starting up a [...]
Sell What You Say
Just over a year ago, we covered Ether, which makes it easy for (budding) entrepreneurs to sell spoken advice and support by providing them with a dedicated 1-888 number for customers to call, and taking care of billing and payments. Now, a massive player has joined the arena. Skype’s latest software release includes a beta [...]
Cardz aim to make customers enjoy your sales pitch.
Robert Likoff was looking for a way to sell more drugs. No, not that kind of drug. Likoff’s Montclair, N.J., firm, Group DCA, markets medications on behalf of pharmaceutical companies.
Group DCA was pretty good at persuading physicians to try new drug therapies, but the company struggled when it came to reaching patients. Rebates, a time-honored [...]
Must I play golf to get ahead?
“Women – or men, for that matter – who are not golfing are choosing to neglect one of the most powerful business and career-development tools there is,” declares Hilary Bruggen.
Bruggen may be a tiny bit biased: A former head of global marketing for KPMG, she quit that job to start and run Strelmark, a Washington, [...]
Accidental Inventions
Viagra – Men being treated for erectile dysfunction should salute the working stiffs of Merthyr Tydfil, the Welsh hamlet where, in 1992 trials, the gravity-defying side effects of a new angina drug first popped up. Previously, the blue-collar town was known for producing a different kind of iron.
LSD – Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the [...]
How to avoid Internet stock scams
Things Scam Companies Don’t Want You To Think About
My editor, Owen Thomas, recently passed along to me an email that had found its way to his inbox about a stock called Xethanol (XNL), suggesting that I might be interested in looking into it. The email claimed that Xethanol was attempting to defraud investors. I wasn’t [...]
Clients Got You Down? Fire the Trouble Makers
When a client says, “Jump!” the only right answer is: “How high?”
Peter van Aartrijk, 48 years old, felt differently. When he realized, as the founder of his own business, that some clients’ unreasonable demands were causing him stress and cutting into time with his wife and two daughters, now 11 and 16, he decided six [...]
