Bob Parsons credits 16 rules for propelling him from humble youth to his role today as CEO and Founder of GoDaddy.com.

1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone.
2. Get and stay out of your comfort zone.
3. When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think.
4. With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be.
5. Focus on what you want to have happen.
6. Take things a day at a time.
7. Always be moving forward.
8. Be quick to decide.
9. Measure everything of significance.
10. Anything that is not managed will deteriorate.
11. Pay attention to your competitors, but pay more attention to what you’re doing.
12. Never let anybody push you around.
13. Never expect life to be fair.
14. Solve your own problems.
15. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
16. There’s always a reason to smile.

bobparsons.com

Grocery shopping for Rene Lopez became magical after he moved Downtown. Lopez merely has to make up a shopping list, and the next day, his groceries are waiting at home for him after work, with the perishables in the fridge and freezer.

Michelle Harvey formed the Pittsburgh Town Shopper delivery service in September and works almost exclusively as a personal shopper and courier for Downtown residents who don’t yet have a neighborhood grocery store.

“There’s nothing here,” said Lopez, who moved here from Los Angeles last summer. “At one point, I didn’t even have a car, so that (Pittsburgh Town Shopper) was extremely convenient for me. I didn’t have to find a way to go out and get food or order from Dominos.”

Pittsburgh Town Shopper is hardly the first Web-based grocery delivery service, but there are few, if any, in the Pittsburgh area.

“I think I have a niche,” said Harvey, who declined to disclose sales figures or the number of customers she has. She said her services, which cost $39 for an average delivery, are in demand and she hopes business will grow to the point where she has employees to shop as well.

Pittsburgh Live

“We’re one of the country’s biggest exporters of marshmallows. We also sell our own lines of gourmet pretzels and popcorn to 41 countries. This means that we have to be pretty creative at tapping into international markets.

“Before I became a marshmallow king, I spent several years in the early 1990s as a banker in Hamburg. I was struck by how much my wife missed American junk food. She’d drive eight hours to Belgium and spend $12 for a $3 box of Oreos. It got me thinking that there might be a demand for American-branded products, not only among expats but among the locals.

“It took me 2-and-a-half years to land my first sale, to a German catalog company. Unfortunately it wanted small quantities of a lot of different items. Soon I was exporting almost 2,000 different American food products- Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Bisquick, cake mixes. “This wasn’t the most profitable way to do business- the margins were too thin, and we depended on the cooperation of major brands. It made more sense to develop our own versions of American food that wasn’t available overseas, selling the product instead of the brand.

“We started with marshmallows. My manufacturer offered to develop a private label for me, and Rocky Mountain Marshmallows was born in 1996. We launched our pretzel and popcorn brands shortly after. Our marshmallow-exporting business grew so well - doubling in sales every year from 1996 to 2004 - that my co-packer, Doumak, purchased the Rocky Mountain brand from me on the condition that we continued to export it. In the past two years we have nearly tripled marshmallow sales.

“Politically the U.S. is unpopular abroad. But we see an almost unlimited opportunity for growth for our products. We recently shipped marshmallows, popcorn, and pretzels to new clients in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. American culture, at least as it’s manifested in food, is pretty bulletproof.” –as told to Alessandra Bianchi.

CNN Money

Who hasn’t fantasized about quitting their job and striking out on their own? Before doing anything, you should check out these excellent six myths about owning a business:

1. Your family & friends will always understand the time commitment, even when no money is coming in.
2. Your friends’ constructive criticism is never out of jealousy
3. Your college degree is all you need to secure the knowledge entrepreneurship requires
4. Your lack of a college degree will ensure your business fails
5. Anyone that has tried and failed automatically must be trusted because “they’ve done it”.
6. If the majority of your peers call the idea silly, it probably is.
7. You have to spend money to make money (this one is borderline, but a lot can be earned by charging people for your knowledge on something)

Personal Finance Advice

The owner of a bike-tour company improves his business using various wireless technologies.

After racing bicycles professionally for two years and realizing that I was no Lance Armstrong, I found another way to make a living on a bike. I had spent 20 years organizing bike treks with friends through the Alps, the hills of Tuscany and the countryside of Provence. Noticing a growing appetite for such trips, I founded Destination Cycling (destinationcycling.com) in 2002. I now run tours on my bike 70 days a year.

We began offering trips for serious cyclists that duplicated famous races such as the Tour de France in 2005. Our clients are typically Fortune 500 executives. The journeys are very complex for me to manage. We ride 100 miles or more a day for 21 days. I never know when a tire will blow or a hail storm will strike. Our customers pay us $30,000 for the experience of a lifetime and, in some instances, six figures for exclusive tours. They expect us to plan for the unexpected.

FSB Magazine

Since launching his first business, Speck Design, 11 years ago, Ryan Mongan and his business partner have founded Speck Products, famous for its iPod accessories; CAD Talent, an online job board for engineering talent; Camera Armor, which makes protective cases for cameras; and Speck China, a design and sourcing firm in China. Mongan’s latest company is called VentureNiche, which will act as a hub to help his growing family of companies to leverage each other whenever possible.

“We learned that we also enjoyed starting companies in niche markets. Our mantra when it comes to starting new companies is to fail fast, fail frugal, and fail fearlessly. We started 10 companies before we had our next successful next company, which became Speck Products. We tried new stuff, didn’t spend a lot of money, and if it wasn’t going anywhere, we shut it down. We never bet the farm on a new venture, which allowed us to keep trying.

“We come up with the majority of our ideas internally. For instance, we came up with the idea for Camera Armor at a trade show. We want to play in niches — we don’t want to go mainstream.”

Yahoo Finance

Combining marriage and business is not an endeavor to be taken lightly. It requires serious consideration and answers to some tough questions. Here are 10 tips for running a successful home-based business with your spouse:

1. Determine if you can work side by side.
2. Discuss your goals.
3. Write a business plan and solicit feedback.
4. Define each person’s role.
5. Keep the lines of communication open.
6. Be circumspect when talking with clients.
7. Form a united front.
8. Set firm boundaries and honor them.
9. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
10. Don’t deal with family matters during business hours.

AllBusiness.com

Business authors and experts have proclaimed enough revolutions to fill a long shelf. Most of these turn out more like ripples than tidal waves, as a check of any bookstore’s markdown shelves will show. Sure, a few tomes and gurus from the past three decades have made a difference in the way entrepreneurs operate–or at least in what they bring on the plane to read.

But even the rare title with the power to change rarely has much staying power. The speakers who promised to teach American companies to operate like Japanese firms were influential in the 1980s, but imploded in the 1990s along with Japan’s bubble economy. Likewise, the 1990s experts who proclaimed an end to the Old Economy lost listeners and credibility when the New Economy’s glitter faded in the new century.

Of the thousands of business books published in the last 30 years, only a handful have withstood the assaults of changing times and changing objectives to remain as relevant today as when they first came out. Here are nine worthy of space on any entrepreneur’s shelf–now and in the future.

1. The One Minute Manager (HarperCollins, 1981) by Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
2. Out of the Crisis (The MIT Press, 1982) by W. Edwards Deming
3. In Search of Excellence (HarperBusiness Essentials, 1982) by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman
4. Guerrilla Marketing (Houghton Mifflin, 1983) by Jay Conrad Levinson
5. Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HarperBusiness, 1985) by Peter Drucker
6. The E-Myth (HarperBusiness, 1985) by Michael Gerber
7. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Free Press, 1989) by Stephen Covey
8. Reengineering the Corporation (HarperBusiness, 1993) by Michael Hammer and James Champy
9. Built to Last (HarperCollins, 1994) by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras

Entrepreneur

It took a few years before Martine Rothblatt got used to describing her daughter’s chronic lung disease as a lucrative market opportunity. “I choked every time I said it - it sounded so immoral,” says Rothblatt, 52. But when she realized that the fastest track to a cure was to launch a biotech firm and then take it public, Rothblatt started United Therapeutics.

The company, based in Silver Spring, Md.,makes and sells Remodulin, a drug that treats pulmonary hypertension (PPH), abnormally high blood pressure in the arteries that supply the lungs. The rare, incurable, and often fatal ailment causes shortness of breath, fainting spells and fatigue. Most treatment options, ranging from daily pills to intravenous medicines, are fully reimbursable by insurance companies.

Rothblatt describes watching her daughter, Jenesis, battle PPH when she was diagnosed as a little girl. Jenesis survived on a mix of pills, but doctors warned that if her condition worsened, she would have to take Flolan, a GlaxoSmithKline (Charts) drug that stays in the bloodstream for only three minutes. It must be continually administered via a catheter threaded directly into the groin or neck. Unstable at room temperature, Flolan requires patients to carry an ice pack 24 hours a day to ensure that it stays cool.

“The treatment seemed worse than the disease,” recalls Rothblatt, stroking one of the three mohawked Labradoodles that roam her offices. “My vision became an inhaled version of the medicine.” Her first step was to develop a drug that lasted longer than Flolan.

FSB Magazine

Back in the early 1980s, Frank Crail had a dream that many of us harbor in some small corner of our souls. A successful - if harried - tech entrepreneur in sunbaked Southern California, Crail yearned for a small town in the cool mountains where he and his wife could raise a big family and savor the simple life. So he moved to Durango, Colo. (pop. 15,000), and started looking around town for a way to make a living.

“I realized I had two options: a car wash or a chocolate store,” Crail recalls. “I’m not a car-wash kind of guy, so I opened the chocolate factory.”

Crail wasn’t exactly a candy man, either. He mixed his first batch of chocolate on a Ping-Pong table and got it all wrong. The nut clusters were as big as hockey pucks. The peanut-butter cups were a size D. But it turned out that folks were hankering for supersized sweets. Crowds gathered, and not just for the chocolate. Part of the fun was watching the new shopkeeper fumble around in his open kitchen.

“Resort towns are perfect for chocolate,” Crail says. “No one’s on a diet when they’re on vacation. People have money to spend, and they’ve got to bring something to folks back home.”

Today Crail’s Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is the largest U.S. chocolate retailer in terms of locations, surpassing Godiva and See’s. Rocky Mountain (rmcf.com) has 325 stores in 44 states and this year plans to open 40 more. Revenues rose 13 percent, to a record $31.6 million, in fiscal 2007. (Same-store revenues, however, were flat.) Profits climbed 17 percent, to an all-time high of $4.7 million, propelling the company to No. 80 on the FSB 100.

CNN Money

Every inventor has a thousand ideas. But it’s the rare one who has 350 of his ideas actually on the market.

Meet Zlatko Zadro, president of Zadro Products in Huntington Beach.

After careers selling large computers and refurbishing real estate, Zadro decided in 1983 to try marketing one of his inventions.

The result is an international company that makes 350 products, many of them patented. It has 40 employees in Huntington Beach and 800 in China. Many inventors can learn from Zadro’s practical approach that focuses on customer needs, not his own desires. Read the rest of this entry »

Question: I have been considering taking two friends as partners in my planned company. I need their expertise as well as their ideas, contacts and other contributing efforts. Should I take them on as employees? Or is it better to partner?

Answer: Here are a few things to ask yourself: First, do you really need business partners to build a successful company? If so, will these friends make strong and trustworthy business leaders? And perhaps most importantly, are you willing to risk hurting your friendship if the partnership falls apart?

Complete article at startupjournal.com

Why do small business owners write on blogs?

1. A faster and better way to create newsletter articles.
2. A strategy for getting published.
3. A low-cost way for a small business owner to market online.
4. A method to communicate and connect — especially important for business owners.
5. Satisfaction of some inner need to share.

Why do you blog? Or, if you do not currently blog, tell us the reason you do not.

smallbiztrends.com

Business is supposed to be fun. Losing sight of that only tends to negatively impact your business and cause you to forget why you started your business in the first place. As an entrepreneur there is probably no end to your overtime, so be sure you have fun for yourself, both at work and outside of work.

Fun is also critical for keeping your employees happy. Statistics and experience both show that employees who enjoy their jobs are more productive and will stay with a company far longer than employees who do not enjoy their jobs.

Fun at work doesn’t have to be an extravagant ordeal. It could be as simple as taking an hour or two once a month to attend an interesting seminar or having a company cook-off where your staff tests their skills to see who makes the best cookies or appetizers.

Or it could mean taking the time to go out for coffee or a drink after work. Whatever the culture of your company is, find something that will engage and motivate employees.

Yahoo! Finance