After numerous prototypes and years of tinkering, Rick Chambers and Larry Kost believe they’ve invented the perfect apparatus to accomplish just that: The Bataround.

It doesn’t sound like much: an elongated stainless steel frame, connected to an aviation cable with a batting practice ball bolted to the end. But with one person swinging the device in a circular motion, a little wrist action and the resulting centrifugal force can provide a whole lot of practice cuts for a batter in a short period of time.

In the summer of 2006, five years and some $70,000 in research and development later, Chambers and Kost, the engineer behind the bataround, finally put their invention on the market.

Lodi News-Sentinel

CNN Money

Whether a child is groomed to take over the family business or mistakenly pushed into it, problems often arise when family and authority mix.

“Being in an emotional relationship and a business relationship puts a different, more difficult kind of strain on relationships,” said Getzler, who inherited his consulting firm from his father.

Difficult-to-solve personality issues are almost inevitable in family companies, and without an exceptionally strong patriarch or matriarch leading the family business, problems can mushroom.

Despite whether a favored daughter was groomed for the business or a son was mistakenly pushed into a position of authority, a parent might not have the ability to select an appropriate heir.

“Once the patriarch or matriarch retires or dies, many businesses become a free-for-all - despite carefully laid plans,” Getzler said.

To that end, Getzler offers some tips to help business owners make rational decisions about their successors. These strategies can also help owners make other tough calls when family relationships are at stake.

1. Set up an advisory board.
2. Employ a family business counselor.
3. Manage egos and salary demands.
4. Stop the feeding frenzy.

“Everyone gets along generally when there is a lot of money to go around. The fights start when someone feels they are working hard and not making enough,” Getzler said.

In the end, he insisted, “there’s nothing magical,” to navigating through difficult family business issues. “It’s about getting people to focus on the end result.”

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

America loves a good mug shot. The more frizzed, frazzled and frantic, the better. An Orlando entrepreneur has seized on that fascination, recently starting “JAIL,” a weekly newspaper filled with nothing but the unflattering thumbnails. Page after page, with only a few ads in between.

“A mug shot is a couple notches below your driver’s license picture,” said Devin James, 41, dressed casually in sweat pants, sneakers and a ball cap. “And everyone takes a messed up driver’s license picture.”

In JAIL, the stars are the readers’ neighbors, charged with everything from drug possession to prostitution to murder. Thousands of arrests each week in the paper’s three-county distribution area provide plenty of material, all obtained free from police and sheriff’s departments.

James carefully chooses the mug shots on the front page — issues with attractive women on the front move fastest.

“Sex sells,” James said.

James said he got the idea nearly a decade ago after a three-month stint in the Orange County Jail after he says he got into a loud fight with a girlfriend and the police sided with her. He denies hitting her.

Using $600 he earned moving furniture, James started the newspaper in December.

“The timing is right for this paper now,” he said. “America is in the midst of a crime wave.”

Associated Press

When Chicagoan Jenny Dombroski spotted the NikeID website where consumers can customize sneakers according to their preferences, she knew it was a concept that could work for lingerie too. So Dombroski, who loves lingerie but knew nothing about the apparel industry, spent six months networking, asking lots of questions and working in a lingerie shop. Then she hired a designer and Evlove Intimates was born. (Evlove is ‘evolve’ spelled backwards.) “A panty is a panty, a boy short is a boy short,” Dombroski says. “There isn’t a lot of variation in the design. We offer customers the opportunity to create personalized lingerie products and to have fun doing it.”

Customized Evlove Intimates lingerie is sold primarily through private home parties. Invited guests sip wine while they select from a wide array of designs, samples, fabric swatches and decorative touches including ribbons, appliqués, rosettes and bows. Dombroski hooks up her laptop to a TV screen where guests view and revise their choices courtesy of her online design studio. Prices for a lingerie set run around USD 100, with prices for individual pieces USD 35 and up. Purchases are delivered in about three weeks. Dombroski recently launched a website to enable customers to design and place orders online. But most of her business is through home parties, with the number of bookings increasing each month, mostly through word of mouth.

Dombroski’s ‘customerization parties’ are an inspired idea that could work just about anywhere for all sorts of products, including t-shirts, home fashions, fragrances and cosmetics. The founder’s advice for other fledgling entrepreneurs? “Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. If you love the product, ask questions and network—a lot. And above all, be persistent.”

Springwise

Based upon an inspired Biblical formula, the world’s first spiritual perfume is designed to be a reminder of God, Christ, spiritual self and soul. “We turned to the Bible to seek inspiration about which items to include and became convinced that a formulation would reveal itself,” explains Rick Larimore, IBI’s chief executive officer. “Creating Virtue(R) has been an adventurous journey through fragrance and scripture, with remarkable miracles confirming our choices.”

Virtue(R)’s subtle blend includes top notes of apricot, pomegranate and fig that transition to a gentle heart of iris, warming to a golden base of rich, exotic woods of frankincense, myrrh, aloe, and spikenard. Several ingredients cost up to $4,500 per kilogram, making Virtue(R) a truly precious mixture of oils. It is available in a 1.7-fluid ounce French bottle and over cap, with 24-kt gold raised lettering on the bottle and embossed gold foil lettering on the box, pamphlet enclosed.

“The natural oils of Virtue(R) blend with the wearer’s own body chemistry to form your own signature fragrance. Uniquely beautiful and definitely unforgettable, it places the wearer in an ancient world of senses, enduring and timeless for over 3,000 years,” says Vicki Pratt, IBI’s president. “A gift for someone special or your own unique treasure, Virtue(R) brings a valued gift of scent and hope of a renewed spiritual self. No one has ever done this before in a perfume - developing a fragrance that reminds us of our, sometimes frail, conscious link to God.”

California News Wire

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

My baking company is growing incredibly fast, and I often feel I could use a little advice. How can I form an advisory board? -Stephanie Vandegrift, Stephanie’s Premium Bakery, Dallas

Dear Stephanie: “Start with a list of experts you can call on individually,” says Dorothy Adams, a board member of the Stamford chapter of the Connecticut Venture Group (cvg.org), who has served on several advisory boards.

To tackle strategic questions such as growth, someone with investment-banking expertise would be helpful. A fellow business owner whose marketing savvy you admire might be another smart choice. Explain that you’d like to ask them for advice now and then. They’ll probably be flattered.

“No payment is really expected,” she says. “It’s a nice idea to offer them payment in kind. You could thank your advisors with cookies.” You may also want to check out the Alternative Board-TAB (TABSanAntonio.com). It brings the leaders of non-competing businesses together to exchange advice.

FSB Magazine

Flexpetz recently launched in Los Angeles and San Diego, and offers consumers the option of having a dog for just a few hours or days a week. Which is a good solution for people who’d love to have a dog, but are too busy, travel frequently, or live in buildings that don’t allow dog ownership.

The company’s founder, Marlena Cervantes, views Flexpetz like an extended family: “When our dogs spend time with their extended family members, they are lavished with love and undivided attention. We feel our this concept allows our dogs more love and attention than single ownership can often provide.”

Membership is limited, and each dog generally spends time with a small group of people. Monthly membership costs USD 39.95 plus a daily fee, and members can reserve their pooch of choice online. Before being allowed to rent a dog, members go through a mandatory training session with a certified Flexpetz dog trainer. The service aims to expand to New York, San Francisco and Boston soon, followed by other cities in the United States and abroad. One to set up locally? Or how about starting a website that matches two or three owners, facilitating fractional dog ownership based on location, availability and personality?

Unusual Business Ideas That Work

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you’re in good company. An average of 464,000 adults a month create new businesses, according to the most recent statistics available from the Kauffman Foundation, which tracks and promotes entrepreneurship. Technorati Profile

But starting a business is a complicated, risky, all-consuming effort. Indeed, just two-thirds of new small businesses survive at least two years, and only 44 percent survive at least four years, according to a study by the U.S. Small Business Association.

1. Determine if you’re an entrepreneur or just a wannabe.
2. Pinpoint an opportunity.
3. Make sure there’s a market for your idea.
4. Write a business plan.
5. Determine your business structure.
6. Look for funding.

Fortune

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

Books Lambert, who runs TheBeerbelly.com as president of Under Development Inc., is also someone who might have been viewed by some as having a less-than-perfect business model for his venture. But — after the press picked up on his contraption and he got 1 million hits to his fledgling site, as well as about 80 calls from offline media, including CNN and the like — he sold his electronics company, turned toward inventing full-time and his beer belly is jiggling as he laughs all the way to the bank.

Lambert also uses a potent mix of marketing savvy and passion, spiced with some serendipity, to run his site. The Beerbelly, by the way, is a neoprene bag that fits under a shirt and can be used to avoid paying $9 for drafts at sporting events.

eCommerce-Guide

Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the late 1980s, Michael Jordan shaved it all off. Soon, the world was examining the scalps of Bruce Willis, Andre Agassi, Moby and just about one token character on every TV show — not to mention a swarm of Oscar nominees and presenters this year, including Jack Nicholson (who had shaved his head for a role).

The response is a booming market of products being developed and sold specifically to the unhirsute — a new front in the nearly $5 billion onslaught of male grooming products in the United States.

“I’m a former comb-over wearer,” confessed Howard Brauner, founder of the two-year-old company Bald Guyz. “I would spend half an hour in the morning making it look right, and then finally I just realized it was ridiculous. Once I decided to really go bald, my wife would get annoyed at me for using her expensive shampoos. But I had to use something to clean my head”

For that particular ablution, Brauner now uses a head wash that’s part of the line of products he developed in response to his wife’s complaints. Bald Guyz also puts out pocket-size individual head wipes, for use on the go. And there is a conditioner, to be used twice a week. “Your skin up there is either dry or irritated or oily,” he said.

New York Times News Service