After 17 years in the NFL, Packers quarterback Brett Favre is finally retiring. He will go down as one of the greatest players in the history of the game, and not just because of his numbers. What made him legendary were his intangible qualities–qualities you can learn from and apply to your business.

Be dependable Favre played in 275 consecutive games. It takes more than physical durability to achieve something like that. It takes dedication, determination and sheer will. Even if you don’t get hit for a living, find ways to make sure your customers and employees know you’re willing to do whatever it takes to show up for work every day and be there for them.

Be loyal Favre spent 16 of his 17 seasons with the same team and, in a climate dominated by lucrative free-agent comings and goings, never once even flirted with the idea of leaving the people who gave him his shot at greatness. It’s no different in business - take care of the people who take care of you.

Be fearless If there’s one thing people will always remember Brett Favre for, it’s his ability to make something out of nothing one play and nothing out of something the next. Call him reckless. Call him “gunslinger.” But never call him afraid. He did it his way and did it well more often than not. Be confident in yourself and in your vision, make even the failures your own, and you can’t go wrong.

Be adaptable Late in his career, while never fully relinquishing his free-wheeling persona, Favre continued to be successful because he proved himself to be coachable and versatile. Be willing to take a new course with your business if the market changes or if the nature of your product changes, and you can see the same kind of long-term success.

Have fun Every time Favre took the field, there was a sense that he’d play the game for free. There’s no substitute for taking that kind of joy in your work. It’s contagious in sports and it’s just as contagious in business. Your employees will follow suit and pass it right on down to your customers.

entrepreneur.com

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

“The economy has been slip sliding away,” says Witcher, whose 75-man operation also sells and services big rigs and is the Northeast’s largest supplier of Pierce fire trucks. “We decided we wanted another place we could sell.”

As the economy slows, this is a good time to take a closer look at the federal government, the largest buyer of goods and services in the world. The advantages are clear. The budget is set; the government typically lets vendors know where they stand throughout the bidding process; and, best of all, bills are paid on time, typically within 30 days.

Witcher says he has become a government convert. After hiring a consultant to learn how to navigate the complicated process of bidding for federal work, he shifted his inventory control officer to the full-time task of researching potential contracts and has amassed a database that tracks all the bids the company has submitted - won and lost - to learn from its history.

“The federal government is my No. 1 customer now when it comes to parts,” Witcher says. “It has been continually on a growth pattern for us.”

The government buys virtually everything the private sector does, from condoms to coffeemakers to the services of publicists, pest control experts to entertainers. Yet for some, the idea of doing business with the government raises images of can’t win backroom deals. That’s just not the case with contracts in the small business arena, says Malcolm Parvey, a marketing consultant who has coached Witcher’s company and others on how to win federal bids.

Most of the work is awarded electronically, he notes, through a rigorous procurement process that takes time to master. There’s a high level of transparency, too. The government even lets bidders see who their competitors were and how they priced once the job is awarded.

“I know that small businesses have a great interest in this market; they just don’t have the time and they don’t have the expertise to go after it,” says Parvey, co-author of a new book, “Winning Government Contracts,” due out in February from Career Press.

The book is the latest attempt to simplify what can look like an insiders’ game. There are many guides on how to get federal work, including the government’s own tutorials at the Web sites of agencies such as the U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. General Services Administration as well as popular sites for searching federal procurement such as FedBizOpps.

“With the Internet what used to take 10 days now takes 10 minutes,” he says. “There are more and more agencies that are allowing competitive bidding to be done over the Internet.”

reuters.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

Tough product reviews anger some advertisers but win reader trust - and revenue - over time.

Running a Web site that publishes reviews of camcorders sounds like a tame line of work. But I had a moment of terror when an executive at a major electronics manufacturer accused me of hacking into the corporation’s computer system to get information about a new product.

My site, CamcorderInfo.com, evaluates equipment for consumers. I started it five years ago as a senior in high school. While I attended Tufts University, my team and I built it to 20,000 visitors a day. Our major selling point is our reputation. Some reviewers in this field have damaged their credibility through cozy relationships with big manufacturers. We maintain our independence - and publicize it.

The executive’s accusation came after I published an advance look at one of his firm’s camcorders. I had found pictures and specs on the company’s Web site. He claimed that the review, which I considered to be neutral, had forced his employer to release a rudimentary version of the product early and damaged sales. He threatened to call the FBI to prosecute me if I didn’t reveal information about an anonymous source at the firm whom I had interviewed.

Complete story at FSB Magazine

What kind of job did you have at 17?

I posed that question to the grown-ups I encountered recently while exploring Whateverlife.com. The teen-girl site and company was started by Ashley Qualls, an entrepreneur from a working-class neighborhood outside Detroit, who happens to be 17 herself. At that age, LeeAnn Prescott, the research director at Hitwise, was working at an amusement park, fashioning faux Civil War shots of people. Robb Lippitt, the former COO of ePrize who consults for Qualls, had worked his way up from dishwasher to prep cook to manager of Buddy’s BBQ. Ceca Mijatovic, the founder of the girls portal dayZloop, didn’t have a job yet; she was a foreign-exchange student from Yugoslavia. Me? I was delivering pizza for Domino’s.

“Of course, this,” says Ian Moray of ValueClick Media, referring to Whateverlife, “is something we all wish we’d done when we were 17.”

If only the Internet had been around then. One of the many fascinating things about Whateverlife is that Ashley didn’t set out to start a business. The Internet practically did it for her. Web design was a hobby, something she’d been learning online since she was 9. As a high-school sophomore, she figured out how to create layouts for MySpace pages, and her friends at Lincoln Park High School were keen to customize theirs, much like school lockers. As word spread throughout the MySpace universe, the 15-year-old couldn’t afford the servers to support her exploding online audience. A friend suggested using Google AdSense, which generates ad revenue based on a site’s traffic. Ka-ching. Whateverlife was off and running. Ashley has created nearly 3,000 layouts, her monthly audience is around 7 million, and revenue has grown from a couple of thousand bucks a month to as much as $70,000 - more than $1 million in less than two years.

Fast Company

When pop princess Ashlee Simpson was first photographed last summer post-nose job, it wasn’t just her plastic surgery that garnered mass attention. Sales of the dress she was wearing in the photo skyrocketed.

In the current celebrity-obsessed scene, an A-list star - on or off the red carpet - shown wearing a new designer’s creation can almost singlehandedly launch a fashion frenzy.

When Jessica Simpson stepped out recently in West Hollywood with Sang A’s “jade” clutch in blue python, blogs were quick to post her picture and solicit comments. And with the attention, from sites such as Pop Sugar and Style Minded, came demand for Sang A’s new $1,576 handbag.

Accessories designer Sang A learned early on that reaching out to the online community could be a crucial element of hawking her high-end handbags, which range in price from $1,500 to $15,000.

With a limited budget for marketing, Sang A has since come to rely heavily on blogs not just for attention, but also feedback.

The sites she chose to sell her wares, such as luxcouture.com and lagerconne.com, have developed mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers by incorporating reciprocal links.

“Blogging is absolutely important because it reaches the people that aren’t inside the fashion industry,” Sang A said.

CNN Money

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

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

Barbara Kavovit — better known to the world as Barbara K — has turned what began as a niche home-improvement business into a mini-empire that now includes a line of fashionable, female-friendly tools available through retailers like Target, two best-selling books and, most recently, an online show. Barbara K admits that while her career has rarely traveled in a straight path, and that she has made her fair share of mistakes, her business is stronger because of what she’s learned along the way.

“My first job I took after college was as a financial analyst. I was living at home in New Rochelle, N.Y., at the time, and it was actually kind of boring. Then one day I heard my mom talking to some of her friends about how hard it was to get things done around the house without a man around, like hanging picture, fixing a leaky faucet, and tightening a doorknob. That’s when a lightbulb went on for me.

“I realized that women are tired of having to rely on men to help with home improvements. I thought women might like to deal with another woman instead. So I went to a local printer to have some business cards and fliers made up. Then I went to the mall and started talking to women about how I had just started a home-improvement business and asked whether there was anything I could help them with.

“After I lined up a job, like putting up Sheetrock, I would go to the phonebook, find the contractors that could do the work, and check out their references. I would then drive the contractor to the job and talk with the customer as he did the work. I made my money by charging the homeowner more than the contractor was charging me. My first year, I made $25,000.

Yahoo! Finance

Allison Stuart felt scared during the day she spent at the hospital in New Orleans awaiting surgery for recurring ear infections. Most 7-year-olds would. She had some things to comfort her, though - not reassuring words from her doctor or the prospect of a new treatment, but far simpler gifts: a colorful quilt and a heart-shaped pillow.

The gifts were the brainchild of entrepreneur Lisa Honig Buksbaum. In 2001, Buksbaum closed her marketing firm, Boxtree Communications (Buksbaum means “boxtree” in Yiddish), which boasted a roster of brands such as Colgate and Lipton, to launch Soaringwords, a New York City nonprofit that helps sick children and their families.

Buksbaum, 46, understands from experience the need for this type of support: Within a span of ten months in 1998, her 35-year-old brother died suddenly of an asthma-induced heart attack, her father had a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (he defied the odds and survived) and her 9-year-old son became gravely ill with rheumatic fever, which left him bedridden for four months. “Everyone wants to do something positive, but they don’t know what to do to help,” she says.

Since its founding in 2001, Soaringwords has boosted the spirits of more than 150,000 pediatric patients in the U.S. and, through its Web site, reached children as far away as China, Israel, Mexico and Russia.

CNN Money

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 years ago to make up a new rule: Fire clients whose expectations are out-of-line. The result at van Aartrijk Group, a Springfield, Va., company with 14 employees that deals in corporate-brand identity, Web strategy, advertising and market research, suggests executives can exert more control over their work environments than many believe. His story.

startupjournal.com

It all started with an accident. Late one night, while experimenting with a jet pump and a nozzle for a refrigerator cooling system, Lonnie Johnson shot a stream of water clear across his bathroom. Where some people might have seen a mess to clean up, Johnson saw an opportunity. Thus was born the mother of all water guns, the Super Soaker.

After leaving NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1982, Johnson built the prototype for what would become the Super Soaker in his basement workshop. He had several false starts, but “a good challenge keeps me going,” he says. Although he applied for his first patent on the water-gun design in 1983, it wasn’t issued until 1987. About that time, he decided to leave the Air Force and work on several private projects, “any one of which might have made it,” says Johnson. But when he left the Air Force, they all fell apart. “There I was with no home, no job and a family of five to support.”

He returned to JPL and began shopping his water gun to toy companies. After two frustrating years, he hit the jackpot with Larami Corp. By that time, he had already sunk close to $15,000 into the project, and his licensing check was only $5,000. But Larami’s goal was to produce 100,000 water guns the following year. In 1990, despite little advertising, the gun — first christened Drencher — became a sellout. Renamed the Super Soaker in 1991, Johnson’s invention became the number-one toy in the country.

Larami has since been sold to Hasbro, but Johnson, who lives in Atlanta, still works with the company on updating the Super Soaker. His quarterly royalties have made him a millionaire, giving him the wherewithal to start his own research-and-development company, which is currently working on energy technology. Before his invention took off, “I had days when I’d stop and think, Why is it taking so long?” says Johnson. “But I never thought about giving up.”

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine