Inventors seek pot of gold through TeleBrands
You’ve probably never heard of Rachel Taylor. But it won’t be long before you can turn on the TV and hear hard-sell pitches — again and again — to buy the one-size-fits-all hair clip she invented.
Taylor is a rare winner in a world of inventors bedeviled by losers. She recently earned a much-sought-after chance to strike it rich, thanks to a demonstration she gave for the right set of eyes.
During a long day at TeleBrands‘ headquarters in this suburban office park, the competition is intense. Each inventor has but a few moments in front of Khubani to land the sale of a lifetime. On the line: the potential to leap from inventor wannabe to serious player in the $170 billion direct-response industry. A nod from TeleBrands means a negotiated share of sales through royalties that can make an inventor wealthy.
Taylor coolly demonstrates — on an assistant and on several other women, including Khubani’s wife, Poonam, — how her Clever Clip works on hair of any length or thickness. As she drove back to Baltimore, several hours after her pitch, her cellphone rang with Khubani’s thumbs-up call.
TeleBrands has a knack for finding quirky $9.99 products you never knew you needed, selling them on TV, then getting them into retail outlets, where sales can really rocket. The company is one of the biggest players in an industry that spent $2.6 billion in advertising last year. TeleBrands spent $300 million of that, the most in the industry, to air its hard-sell 30-second- to two-minute ads, estimates direct-response tracker Infomercial Monitoring Service. While most direct-response companies are privately held and don’t report earnings, TeleBrands has one of the most consistent records of hits.
Smart small business tips for success
Creativity is the key to keeping a small business flourishing in tight economic times. And while creativity will make your business grow stronger, there are also other free tools and opportunities small businesses should use to their advantage.
Make your small business appear big.
You might not have a huge warehouse or more than a dozen employees, but you can still give your business the professional appearance of one 10 times your size. First impressions are important. A business web site is a must.
Get free help.
Organizations like the Small Business Administration and SCORE “Counselors to America’s Small Business” exist to provide assistance. They can give you help specifically tailored to your business.
Focus on your X Factor.
Recognize what you do and why you do it, and then research your competition. When you discover the factor that makes your business better and different from the competition, learn how to focus and multiply that “X Factor” to achieve success.
Mom entrepreneurs conceive, give birth to some fascinating businesses
Who would have ever thought that making a plaster cast of an expectant mother’s belly could be turned into a work of art, let alone a business?
Original Belly Works was born out of a desire to make my own contribution to the family budget while being a stay-at-home mom. I also wanted to create something tangible that would forever keep me connected to that special time in my life.
Tisha DeShields of Atlanta is one of 200 working mothers who have built successful businesses that topped the voting in StartupNation’s 2009 “Top 200 Leading Moms in Business” competition. “Original Belly Works” is one of 16 mom-owned ventures from the Carolinas (four in the Triangle) and Georgia that cracked the list. Belly Works came in at 126, but it’s the favorite of The Skinny.
Hiring The Right Person
Hiring is more of a headache than ever, so say many companies who receive HR services from my firm. This might come as a surprise considering that there’s no longer an overheated talent market in which companies desperately compete for top talent. But instead, business owners are facing a down economy in which scores of job seekers clamber over each other in order to land scarce positions. The influx of new candidates into the marketplace makes it even more difficult for executives and hiring managers to find the perfect people for open, high-impact positions.
And yet, hiring the right person is more important than ever. A single bad hire can cost between $60,000 and $120,000–that’s not exactly the way you want to spend precious dollars in a difficult market.
There’s no question this is a great time to hire people. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it’ll be easier. The exceptional hires are out there, but just as in the old days, you may need to do some detective work and actively seek out the people who will make your company great.
Quit Using Email to Train Your Leads to Ignore You
We all get email marketing messages. The ones that really irritate me are the offers that get sent repeatedly with the exact same messaging. If it doesn’t catch my eye the first time, why would they think I want to see the same thing 5 more times in two days?
At this point, I unsubscribe. Or ignore them because I know I’ll get ten more for that webinar that I’m not sure I want to commit to now, so why bother? They aren’t likely to let me forget about it.
Don’t you consider this spam when it’s done to you? That your tolerance is being taken advantage of? Why do it to anyone else? It’s that “do unto others” rule. There’s absolutely no urgency or need to click through right now when I know I’m going to get more of the exact same message. You’re training your leads to ignore you.
Love Your Product and Live Longer
Daniel Carasso, former head and still honorary chairman of Groupe Danone, died peacefully in his Paris home in May at the ripe old age of 103. This longevity is a tribute to a lifetime of yogurt.
The story began in Spain. Carasso’s father, Isaac, a physician, migrated from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Barcelona and started a business in 1919 to sell yogurt in Spain using cultures from the prestigious Pasteur Institute. He named the yogurt Danone after son Daniel’s nickname. Throughout its early years Danone yogurt was marketed as a health food and sold by prescription through pharmacies. In 1929, Daniel Carasso, having studied business and bacteriology, established the Danone brand in France.
Carasso and his company survived the Great Depression, World War II, post-war recessions, mergers and acquisitions, and changing consumer lifestyles to transform yogurt from an obscure ethnic food to a worldwide sensation. His story holds inspiring lessons about the healthiest ingredients in business: innovation, collaboration, and long-term commitment.
Along the way, Carasso remained dedicated to yogurt no matter what happened. He ignored the beginning of the Great Depression because he was too busy trying to find dairy stores for his product in France, as the New York Times reported. After fleeing the Nazis in 1941, he found U.S. partners with whom he created the American version, under the name Dannon. Yogurt rose from obscurity and niche markets into the mass consumer mainstream when adding fruit jam to the sour product proved a marketing breakthrough. The American Dannon was sold to Beatrice Foods, and Carasso returned to Europe after World War II to grow Danone into a global brand, merging several times along the way to form Groupe Danone in 1973. In 2008, the Groupe had worldwide sales of $20.48 billion.
Carasso’s success involved a lifetime of innovation, yet the innovations were often very simple. Enhancements to make a product more user-friendly can quickly propel something from the margins to the mainstream without radical new inventions. Carasso’s success is a tribute to finding creative but very simple innovations that keep enhancing the product and cause leaps forward in popularity. Adding jam to yogurt doesn’t require scientific genius or grand statements about disruptive technologies, but it was game-changing for yogurt anyway.
For instance, the same thing happened with the growers’ cooperative marketing cranberry juice under the Ocean Spray name. For years, the tiny tart berry grown in New England bogs was an acquired taste for a small niche market. Ocean Spray’s Dannon-like breakthrough was the creation of blended juices to add sweetness and pizzazz – cranraspberry, cranapple, crangrape, cranpeach. (They tried cranprune, but that didn’t work, as many of us would have predicted.) Successful companies are open to creative partnerships to add something from outside the core to enlarge a product’s appeal.
Contrast Carasso’s long-term dedication to yogurt with the way many businesses have been conceived in recent years — as empty vessels for making money rather than enduring contributions to well-being. Before the recession, the world moved so fast that tech products could become obsolete in months, if not minutes. Before the recession, some entrepreneurs dreamed less of their product and more about cashing out. During the recession, some entrepreneurs are undoubtedly thinking about giving up rather than selling even harder.
Daniel Carasso lived though a century’s worth of turbulence and destructive change, some of it much worse than anything happening today. He persisted when others gave up, reached out to partners to help him implement his vision, remained true to his values, and never lost his passion for yogurt. Maybe it wasn’t consuming his product himself that gave him a long life; maybe it was enduring confidence and belief in his product. Doing what one cares about — as a force for good in the world — is the real prescription for personal longevity.
Innovative Ways to Reel in Cash
As the credit crunch makes raising financing more difficult, small business owners are finding innovative ways to reel in extra cash.
Just ask day-spa owner Eva Sztupka-Kerschbaumer, who says she recently raised $30,000 in a single day. Her Pittsburgh,-Pa. spa, ESSpa Kozmetika Organic SkinCare, needed a quick cash infusion when a $12,000 microdermabrasion machine and two $1,000 facial steamers conked out in April. However, the last thing she wanted to accrue was interest charges, so she didn’t go to a bank to raise funds. And to avoid missing out on future profits, she also didn’t tap a factoring company, which provides cash up front in return for a cut of her company’s future receipts.
Here are four other ways to raise (and save) cash quickly:
- Offer upfront pricing
- Discount items, sometimes
- Consider purchase money financing
- Switch from fixed to variable costs
