Deb and Amy talk about Thinking Bigger, how to Start Your Own Business without an MBA, how a Business Coach can speed up success, and much more in this final 3-pound mafia podcast.

If you missed it: Part 1 interview on Business Ownership
Part 2 interview on Business Ownership
Part 3 interview on Business Ownership

Deb and Amy talk about Women in Business, Work at Home Parents, following your destiny, and much more in Part 3 of our Business Ownership Interview with Amy from Hello World.

If you missed it: Part 1 interview on Business Ownership
Part 2 interview on Business Ownership

Stay tuned until Monday for part 4 of our Las Vegas Show Girl turns Business Owner series…

What do your days rate? Are you content with a 5 or a 6 day after day? Or are you willing to have a 1 day in order to shoot for those 10 days?

Some interesting Business Owner Mindset gets revealed in this Part 2 Interview:

If you missed it: Part 1 interview on Business Ownership

Stay tuned until Friday for part 3 of our Las Vegas Show Girl turns Business Owner series…

Amy was a Las Vegas Show Girl working in one of the most famous shows on the strip, until… “You never know when the tiger’s gonna bite ya!”

Deb and Amy talk about starting your own business, getting paid for your passion, and the freedom of business ownership.

This 3 lb Mafia Podcast was filmed on: March 21, 2007
at the TV set of: LOST Beach - on the famous North Shore of Hawaii

Stay tuned until Wednesday when our Las Vegas Show Girl turns Business Owner series continues…

Another success story of RPM Success Business Coaching and the Business Owner’s Coaching Club!

Frederick Robison (or Rob, as he likes his friends to call him) is the owner of a thriving regional office that is part of a national franchise for non-medical in-home senior care. Rob’s challenge was not finding business clients, he was flooded with more clients than he could handle. Instead, his challenge was finding good employees to serve all his clients. He was looking for an effective way to identify, hire, and then efficiently train the best candidates possible. Here’s what he had to say after working just 45-days with his RPM Success Business Coach:

“I can’t recommend strongly enough working with an RPM Business Owners Coach. Even after 35 years in senior and professional positions what you’ve provided in your one on one coaching is invaluable — totally on target, personalized, and directly applicable professionally.

I didn’t grow up in the era of electronic education and I was initially concerned that the phone and internet based coaching would be impersonal and distant — but this was definitely NOT the case. I very quickly became comfortable with the telephone conference method.

Working with JP and Deborah “virtually” from their offices in Hawaii couldn’t have been more convenient and interactive!

We worked together to build an assessment package to help our franchise owners understand why an applicant wants to work as a caregiver and accurately identify how they are likely to function in a variety of client-customer scenarios.

Before we were losing at least one care-giver each week. That was obviously quite disruptive to our business and unsettling for our senior clients. Now my turnover now is practically nil, and I have a tremendous staff that works because they love it — not just for the money!

Management now is a relative breeze.

Don’t struggle another day, start working with and RPM Success Business Owners Coach today!”

- Rob Robison
Comfort Keepers Assisted Living
Shrewsbury, NJ

[tags]business, coaching, testimonials[/tags]

Successful business ownership and living the business owners lifestyle is what we’re all about here at the Business Owners Coaching Club. That lifestyle includes making an impact on the world around us, and leaving a legacy of capitalist freedom.

Now if you’re looking for one book that states clearly why small business ownership, entrepreneurship, and capitalism matters — this is it! It’s by Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation.

Schramm does praise America’s nurturing environment for entrepreneurship, but he puts out the challenge for all of us to be more entrepreneurial.

The Entrepreneurial Imperative: How America’s Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World – And Change Your Life

Not only is it his passionate goal to see a greater expansion of start-ups domestically and globally, he feels the promotion of entrepreneurial capitalism is a key formula for bringing about peace, prosperity, and stability in the world. You can read more about Carl Schramm in this article form The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5108000

In our business coaching with hundreds of business owners around the world, we’ve rarely seen “common consensus” to be accurate — especially when it comes to women business owners. Conventional wisdom used to be that women business owners are more “attached” to their businesses than men. As a result, some “experts” felt that women business owners were less open to a clear exit strategy than their male counterparts.

Now there’s tangible proof that once again, the experts are wrong…

In a survey of successful business owners (firms more than five years old with more than $1 million in annual revenue), researchers found few differences between men and women in terms of their development of a long-term exit strategy. In the study by the Center for Women’s Business Research and MassMutua, both men and women business owners had developed a viable exit strategy, and both groups deemed price to be the key factor in determining whether to sell a business.

One difference that I found interesting is that women business owners did express a greater concern about the sale’s impact on their employees. And although first time women business owners were more reluctant to sell their companies, serial women entrepreneurs showed no differences compared to men when it comes to the willingness to sell their business.

Learn more about the October 2006 Center for Women’s Business Research Report here at Exit Strategies of Men and Women Business Owners.

The number of businesses owned by women grew nearly 20 percent between 1997 and 2002. Of course the U.S. Small Business Administration is woefully slow in their data collection and analysis, but the trend is clear now. This confirms somethign we’ve seen with our business coaching clients and new members of the Business Owner’s Coaching Club.

Women make more than 3/4 of all buying decisions — in and out of the boardroom

Women are directly and indirectly making 85% of the buying decisions in and out of business. That’s a major point to understand when planning your marketing. And women are running more and more of the small businesses in the US. Another trend that b-to-b marketers better wake up to.

During the five year period women-owned firms grew by 19.8 percent while all US firms grew by seven percent. A good number of those firms were in professional, scientific, and technical services, and in health care and social assistance.

Understanding how all this estrogen is tranforming the way business and marketing is done is essential to being successful in the marketplace of the New Millennium. (Just one more reason why you should grab your free excerpt to our book due for release in October Secrets Of Online Persuasion.)

The U.S. SBA report

Women in Business: A Demographic Review of Women’s Business Ownership uses newly released Census and other data to reveal some intersting trends including:

In 2002, women owned 6.5 million (28.2 percent) nonfarm US firms with 7.1 million employees and $173.7 billion in annual payroll.

Women-owned firms accounted for 6.5 percent of total employment in U.S. firms in 2002 and 4.2 percent of total receipts.

Of all women business owners in 2002, 85.95 percent were White, 8.43 percent African American, 8.33 percent of Hispanic heritage, 5.25 percent Asian, 1.23 percent American Indian and Alaska Native, and 0.18 percent Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (total does not add to 100 due to some double counting across ethnic groups). This means that on average the number of women business startups mirrors the general population.

Here’s where you can grab your own copy of Women in Business: A Demographic Review of Women’s Business Ownership.

As small business owners, you and I know very well that all “subsidies” from the government have a cost. As a Krazy Capitalist I know there’s no free lunch! Tax breaks are a welcome incentive. But subsidies are an entirely different story. Subsidies come out of your and my pocket, and the money funneled to recipients is rarely well managed or even necessary.

In an unfolding story that surprised me, large national retailers are grabbing up state subsidies to build their stores. But one major retailer of outdoor sporting goods in America, Gander Mountain, opposes tax breaks for retailers and is critical of those who accept them. They compete head on with those who feed at the government trough, and have moved their way up into #3 position in the US.

Allegheny Institute for Public Policy has put together a great overview. Here’s the PDF version of their Policy Brief on Gander Mountain and subsidies for retailers.

If you’re a business person who appreciates keeping responsible ownership, less government intrusion, and true capitalist ideals, this is a good read for you.

Enjoy!

Well, the new Census Bureau figures confirm what we as business coaches have known for the last three years. The US is in the midst of a major boom in self-employment. Many of the people who lose their jobs in massive layoffs choose not to remain victims. They’re going out and starting their own businesses.

We have many business coaching clients who we’re helping leave unfulfilling careers to step out, gain freedom, fulfillment, and financial independence by starting their own small business or solopreneurship. These are people who have had the entrepreneurial drive for years and have finally had it with corporate life.

2004 US Census Bureau data shows that 19.5 million Americans are self-employed, and their numbers are growing. Between 2003 and 2004, the number of self-employed grew by 1 million (about 4.7%). Overall, these businesses without employees account for 70% of all US businesses and generate annual receipts exceeding $887 billion.

E-Bay is clearly having an impact as electronic shopping and mail order houses are among the fastest growing sectors (up 12.7%) for new self-employment ventures. Even faster growth can be found among building finishing contractors (up 22.5%), Internet service providers (up 18.7%) and nail salons (up 14.7%).

Some very positive data for existing business owners too in the July 2006 U.S. Census Bureau report. You can check out the Non employer Statistics at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/ns0400a01.pdf.