Many small businesses are handed down from generation to generation, with each succeeding operator leaving their own stamp on the family business. Some do better and others do worse, but every so often an heir comes along who profoundly changes the way that business is operated and leaves a meaningful legacy for the family to build upon further.
Dario Cecchini inherited his family’s 250 year-old butcher shop in Panzano, Italy 30 years ago and has turned a small shop into a mecca for foodies, built a brand which is now recognized internationally, extended the business into other areas, with restaurants and branded packaged products, and become a star of the international media and in the restaurant world. He has been featured dozens of times in the international media, with outlets from the New York Times, to Atlantic Magazine, to the New Yorker singing his praises and waxing lyrical about his butcher shop, his restaurants and his philosophy. A quick YouTube search turns up more than 175 videos, including this great episode from Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations on the Travel Channel.
Dario is a philosopher as well as a chef and a butcher, but more than anything he is an entrepreneur who has taken a passion for traditional methods of butchering and food preparation and turned these into a thriving small business in the heart of Tuscany. The Cecchini brand stands for humanity, quality, and tradition and these values have resonated across the world of restaurants, business, the locavore movement, and the internet.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The video above shows CubeStormer II, a Rubik’s Cube solving robot. This robot set a world record, solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle in 5.35 seconds. Now if only it could solve problems with the economy as quickly.
Small business and startups: great reads from the business press – http://bit.ly/n7Pxww
crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Coupon Cactus – http://bit.ly/skiY1O
9 Metrics to Help You Make Wise Decisions about Your Start-Up – http://t.co/0XU8cdEt
If there’s one thing I regret about myself, I wish I were better at clipping coupons. In my dreams, after sitting at a sunny table finding deals galore in the Sundays, I go to the supermarket and I buy $250 worth of groceries for approximately -$23.57. That’s right, in my dreams, I’m into extreme couponing. Obviously, a few problems present themselves with this scenario. One, I don’t get the newspaper , two, I believe everything should be available online, and three, I’m lazy.
And, with Coupon Cactus, my dreams have (partially) come true. Unlike Groupon, Living Social or other coupon sites that require you to buy in with a bunch of people, Coupon Cactus simply organizes all sorts of online deals. The website is broken into categories, ranging from “Auto, Boat, & Motorcycle” to “Musical Instruments.” About to buy something online? Stop by CouponCactus first and see if there’s not a deal out there for what you want to purchase. No clipping required.
Scott, being the good sport that he is, took some time to talk to me about coupon dreams:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
CouponCactus.com is an online coupon and cash back shopping website. You know those coupon code and promo code boxes you see when you are checking out while ordering something online? We have coupons like “25% off your order” and “free shipping” for about 4,000 online merchants. We also provide cash back on your purchases just like a cash back credit card, only with higher percentages.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
We already had a logo but it just wasn’t doing it for us, so we decided to add a mascot. We wanted something fun and interactive, but professional. We had worked with many great graphic designers in the past but we couldn’t describe exactly what we were looking for and we would only know it when we actually saw it. We didn’t want to wind up in a never-ending back and forth exchange of changes costing lots of money and never being totally happy with the result. We decided to crowdsource the project and found exactly what we were looking for. You can see Coupon Cody on our sign-up page.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
There are quite a few competitors in both the online coupon and cash back arenas, so differentiating ourselves from our competition is always a challenge. We pride ourselves at having the best coupons and the highest cash back rates but we needed to go further. What was missing out there was a site that showed they cared about their members by responded to their inquiries immediately, with empathy, and basically have their back when it came to finding them the coupons they needed and contacting merchants when cash back was not awarded. (more…)
I have been spending some time recently with the online business press. Lots of great articles and information out there, so I thought it was time for another edition of the Business Press roundup! It is an incredibly dynamic time in the world of startups and small business: the economy continues to freak, but at the same time we are seeing a record number of new businesses formed every month. Entrepreneurs benefit greatly by staying on top of the news, seeking out disparate opinions, and sharing their own analysis and judgements.
The 13 articles listed below are organized by category: Small business news, Small business and the economy, Starting a business, and Running your business. Let me know your thoughts and please share links to any great articles you’ve come across recently.
Entrepreneur.com Intuit Program Awards Grants to Help Spur Local Jobs
“Over the past 18 months, Intuit has been awarding hiring grants in $500 to $25,000 increments to U.S.-based small businesses. The company has pledged to bestow $1 million in grants over the course of the program, which runs in three-month increments.”
Small business and the economy
American Public Media: Marketplace Small biz lending fund is a bust
“The Small Business Lending Fund was designed as an answer to small businesses that said banks were too scared to lend them money.”
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above shows a radical new camera – called the Lytro. This camera introduces a new camera technology – light-field photography. Conventional digital cameras use lenses to focus a subject. In doing so, light from only one direction reaches the sensor (for the portion of the image in-focus). The Lytro camera allows light from multiple directions to reach the sensor and the camera records all of this information. The result is that a user can focus on ANY part of the photo after the picture is taken. It looks like magic. More details in the Other section below.
Startup tips: 5 great tools for freelancers (and small businesses) – http://bit.ly/pTgDT0
So, remember this crew of Brazilian entrepreneurs looking for a way to stream line monetary gift giving? Well, they’re back, but this time they bring us Donability.
Donability is a crowdfunding platform specifically designed to fundraise causes. Meaning, you know that 5k you want to gather pledges for? Post it to Donability and appeal to the masses on the internet. Have your own, specific non-profit you’re running and you need some extra cash? Take it to Donability. You get the picture.
Felipe took some time to tell me a little bit more about crowdfunding donations:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
I work on Donability, a website that collects money online for supporting causes. Main focus is social causes but we also work with personal causes.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
Time and options. We are in a hurry to launch the beta version by November, if it wasn’t for crowdSPRING, we would still be stuck on our logo.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
Finding the right niche and innovation points. There are a lot of crowdfunding startups coming up, we had to work a lot on market research to find our niche, with more ‘blue ocean’. Also, innovation points, it’s a big concern, we will deliver features that no other competitor has already thought of.
In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Debs & Johnny (crowdSPRING username: UsBeingUs ) today. Debs & Johnny live and work in the countryside of central Portugal.
1. Please tell us about yourselves.
Well firstly what a lovely surprise to be asked to do this, we are touched and honoured – thank you – you will certainly get to see some of the diversity within your crowd
Well here goes, our story……I think it could be long, so I’ll leave our previous professional background to our own website if anyone wants to know it. But UsBeingUs started really with us finding us – Johnny & I had both previously been married and when we met we were literally start again teenagers in our mid thirties – we were living in England at the time and had very normal busy lives, however we were on an uphill climb as we were start again financially too – we were often ‘stressed out’ and to be honest not necessarily the nicest of people, we had become snappy, irritable, with little time to relax and enjoy what’s real – thankfully we recognised who we were becoming and felt it was time to try things a different way to see if we could get a bit more balance in our lives – I have traveled quite a bit previously and whilst I love my homeland, I also love the warmth and slower, more relaxed lifestyle that some other countries manage to lead – to be honest we didn’t really know what we were looking for we just knew that we wanted to experience something different, try life a different way – so we took the plunge to experience a more rural lifestyle and moved to Brittany in France in 2003. We were lucky enough to find a beautiful former farm, which we renovated together. A busy time for us as we had a big mortgage and bills to pay – but being in the countryside with space around us did give us the opportunity to experience a different way of life – we chose not have a television, which was one of the best decisions we ever made, everyone always asks us what you do???
Well we got in touch with our surroundings to begin with and we talked, we read, we surfed the net & we opened our minds to new ideas – we began finding out who we really were and discovering what felt right for us – we became vegans, our furry friends started to find us. We also took the time to teach ourselves new skills, the main ones for us, our art and graphic design, passions that have grown and grown
We decided to continue to follow our love of a more natural life & our creative passions – so we gave up the house, the heating, the running water, the dishwasher, the luxuries, the mortgage and the bills and have opted for living in a yurt here in stunning countryside of central Portugal – We have a lovely riverside plot of land and are surrounded by nothing other than nature. We live with our furry family of animals, all of whom have found their way to us one way or another, we have 14 gorgeous dogs and a cat – not planned, just fate
We are lucky enough to have had the love and patience of our family and friends, who may not quite understand what on earth we are doing, but nonetheless give us their support both with their love and their finances at times – thank you so much – you are all here with us in our hearts x
We have just had our third anniversary of living here in Portugal and so far so good, there are certainly challenges and certainly some we were not expecting, having so many dogs was one of those So it took a while with many ups and downs, but this last year, we have been finding our rhythm and so far so good – We love our ‘off grid’ lifestyle here and in time we hope to become as self sufficient as possible with a forest food garden & permaculture system – we are also just starting the process of building our own handmade ecological home to accommodate us all – That should be fun
We have now become I guess what could be described in today’s terms as an alternative couple, with a wide range of interests and ‘cookey ideas’ but in fact as you can possibly see from our art we are probably more traditional than most…
What is a freelancer if not a small business? Just like small businesses, freelancers must engage in marketing, manage payables and receivables and other accounting tasks, perform HR functions, direct production, and plan strategy.
1. Planning and strategy. There are lots of great tools and apps out there that will help you to plan and execute great strategy for your freelance career or business, but the greatest tool you can use is knowledge. The Harvard Business Review is probably the leading publication for business and their an online journal contains thousands of articles nonbusiness theory, practice, and technique. The current issue of HBR includes articles which can provide great value to freelancers, such as “Stop Procrastinating…Now,” “Customer Loyalty in the Twitter Era,” and “he Secret to Dealing With Difficult People: It’s About You.”
2. Marketing. The single greatest marketing tool that a freelancers can use is standing directly in front of you: your clients. Happy customers talk, and when they talk about you or your business, the people they speak to listen. The typical freelancer will receive well over half of their new clients through word of mouth, and strong WOM builds business. Wikipedia defines it thus, “Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. Two great resources are Salesforce and Zoho.com. These two online resources allow you to plan and manage marketing campaigns, manage lead generation, automate sales management, perform inventory and customer support functions, and analyze and visualize customer data.
3. Managing HR. The human resources manager is typically one of the most important (and feared) members of the corporate management team. They typically manage processes that touch every employee every day: payroll, health benefits, incentive programs, performance reviews, pension and retirement plans, and vacation policies. But freelancers do all of this on their own, and more. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the world’s largest association devoted to human resource management. Their website has a ton of resources for small businesses and freelancers, including articles, forms and templates, and user groups and forums, as well as information on other resources such as health care benefits, employee assistance programs, and retirement plans.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above shows a 3 year chart for Netflix stock (chart from CNNMoney). The stock took a remarkable dive after Netflix announced it was splitting off its DVD by mail business from its streaming business. This past week, Netflix reversed course and announced that it would not split the two businesses. More details in the Other section below.
How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC] – http://bit.ly/plvqcq
Negotiation Tips For Small Businesses, Entrepreneurs and Freelancers – http://bit.ly/9yioyH
Really good way to think about customers … In-store good or at-home good? – http://bit.ly/mYp42y
Google+ (also known as Google Plus) has generated lots of buzz, but most small businesses are still largely unfamiliar with Google+ and what it offers. In this post, we’ll explain what Google+ is, the key features every small business should understand, and how small businesses can use those features to increase sales.
For those of you who prefer a video introduction, here’s a short video from Google with an overview of Google+
1. Google+
What is Google+? Google+ is a social network, but it’s more than just another social network or a competitor to Facebook. With Google+, Google is integrating many of its products, including search, under one umbrella. Assuming Google+ continues to grow in popularity, small businesses will absolutely want to have a presence on Google+.
How can a small business use Google+ today? Unfortunately, businesses are not yet able to establish business accounts on Google+. At this time, Google is permitting only individual accounts and is allowing only a small group of businesses (such as Ford) to set-up business accounts. Google promises to permit businesses to set-up pages before the end of the year.
What can you do now while waiting for Google to set up business accounts on Google+? You can experiment with a personal account. In fact, some businesses have set up an account for a real person at the company who is at the moment, a public face of their business on Google+ (until business accounts are available). For example, Mashable does this through Pete Cashmore’s account and crowdSPRING shares through my Google+ account. Keep in mind, however, that it’s likely that Google may not permit migration of data from a personal account to a business account.
Is Google+ difficult to use? If you’ve been using Facebook, you’ll quickly get up to speed on Google+. You can edit your posts, upload photos and videos, chat with friends, and much more. To help you get started, here’s a handy cheat sheet for Google+ (available in English and many other languages). And for more great tips, read 40 Google Plus Tips for Newbies.
Should a small business invest the time now to learn about Google+? Yes, because Google+ integrates so many of Google’s products, it’s important for small businesses to understand how they’ll be able to leverage Google+. But as with everything, experiment without committing too much of your time. It’s not yet clear whether Google+ will continue to expand to levels that would interest small businesses in the long term. Recent data suggests that Google+ growth has softened considerably. In fact, a recent report from Chitika suggests that Google+ traffic has fallen 60% from it’s high set in the second half of September 2011.
2. Circles.
What are Circles? You can group people you follow or want to share with into “Circles.” The idea here is that you can organize people into different groups: friends, customers, associates, employees, vendors, etc. You can share specific things with one or more circles (or share with specific people), and whenever you have someone in your circle, anything that person shares with the public appears in your news feed.
How can a small business use Circles? Think of circles as your customer groups. Most businesses will have a variety of different customer groups and sometimes, you want to communicate separately with each group. Circles allow you to put your customers into these groups and then easily communicate with each group separately, or multiple groups at the same time. For example, if you have a group of loyal customers, you might customize offers and deals specifically for those customers without sending the same offers generally to the rest of the world or to your other customers. You also share information selectively, with specific circles.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
Many small businesses are handed down from generation to generation, with each succeeding operator leaving their own stamp on the family business. Some do better and others do worse, but every so often an heir comes along who profoundly changes the way that business is operated and leaves a meaningful legacy for the family to build upon further.
I have been spending some time recently with the online business press. Lots of great articles and information out there, so I thought it was time for another edition of the Business Press roundup! It is an incredibly dynamic time in the world of startups and small business: the economy continues to freak, but at the same time we are seeing a record number of new businesses formed every month. Entrepreneurs benefit greatly by staying on top of the news, seeking out disparate opinions, and sharing their own analysis and judgements.
