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The downside of mixing business with blood should be obvious - or at least it will be when you start getting late-night calls from Aunt Tillie asking about your schedule for an IPO.

But hitting up relatives is how a lot of businesses get going. It’s what Kyle Campos and his older brother Aaron had to do.

In 2004 the brothers, both software engineers, quit their jobs in Santa Barbara and decamped to Buckeye, Ariz. After visiting relatives there earlier that year, Kyle had become convinced that the town was “filled with wide-open opportunities,” especially compared with the software biz. “The tech sector was getting hit hard,” says Aaron. “I didn’t have a good feeling.”

Aaron and Kyle, neither of whom had run a business before, began brainstorming about starting one together. Both had frequented a smoothie joint in Santa Barbara, and they fell in love with the idea of starting their own. They found an industry consultant online who helped them write a business plan. Then they hired an experienced designer. The Main Squeeze would be a 1,200-square-foot store with hardwood floors and stainless-steel tables. And it would cost more than the $130,000 they had saved.

That’s when they drew up a list of 40 friends and relatives they could solicit as investors. “We wanted it to seem like we were offering them an authentic business opportunity,” notes Kyle. For that they turned to CircleLending, a site that helps informal borrowers create formal lending deals. The siblings spent $99 to set up a loan agreement, choosing an attractive interest rate (9%), a repayment schedule they figured they could afford (either five or seven years) and a $1,000 minimum.

Four folks each lent them $1,000, and another four each threw in $5,000. Last year the Campos brothers whipped up a profitable $210,000 in sales, and they’ve been paying their investors on schedule for close to two years. Says Kyle: “Not one has complained.”

CNN

With skyrocketing credit card debt, fewer job prospects and a growing economic divide, young people are increasingly in need of more financial knowledge.

In response, a growing number of summer camps are teaching kids money management skills. While our memories of camp were more about canoeing than banking, programs such as those listed below show that that kids’ financial-savvy (or at least parental interest in) is starting at increasingly younger ages:

Young Americans Center for Financial Education: This Denver-based non-profit hosts “Fun-ancial Summer Camps” for 2nd to 7th graders. Curriculums range from Money $ense, where campers learn about budgeting, investing, credit and taxes, to Running Your Own Biz, where mini-entrepreneurs make their own crafts and sell them at a weekly marketplace.

The Money Camp for Kids: Based in Southern California, this camp aims to give 10-18 year-old campers an understanding of how the economy works and how to earn money, budget, invest and save it. Kids are given “paychecks” which they invest in stocks, real estate and businesses. And it wouldn’t be camp without field trips: every Friday the kids take a trip to a bank, business, real estate broker or stock broker.

Millionaire Kid$ Club: At this Texas program, 8-16 year-olds learn the basics of making, managing and multiplying money. Despite the name, it’s not necessarily aiming to create the next generation of oil tycoons, but rather to help young people develop good money habits that will last throughout their lives.

Grow Your Own Family Business

TrendCentral

Craig Newmark started craigslist in early 1995 as a way of staying on top of San Francisco’s busy arts and technology scene.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the site’s determined non-commercialism, craigslist survived and even thrived in the post-dot-com days.

Now 20 million people visit the site each month, viewing and self-publishing more than 17 million ads and forum posts. With characteristic modesty, Newmark continues to refer himself not as a founder but as a “customer service representative.”

In this podcast, Newmark and David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, discuss craigslist’s unstructured approach to managing the site’s growth and its features, and what that might mean for planning and strategizing in other areas of business. The old structures of control just don’t work. Given the steady success of craigslist, what does?

This podcast interview is the sixth in a series of interviews by Weinberger, sponsored by Wired News and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. You can use the player below to listen to the interview. Or, for a downloadable MP3 file and full transcript, continue reading.

Download the MP3 file Interview With Craig Newmark Of Craigslist

Looking For Inspiration Today?

Check out this collection of videos about social entrepreneurs from around the world. It’s called the FRONTLINE/World series.

This special site will feature the stories of people whose ideas and organizations create new and sustainable markets and services that benefit underserved communities everywhere in the developing world.

In a nutshell, these are stories about individuals whose ideas leap beyond charity to find systemic solutions to poverty, education, health and social justice.

FRONTLINE/World has profiled a computer engineer in India who puts Internet kiosks in poor neighborhoods throughout his country, helping bridge the digital divide for thousands of children. In Kenya a world-class long-distance runner uses her prize money to start a training camp for poor village women, like herself, whose lives are changed forever.

In South Africa a business entrepreneur invents and installs a merry-go-round pushed round by children that pumps enough water for a village of 2,500, making the delivery of clean water child’s play. In Guatemala, an American coffee distributor helps develop organic growers among the region’s poor farmers, whose beans can be marketed as “fair trade” providing them a living wage.

In Uganda, two young social entrepreneurs develop a revolutionary model for microlending, using the Internet to connect borrowers with lenders, person to person, a venture that has grown from one small village in Africa to 11 countries around the world.

PBS

From the start, entrepreneur Kazumasa Terada had his eye on the global market.

Using celebrities like the Hilton sisters in 2002 to promote his handbag label, Terada has turned Samantha Thavasa into a household name in Japan, and is on the verge of bigger things abroad.

With the opening of the first outlet overseas on Madison Avenue in New York City in November, Terada, 41, has moved a step closer to his long-cherished ambition: to transform Samantha Thavasa into a world-class brand.

Terada’s promotional tactics of tapping famous fashion icons as ad models and designers for Samantha Thavasa have proved effective.

“We had a showroom in New York more than 10 years ago and the Hilton sisters were frequent customers,” Terada, president of Samantha Thavasa Japan Ltd., said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.

When they came to the reception, Terada approached them and asked if they would be interested in promoting Samantha Thavasa items.

Others on the list of worldwide celebrities who represent Samantha Thavasa products in advertising campaigns are Victoria Beckham, Beyonce, Maria Sharapova, Penelope and Monica Cruz, Tinsley Mortimer and, most recently, Sarah Jessica Parker.

Japan Times

In today’s Internet marketing world we are so used to seeing those long sales pages with a huge list of testimonials including plenty of smiling faces, sometimes audio and even video comments endorsing a product or service or person.

The last few days I’ve been preparing my first draft of the sales page for Blog Mastermind in preparation to hand it over to my friend Will Swayne for a review, who knows copywriting better than me, and then to a paid copywriter for a final review (apparently copy is important or something!).

In some ways I think having a long-form sales page is a necessary evil when it comes to selling online. I realize a lot of people will join Blog Mastermind just on the back of knowing me and sampling my work. They will probably scroll straight to the first “join” button and sign-up, ignoring all my carefully constructed copy. That’s great of course, yet I can’t simply launch a product with a page that says “join” on it because I’ll be loosing a lot of potential clients. Continue reading →

This list shows the rate of entrepreneurship across the country; each state shows the number of residents out of 100,000 who have started their own business.

According to CNN Money Magazine the most popular state for entrepreneurs is Colorado with 530 per 100,000 people.

Are you the person everyone calls when they have a computer problem? Have you considered getting paid for fixing near-fatal errors and turning your PC prowess into a business? According a recent report, sales of computer services are expected to exceed $47 billion this year in the U.S. alone, with PC repair leading the way.

“Almost all small businesses and home offices use computers and depend on them to be working properly,” says Chip Reaves, CEO of Computer Troubleshooters, a franchise network of computer professionals. “They don’t have the skills, the time or the desire to do their own computer service, repair and upgrades, and that puts us right in the middle of one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.”

But if your only business experience is selling your mom’s friend her first computer, how do you get started? Besides coming up with a business name, getting a business license and obtaining general liability business insurance (which ranges from $300 to $1500 annually and is obtainable through your local city hall), there are a number of things you need to do to get started on the right foot. Here are 10 tips that will help you successfully launch and run your new endeavor.

Entrepreneur Lifestyle

Providing quotation to prospective clients is an important aspect of a lawn care business. If you are new to the lawn care industry, you’ll need to do some serious research before you can come up with a pricing model for all the services that you provide. Here are 4 things that you should keep in mind when establishing the prices for your lawn care services. Know how much to charge per square foot. This is the basic factor in your pricing model that determines whether your business will be profitable in the long run.

Here is a quick way to generate some idea on how much to charge. Measure your lawn size and then call up a few reputable lawn care companies and ask for their quotations. Taking this a step further, you can ask a few of your friends to do the same and then get the feedback from them. You will have a good idea on the various pricing for different lawn size and help you determine the acceptable price range for your services.

Once you have an idea on how much to charge, set up a pricing schedule based on the type of service performed per square foot. For example, you may charge $3 per square foot for mowing and $1.50 per square foot for fertilizing. Most lawns various from a few hundred square feet to a few thousand square feet. Thus it is more convenient to set your price in terms of per hundred square feet or per thousand square feet.

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