By Brent Barnhart
Small businesses love statistics.
And why not? They help us understand where we’re going and where we’ve been. After all, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
By better understanding the small business landscape by the numbers, we’re more likely to make informed decisions and keep ourselves from heading our businesses in the wrong direction. As business owners, continuing education is crucial in keeping our companies current.
The following six statistics have a lot to teach us about the state of small business, the economy and the future of Internet marketing. Whether or not they come to surprise you, consider how these stats impact your company.
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By Jesse Rodgers
I spent a little time at StartupWeekendHamilton3 in April as a mentor and was talking to a young founder who proclaimed that there was one great accelerator in Canada. Who he said it was surprised me a little and got me thinking, what makes an accelerator “the best” and why should an eager founder care? The baseline in my mind is Y-Combinator. No one can argue it is the best seed-stage accelerator based on its results. What is difficult for everyone to agree upon is what does it do to achieve those results or even harder, what defines success?
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By Leo Valiquette
During my years as a full-time journo, I crossed paths with many a startup technology venture that claimed to be operating in so-called stealth mode. It was the early 2000s, before the process of getting technology to market was as socially enabled as it is now, and startup CEOs seemed to consider it hip and trendy to apply the S word to their businesses.
Where, I wonder, are many of those startups now?
We wrote many moons ago about the inherent foolishness of trying to build a business by somehow staying under the radar. You can’t define a market need, develop a product to meet that need, secure the funding necessary for operations or build the team that can pull it all off without telling the world who you are and what you are trying to do.
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By Denzil Doyle
In my last article, I discussed the tendency of key stakeholders in a high technology company to call for the CEO’s resignation at the first sign of trouble, particularly if the CEO is a technical person who lacks “business management” experience. The pressure for change is usually strongest from the financial community. My advice to a board of directors that must deal with such pressure is to remain focused on the qualities that any good CEO must possess regardless of his or her background, namely leadership, management, technology knowhow, and marketing knowhow.
I cited the example of Ken Olsen, the founding president of Digital Equipment Corporation, who came under severe criticism from Wall Street for turning in a bad quarter shortly after the company went public, despite the fact that he had built a company with sales of over $100 million in less than a decade. (That was the equivalent of over $1 billion today.)
Ken decided to go to New York and address his critics directly. He started with a lecture that went something like this:
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are memeburn, ReadWriteWeb, TopRank Blog and Fast Company.
Meaningful social measurement: A lesson from the underpants gnomes
Sam Beckbessinger looks at why measuring follower counts on social media is a meaningless metric that’s quickly falling out of favour. Instead, she proposes four more meaningful metrics that offer greater insight into the community you’ve created around your brand.
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Startup Canada Communities seeks to build regional economies ‘from the inside out’
May 02, 2013 by Francis Moran
Startup Canada, the grassroots campaign that is seeking to foster a more entrepreneurial culture in Canada, today launched its most audacious initiative so far with the creation in 15 different cities across the country of Startup Canada Communities […]
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April Roundup: What does it take to get technology to market?
May 01, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette
Last month’s lineup featured great posts on how established companies should innovate, a startup CEO’s tips for wooing investors, the risks of discounting your product and the need for philanthropy to be a natural part of doing business […]
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Patent harvesting versus mandated innovation
April 30, 2013 by David French
The expression “patent harvesting” has surfaced in management jargon. These words invoke a scenario wherein corporate management looks under the carpet, so to speak, to see if somewhere in their organization the staff have generated good ideas that are worth patenting […]
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In it until everyone crosses the finish line
April 29, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
In my various engagements as a freelance writer and marketing communications consultant, I often find myself working with the clients of a client. It’s a situation that adds a whole new dimension to the service provider/client relationship […]
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Great articles roundup: Content marketing, entrepreneurship, startups, PR, the pivot
April 26, 2013 by Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Techvibes, Financial Post, Ventureburn, Velocity and Fast Company […]
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The folly (or possibly the wisdom) of discounting
April 25, 2013 by Francis Moran
I doubt if there’s a single business ever that hasn’t been asked at some point or other to discount its prices. For startups, it’s almost an inevitable part of the process in bringing their technology to market. As you can probably guess from the headline, I’m not a big fan […]
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A startup CEO’s tips for wooing investors
April 24, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
Investment. It’s big news in the startup world. Sites such as TechCrunch and The Next Web are full of stories about how much a company has raised and what it wants to do with it. But if you’re set on putting together a round for your business, you’ve got to think about more than just passing around the tin […]
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What have you done for someone else lately?
April 23, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with several individuals who reminded me how important it is for philanthropy and giving back in some way to the community which sustains you to be a natural part of doing business […]
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