Do you want a job instead of to be an owner? No way! Read "How To Get Rich" by the dear departed Felix Dennis, who did not have to sell a single copy of his book because he was already bloody rich. (Compare/contrast against so many other "gurus".) You'll read that he says not to give one single % of equity away. Without 51%, you are no longer in control. If you want someone else telling you what you can and can't do with the company you created...if you want a job or worse because they can limit you to being a silent partner or consultant now that you are just a minority partner with a few rights...go ahead. You can do this some other way.

Are you doing 'maker classes' for kids, or are you making and selling toys that help them learn on their own? If you're doing classes, the only way to sustainably scale up is to make sure that a majority of your classes are using digital maker tools, instead of physical ones. For instance, using https://scratch.mit.edu instead of Lego Mindstorms. This is because scaling up with digital tools will be enormously easier than dealing with physical inventory: No need to buy / keep track of / store / transport, etc., no need to do on-location training of new instructors (they can train at home), etc. If you're not doing classes, but are instead making toys for kids, again a software product would allow easier scaling, but if that's not possible for you, then you're going to have to work on getting into retail shops and/or increasing your online presence in the maker space. Feel free to send more background info if you'd like advice more tailored to your specific problem, best of luck, Lee

I'm using Teachable.com and so far I really like it. I'm producing a course on "How to get massive amounts of free PR" that I will be launching in March 2018.

It seems you're asking two different questions: 1. What is the importance of demographics? 2. What are the pain points in building facial recognition into a retail transaction? To answer the first, demographics inform what products are being sold, who gets what promotion, what to start and stop carrying, and more in retail. The degree to which a retail shop pays attention to its clientele is directly related to those decisions and thus to its success. To answer the second, you will need to deal with the legal ramifications of facial recognition technology, and once you've handled that, you'll need to deal with the range of reactions you'll get from customers who will need to know they're being recognized--not by humans but by robots. I'd say the second issue is the most important one to consider as you shape the technology and how it will be used.

Listen to my interview with exit strategist Jock Purtle of Digital Exits here (no opt-in, simple download): https://www.mediafire.com/file/ufbe877j6qupun6/JockPurtleInterview.mp3

The easiest answer to this is something a mentor told me a few years ago when I was working on a niche app....she said "do you honestly feel like you could be passionate about this for the next 10 years"? That may not sound like it's relevant but it is...honestly that's the only thing that matters when starting a compay (besides the obvious of is this valuable)...That's the first thing to figure out. Then when I answered and said maybe, she said "do you think that this is the biggest thing you could be doing with your time? Why stop at helping a few thousand people, why not pour 10 years of your life into something that can help millions".....so reframe your question, is my product only helping a few people? Is there something else I could be doing that will help more people? If the answers are obvious then you know what you need to do...back to the drawing board.

I would highly recommend connecting with someone who has experience here to shorten your learning curve if this is not what you do. For our agency, we spent a lot of time & money outlining and creating the infrastructure which now is mainly on autopilot for our outbound strategy. For example, we now have a small team running it while sending on average 5-10k emails per month consistently. I can help outline how to do the same thing as well. Team-wise I would lean in the direction of learning the framework, building a small team and launching some base campaigns internally. I have looked and hired a lot of 3rd party companies that claim to handle all your outbound campaigns but most are 5/10 quality wise and charge a hefty premium. Once you know the structure it mainly comes down to team building, having a quality product/service, and creating value through very personal outreach campaigns. Resources wise- there are some great books out there on this. I would highly recommend "The Ultimate Sales Machine" by Chet Holmes and "Predictable Revenue" by Aaron Ross. These both will give you a lot of higher level ideas and ways to structure your outbound campaigns. A lot comes down to your internal resources and budget as well. Hope this helps!

Lead generation or in more specific form, prospect building is done by almost all companies in some form or the other. The traditional approach of lead generation is rapidly going through a transitioning stage. The need of the hour is to be smart and gain competitive advantage by utilizing “Time Sensitive Sales Trigger”. So, what do we mean by Time Sensitive Sales Trigger? These are basically events that can lead to quick conversion in your sales and marketing efforts. Few examples can be: Competitive Changes: This can be in the form of business model changes, closing/expanding facilities, contract win, FDA approval, joint ventures & partnership, new market opportunities, product launch, real estate transactions, technology advancements, weak operational performance, etc. Financial Changes: Sales drop, bankruptcy, credit downgrade, distressed loan, EBITDA drop, IPO, loan default, restatement of earnings, etc can be few examples within this. Ownership Changes: Here, we can think of divestitures, legal issues, M&A, strategic alternative and others as some possible events. Personnel Changes: This can be crucial specially when we think about fortune companies- typical example could be headcount changes, top level management (CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, CIO, etc.) removal, resignation and appointment. Recognition Changes: Awards, press releases, conferences, events, trade shows, reviews, feedback and perhaps improved web ranking also give insights on company’s current standings. The above scenarios help companies to target the right prospect with the right solution at the right time. Also, with social media at its peak, companies have started leveraging social media big time and it’s showing positive impact. Now, apart from dependency on above news and events, companies have also shown great amount of interest in reviews, comments, social post to create real time/concurrent leads for their sales funnel. This is based on my recent consulting experience. Thoughts??

Here are some ways to get more customers: 1. Start by reaching out to your friends who own businesses and ask to doncome consulting work for them in exchange for case studies. You need to show credibility to give people a reason to trust you and work with you. 2. Create content. Either document your journey as a consultant or create a blog/vlog that will give you the ability to demonstrate your expertise. 3. Once you have content to work with, promote it via ads. 4. Lastly ask people to introduce you to people or businesses they may know could use your services. Hope this helps! I'm available for followups if needed!

Great question for anyone who has a newly published book and would like to hit the speaking circuit. I was once in the same boat and here is what I would suggest as the fastest and most effective method to getting your speaking engagements. You must be active on social media. You should give away small tidbits of your book in videos and join FB groups related to your topic. There are millions of groups that you can join which will give you instant access to the people you need to know. When I ran for U.S. Congress, I joined the political groups of my party. Your book was written for someone at some stage of life, so find the groups associated with their interest. I also hired someone to work for me 1 hour a day to make calls to decision makers of associations, conferences and trade shows. They would contact the organizer and send them the videos and one-sheets about me. Use free speaking engagements to build your brand. Take lots of pictures, record videos and use these pictures in your promotional material. Cut and splice them. Be sure to wear different clothing to each speaking engagement, so you can have the appearance of different speeches in the beginning It's always a great idea to have loads of books at any event to sell them after you speak. Bon Chance!

The best way is to begin with friends and colleagues, and then LinkedIn will suggest hundreds of people who you probably know or know of. LinkedIn is a place for people to interact, so don’t be afraid of shooting someone more experienced than you a message for some advice. It might help you more than you think!

Hi! I work for a Injection Molding company. Injection molded grades of plastic will behave differently than Blow Molding Grades, sheet plastic or extruded grades. I could write an encyclopedia here on this subject as it is very complicated and there are a lot of different types of plastics and grades of each one of them. As far as Injection molded plastics goes, the easiest to recycle are also (luckily) the most common. Polyethylene (HDPE, PE, LDPE), Polypropylene (PP, homo or copolymers) ABS, Poly-carbonate (PC), PVC and Nylon. All of these materials will lose strength and other properties when recycled. It is always recommended to mix virgin material with the recycled material (known as regrind). What percentage would depend on the material and the molded part. For HDPE and PP you could use up to 70% regrind, depending on the barrel size of the machine. Virgin material is in round pellets but regrind will have rough edges and won't flow down the hopper as easily. ABS and PC can be mixed together in many cases and can be used in mixes up to 50% without any major property loss. Nylon 10%-20% but it is hydroscopic so it will absorb or lose moisture when recycled. This will change it's flexibility and strength. This may be remedied by adding an impact modifying additive or glass. PVC 10%-20%. As far as recycling companies go, there are a lot and I can't just recommend one. The key will not be so much the recycling company but the source of the material that that company has. - How consistent is the material type? Is it mixed with other material types, colors or grades (e.g. melt flow). - How consistently clean is the material? You would be surprised to know that it is very common to find metal and paper in recycled plastics which is a major headache for molders. As far as a waterproof enclosure goes. You could easily use recycled material in large quantities, no problem. Just don't use recycled seals! :D Hehehe... I hope this helps! I apologize for the delay in answering. There are very few plastics questions here on Clarity! Feel free to contact me or schedule a call if you have any more questions and I would be glad to help with material selection! -Jason

Start by creating a persona of your desired audience... here are some basic ways to create them: 1. Common behavior patterns 2. Shared pain points (professional, personal) 3. Universal goals, wishes, dreams 4. General demographic & biographic information Basically you are creating a fictional character of your audience to help you figure out how to connect with them in an impactful way

I love that she's doing this! I don't have expertise in athletic sponsorships but I am familiar with being a brand ambassador. This is a great way to get on the path toward sponsorships if she's not currently doing that.

Are you asking how to find travelers to reach out to, or what to say when you get in touch with them?

I think at this stage there are a couple things to research 1) your audience and their behavior in trying new things 2) Test it out... it's really hard to tell unless you try it and see what works. Most companies are using the freemium approach only cuz it makes sense with their product/service but also it makes sense with their business model.

I have done this into enterprise but I would say this advice also follows for B2C. It is hard, slow but very interesting. I would suggest a couple of things: (1) there are so many “experts” on social media to follow and get up to speed. Use this to build a casual network, ask questions on the group boards on LinkedIn, and make LI connections but ask for calls for 20 minutes to pick their brains. (2) I would partner with one or two people who can fill in the gaps in terms of expertise. You can tripped up by industry norms that you don’t know about and make no sense; obscure regulation and jargon; silent influencers and just a general understanding of how an industry moves in terms of adoption etc. Having done this into a highly technical "expert mindset" industry, which was mature, I ending up looking for a partner who could fill in the gaps. I found someone on LinkedIn that became my partner in this and was extremely helpful once I got in front of sales prospects in terms of technical language, regulatory information and experience in implementing technical solutions. By the way, as I find with all early stage sales, the things that tripped us up were not industry knowledge related but as always, how much energy your champion could into it; how much political capital they had to push stuff through and whether they’d been successful before doing this. Happy to talk to you more about my experience if that’s any help.

The "important attributes" of any product are typically determined by your target market and vary significantly, but broadly speaking "ease of use" for the customer could be added to your list.

Lock yourself in your home this weekend and spend every hour possible on YouTube learning how to use a particular type of software commonly used by ecommerce companies (eg. Kiss Metrics, CrazyEgg, Click Tales, Google Analytics, Google Conversion Optimizer, Google Tag Manager, etc...). The goal is to consume as many hours of video on a particular tool type as possible. And don't worry about the quality of that information just yet - after about an hour or two, you'll start to build a reference for what's good/bad in terms of content. Also, take out a new notebook that you can solely dedicate to notes on that topic. It will be your field guide. Carry it everywhere, and study your notes during breakfast and before bed. Keep in mind that the goal here isn't to become the "expert" - but rather get to a point where you know more than your potential client or the people on their team responsible for managing those tools (so you can offer value). You'll be surprised how 40-50hrs of video can accelerate that for you since most people managing accounts day-to-day rarely get that time. Next, focus on your offering. Something free. For example, let's say you start getting really strong with Google Tag Manager and discover a few Chrome plug-ins that will tell you if a tag is broken. You could then use that to check the sites of prospective clients and give them a free troubleshooting report of the issues they have (your service would be either a more extensive report, or your help in fixing those issues). Also, there are some great tools out there to narrow down the prospect list based on technology. For example, you could use builtwith.com to find sites that already use Google Tag Manager and narrow down your outreach to them. Holler with questions, and good luck!

This is because the small business and renovation loans are usually made to a person and it's their ability to repay which is important to the bank rather than the collateral they could seize. Only people with cash flow and a good history with the bank can get these kinds of loans. If you'd like to chat about a strategy to finance your business just give me a call. Cheers www.DavidCBarnett.com

The first step is measurement. Do you have a gauge as to how long people are engaging with you app? Typically companies use Appsflyer or Kovchava to measure app installs and behavior. Once you can see where and when people are dropping off you can get a good understanding of what dev changes you need to make.

The first thing you're going to want to do is to make an export file from the destination CRM, in your case it's SuiteCRM, and pull it into Excel. What I mean is when you export from the new CRM you will have a comma delimited or Excel file with all of the fields required as column heads on a spreadsheet

This is a very hard question because the experience of each entrepreneur will be different based on what they are seeking to gain as well as what they contribute. Develop a list for yourself of what you seek from a mastermind and then start looking. House of Genius is one I have worked with that is hugely collaborative, though not officially labeled a mastermind group. Meetup has lot of groups with specific targets but again, it's best if you know what you seek to gain, also how you wish to contribute, before searching for a mastermind.

I'd suggest first joining a local Toastmasters club. There you'll be able to practice, receive feedback and more. Then work with a coach one on one. If you'd like specific recommendations, I'd be happy to offer coaches I know on a short call.

You have some useful elements available here for positioning. First thing to understand is you will not "put out your shingle and they will come." There are many tax accountants and most business owners couldn't tell a good one from a bad one. So you must Stand Out. You must also develop a source of inbound leads. My advice is to begin at the end, how much money you want to make over a year, and work backwards to how many sales that needs to be (using an average engagement price) and then to how many people you need to be talking to that will result in those sales. This right here--or the lack of it, really--is why most businesses fail. They think just because they're there they will attract customers...and they don't know what they should be doing every day. They do not define their money target and consequently cannot figure out an activity level. So they sit there, play with their website, and wonder why the phone isn't ringing. In your case once people get to you or your marketing platform you have a couple things to talk about. First, scarcity. You're retiring and so you only have the time to help a few fortunate people Second, you have all this experience with the city. You know who to talk to there. That's not directly applicable to the IRS but it might be useful to building contractors and other types of clients who interact with the municipality. If you can use that knowledge and those relationships to help your clients lower their taxes payable, that's valuable. You've also seen administrative process in action so that'll be helpful in your IRS interactions. IMO you'll benefit most from starting to build proto-client relationships now, rather than waiting. Position yourself to get affluent clients and you'll earn more serving fewer clients. How to do that? Get this book and apply what it says: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Selling-Affluent-Attract-Customers-ebook/dp/B00HTKWMBY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513859984&sr=8-1&keywords=the+art+of+selling+to+the+affluent I don't want to come off as preachy, but this is one-way communication right now so I have to say what I believe needs to be said: most professionals who have never run their own business (and I don't know whether you have or haven't before) are gobsmacked by the fact that they must actually market and sell their services. The world does not line up at the door to buy just because the open sign is up. Resist the urge to "dumb it down". This is a tough concept and I struggle with it, too; however, every time I see an expert try to dumb down their ideas when talking to a marketplace they attract the wrong people. For instance there's a super cool investment banker I'm friends with who at the very lowest level should be talking about the subtleties of why an s-corp election can screw you up. But he forgets, and starts talking to an audience at a lower level...and soon enough, surprise surprise, he's rolling in the mud with the pigs and the pigs like it! Yet if he marketed with an opener about ways to monetize "dead" assets or some other higher level money concept, nobody could argue with him...and the "spider sense" of business owners like me would tingle and we'd pay attention. We might not interact, but we'd learn and start respecting his opinion. The loudest people in a marketplace are not necessarily doing the best--it's no indication of anything other than they like to talk, actually. Sometimes I've seen wealthy people interact a lot; sometimes it's been the broke people with nothing else to do. So stick to your higher level message and attract the people you can serve the best...and can not only afford your rates but *want* to pay them. As an employee you have been receiving the benefit of the organization bringing in the need for your work. If it was a private company someone would be selling something, and that would justify the expense of having you there. In the city they have figured out staffing and expertise levels required to handle the amount of work required, and you're a line item in a budget paid for by parking fines, property taxes, and a surprisingly small list of other ways the municipality brings in revenue. On your own, you no longer have these benefits. It's completely up to you to bring in the work. And that means you'll have to be doing different things than you were before. Actual accounting work will take a back seat: you'll be marketing most of the time in the early years. Maybe after a year and a half you'll build up enough referrals to back it off to say 50/50 marketing vs work activities. But the big takeaway is this: don't think you'll be doing accounting work most of the time.