Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes. —Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady, United States of America Few things are more irritating in business than dealing with a person who pretends to be a decision-maker but in reality is just a subordinate. You know these misleading types. […]
View Post Eleanor Roosevelt, Sales
To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. —Mark Twain, author, humorist. Pete Kight has a success story that is simply amazing. The company he founded, CheckFree, was acquired in 2007 by Fiserve for approximately $4.4 billion in cash. In many ways, his story sounds like other millionaire success stories that include […]
View Post Bill Gates, CheckFree, College, Courage, Fiserve, Forbes, Forbes 400, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Plank, Ohio, Pete Kight, Sara Blakely, Software, Spanx, Under Armour, Warren Buffet
A winning effort begins with preparation. —Joe Gibbs, former NFL coach, race team owner At a recent entrepreneurship conference where there was a panel with angel investors, an audience member asked the following questions, “Do you take cold calls? And if you do, what should I, as a business owner seeking capital, say?” One of […]
View Post Capital Growth, Daymond John, Forge Intellectual Capital, Joe Gibbs, Timothy Reese, Valerie Gaydos
Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty. —Plato, Greek philosopher If I had listened to my intuition, I could have saved myself some trouble. I would have heeded the many clues that the shoddy owners of the mom-and-pop business gave me. I would have run out of their dubious restaurant as fast […]
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music. —William Stafford, poet For the past two years, I have had the privilege of being an instructor for the Teenpreneur conference, a two-day program that has taught thousands of teens the vital concepts of entrepreneurship. Along with other instructors who are entrepreneurs, I […]
View Post Capri Investments Capital, Quintin E Primo III, Teenpreneur, William Stafford
Timid salesmen have skinny kids. —Zig Ziglar, author, motivational speaker Reality hit us like a Mack truck and stopped us dead in our tracks. Although we reached our goal of creating OmniPublisher, one of the first content management systems built specifically for newspapers and other periodicals, we realized that we forgot to include the most […]
View Post Apple, Eduardo Saverin, Facebook, George Cloutier, Goldman Sachs, Mack Truck, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix, OmniPublisher, Pandora, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Twitter, Webvan, Zig Ziglar
Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers. —Tony Robbins, author, professional speaker. As an entrepreneur, your success depends greatly on your ability to ask the right questions. However, few people understand the enormous value of mastering this art. I would argue that several entrepreneurs—business professionals, too—have no idea that […]
View Post Competitive Advantage, Customer Objections, Marketing, Paul Cherry, Sales, Skills
Beauty awakens the soul to act. —Dante Alighieri, Italian poet. Excited to hit the pavement and to sell advertisements for my new magazine, I visited a local mom-and-pop store near my alma mater, Morehouse College. After my sales pitch, I waited to hear if the business owner would place an ad in my next issue. […]
View Post Black in America, Black in America: The New Promised Land, Cadillac, Chelsey Rodgers, CNN, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ford, Investors, Los Angeles Lakers, Miss USA, Morehouse College, Silicon Valley