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| Small Business Tycoon |
| The Small Business Tycoon blog is the most informative information source for budding entrepreneurs. All content is geared at helping you launch your homegrown enterprise. All content is free and no registration is required! |
| Language: English |
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Statistics |
| Unique Visitors: 0 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 24592 |
| Visitors Out: 745 |
| Total Visitors Out: 1884 |
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| 3M and the Post It note |
| 2007-03-26 07:10:04 |
Pull open your desk drawers or scan your eyes across the surface of your desk. What do you seea computer monitor, a pen holder, or maybe a Dilbert (or Far Side) calendar? Do you see any products made by the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company? I bet you or your coworkers have a least a few, of what were formerly called, Press and Peels.
Or maybe you know them better as Post It notes made by the, now more popularly named, 3M Company. Did you know that Post It notes were an invention that took many years to sell?
Spence Silver, one of the 7,000 scientists who made a career from 3M, was excited about his low stick glue. You could stick it to a piece of paper and then pull the paper apart without tearing or damaging the text. But Silver couldnt find an application marketable for his magic adhesive.
It was colleague and church choir singer Art Fry who came up with the magic application for the revolutionary adhesive. Fry was irritated how the page markers he use...
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| The Kellogg Company: The story of a cereal filler |
| 2007-03-23 07:04:29 |
The breakfast cereal was discovered by accident. In 1894, brothers John and William Kellogg were working at Americas most prestigious sanatorium (a place to come eat a vegetarian diet, exercise, and revitalize your body). They were working on new ways to create a breakfast of boiled bread when a thin rolled sheet was left out for two days. What remained were thin flakes the brothers baked and eventually served to their customers with milk.
Their elite clientele would leave still tasting the delectable breakfast treat and would request mail orders of the cereal shipped to their homes. John, the doctor, refuted the idea of lending the Kellogg name to a commercial enterprise. Eventually he was won over by his business savvy brother, William. They called their invention Granose.
What was born out of the Battle Creek Sanatorium was a mail order foods company called Sanitas Nut Food Company. Im not interested in selling corn flakes by mail, William said, I want to se...
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| Dyson's inventive vacuum |
| 2007-03-22 07:43:55 |
"Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success."
- James Dyson
When James Dyson invented the bagless vacuum cleaner, he thought hed have buyers waiting in line. But the lack of excitement from manufacturers led him to believe that some major companies were not in the business to sell vacuumsbut to sell vacuum bags.
Dyson also was surprised to have his idea met with hostility by engineers not happy about Dysons claim that their vacuum designs were so inferior that they were not fit to be sold.
The idea for the Dyson vacuum came out of frustration when the engineer realized that as a vacuum collected dust it lost its suction. Hed seen a sawmill use an enormous cyclone to sort out dust and thought this same idea would make a better home vacuum. Dyson created over five thousand prototypes before settling on the final design which would become his first vaccumthe DC-01. Add $80,000 dollars of his own capital and a few years of penny pinching (living o...
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| MAJOR MILESTONE: 1,000 Daily Readers!!! |
| 2007-03-21 06:08:34 |
Hey everyone -
Taking a timeout from our normal format today to just share with you how excited we are about the response we've been getting from SBT. We've reached a major milestone this week. It's hard to believe that this site is now being seen by a 1,000 TYCOONS PER DAY! Thanks to everyone who has been returning and spreading the word.
Please continue supporting SBT by visiting our advertisers! This helps us continue providing this content for free.
And we're offically seeking out the right companies interested in advertising their products and services to 30,000 entrepreneurs per month! If you or someone you know is looking for a hot demographic with savvy readers, please contact our advertising experts:
info@smallbusinesstycoon.com
Thanks!
-SBT
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| Liquid Paper's long road to success |
| 2007-03-20 07:14:26 |
Many entrepreneurs quit on their ideas if they havent achieved instant success within the first six month. For this reason, over 99% of small businesses never see the end of a calendar year. If youve ever used a typewriter, youre probably thankful that Bette Nesmith Graham continued to developer Liquid Paper for over a decade before hiring even a single employee.
Twenty years after the first bottle was sold, Graham sold her company to Gillette for $47.5 million.
The idea for Liquid Paper started as a secret method to fix blotchy mistakes on her bosss documents. Graham worked for Texas Bank & Trust as an executive assistant. One day when workers were painting the bank windows for the holiday season, Graham had an idea: she could mix a paint that matched the paper and could cover up those embarrassing mistakes. And thats why she called her product Mistake Out.
Soon others in the office were learning of Grahams practical solution and were ordering bottles for t...
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| The story of Sony and the Walkman |
| 2007-03-19 06:52:00 |
In January of 2007, sales of the Apple portable music player, iPod, reached a staggering 88.7 million units. Apple struck gold with their cleverly designed portable music system. Authors note: my household has two of them (a 4GB mini and a 60GB).
But we wouldnt have iPods today if Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, hadnt given us the revolutionary portable music system known as The Walkman.
The Walkman was not an instant success. Sony sold only 10% of its initial mass production. There was simply no demand for portable music in 1979. But Morita was convinced that the Walkman would eventually catch on, so he continued pushing the Walkman holding news conferences allowing members of the press to try the Walkman for themselves.
The public does not know what is possiblewe do, said Morita in his autobiography.
Originally founded as Tokyo Teletech, Morita dreamed up the fictitious Sony moniker out of (nearly) thin air. He even had the logo printed in...
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| RED BULL Brings Pop! |
| 2007-03-16 08:00:00 |
Source: 100 Great Businesses
So you want be a big shot? You think youve got the smarts, the fortitude, to be a CEO? Heres a little test weve put together for you. Put yourself in the shoes of Red Bull President, Dietrich Mateschitz. How would you turn the following dire situation into a billion dollar beverage empire?
Focus groups say your product is disgusting. The Ministry of Health is dragging its feet giving your energy drink a safe thumbs up. Consumers are wary of your products synthetic ingredients. How do you turn this company into a success?
Maybe your nine-to-five job isnt so bad huh?
Rewind back to 1982: According to company history, Mateschitz was sitting in a hotel in Hong Kong sipping on a sweetened energy drink which eventually would give birth to the fizzy energy drink boom of 2001. Desperate to take the recipe back to Austria, Mateschitz forged a partnership convincing the owner of Hong Kongs TC Pharmaceutical Company to license him th...
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| Hallmark: When You Care Enough... |
| 2007-03-15 08:00:00 |
Excerpted & paraphrased from 100 Great Businesses
Imagine starting a mail order business while sleeping in a single bed in the YMCA. Joyce C. Hall, at the age of 18, did exactly thataggressively selling postcards to anyone who would (and wouldnt) buy them. Hall dreamed that he would be successful enough to eat a baked potato with three pieces of butter everyday.
Today, the privately owned Hallmark company produces annual revenues in the neighborhood of $4 billion. The company, started by an eighteen year old fighting starvation, now produces 23,000 new and redesigned cards every year.
Its not surprising that a man from such humble beginnings would be one of the first to introduce radical new policies such as paid vacation, employee insurance, and paid bonuses.
Hall sold postcards from his room at the YMCA, all the while maintaining a client facing image of The Leading Postcard Dealer. When postcards began to decline, Hall and his brother, Rollie, came up with...
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| Callaway's Romance with Big Bertha |
| 2007-03-14 08:00:00 |
Excerpted & paraphrased from 100 Great Businesses
I will venture to say that if youve ever played a single game of golf in your life, you know exactly what I mean when I say I picked up a new Bertha. Anyone whos been on the course has seen the oversized heads and has heard the crisp sound of a ball sailing three hundred yards from the tee box. But have you ever wondered how this unusual club with its bizarre name found its way onto your local golf course?
It all started back in 1982, when sixty-two year old Ely Callaway bought a struggling business called Hickory Stick. Callaway, a wealthy tycoon who couldnt stand the idea of retirement, was intrigued by these throwback clubs which sported a wooden shaft just like the clubs Callaway remembered from his childhood.
One year earlier, Ely had sold his winery for $14 million dollars. Investing in something that he was passionate about, golf, seemed like a great way to invest his money. Taking charge, he relocated the ...
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| The Baby Einstein Sensation |
| 2007-03-13 08:00:00 |
Turn Your Idea or Invention Into Millions!
Excerpted & paraphrased from 100 Great Businesses
In 2001, entrepreneur Julie Aigner-Clark had sold Einstein to Disney for a whopping $25 million dollars. Thats an incredible amount of moneyeven more amazing when you consider that Baby Einstein started as a silly basement experiment. Aigner-Clark was looking to make an education video that would expose her daughter, Aspen, to music, art, and literature. She had rounded up her daughters favorite toys and had set out to film them in her home made studio.
Her husband, Bill, saw the potential. He pushed her to invest $10,000 of their own money into producing more videos. Soon they were approaching targeted retailers that would carry her product at a higher price without burying them on the lower shelf behind items with bigger brands and marketing budgets.
Baby Einstein initially ran on an all cash and never fell into debt. This sometimes meant sacrifices such as ski...
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