Twenty Dollars!

Next time you are thinking about spending $20 on a CD, DVD, or a few drinks at the bar, why not spend it on this instead? I just showed my support, I hope you are able to show yours. It's nice to see something positive come from sports these days.

Oh, and on a much lesser note, since when did I move to China? Please support Net Neutrality by spending five minutes here and here. This will effect anyone who uses a computer, but will have a devastating impact on small internet business. If this actually happens it will set back innovation for years.

That's it for the PSA's...I'll return to my regularly scheduled entrepreneur blogging next time. Have a good weekend everyone.

Embrace Rapid Change

We are living in a very unique time period. Innovation happens faster than we can process it, especially on the internet. If you literally take a week off, you have missed a ton. There's a good chance you missed Google's latest release, Apple's newest iPod, or AOL's legal battle. Take a few months off and you've probably missed the introduction of a technology that will be pivotal in the future (think about how hot AJAX is right now and most of us hadn't heard of it a year ago).

While it can be exciting to just sit back and soak in all of the amazing things happening, it can also be extremely stressful as an internet entrepreneur trying to keep up. If you are like me, you probably subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and print magazines. It seems like each one is talking about how to increase my traffic by doing x or increase my conversions by doing y, and if I don't do it now I will fall behind and my business will fail. It can be enough to make your head explode.

What are we to do? For obvious reasons, the worst thing you can do is stop reading those newsletters and magazines. You need to stay up to date on what is going on in your industry. Going into a shell and focusing entirely on your business without contact with the outside world will lead to missed opportunities. Learning should not be considered a finite thing - we should always be growing our knowledge base. We will never know everything that we need to know.

That said, we also need to understand that we can't possibly adapt every single change available to us. Any entrepreneur should have a business plan that conveys the major goals of the business, and should try to adhere to it. It will undoubtedly be a fluid, living document that changes over time, but still maintains the core goals of the business.

In the course of your reading, if you encounter a technique or technology that will directly help you meet those goals, then you should certainly pursue it. If not, make note of it and move on. I keep an 'idea book' where I write down any ideas I have that are not directly applicable to my current business. That way the idea isn't lost for the future, but it also doesn't clutter my mind now.

You have two choices - hate change and watch your business fall behind, or learn to embrace it by implementing exciting pertinent technologies. After all, isn't it better to live in a time with rapid change as opposed to a hundred years ago when major change only happened once or twice in a life time?

"Feature Creeper"

I thoroughly enjoy reading David Askaripour's blog, Flush the Toilet, a blog "focused on helping students start their own business." The best part is his brutal honesty when it comes to his entrepreneurial failures. He recently wrote a six-part post about an entrepreneurial failure where he discusses how he lost $12,000 on his first business. I highly recommend that you read it when you get a few minutes. I for one am inspired by his resolve. One of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur is knowing when to admit failure and move on, and he has done an admirable job with it.

I began reading the six posts last night and continued with it this morning. To be honest, it was the first thing I did today because I couldn't stop thinking about it last night. The one thing that stuck in my head the most was the term "feature creeper." David describes it as:

When you start planning for a business you have to have two sets of ideas that you wish to implement. One set for ideas that “must” be offered when your business firsts launches and another set of less important services that can wait until your business matures a bit.

You need to ask yourself: “what are the features that really matter?” The features that really, really matter should be in the first version of your business. Everything else should and must wait until you to gain some credibility and trust from your clients, and then you can slowly start to implements some of those features/services you’ve just been dying to launch. Just be cool and take your time.

Some people call it “feature creeper” when you feel the need to keep on adding and adding ideas (the ideas just keep on creeping up on you), I just call it being overly-excited and trying to do a million things for a million people. Your business should only do a few things for a few people, not the world. Remember, a few people can mean millions of people.

Don’t feel the need to make your business cater to all groups of people because you feel that it can. Just because it can, doesn’t mean that it should. It’s always better to keep your business tight and focused on solving a certain problem for a certain group of people.

Now that is one thing that I definitely do that I need to stop doing. The perfectionist in me always sees something wrong with what I've done. The entrepreneur in me always wants to keep innovating. Combining the perfectionist and entrepreneur in me results in me becoming a feature addict.

I always tell myself "I need to focus on marketing more, but first I've got to finish this improvement." Then I work on marketing for a week or two, but inevitably I get sidetracked to another feature that needs improvement. I am pledging right now: for the next six months I will not make a technical upgrade to SportsLizard.com. I'm quitting cold turkey. No more "feature creeper" for Adam. We'll see how it goes.

Distractions

How many times has this happened to you - you sit down to do a solid hour of work, but before you get started the phone rings, then an IM pops up, and just as you take care of those, an interesting email comes in. Before you know it, your hour is gone and you've accomplished nothing.

These distractions can eat away more than an hour. Sometimes it seems like I waste away a whole day and get nothing tangible done. As a business owner, it can become especially difficult. It's easy to shut off your phone and turn off IM if your only shutting out your friends, but what if those channels are how your customers reach you? I struggle with the same question whenever I work - should I keep Outlook open or not?

If I close it, my productivity shoots up but I don't see any emails from customers. I think it's important to respond to customers ASAP. A rapid response can go a long way with a customer. However, if I keep Outlook open, 95% of what comes in is spam, newsletters, or emails that could be answered later in the day or the next day. I end up wasting time glancing at these and my productivity is shot. So is it worth the waste in productivity to satisfy customers?

Increasingly, I'm saying no. I NEED time to be productive. I shut off the cell phone, turn off IM, and close Outlook. I check back every 4 or 5 hours at a minimum in case their is an important email. Yes, I may not reply as fast to those super urgent emails, but at least I get stuff done (and honestly, nothing in the world of sports collectibles is THAT urgent - I'm not running a hospital here).

I also plan on taking my work to places where there is NO internet access as the weather gets nicer. I can't be distracted by my cell phone or email if I'm at the lake or park where there is no phone reception or wireless internet!

As bad as this is now, how much worse is it going to get in the next few years? The more ways we figure out to communicate with each other, the more distractions we will have. And the more distractions we face, the more work we're going to have to put in to get away from them.

My Greatest Challenge So Far

I am coming up on the two year anniversary of the launch of SportsLizard.com and without a doubt my greatest challenge has been getting customers. This may seem obvious to anyone who has run a business, but it wasn't to me.

Two years ago I had no clue how to legally set up a business. I didn't know a thing about web programming. I didn't know basic accounting or how to file taxes for a business. I was an engineering student and engineering was about all that I knew very well. I figured the fact that I didn't know web marketing very well either would just fall into the same category - things I needed to learn but would have no problem with.

However, I failed to realize that the difference between marketing and those other things is that each one of those other things required me to buy a few books, practice a bit, and I was all set. I bought several marketing books, refer constantly to several great sites, and have read thousands of email newsletters. Each one gives me a little more insight and makes me a little bit better of a marketer.

The thing that differentiates marketing from those other things is that the result, a consumer doing something, is an extremely unpredictable and variable thing. In essence, you need to find what works for you and do that because no two markets and no two consumers are the same. What worked for me might not work for you. What worked for you might not work for me.

That frustrates me to no end. Having an engineering background I'm used to forming a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, and then developing a conclusion based on the results of the test. In theory, if you run the same experiment as me, you will get the same result. Why? Because you can control all of the variables involved in the experiment in the same way that I did.

The difference with web marketing is that there are more variables than we can possibly control, the most impossible of which being the consumer. The same person put in the same situation two different times doesn't always react the same each time. Maybe they are in a better mood or maybe they just got a bonus at work and are more likely to make a purchase. Whatever it may be, it is nearly impossible to predict (I only say 'nearly impossible' because I never believe anything is impossible. Who knows, maybe someday someone will come up with a complex formula that predicts with 100% accuracy the actions of a human being. I doubt it, but who am I to say it can't be done).

When you start a business, you are so certain that people will buy that or do this, click on that or download this. The truth is that yes, people will do whatever you want them to do (assuming of course it will benefit them in some way). The problem is that we grossly overestimate the number of people that will perform said action. Think about how many stores, both on and offline that you visit without making a purchase.

Think about how many times you see something and don't go back to get it for a few months. To those business owners, you are a lost customer when you leave their store or site. The overwhelming majority of the people that will come to your site are like this. It's nothing personal, it's just the way it is.

I have an insane amount of respect for anyone that has successfully built a web business. It isn't like a brick and mortar store at your local mall - you don't just throw a store up and have people walk in and start buying. There are literally millions of websites out there and likely thousands out there in your industry. Successful web businesses have found away to differentiate themselves AND generate sufficient traffic. Many times they are as limited in budget as I am.

So what should one do if they are in this situation? As I mentioned before, keep trying until you find what works for you. Read books, magazines, web sites, and newsletters to get ideas and keep up on what is successful for others. Try out the ones that could work for your business and track the results. If it doesn't work, move on and try again. If it does, keep doing it. As mad as it makes me, that is about as scientific as I think I am going to be able to make this process :)

Entrepreneurial Failure - Get Used to It

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur you are going to have to learn to deal with failure. There is no way around it. Thomas Edison tried over ten thousand different experiments before he finally demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb on October 21, 1879. Bill Gates' first company, Traf-O-Data, was a failure.

Michael Jordan was once quoted as saying: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot; And missed. I've failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

In my short stint as an entrepreneur I've failed more times than I can count. I have also had my share of success, but it is not even close to equal. The failures far outweigh the successes and I probably have a lot more failure ahead of me. As soon as I stop failing, I have stopped trying to innovate. It's the nature of the business of being an entrepreneur and of success in general.

If it were easy, everyone would do it. It is naive to think that every good idea that you have will result in a successful business venture. I have yet to hear an entrepreneur say "every single idea I come up with seems to work." More likely, you hear something like "I failed at my first five businesses before this one took off."

Think about that for a second. Five businesses. Sometimes the number is three, sometimes it's 20, but the important point is that most entrepreneurs don't hit a home-run with their first company. It really does amaze me - how many people have the stones to fail five times and still start a sixth business? You have to be supremely confident and treat those previous five times as a learning experience for the sixth. If number six fails, you have to do the same and move on to number seven.

The important thing is how you deal with failure. Once you accept that it's inevitable, you are able to learn from your mistakes and move on. It's easy to let the failure consume you - not so much because you are pessimistic, but more so because it is hard to see something that you poured your heart and soul into be ignored or rejected. As soon as possible you need to come to the realization that your business is what they are ignoring or rejecting, NOT you. The sooner you do that, the sooner you can objectively analyze why you failed and learn the things necessary for improvement in the future.

Failure isn't easy and is extremely frustrating, but it's a necessary part of success. Don't believe me? Ask Thomas Edison, Bill Gates or Michael Jordan! Ok, asking Thomas Edison might be a little tough, but you get the idea :)

Young Entrepreneur Business Ethics - Part 2

Last post I started discussing business ethics for young entrepreneurs. The things that I talked about were the things that everyone should be doing, regardless of whether you are a young entrepreneur, an "old" entrepreneur, or an employee. Core ideals like treating others with respect, telling the truth, and taking responsibilities for your actions are the things that everyone in society can do to help make the world a better place.

But as a young entrepreneur (and an entrepreneur in general), I think that we can do more. Do you HAVE to do more? No. Does it make you a bad person if you don't? Far from it. But I think that sometimes we are so focused on our bottom line that we forget that we can also use our "powers" for the greater good of society. As entrepreneurs we have a great deal of skills that we take for granted. It's completely fine to be using those skills for our own benefit, but we can also use them for the benefit of others.

We have the power to create a different future for this country. As entrepreneurs we have the wherewithal and resources to help drive changes to help make this world a better place for the people around us who are less fortunate. Not everyone can do that. It's much easier for us to start a non-profit organization than it is for the average person.

We have a customer base that will listen to us. We can do things that will benefit both the business and society. For example, giving a portion of your revenue for a week to charity. Customers will respond to that. You may even get some positive PR. It will help your business in the long run, but more importantly it will help society. Average Joe can't do that.

I challenge you to do SOMETHING. Whatever you can. Maybe all that you have is a few hours a week to help out at the hospital or the homeless shelter. Don't dismiss that as not enough. It helps. Every little bit helps.

Now, I am certainly no saint and don't claim to be. I have not done enough in the past, and this post is a part of me trying to do more in the future. I know that people read this blog and I appreciate each and every one of you for taking the time to do so. I have a built-in audience of entrepreneurs that can make a difference and I want to make sure that I express how important I feel this is.

Later this year, I am hoping to donate 100% of SportsLizard.com's revenue for a month to a homeless shelter. I still have to work out a few of the details, but I am very optimistic. If not a month, I'll do a week. If not 100% I'll do 50% or 25%. But I will give something. Who knows, maybe I'll start a 'charity week' where each days proceeds go to a different charity during the first week of every month.

One of the things I am really challenging myself to do is to donate my time. It's easy to sign a check, but time is just as important as money. Being the one to cook a meal for someone who wouldn't have been able to eat that night is just as important, if not more important, than being the person who paid for the groceries.

If you are an entrepreneur, or thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, you have something to give. You have the basic needs met - food, water, clothing, and a roof over your head. There are people in the world that don't have those things. Let's do something about it.

As the late, great Roberto Clemente once said "If you have a chance to make life better for others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on earth."

Young Entrepreneur Business Ethics - Part 1

Business ethics is one of those interesting topics - do you really need to be "ethical" to succeed? There are examples of both business owners who are extremely ethical and fail, as well as business owners who are unethical and succeed. There might not be a perfect correlation between being ethical and being successful, but I believe that it does matter. Not only can being ethical positively impact your bottom line, but more importantly it can set good examples for others to be ethical as well.

I know what you are thinking: is business ethics really a problem? Yes. It is a huge problem. Even if one looks past the Enron's of the world, it's hard to ignore the lying, cheating, and backstabbing that people are willing to commit to "get ahead". I was lucky enough to have several college internships and co-op's in addition to the one year I spent out in industry, so in reality even though I am only 23, I have a solid four years of business experience in various industries. In those four years I saw numerous examples of things that I considered to be unethical.

Last year I was given the responsibility of conducting interviews for some young engineers for our company, as well as recruiting and interviewing for our co-op program. After screening resumes and doing around 10 interviews I was shocked to see how many people blatantly lied on their resumes and in interviews, and how easy it was to tell that they were lying. Could that many people really lie? Well, a study from ResumeDoctor.com shows out of 1,000 resumes, almost 43% had at least one inaccuracy. So yes, a lot of people lie.

I can't comprehend why someone would lie to an employer during on a resume or during an interview. You are also screening and interviewing them to see if you are going to fit well in their organization. If you don't show your true colors, you are doing a disservice to them and to yourself. What if you lie about liking something or being good at something, and then you start the job and that is precisely what they have you doing? You are miserable and your boss is stuck with a sub-par employee. Exactly who wins in that scenario? If you are honest and truly show who you are, you can be assured that when you are hired you are being hired because of who you are, not a perception of who you are.

Since those interviews, I've paid attention anytime a friend mentions working on their resume or talks about going to an interview and I can't believe how many of them lie! They pretend to have skill-sets that they don't just to impress employers or they pretend to be excited about a field that bores them. Last week, one of them called me to discuss an interview that they had upcoming with a company that they didn't really know if they wanted to work for. They said "I'm going to have to lie in the interview." That drove me nuts - the way I saw it he had two options - respectfully decline the interview or be honest. You can still be honest and not insult the potential employer. Saying "I've never really considered a career like this but I'd be interested to learn more to see if I might be a good fit" is fine. Saying "this is what I've dreamed about doing my entire life" when it's not, is not fine. That is lying.

When I was in college we were forced to take three business ethics courses. RPI was the first school in the country to have this "extensive" ethics training as a requirement. I was less than thrilled - at the time I thought it was the school trying to teach us our values and I didn't want any part of it. And that is essentially what it was - the school trying to impose things on us that our parents should have twenty years ago. Why would they do this? Because these problems are real. I suspect that a liar and a cheater isn't going to change after 21 years of being a liar and a cheater, but there are certainly many people that want to be ethical but get caught in a bad situation, make one wrong decision, and then ruin their careers. Those are the people that they are going to connect with and hopefully influence them to do the right things, no matter how hard and no matter what the penalty.

It might not always be the easiest thing to do, but I challenge you to set an example for other people. I challenge you to show them that you can succeed in business AND be ethical...that those two things can go hand in hand. What you do does matter, and others will follow your lead.

Next post I'll talk more about what I think young entrepreneurs can do to be more proactive with our skills.

Book Review: Start Your Own Business

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was going to start doing book reviews on all of the business books that I have read. This book is THE BOOK FOR ENTREPRENEURS. If you can only afford to buy one business book, or only have time to read one business book, this is the one.

If you want to start a business, but don't know where to start, then the place to start is with Start Your Own Business: The Only Start-Up Book You'll Ever Need by Rieva Lesonsky. The book is put out by Entrepreneur Press and is essentially a compilation of Entrepreneur Magazine's large knowledge database regarding starting a business.

The book literally takes you through the entire business process - from determining if you really have what it takes to run a business to how to deal with failure if your business doesn't work out, and everything in between. The best part about the book is that it covers nearly EVERYTHING in some capacity. If you need more information, it does a great job of suggesting further reading and pertinent web sites.

The book is broken down into seven sections, each with several chapters. The first section, 'You Gotta Start Somewhere' covers determining if you can be an entrepreneur, how to come up with an idea for your business, and whether you should launch your business part time or full time. Most people who buy the book will already have answers to these questions, but going through the exercises in the book can still be helpful.

The second section of the book is entitled 'Building Blocks'. It covers how to name your business, choosing a business structure, creating a business plan, and how to hire a lawyer and accountant. I think that this is the most valuable section of the book. These are the things that most entrepreneurs either struggle with or ignore. The Naming Your Business chapter in particular helped me a great deal. Naming your business is not nearly as easy as you think - you need to consider all registered trademark names, registered domain names, and names that are being used but not trademarked. One of the worst things that you can do is to pick a name that is already being used by someone and face a legal battle down the road.

The third section covers financing including where and how to get money to run your business. The fourth section, 'Setting the Stage' is absolutely massive and covers numerous important things such as choosing a location for your business, creating a professional image, offering customers credit, hiring your first employee, and business insurance. Needless to say, all of these things are extremely important to every business owner.

The fifth section covers buying company computers, cell phones, and cars. These things probably won't be very difficult for most business owners. The sixth section, however, covers one of the hardest thing every business owner faces - marketing. The section is nearly 100 pages about advertising, marketing, and public relations. It also briefly touches on web-marketing but those looking to seriously profit online will need to look elsewhere because the book is a little thin when it comes to e-commerce.

The final section, entitled 'By the Books' goes over every entrepreneurs favorite things - accounting and taxes. It gives solid advice regarding basic bookkeeping, financial statements, budgeting, and taxes. For most business owners this section and the web resources listed should be more than enough to get them started on keeping their business legal.

I can't overemphasize how important I think it is for every business owner to have this book. It is a mini-encyclopedia (ok, so 800 pages isn't THAT mini) for everything business related. Having this book on your shelf will save you countless hours. I read it from cover to cover when I got it and I constantly refer back to it. I have recommended it to every person I know that has talked with me about starting a business. Each and every one of them bought it, and each and every one of them came back to me raving about it.

For the amount of depth that is covered in the book, Start Your Own Business: The Only Start-Up Book You'll Ever Need by Rieva Lesonsky is an amazingly easy read. Anyone over the age of 16 will be able to comprehend the simple nature of the book. Reading this book won't guarantee your success as an entrepreneur, but it will help reduce the risk of starting a business by providing you with a sound foundation to build upon.

The Penalty of Leadership

A while back a former co-worker forwarded me an email entitled The Penalty of Leadership. The message (author unknown, otherwise I'd give him/her their due) talks about how all great things are emulated and envied. I posted it at the end of this post for you to check out.

The greatest thing that I take out of the piece is that you know you are on to something when people start gunning for you. They either criticize or they try to copy. Either way, when that happens, keep doing what you are doing because you are on the right track.

What makes me bring this up now? Well I had two of those moments in the past couple of weeks. First, a few weeks back I got a phone call from one of the largest businesses in the sports collectibles industry. They asked me what type of marketing I was doing and if I would have any interest doing some advertising with them. Now, I was recently kicked off of their forums for being a "competitor" so I found this kind of odd. Then the lightbulb went off - they were digging for information. So I told them nothing. But after I hung up the phone I was ecstatic...I am officially on their radar. They know who I am, at least enough to call me and pry for information, and that makes me feel like I am heading in the right direction.

The second occurrence happened this morning. In an article on SportsLizard.com recently, I was VERY critical of a few major players in the sports collectibles industry. I believe that those individuals are intentionally manipulating consumers for their own benefit. I had received a few atta-boy emails from people for saying what they were thinking, but nothing more. Then this morning I got an email from one of the men I was critical of. He had actually taken the time to read my entire article and put together a rebuttal (a mediocre one by the way). Why would someone who is at the top of their industry take the time to do that? He must value what I say enough to take the time to refute it. I take great pride in that. I figured the article would never cross his desk, and if it did he would glance at it and throw it in the trash.

Both of these moments are as important to me as the Microsoft Award and mention in Tuff Stuff Magazine because they show that my business is, in a small way, starting to pay the penalty of leadership. I suppose it means that SportsLizard.com is beginning to matter in the collectibles industry and that excites me.

Anyway, here it is:

The Penalty of Leadership

In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition, the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. When a man's work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be merely mediocre, he will be left severely alone - if he achieve a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a-wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you, unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountebank, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy - but only confirms once more that superiority of that which he strives to supplant. There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as the human passions - envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains - the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live - lives.

Be "Buzzworthy"

I think that anyone who runs a website or owns a business will agree that the best form of marketing is viral marketing (essentially word-of-mouth advertising). It is definitely the most cost-effective way to build your business. What influences you more, a commercial advertising a product or an email from a close friend hyping it up?

Becoming buzzworthy has become so desired that there are now marketing firms that specialize in viral marketing. For example, they pay 12 year old girls to tell their friends about the new clothing line/music group/website. Recently, a number of their tactics have come into question. Not to mention that paying to be viral isn't being TRULY viral.

Most people know the story of Hotmail - probably the best example of the power of viral marketing on the web. Hotmail did absolutely no marketing, the only thing they did to promote their service was put a line of text at the bottom of every single email saying "Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com". That's it. People saw the message and signed up for their own account.

I think that most businesses try to be buzzworthy, but the problem is that viral marketing is an extremely inexact science. Predicting what things people will tell all of their friends about and what things they won't is not easy. Personally, I THINK it happens when a site is so unique and pertinent to me AND my friends that I absolutely must tell them. It's usually a pretty unconscious thing so it's hard to be sure.

I have probably tried 200+ things to generate buzz about SportsLizard.com. Some of which have failed, some of which have been moderately successful, but none have generated the kind of buzz that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors in a day. However, this week I had a great (albeit small) exposure to the power of viral marketing.

One of the subsections of SportsLizard.com is focused on re-painting sports figurines to look like your favorite athlete, someone you know, or yourself (known as customs). The hobby has become so popular that hundreds of people sell customs on eBay and on their own websites. The problem is that in many cases they are profiting off of licenses of teams, players, or universities that they don't have permission to be using.

I decided to write an article about the licensing problem and post it in customs news groups and message boards. Literally within MINUTES my inbox was flooded with emails and replies to the article. It was something that all customizers had an interest in and were willing to go to war with each other about. I was thrilled, my article was read hundreds of times in the first few hours!

Now, to put this in perspective, there are probably only a thousand customizers in the world, so there are only about a thousand people who would actually care to read the article. Not enough to be super-buzzworthy, but I got to see the impact of being truly viral on a small scale.

Because it is such an inexact science, I believe the best approach is to try A LOT of different ways to be viral. If you put all of your eggs in one viral-marketing basket, you will probably fail. My educated guess is that it takes anywhere from 100 to 1,000 attempts to spread the word of your product/service to find the technique that inspires people to tell others. It can be frustrating, but you only have to get it right ONCE for your business to take off.

Getting Paid to Learn

My favorite entrepreneur is Mark Cuban. His focus, passion, drive, determination, and love for what he does translates into business success and success in life. He is not only one of the most successful businessmen in the world, he is also one of the most charitable.

And thanks to his blog, Blog Maverick, I am able learn directly from the source. His post this week about Getting Paid to Learn couldn't be more true.

Cuban talks about when he was in his early twenties, bouncing around from job-to-job and living on the floor in his friends apartment. But all along, he was getting paid to learn. At each and every job, he was getting paid to learn computer skills, management skills, and communication skills. That education, Cuban says, is much more valuable than an MBA would be.

I couldn't agree more with him. I knew I wanted to run SportsLizard.com full time back in 2004 when I started it. However, when I graduated school I took an engineering job against my better judgment. Now, a few months after leaving the job, I am able to reflect back and say that I did it the right way. I needed the exposure to industry, to all of those things that Mark mentioned. I really did get paid to learn.

It's really interesting to look at Cuban's statement as part of a larger question - how much value is their in an MBA (or any post-graduate degree for that matter) in the success of an entrepreneur? I don't have any data to support this, but my guess is that there is no correlation between a successful business an MBA. An MBA probably doesn't increase your chance of success, and if you are trading the MBA for valuable on-the-job experience it may decrease your chance of success.

There's no doubt that every entrepreneur needs to value education. The question really becomes where does that education come from? With the increasing prices of tuition, it is becoming more and more practical to get it informally. Personally, a mix of formal education, informal education on the job, reading stacks of books on my own time, and learning from others by reading message boards and articles on the web has given me what I consider a very thorough knowledge base to build my business. But I guess everyone needs to figure out what will work best for them in their situation.

SportsLizard Launches Network of Sports Sites

It's pretty safe to say that anytime I only post twice in two weeks I am up to something. It's not that I'm not working, it's that I'm working so much that I am unable devote as much time as I'd like to the blog. That has been the case recently.

Yesterday I launched a network of sports-related sites called the SportsLizard Network. By far the coolest of the seven new sites in my opinion is the Announcer Ratings. I've always wanted a site where I could go and let out my frustrations on a bad announcer. The great thing about this site is that if it picks up in popularity it can be a pretty interesting look at what announcers are doing their jobs and what ones aren't. I would encourage those of you who are sports fans to check it out and participate.

From an entrepreneurial perspective, the network is important for my business. This expansion was done extremely quickly (approximately 2 weeks from start to finish) and requires nearly no maintenance on my part. The primary source of revenue from these network sites is advertising. By doing this, I have drastically increased my audience and potential marketing opportunities with very little up front effort.

If these sites do what I hope they do for SportsLizard.com, I will continue to release 5-10 mini-niche sites like this each year under the SportsLizard name.

This is something that wasn't in my plans a few months ago, but it became apparent that it would help me a great deal, so I did it. As a business owner you are constantly walking that fine line of becoming distracted from executing your plan and changing your plan to help improve the business. Sometimes you think you are doing one when you are really doing the other. You never know for sure, but this seems like it can do only good for my business. I suppose time will tell...