I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately thinking about how to help connect small businesses in a positive way. It just seems to me that there are a ton of smart and talented entrepreneurs around that could benefit from an organized “collaborative consulting” group. I’ve outlined the basic idea over here to get started.

From my experience as a small business owner/manager I’ve learned that professional help in some areas is needed and useful but can be out of reach financially. I was in a position to hire the people that I needed to some extent but I know many are not. I’m talking about accountants, marketing firms, HR professionals, insurance consultants, management consultants, etc. These are important parts of small business no doubt, but they can be too expensive for some to hire out. I also learned a ton and got a lot of support from fellow business owners.

What if you could get the benefit of having these pros on your team without paying for exclusive service. How about a regular meeting with experts and other small business owners that is organized and focused on finding solutions to YOUR current issues. All the while saving on the expense by splitting the cost with others.

I see a meeting of the minds. Small business owners collaborating and helping the other members with their issues. Every small business faces the same types of challenges on a regular basis- hiring, firing, insurance, tax prep, budgeting, marketing concepts, ad buys, delegating, efficient systems, the list goes on and on. Can’t these questions be solved with a universal solution that is tweaked to fit into the business? The underlying systems work for any business when applied correctly don’t they?

I was talking this idea over with a friend of mine that always plays the devil’s advocate, thankfully. He seems to think that business owners are too secretive with the inner workings of what they do to share much with others, especially the competition. One of his solutions was to allow only one business from each industry at a time.

Please do me a favor and answer a couple of questions when you have the time-

1. Are small business owners too proud/scared/secretive to share their business with others? Keep in mind that these other folks would be business owners themselves, maybe even competitors. Also, I’m not talking about specific financials or proprietary info, just solutions to common problems that have worked for them.
2. Can you see a benefit to meeting once a month with experts, guest speakers and fellow business owners as an alternative to hiring these pros separately but having them to yourself? Realize that the cost would be about 10% of hiring them individually, plus the benefit of networking with other entrepreneurs AND having all of the information available online via video, text and presentations.
3. Would you be interested in taking part in a test group? No charge to you except for your feedback, which will be structured and required.

I’m hoping for responses from small business owners and managers but of course everyone’s input is welcome and helpful. I plan to run a test group if I see the interest and the folks that respond here will be the first to be invited. Please share this with your friends and colleagues that would be interested. If you want to chat about it you can reach me at 772-8447 or any of the places on my network page. Thanks in advance for your insight!

I’m not sure why I try to look at everything through different eyes these days. Probably due to the time that I spend thinking about my past life, present life and future life. Anyhow, over the past weekend I spent a lot of time thinking about independence and what it means to me.
We all know that we celebrate Independence Day every year to acknowledge the creation of our country. I think it makes some sense to tie it into my own life a bit too.
For me, independence is about doing things on my own. Doing things that don’t require me answering to anyone. Living life on my own schedule. Writing my own future.
It helps that I’m an entrepreneur at heart. Mostly I just don’t like authority, I also have deep seeded ideas on how things should be done business wise and have a hard time finding folks that agree with those ideas enough to go to work for them.
It used to be that I always put money and success ahead of everything else. At times that helped and other times it drove people away. I’ve been told I’m conceited and arrogant on many occasions because of that. I’ve recently come to realize that my time, and my enjoyment of that time, is much more rewarding than money could ever be. Instead of financial independence I’m striving for time independence. The money will find it’s way to me if I concentrate on helping others in ways that I enjoy. At least that’s the theory, I just may have to go flip burgers if the money doesn’t catch up….. But since I know it to be true, then it will come to be.
And this brings me to my point. I celebrated Independence Day catering an event at Lake Tahoe. It was a full 12 hour day of loading, unloading, dishes, moving tables, etc. At the end of the day, I was happy that I could do it for myself, on my own terms, for people that appreciate my work. Looking forward to many more days of independence!

And just for fun, here is a little video of the appetizer portion of the menu we catered. Shot, edited and uploaded completely from my phone. Now that’s independence when it comes to creation!

I’ve become a fairly regular redbox user in the last couple of months. Many of my friends use netflix which I hear has great service and selection but I just don’t want to commit spending the money each month instead of having a little more control over it.
Anyway, I was thinking recently about how redbox could make the experience a little more social. Movies are a hot topic for discussion amongst friends and I think redbox could integrate some existing social tools to help start those conversations online.

• What if you allowed redbox to connect to your Twitter account? Basically every time you rent a movie it sends out a “I just picked up Caddyshack from redbox!” With twitters new metadata advertising additon they could possibly make a few bucks as well. Check out Robert Scoble’s post on Super Tweets for the idea.
• Let’s say you rent a movie one evening and write a review on flixster or another site. Maybe your redbox account could track the movie reviews that you write and send you suggestions.
• What if redbox had a facebook app that was alerted when you rented a movie and it shared it with your friends. Maybe you could suggest the movie to your facebook friends that you know would like it.
• Couldn’t redbox give you a free movie if you became the mayor of a machine on foursquare?
• If redbox changed the protocol for renting a movie and you signed in with your account first, they could deliver suggestions and options for sharing right there on the screen to make it super easy.
• At this point redbox could link their twitter account to the machine so you could tell them what you thought of a movie, or if you had issues with it. Easy customer service and feedback.
• Speaking of that, why don’t they have an easy way to get in touch with customer service on their machines?
• An onscreen link to IMDb would give you access to much better info than what redbox themselves offer for each movie.

Just some thoughts, wonder if anything will ever come of it?

In a world of constant communication, where everyone has a few phone numbers, fax number, multiple emails, twitter, etc. why is it so hard to get in touch with people? I have seen this go both ways for me in the last week or so.

I got a call from a friend letting me know that a mutual acquaintance had been trying to get in touch with me for a while. When I reached out to them they were overjoyed that they had finally found me. This puzzled me a bit and I thought about it for a few days. If I wanted to get in touch with someone and I didn’t have their info handy I would hop on google and type in their name- mine comes back with 42 of the first 50 results leading to some form of getting in touch with me. Luckily I have a unique name…..and I started planning this a few months back.

Going the other way, I have been trying to get in touch with someone for the past week. Phone calls, messages, emails and more go unanswered. Now it is quite possible that they just don’t want to talk to me but since they haven’t relayed that to me I will keep on being my persistent self. And someone else offered up something, something I would BUY from them, and they haven’t answered messages since…..

Is it that people are just drowning in all of the communication portals? Have people just become rude? Or does nobody like me?

I think maybe some people don’t understand my motives. I offer to help folks with whatever I can when the opportunity arises and I think that some may misunderstand my motives and think I want something back. Well I do- I want you to answer me, even if it’s a no…..

This post was unofficially sponsored by Chris Brogan’s recent post on communication.

My Wet Dreams series shares my wondering thoughts that pop up every morning in the shower. But- I didn’t think this up in the shower…..this one came last night as I was lying in bed watching TV.

I started thinking about some of the folks that I follow online and tried to nail down what it was that kept me interested. Now of course there has to be some good ideas, interactions and something of value to keep our attention in the online world with all the noise out there. But I noticed one major trend in the blogs that I read. Their authors all have fairly unique names, or at least names with a good cadence and ring to them.

Think about it, if my name was Jon Smith I would be competing with thousands or tens of thousands of other Jon Smiths for recognition. But when was the last time you heard of two Gary Vaynerchuks, Seth Godins, Baratunde Thurstons, Chris Brogans or Clint Jollys? (Thanks mom and dad!)

It seems that in the world of online branding, your name can become one of your greatest assets. This is not to say that you can’t become well known if you are a Jon Smith, just that you have to work hard to separate yourself from the other Smiths out there. I’m wondering if anyone thinks of this when naming their child, is there any sense in starting the “branding” process pre-birth?

To add to this, one of the first blogs I read this morning was Maren Kate’s posting about her name, quite serendipitous actually. Her post discusses how she views her name and makes it an advantage in her business. Solid thoughts behind this for using your name, regardless of it’s uniqueness, to convey a message.

Who do you follow/admire that has a unique name?