Getting a restaurant off the ground.
Start-Up Chronicle
I apologize. This blog post is anything but timely. I admit to being laid low by recent events: a Memorial Day fire led to a nightmare June of inspector hunting and permit gathering, culminating in two days of actual repair — all of which brought us to our third opening in less than a calendar year. Just in time for the Fourth of July. And fireworks. Not the celebratory exploding rainbows of the Grucci Brothers, more like the gruesome tales of the Brothers Grimm where an evil queen casts evil spells while stirring a smoldering cauldron behind a castle parapet in some dark forest.
Whatever we did to upset Your Highness, please accept our apologies.
The long weekend began well. T
Online retail giant Amazon today launched a new service called Kindle Textbook Rental which allows students to save up to 80% off textbook prices by renting from the Kindle store. The new service provides students with access to tens of thousands of textbooks for this school year and gives them an option to choose the rental length between 30 and 360 days paying for the exact time they need a book.
“Students tell us that they enjoy the low prices we offer on new and used print textbooks. No
For many of us, our business website is structured to funnel people toward our contact form. That’s where we want them to go. We want potential customers to land on that page and fill it out so that we can take a relationship to the next level, whether that means someone is ordering catering services for a large event or looking to receive a quote from your lawn care service.
But have you optimized your contact form to increase your odds of conversion? Or are you letting confused or unsatisfied customers abandon the page completely?
If you haven’t optimized your contact form page, you may be turning away motivated customers without even realizing it. Below are six questions to ask yourself when optimizing your site contact form.
1. Is y
Borders Group Inc. said it would liquidate after the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain failed to receive any offers to save it.
Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. It said it would ask a judge Thursday to approve a sale to liquidators led by Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Brothers Group.
The company said liquidation of its remaining 399 stores could start as soon as Friday, and it is expected to go out of business for good by the end of September.
Borders filed for bankruptcy-court protection in February. Full Article…
As you see in this collection of Statistics on Being a Canadian Small Business Owner, small business owners generally work long hours (an average of 48.7 hours per week) and find it difficult to separate their business from their personal lives (perhaps because of the long hours they’re working)!
But still, two-thirds of small business owners describe themselves as ‘very happy’ in the Annual TD Canada Trust Small Business Survey.
So why is owning your own business so much better than working for someone else? What do you view as the top benefits of owning your own business?
On Tuesday, Apple announced financial results for third fiscal quarter of 2011, reporting its best quarter ever. The company reported that it sold a record 20.34 million iPhones as compared to 8.4 million in the same quarter last year, a staggering 142% increase. Apple sold 9.25 million iPads last quarter, another record sales for the tech giant and an increase of 183% versus 3.3 million in the year-ago quarter. During the last quarter Apple reached more than 220 million sales iPhone, iPad and iPod touch combined.
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple CFO outlined that the company has seen the highest quarterly earnings and revenues since its inception, reporting that total revenue for the quarter was $28.57 billion, up from $15.70 billion in the same quarter last year, and surpassing Wall Street forecasts by close to $4 billion.
Welcome to another in our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. Rajen Sheth, Group Product Manager for Google Chrome for Business and Education, spoke with Brent Leary in this interview, which has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, page down to the loudspeaker icon at the end of the post.
Small Business Trends: Could you give us a little bit of your background?
Rajen Sheth: I’ve been at Google about seven years, focused on our Enterprise products. I