Innovation and Entrepreneurship
by Paul Mobley, MBA
From the category archives:
It is much easier these days to have your voice be syndicated and reach a wide audience. However, how many people that you like and respect would you consider to be approachable? How approachable are you? Great leaders recognize that it is important to be approachable. Seth Godin, author of Tribes, said that he reads [...]
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I describe my company as a newmedia real estate company. We are BOTH a tech company and a real estate company. It is easy for me to classify my business like this because we spend a majority of our time on the tech side trying to reinvent the real estate business. Yet, I believe that [...]
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two things happened on the same night. (1) tried takeout from a sushi place near our house (2) vomited four hours after dinner do these two things have a cause and effect relationship? maybe not, but unfortunately the sushi place doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
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This week we took our son to his first mountain experience. We chose to go up to the Idyllwild Inn where my old friends Josh & Emily White are the hosts. In a world of cookie cutter hotel experiences the Idyllwild Inn is a refreshing change. There is something special about a business that has [...]
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What if you were given the opportunity to have lunch with Seth Godin or Donald Trump but you could only pick one. Who would you dine with? Would the choice change if you were paid $5,000 to sit down with Donald but it would cost you $5,000 with Seth? If given that choice I would [...]
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I’m in the process of setting up an internship program with the Crowell School of Business. This is the same school that I did my undergrad and MBA. It turns out that one of the people who is point-of-contact was my old ‘Intro To Marketing’ professor. I got a D in his class and when [...]
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A lifelong friend taught me a lesson this week. There is a lot of power when you start talking about your dreams as if they already exist. If you say something might happen then very few people believe that it will come to pass. You might not even believe it to be true. Yet, when [...]
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Ten years ago the reach of a small business expanded from a local sphere of influence to a global one. Initially that was great and the advantages resulted in more competitive prices, greater diversity of product offerings, and an expectation of instant results. One thing that was lacking was trust. Companies like Amazon and eBay [...]
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Well done viral marketing from Office Depot.
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Yesterday Microsoft launched is new search engine Bing with an expensive advertising campaign. I bet the owners of bling.com are super exited as the value of their domain has increased the chance that they can convert that domain into real bling. Of course the first search that I completed was for “Paul Mobley”. I’m happy [...]
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Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a FICO for your small business? Judging personal credit is easy. You just look at the FICO scores from the three credit agencies and see how you stack up to the statistical average. What if that existed for small business. A FICO type score that took into consideration [...]
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American Express is continuing it’s attack on small business owners. The latest battlefield is the credit lines of small businesses who have never been late on a payment or gone over their limit. It’s understanding that the risks have increased for AMEX but you would think they would try to keep the best customers instead [...]
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urbanspoon is an entrepreneurial success story that is worth talking about instead of all this fear mongering stuff (that I’m guilty of too). It’s a company that is lead by three guys Ethan, Adam, and Patrick. From what I can tell back in November 2006 they landed on the concept of collecting information about local [...]
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I was looking at the stats recently and noticed that the amount of spam that I’ve received on this blog is slightly greater to 1:1 (spam to posts). What is the strategy behind all of the effort that is made to build either fake community, blatantly stealing original content, or promoting illegitimate business activities? The [...]
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On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, my wife and I needed to go grocery shopping. We had just finished moving to our new home in Tustin, CA and needed somewhere close. A quick Google map search on my iPhone revealed that there was a Stater Bros just north on Redhill about a mile. The place [...]
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Greg Creed, the President of Taco Bell, said last week that their goal is to be, “the other number one” by growing to $10.6 billion in sales within 5 years. (Note: The “one” is McDonald’s). Today I am proud to say that I have reached the status of “the other number one”. At what, you [...]
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Nicky Senyard wrote a wonderful article for Website Magazine. She said, “In a community, relationships come before sales. Business, in other words, is not the first order of business. Leveraging communities is a great way to boost sales, but you actually have to become a respected and trusted member before you can tap into that [...]
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One of the most common things people do is focus on themselves then try to maximize their income by various marketing tactics. These could be the old status quo way of doing things in your industry or the latest “Web 2.0″ marketing tricks. Now is the right time to rethink your business model. Where is [...]
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There is a lot of fear and confusion right now. This is often made worse by the media. What is the cure for this sickness? CONNECT WITH REAL PEOPLE. A dear friend of mine, Kurt Daradics, is one of the social catalysts who has been critical to my success in business. He, along with some [...]
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My wife and I were flying to Anchorage, Alaska as I wrote this post. She requested that we upgrade our tickets from coach to first class. I agreed, not because we feel entitled but because she is pregnant and a 1:12 bathroom to passenger ratio in the first class cabin is a “necessity”. Honestly, I [...]
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This week LinkedIn released some new applications. One that was of interest to me was for WordPress. PaulMobley.com is published using my own server running WordPress. I was impressed on how easy it was to integrate the blog posts into my LinkedIn profile. If you have both a WordPress blog and a LinkedIn profile I [...]
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