Here's The Only Way To Get Really, Really Rich

Want to be remarkably successful? Want to get really rich? (While there are many ways to feel "rich," in this case we're talking about monetary wealth.) Then check out this little gem of an investment opportunity.

It's a simple investment. You only have to invest almost all of your money. On the upside, after a year you might earn 3 percent more. The downside? Any day you could lose it all, for reasons usually outside your control and that you will almost never see coming.
Would you make that investment? Of course not.

Yet millions of people do — every day they go to work for someone else.
Of course the analogy isn't perfect. Until you're laid off or fired you do earn a salary. But when you work for someone else, your upside is always capped — sure, you might occasionally get a raise, but in most cases 3 to 4 percent is the best you can expect.

Yet your downside is always unlimited because getting fired or laid off can make your income disappear overnight — and with it the considerable investments you've made in time, effort, dedication, and sacrifice.

Extremely limited upside. Unlimited downside.

The 10 Things You Need To Know In Advertising Today

Good morning. Get your week off to a flying start by getting up to date with all the important

advertising stories.

1. Coca-Cola has become the first major World Cup sponsor to publicly criticize FIFA over the handling of its corruption investigation into the winning bids for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The drinks company said the current situation — which has seen the report's author accuse FIFA of misrepresenting his findings — "disappointing."

2. Google has revealed how it plans to use the new huge Times Square billboard as it becomes the mega screen's inaugural advertiser today. Passers-by will be able to use an app to create their own mini Android characters to play with on the screen.

3. Apple finally confirmed late last week that its iAd advertising platform is venturing into programmatic for the first time, via a post on its news site. Business Insider had broken the news that Rubicon Project was to be one of iAd's automated partners last week.

4. Snapchat has rolled out a second new ad format, AdAge reports. Samsung became the first to sponsor an "Our Story" feed, which works a bit like Twitter hashtags around events, during the American Music Awards on Sunday.

Warren Buffett on Secret of His Success

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Warren Buffett On Investment Strategy

Buffett & Gates on Success

Motivational - Bill Gates Speech at Harvard

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Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013

Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012

The Difference Between Advertising and Marketing

Advertising, and marketing; two terms that are somehow interchangeable for most people outside of the two industries (and sadly, inside as well).

It’s easy to understand why people who don’t work in these fields confuse the two terms. TVs and movies often use the two to mean the same thing. “I’m in marketing,” says the advertising executive. Or, “I’m in advertising,” announces the marketing manager.

There are specific differences that make the two disciplines different from each other, and similarities that lead to the confusion. Let’s take a look at them.

What Is Advertising?
Look in any online dictionary and you’ll get a variation of the same definition:

Advertising is “the act or practice of calling public attention to a product or service, usually by paid announcement in newspapers and magazines, and via the Internet, radio, TV, cinema, billboards, bus shelters, and guerrilla placements.”

In short, it’s a memorable announcement about the client’s product or service.


What Is Marketing?
Now, the definition for advertising sounds very similar. But, it’s definitely not advertising. Here’s what most online sources will tell you:

Marketing is “the process by which a company acquires and maintains a relationship with new and existing customer, including strategy, market research, media planning, public relations, advertising, product testing and pricing, packaging, distribution, customer support, sales, and any other method that bring a product or service to market.”

How to Start a Small Business

Deciding to start a business can be one of the most exhilarating decisions you make in your life. But there are a lot of moving parts and many different elements to consider.

Here are 10 steps that provide an overview of the basic steps required to start a business successfully. Take one step at a time, and you'll be on your way to small business ownership.

Step 1: Get Inspired

All businesses start from a common point - an idea. You may have dreamed of starting your own business for years, or inspiration may have hit you unexpectedly. Regardless of the source, the first step of starting your own business is coming up with a business idea.

Step 2: Do Your Research

You've identified your big idea, now it's time to balance it with a little reality. Are you really ready to start a business? Take this starting a business quiz to gauge your readiness and see what you need to prepare yourself for business ownership.

3 Accounting Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Most Often

As an entrepreneur, you often have a lot of hats to wear when it comes to running your business -- or

at least you often feel as if you have to wear many of them. The truth is that you do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades. You can delegate roles and responsibilities to key personnel within your company or engage professionals outside of your company to handle tasks that you do not have internal staff to perform. You need only understand what these individuals are doing, but you do not necessarily need to know the nitty-gritty details of how they do their jobs. Many entrepreneurs have an overwhelming need to control all aspects of their business, increasing the likelihood of accounting mistakes and errors that could have easily been avoided if they had outsourced those tasks to someone else. You will find three common accounting mistakes entrepreneurs make so you can avoid them yourself in your small business.

Accounting mistake #1: You record deposits for a product or service as revenue.

A common accounting mistake you can make as an enterprising entrepreneur is to record the payment received from a customer for a product or service as revenue. Since you have to return this money to your customer at some point, it is not properly revenue; it is a liability because it represents an amount you owe your customer. If you record this in your sales revenue account and you do not back them out of revenue, then you overstate your company’s revenues for the year and pay income tax on the additional revenue that you could have avoided. You may also lose track of how much deposits you have on hand and what customers paid a deposit. This can be an accounting headache, to say the least, as you will have to go and backtrack through your records to figure out who is owed how much.

5 Accounting Mistakes that will Ruin Your Small Business

You can avoid the top 5 accounting mistakes that small business owners make just by knowing what

they are and make a conscious plan to avoid them yourself. Why not learn from others rather than make the same mistakes other small business owners have made?

1: Not staying on top of receivables

You have done the work, and now it is time to be paid. Sometimes owners just assume that a customer will pay or small business owners forget to enter receivables into their books because they are too busy working. A receivable is entered when an invoice is sent to a customer – the accounting entry is to debit accounts receivable and credit revenue. At the end of the year, if you have not collected on your customers’ accounts, then you will recognize a lot of revenue and have a large accounts receivable balance on the books. By not collecting on receivables, you can run into trouble at tax time, especially if you are an accrual basis taxpayer (as opposed to a cash basis taxpayer) because you will be obligated to pay taxes on the receivables you have not collected. Regardless of what method of account you use to prepare your tax returns, customers willingness to pay invoices decreases with time. So by now billing accurately and timely, you are only hurting yourself in the long run.

2: Not keeping expense receipts

Many small business owners do not always keep copies of their receipts. It can be hard to recall what a $250.00 charge hitting last month’s bank statement was and if it was a valid charge. You can go back to the vendor who had the charge and ask for a copy of the receipt. But that is time consuming, and your time is too valuable to be spent trying to remember if a charge was valid and chasing down receipts. You also run the risk that your bookkeeper misclassifies expenses in your accounting records, and some expenses may not be 100% deductible, such as meals and entertainment, so you can run into issues if these are misclassified in an expense account that is fully deductible. The point is to keep your receipts; it is easier and will help you avoid potential problems in your bookkeeping.

3: Not seperating business and personal expenses

10 Character Traits of Successful Small Business Owners

There may be a hundred remarkable character traits that define you or your favorite successful small

business owner. When you compare the entrepreneurs behind successful small businesses, however, a handful of traits rise to the top.

Here are some of the most common and powerful character traits that describe small business owners who have started successful businesses.

1. Driven
2. Goal-Oriented
3. Confident
4. Passionate

50 Signs You Need to Start Your Own Business

1. The lightbulb went off.

2. You're always thinking.
3. You’re passionate.   
4. You’re independent. 
5. You’re motivated. 
6. You’re organized.   
7. You feel a need to help people. 
8. You're certain that you can build a better company. 
9. You feel stuck at your job. 
10. You feel a need to prove your vision. 

How to Start a Business Online

There is a proven sequence of steps you can follow to guarantee your success when you're starting a small business online. I've seen thousands of people start and grow successful businesses by doing the following:

1. Find a need and fill it.
2. Write copy that sells.
3. Design and build an easy-to-use website.
4. Use search engines to drive traffic to your site.
5. Establish an expert reputation for yourself.
6. Follow up with your customers and subscribers with e-mail.
7. Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling.

Anyone, from newbie to seasoned online entrepreneur, can benefit from this process in learning how to start a business online.

Why Small Companies Have the Innovation Advantage

When I first started my company, I hit the business plan competition circuit for funding and feedback.

At each event, I encountered the same question from a judge or a member of the audience: "This seems pretty simple, why doesn't [insert large competitor] just do this?" My response was always the same: "I don't know­--they just don't." The answer was always oddly sufficient, probably because the asker had no idea either.

That question ultimately became rhetorical, in the eventual sale of my company and in general observations on how big companies and startups act. Why do large companies more successfully acquire instead of innovate? They certainly have the talent, the money and the existing market share to launch startups with ease, yet they don't do it very well. What's clearly missing is something in their DNA, but also something in the numbers. As big companies look at growing internally or via a shopping spree, it's important to consider the underlying motivations and math.

People and culture: Startups require innovative entrepreneurs, and that typically isn't in a job description for a large company. Big companies hire people when the workload demands it, not when they can come up for air and think about innovation.

How to Acquire a Small Business (and Keep Employees Happy)

There are many books that discuss the inner workings of big M&A deals but there are few that delve into the purchase of a small business -- a move that requires a different strategy. Small companies are difficult to buy, but they can have tremendous benefits to the acquirer over the long term -- an argument that has been proven over and over again in Silicon Valley.

That said, they rarely work out if they are done opportunistically, meaning the buyer is just looking for a "good deal."  

Having bought a number of small companies and frankly having sold my companies to bigger companies a number of times, I have found the following eight steps to be essential to making the process a success -- on both ends.

1. Determine exactly what you aim to purchase. When you’re buying a small company, you may be buying the business either for its talent or the intellectual property to apply to your business.

If you’re buying the business as a whole, you need to keep that business separate for at least 18 months and let the team develop on their own with minor points of integration. Let them have their own success with their own leadership team.

If you’re buying the talent, quickly move that team off the existing product and inject them into your business.

5 Key Lessons About Making The Switch From Employee To Owner

Every person who ever clocked in at work has had this thought: “If this were my business, I would

run things differently.”

But what happens when you actually have the chance to buy the business you work for? I found out in 2006 when I purchased GroupBaronet, the marketing company where I’d been working for eight years. I was only 31 years old, and I transitioned from manager to owner almost overnight.

The lessons I learned as I drastically changed roles helped me honor the business I valued enough to purchase, bond with a core team of star players and take the rebranded company, MasonBaronet, to the next level of success I dreamed of.

Here are five takeaways from my experience:

1. Don’t leave a vacuum behind when you transition.Becoming the owner means you’ll have tons of new responsibilities, from customer relationship management to business development, marketing, accounting and human resources oversight. Before you step out of your previous role, have a plan in place to cover your former responsibilities so vital tasks don’t fall through the cracks.

It’s not realistic to expect to do both your former job and your new one, especially since ownership will keep throwing you curve balls. You may miss certain aspects of your previous job, but you’ll discover the importance of your new role as owner and CEO -- to work on the business as opposed to in the business