Business Blog on The Huffington Post

It is estimated that by the year 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) will consist of approximately 50 billion objects, each with its own embedded computing system, and able to interact with the existing Internet infrastructure. This being the case, the pace of development for the IoT is rapidly outstripping advances made in the areas of today's electronic devices, especially since it is widely considered that electronic device development is approaching maximum maturity.

This has some far-reaching implications for businesses and the marketing strategies which they should adopt in order to stay abreast of the powerful trends now underway.

IoT Marketing Strategy

Consumers respond far more favorably to products which offer appealing personalities, as evidenced by the vast numbers of products which already have been linked in commercials and advertising to adorable kittens and talking coffee machines. All this promotes loyalty and commitment to a specific brand name, and this is precisely the kind of desirable effect marketers are always trying to achieve. In the future, this trend will be emphasized and developed further to encourage even tighter linkage between consumer and seller.

More precise targeting of purchasing consumers will likely be necessary during the age of the Internet of Things. It will become necessary to provide exactly the right message to the audience most likely to make a purchase, and in the most appealing format possible. This will require an even greater investment in advertising production, as well as better research to identify the appropriate consumer groups to deliver the message to.

Value-added services and products will become even more important and more emphasized. This means that in addition to the main service or features provided by a product, something above and beyond must also be built-in. For instance, ordinary watches will give way to smartwatches, kitchen blenders will be replaced by smart kitchen blenders, and this kind of strategy will begin to permeate all product development and marketing strategies. The unique and distinctive value provided by such products will differentiate them from the competition, and make them seem far more desirable to the typical consumer.

Smart Device Impact on Marketing

According to Steve Reed, VP of Client Development at Elevation Marketing, "We are on the cusp of revolutionary technological change. The inherent value of the Internet of Things is in connecting devices to the cloud, which is no different whether you are on a farm, in a factory, or any of a billion other places. With the advancement of IoT, every industry will enjoy countless opportunities to market to potential buyers, precisely target customers and achieve instant results."

Marketing and advertising will be rendered much more specific and effective, since many smart devices will be installed throughout the country which can supply priceless data on usage. This will allow businesses to develop much more informed strategies, and improve return on investment for future sales. When smart devices do not perform to expectations, that information will also be fed back to the supplier, providing a prompt opportunity for modification and improvement.

Smart devices will be used in conjunction with sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, so that more than simple gathering and organizing of client data can be achieved. It will be possible with this kind of CRM configuration to analyze customer data as well as gather it, so that a business can take intelligent actions regarding its consumer base. This is priceless for marketers, because it circumvents the need for processing information through a long chain of command, and will help identify where a prospect is in the purchasing process.

Once again, everything is about to change in the world of business and marketing.

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Arlene Verge's theater tickets are for a performance in the wrong city. They're also nonrefundable. Does she have any chance of getting her money back?

Question: I recently ordered tickets to a show through a company called Box Office Tickets. I called their toll-free number to make the reservation. But I received tickets for the wrong theater. It was my intent to order tickets for the Kennedy Center in Washington; instead, I received tickets for the Sondheim Theater in New York.

I purchased four $209 orchestra seat tickets, and, instead, I got four $169 tickets and they tacked on $309 in extra charges totaling to $984.

Box Office Tickets' recording of my order shows I agreed to the purchase of tickets for Sondheim. But that's not how I understood it. I thought I was connected to the Kennedy Center Box Office, and the performance would be in the Sondheim Room.

I've asked for a refund, but Box Office Tickets' tickets are nonrefundable. I know it was my error. At 76, my friends and I do not wish to travel to New York to see a show we can see here in D.C. All I'm asking is for some compassion and a refund on my credit card. Can you help me? -- Arlene Verge,Berkeley Springs, WV

Answer: Box Office Tickets is correct. Its tickets are completely nonrefundable, which is clearly stated in your purchase agreement. What's more, you admit to agreeing to purchase tickets at the Sondheim Theater. The recording verifies this. You admit that you made a mistake.

Case closed? No. After all, this feature is called Problem Solved. I'm not here to pile on with the rest of the critics who will tell you to accept your purchase; I'm here to help.

Let's go back to your transaction. Box Office Tickets has a website you could have used, which might have prevented this type of misunderstanding. Carefully reviewing your purchase before pushing the "buy" button might have prevented this, as opposed to calling.

I'm a little troubled by the fees that Box Office charged you. I've seen similar fees with live events, and I don't care for them. The price of your ticket is the price you should pay. Everything should be included. Why? Because it's the right thing.

This was not the kind of case I could advocate because the company was technically right, and you admitted to being wrong. Still, I suggested that you send a brief, polite email to Box Office Tickets, explaining what had happened and asking for a refund. The company isn't required to give you anything, but it would be a nice gesture. I didn't want to pressure it to do anything it didn't have to.

A few days later I heard from you. "Well, you brought me good luck," you said. "I just got a call from a supervisor, and I will be getting a full refund."

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When building a business plan, identifying a time frame for financing and revenue is essential. Many businesses start up with the expectation of not showing a profit for several years. During this time they rely on loans or other sources of capital to sustain them. If that financing disappears before the business has reached profitability, there is nothing else for the business to do but fold.

This is exactly what is happening to Consumers' Choice Health Insurance Company, South Carolina's health insurance cooperative established under the Affordable Care Act. Today it was announced that the company will be closing its doors and its 67,000 policy holders, individuals and small businesses, will need to find coverage from another insurance company offering policies in the federal Health Insurance Marketplace.

Under the Affordable Care Act, private, non-profit co-ops like Consumers' Choice were set up in 23 states with federal loans to promote competition in the Marketplace in an effort to keep premium increases as low as possible. To help these co-ops and other existing insurance companies through the early years of the new Marketplace when they might experience more losses than anticipated, the feds promised to infuse them with payments for some of their losses from a "risk corridor" program. It is this risk corridor program that the federal government will now only fund 12.6% of the requested loss reimbursements.

The business plans of Consumers' Choice and the other state co-ops have now been obliterated and most if not all will close their doors. And while the co-ops are on the hook for repaying the federal loans, the residents of the states impacted and the whole nation are the real losers.

Not only will this be an inconvenience to the co-op policy holders, premiums will naturally rise for every Marketplace individual and small business customer due to less competition.

Let me make this very clear. The idea of using public funds to create competition within the health insurance industry was a good idea. The co-op plan was selected because private health insurance companies successfully fought the federal government creating a public health insurance option as competition. Had the latter idea won, we probably wouldn't be having this problem today.

Never-the-less, the co-ops had a shot at surviving. Consumers' Choice was one of the best co-ops in terms of revenue and policyholders. It was providing a valuable service to all South Carolina health insurance customers regardless of their insurance company. And it was only a few short years from being successful.

Having been involved in the very early effort to establish a co-op in South Carolina, this debacle is also personal. It should also be personal for President Obama who should step in and fight to make good on the commitment made to the co-ops by his signature legislative achievement. Otherwise the success to date reining in premium increases will start to unravel along with the promise of Obamacare.

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Crowdfunding is growing at a tremendous rate and shaping the innovation of every S.P.P.I.C.E. (service, product, project, investment, cause or experience), causing a shift in the role of financial institutions around the globe and influencing government policies and market trends.

In the UK alone, the Nesta Report disclosed that the alternative finance market which includes Crowdfunding was expected to grow by £1.74 billion (US$1.99 billion). This was based on the 150 percent growth experienced by the market from 2012 to 2013, and 161 percent from 2013 to 2014.

The Nesta Report also highlighted that the UK alternative finance that includes crowdfunding is estimated to have provided working capital in 2014 for 7,189 small and medium enterprises, equivalent to 2.4 percent of bank lending to businesses.

In the United States, real estate crowdfunding emerged as one successful niche in the crowdfunding landscape.The 2015 Times Realty News Real Estate Crowdfunding Report cited that there are more than 140 real estate crowdfunding platforms in the US, with funds raised online placed at US$1 billion in 2014, and is expected to climb to US$2.57 billion at the end of this year.

In 2016, the number of crowdfunding platforms is likely to hit the 2000 mark due to the following reasons:

1. Growth Rate of Crowdfunding Platforms since 2012
There were more than 700 crowdfunding platforms in the world in 2012. Of this number, 191 crowdfunding platforms were established in the United States that year. The Soho Loft News, which is an Alternative Finance news and info site, have tracked over 600 of the more than 1250 online crowdfunding platforms today globally and adding to the list daily.

The number of crowdfunding platforms in other parts of the world is also growing exponentially. In Europe, the number of crowdfunding platforms has also gone up.

In the real estate financing industry, the 2014 TRN Real Estate Crowdfunding Report highlighted more than 60 real estate crowdfunding platforms that year worldwide, which was worth US$1 billion by year end. This number has now increased to over 230 platforms in 2015, and currently being tracked by Times Realty News.

If this trend continues, there will be over 2000 crowdfunding platforms across the globe by early 2016.

2. Easing of Regulatory Environment
More investors are now able to make private investments across the globe as the regulatory environment becomes favorable.

In the United States for instance, changes in legislation has opened up the space to non-accredited investors and allowed issuing companies to state publicly the plans they have for raising funds. The approval of Title IV of Regulation A+ under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act is likely to spur development of more crowdfunding platforms. Under Regulation A+, accredited and non-accredited investors can participate in public offerings, a move that expanded the investor pool from which entrepreneurs can raise capital. This regulation also raised the maximum crowdfunding ceiling to 50 million dollars and removed the requirement for state compliance.

Italy was the first country to enact Law 221/2012, the law on equity crowdfunding in 2012 that allows innovative startup companies to raise funds online. CONSOB, Italy's equivalent to the US SEC, released regulation no. 18592 on June 2013. This consists of rules in implementing the law which covers the creation of platforms, requirements for their registration, rules of conduct and offerings and more. However, the equity crowdfunding market is not moving that much because of intrinsic limitations within the business environment and existing regulations. Not to be left behind in the crowdfunding space, Italy in its Law Decree no. 3, allowed Undertakings for Collective Investment (UCI) and venture capital (VC) companies to raise capital online for any specific project, provided they invest in startups and in SMEs engaged in innovation.

Austria, on the other hand, has recently passed its crowdfunding law. In this new law, only a simplified prospectus is mandatory for issue volume between EUR 1.5 million and EUR 5 million (no longer EUR 250,000). The complete prospectus will now be required only for issue volume of EUR 5 million or more. An individual can invest up to EUR 5,000 per project, but this can be doubled if his or her net monthly earnings reach EUR 2,500. Investors can withdraw within two weeks, just like in its Consumer Protection Law. Issuers can only raise EUR 5 million in capital over the next 7 years, less the amounts already paid back to investors. The company is required to issue a capital market prospectus if this is exceeded.

3. Changes in Investor Behavior
In the Democratising Finance report, behavior changes among investors is an important factor fueling the growth of the alternative finance industry, a concept that brings crowdfunding and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending together. Based on this report, there are changes in the demographics of people who use P2P lending and crowdfunding, with boomers being 10 times less likely to make use of P2P lending than millennials. The millennials opt for mobile and online solutions that offer limitless and faster user interactions. This new breed of investors finds the growing interaction and openness that crowdfunding platforms offer in investment processes more appealing. This will drive the need for crowdfunding platforms to tap the huge population of millennials.

4. Technological Innovations
Technological innovations are occurring rapidly in alternative finance. When it started, crowdfunding was operating as rewards-based and donation-based fundraising options. Today, crowdfunding has evolved and expanded operations as debt and equity funding options. Additional tools such as data providers and analytics are evolving to complement the crowdfunding sector. There is a growing trend of integrating social media in crowdfunding platforms where investors and issuers get incentives for marketing their funding campaigns online. This results in a network of investors and issuers enhancing the ability of crowdfunding platforms to attract customers, sometimes turning their customers into investors or crowdfunders.

Many of these innovations were spurred by the online automation and streamlining of the underwriting and financing of the real estate industry. This was reflected on the increase of real estate crowdfunding platforms that is being tracked by Times Realty News: From a hundred real estate crowdfunding platforms in January 2015 it rose to more than 230 platforms globally by summer 2015.

All these innovations in technology will drive the growth of crowdfunding platforms in 2016. The automation in the space indicates that an additional 700 will join this list by next year.

5. Crowdfunding's Increasing Popularity
The level of crowdfunding awareness across the globe has increased significantly over recent years. Policy makers and media have significantly contributed towards raising this global awareness. Brian Meece, who in 2009 founded the crowdfunding platform RocketHub, predicted in 2013 that at least 90 percent of seed-stage ideas will be crowdfunded five to ten years down the line due to the increasing popularity of crowdfunding. According to the Democratising Finance report, crowdfunding platforms are being set up for different sectors as crowdfunding gains popularity. This trend will continue into 2016 leading to a significant rise in the number and diversity of crowdfunding sites.

Image: New York City
Image credit: VictoriaGlobal.co

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I didn't know I was so popular until Verizon filed a 'me-too' objection with the FCC to block my viewing of the recently compiled 'special access' data.

Last week, AT&T started the trend with the first request to the FCC.

What are these companies afraid of?

Click to see my Huffington Post article about the AT&T letter.

AT&T Objection

Verizon Objection

We Filed a Response to the Opposition.

As one of our lawyers wrote:

"New Networks Institute (NNI) wants to bring a leash to the industry's dog party to prevent these players from biting their customers (including NNI and its members), and has every right to do so. NNI most certainly has "administrative standing" to participate as a party."

Now, seeing the special access data requires a signed letter of confidentiality, and I take these kinds of things seriously and would not reveal anything that was covered by this binding agreement. However, I assume that the two largest wireline and wireless providers in America have concerns that I would reveal competitive secrets or something questionable about their business practices... that they, of course, want hidden.

And it is a bit bizarre that both AT&T and Verizon have decided to pick on me, alone, (as far as I know) and are attempting to block my ability to see this information.

However, it would seem that AT&T and Verizon do have some things to hide. Last week the FCC also initiated an investigation into some of the special access services offered by AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink, the companies that control most of the incumbent phone company wires in America and in every state.

"By this Order, the Wireline Competition Bureau (Bureau) initiates an investigation into the terms and conditions of certain incumbent local exchange carrier (LEC) tariff pricing plans of AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier, and Verizon for business data services (or special access services) that competitive LECs allege are unreasonable, anticompetitive, and lock up the vast majority of the demand for TDM-based business data services - assertions that the incumbent ILECs have disputed."

("ILECs" are the "Incumbent Local Exchange Companies" that control the wires of the state utility, like Verizon New York or AT&T Illinois. "Competitive LEC (CLECs)" are companies offering competitive services, and while some have their own facilities, many rely on the existing copper networks as they are restricted from using the fiber optic networks.)

Special Access Lines Are Not Special.

As I wrote previously, in 2015, the FCC is finally making available a database of collected information about special access lines and services, which, according to the FCC, has hit $40 billion in revenues.

The FCC writes that special access lines are regular broadband/data (high capacity) lines used by business.

"Special access lines are dedicated high-capacity connections used by businesses and institutions to transmit their voice and data traffic. For example, wireless providers use special access lines to funnel voice and data from cell towers to wired telephone and broadband networks. Small businesses, governmental branches, hospitals and medical offices, and even schools and libraries use special access for the first leg of communications with the home office. Branch banks and gas stations even use special access for ATMs and credit card readers. The FCC has the obligation to ensure that special access lines are provided at reasonable rates and on reasonable terms and conditions.

However, this has been a hidden network, which we now learn is worth over $40 billion, and yet there has been no data made available since 2007, even about the basics, like how many lines there are. (I note that in 2013, the FCC claimed that this was only a $12-18 billion market. Besides growth in these areas, I guess having some actual data changed their accounting.)

What makes them special, then, is not the telecommunications part of the equation, as they use and are mostly part of the regular wired utility network and access lines; their special-ness is that this class of service has been taken off of the accounting books.

And, these access lines appear to be monopoly services with obscene profits. While AT&T and Verizon et al. claim they are competitive, there's plenty of evidence that says they are not.

However, the real surprise is that we are talking about mega-bucks for copper-wire-based services. Forget about the jargon of this next quote, what it says is -- 60 percent of the $40 billion of special access revenues are still mostly based on the old copper services (DS1 and DS3).

"TDM-based business data services such as DS1 and DS3 channel terminations are the dedicated (usually copper) circuits that many business and other institutional users continue to rely on for their data and other communications needs. Despite the growth of newer technologies, preliminary analysis of the Commission's special access data collection shows that revenues from such TDM services continue to make up in the range of sixty percent of the roughly $40 billion."

A Host of Issues

How can these Services be Based on Copper Wires?

Nationwide, we now know that all of those tales about the copper-based line losses were rigged. As I previously pointed out, the accounting of lines by Verizon et al. has been to only supply one class of service, 'local phone service', which is mainly used for voice calling. This quote, based on the new findings by the FCC, claims that nationwide, about $24 billion in access lines to businesses are not only still based on the aging copper wires, but also, these access lines were NOT previously counted.

The Local Phone Networks are Profitable.

This also means that the 'local service networks' are NOT losing money. Special access uses these 'local service networks', but they are paying a fraction of the costs. Instead, they are helping to create the reported losses through the manipulation of the accounting, (something we will be addressing in the next few articles).

The Prices could be Highly Inflated.

This also means that special access prices charged to those who buy these services could be massively inflated -- as the copper lines were already written off, there's been little maintenance, they have been letting go of employees, and there is little or no advertising costs for basic phone service -- or for these access lines.

Finally, our research shows that the FCC's special access revenue number, $40 billion, is low and the market is probably between $50-60 billion.

Conclusion

The only way to prove or disprove all of this is to actually analyze the data collected and apply the insights to our existing information and see what turns up.

Though, with the attention from AT&T and Verizon, I must have found something that makes them nervous.

As we are approaching Halloween, I have only one thing to say to AT&T and Verizon, the two largest wireline and wireless companies in America -- Boo.

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Every year, you get poked and prodded by your doctor to ensure you're in good health. You should take similar care of your financial well-being with an annual checkup of essentials, such as your credit situation, retirement savings and life insurance.

No needles or latex gloves are involved. You just need to review your finances, perhaps with an advisor.

It's not about beating yourself up over what you did wrong, but considering how to set things right, says Patricia Jennerjohn, managing partner at Focused Finances in Oakland, California. "If you make small corrections right away, you're not going to drive off the cliff."

Here are the nine key elements of your annual checkup.

1. Make a budget

Consider your likely spending habits and financial goals for the coming year. These questions can help:

Does your income cover expenses, with enough left over for savings, or do you need to scale back spending?

Do you need to save up for an anticipated expense, such as home maintenance or a new car?

Do you want to save for a vacation or other indulgence?

2. Give your emergency fund a once-over

You can't just budget for what you expect, notes Chad Nehring, a partner at Conceptual Financial Advisors in Appleton, Wisconsin. "You're always going to have unplanned spending, because things just happen."

That means keeping money in reserve for emergencies, such as a job loss or surprise medical bill.

Nehring recommends saving enough to cover six months of fixed expenses. "I know for a lot of people that's a fairly lofty goal, so I'm thrilled if they can hit 90 days," he adds.

3. Review your debt

Look at your credit card balances and other loans.

"What we want to see is, has the level of debt changed since the last financial checkup?" Nehring says. An increase could be a sign that you need to cut spending.

Check interest rates on any loans, including your mortgage and car loan. You may be able to save by refinancing. You can find the latest mortgage rates at NerdWallet.

4. Analyze your retirement funds

As soon as you get your first real job, you should start planning for retirement -- and that doesn't just mean setting up your 401(k) and maxing out the employer match. Then, and every year after, you need to ensure the amount you're saving meets your needs and goals. Advisors often recommend putting away at least 15% of your pre-tax income.

Consider your savings even if you intend to work into your 60s or 70s or beyond, Jennerjohn says. "You should be saving for the future so you have more choice over what you do as time goes by."

Make sure your retirement portfolio has the right mix of assets. This might mean rebalancing your 401(k) or other parts of your portfolio. As you near retirement, move away from riskier, more aggressive investments, such as growth stocks, toward safer vehicles, such as bonds.

5. Evaluate insurance coverage

As you age, your life insurance needs change. You might need to boost coverage after you buy a house, get a raise or have children. Later, you might need less coverage, or none at all if you've paid off your mortgage and your kids have finished college. Check out our tips to determine how much life insurance you need.

[Life insurance quotes are available through NerdWallet's Life Insurance Comparison Tool.]

You should also ensure that your insurance liability limits are still high enough to protect your assets, and that your homeowners policy limit is high enough to replace your home and possessions if they're destroyed.

And get new car insurance quotes. Your provider may no longer be offering you the best deal. If your car is old, consider dropping comprehensive and collision coverage, which may not be worth its cost because it will only pay up to as much as your car is worth.

6. Optimize your taxes

Make sure you're taking full advantage of tax deductions and credits for retirement and education savings, dependent care, medical expenses and charitable giving. An extra retirement contribution might mean a big reduction in your tax bill.

If you got a large tax return this year, you might want to reduce your withholding to avoid giving the government an interest-free loan. Conversely, if you owed money, you might need to boost your withholding.

7. Request free credit reports

Federal law requires the three nationwide credit reporting companies -- Equifax, Experian and TransUnion -- to give you a free copy of your credit report every year. Get them at AnnualCreditReport.com.

Check the information on your credit reports for accuracy, particularly if you're planning a big financial move, such as applying for a mortgage. Consider requesting one of the reports every four months or so. If you find errors, notify the credit reporting company and the information provider (such as a credit card company or utility) in writing.

8. Start a college fund

If you have kids, you probably want to save for their college educations. Try tax-advantaged 529 education savings plans or prepaid tuition programs. Earnings on 529 savings plans aren't taxed if used for qualified expenses such as tuition, fees, books, and room and board. Prepaid tuition programs lock in current costs for public colleges and universities, although you can also use the money at private colleges and public schools in other states.

9. Plan for the end

Marriage, divorce, deaths and changes in financial circumstances can necessitate revisiting your estate plan:

Does your will account for everything it should and conform to your wishes?

Have you designated the right people to be executor of your will and to hold power of attorney, in case you become incapacitated?

Do you need to update the beneficiaries of your retirement plans and life insurance policies?

Do you need to make changes to trusts you may have created for family members?

Do your health directives -- such as a living will that spells out medical measures you want taken, or not, in specific situations -- still reflect your desires?

If you can stay on top of all of these elements, you'll be in good shape. Looking for expert help? You'll find it in NerdWallet's advisor network.

Aubrey Cohen is a staff writer at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email: acohen@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @aubreycohen.

Low-Cost SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website's search ranking performance by making your Web presence, both on and off your website, easy for search engines to understand. When search engines process what you offer and consider you a trustworthy resource, your website is more likely to appear closer to the top of the search results.
Whether your audience is local or global, your company will benefit significantly from search engine traffic. Try these low-cost marketing tactics to improve your search engine presence.

Write Better Website Copy

Instead of investing in expensive Web development, put together a basic website using WordPress or Squarespace. Start with a home page, "About" pages for your company and your product, and a contact page letting people know how to get in touch with you.

On each page, write compelling, clean, and optimized copy. Compelling copy makes readers want to learn more about your product and your business, and clean copy is both easy to read and free of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and word usage errors.

Optimized copy incorporates keywords explaining to search engines what your business does. To discover good keywords for your business, try a free tool like Übersuggest or WordStream's Free Keyword Tool. You can also navigate to SEMrush, paste a competitor's URL, and see which keywords your competitor's website uses. If you are not confident about your writing, hire a freelance writer to help you.

List Your Business on Local Directory and Review Sites

List your business information consistently across respected local directory and review sites. Start by writing a company name, address, and phone number (NAP) format that you will use for every listing:

Search engine listings. If you have a storefront, list with Google My Business, Bing Places, and Yahoo Local.

Relevant local directories. Register with Angie's List, the Better Business Bureau, the Yellow Pages, and other highly respected local directories.

Review sites. Claim your listing on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato, or other review sites relevant to your industry.

Publish Guest Blog Posts

Look for opportunities to author guest posts on high-quality and relevant blogs your customers read. If the publisher links back to your site, the inbound link becomes a vote of confidence in your site, earning a higher search engine ranking.

Affordable Digital Marketing

In addition to investing in SEO, establish a presence on social media. Choose networks frequented by people who match your target customer profile. Once you have set up your social profiles -- which should include your NAP and a link to your website -- spend time not only sharing content but engaging with customers and people in your industry.

Finally, start building an email marketing list. You can invite people to sign up for your blog in exchange for their email addresses. Additionally, you can invest in some content assets such as videos, podcasts, white papers, and other materials that customers can download in exchange for giving you their contact information. Use a free email marketing tool like MailChimp to manage your lists, create messages, and track campaign results. Avoid emailing subscribers too often, but be consistent enough that people will anticipate your messages.

When you start a company, Gardner advises spending half your time on product development and the other half on marketing and building customer relationships. Fortunately, marketing does not have to be flashy or costly to get the job done -- as long as you are willing to put in the work.

*****

Danny Wong is the co-founder of Blank Label, an award-winning luxury menswear company. He is also a digital marketing consultant and freelance writer. To connect, tweet him @dannywong1190 or message him on LinkedIn.

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Author Susan Cain is probably best known for her breakout TED talk based on her bestselling book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

Cain is helping people on both sides of the fence, introverts and extroverts, understand each other better in personal and professional situations. She and her team have created the Quiet Leadership Institute, to enhance organizational performance through the understanding and empowerment of introverts.

Why this matters, according to Cain...

By creating environments that encourage introverts to understand and draw on their natural strengths, organizations will increase productivity, innovation, and impact. To support organizations in accomplishing this goal, we help introverts to communicate, connect, and lead in an authentic manner--while also teaching managers to better engage with, and lead, their introverted employees.

From Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein to Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, some of history's greatest leaders and innovators have been introverts. Almost half of all human beings are introverted by nature. It's time to take a closer look at the role of introverts in today's organizations and learn how to create environments that allow them to reach their full potential for the benefit of the entire organization.

That said, why do introverts make better leaders?

The tech boom with founders like Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) has brought introverts into the spotlight. But there is still a stigma around introversion and leadership and Susan's work is helping to set the record straight.

One common myth says extroverts are better leaders than introverts. This is false.

According to Adam Grant's research at Wharton,

Studies show that 96 percent of leaders and managers report being extroverted. And in a poll, 65 percent of senior executives said it was a liability for leaders to be introverted, and only 6 percent saw introversion as an advantage. Extroverts must be better leaders!

Not so fast. Extroverts are more likely to be attracted to and selected for leadership roles, but they're not better leaders than introverts. When I tracked leadership effectiveness with Francesca Gino and Dave Hofmann, we found that extroverts and introverts were equally successful overall--and excelled with different types of employees. When employees were passive, looking for direction from above, units led by extroverts had 16 percent higher profits. But when employees were proactive, voicing suggestions and improving work processes, units led by extroverts had 14 percent lower profits. Extroverts had the enthusiasm and assertiveness to get the best out of passive followers, but they hogged the spotlight in ways that stifled the initiative of proactive followers, leaving them discouraged and missing out on their ideas.

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Susan had some important parting words of advice for introverts and extroverts who want to be successful:

To Introverts...

Have an inner sense of entitlement to be who you are.

Once you're comfortable in your own skin you start to organize your life differently. Don't make apologies or pretend to be someone you are not. This could include scheduling some quiet time alone after a busy day of meetings or closing your office door for some deep reflection. Stay connected with people and avoid total isolation. Your ideas matter and you have a lot to bring to the table.

To Extroverts...

Consider the Yin and Yang approach.

Instead of trying to change people into how you think they should be or rewarding the most out-going person with leadership, remember how important collaboration with different kinds of people can be. There is no successful company that doesn't have people from both ends of the spectrum. Respect each other. Learn to tap the strengths of both groups.

What did I leave out? Post a comment below or tweet me @BryanElliott and I promise to reply! To watch more episode of Behind the Brand, visit: http://bit.ly/GetBehindtheBrand

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When I was 16 years old, I went to work for a suit retailer that will remain nameless here. The company was on the lower end of the suit market, the shallow end you could say, where polyester is rampant and a dinner jacket can turn into a pile of shoelaces with the single pull of a loose thread. My job was simple: Sell. Everything. Shirts, ties, pants, shoes, the whole works. In exchange for my diligent efforts, I was paid minimum wage, and like most people who work in retail, hated every hour of it. I eventually left, but what I "got" out of this job beyond my paycheque was that mystical resumé steroid known as work experience.

In a world where 1.2 billion youth are unemployed across the world, wealth inequality is increasing and class divisions are deepening, work itself has become a scarce opportunity. Payment for work has become a luxury; you can consider yourself lucky if you are able to sell your labor not for money, but for work experience. This is mostly because there are not enough jobs around for young people to do, but the rise of unpaid internships has been a contributing factor.

Private companies, elite think tanks, government offices, media outlets, NGOs--all of them have unpaid internship programs. So does the United Nations, which attracted worldwide media attention this summer when a local paper in Geneva reported that a 22-year-old UN intern named David Hyde was sleeping in a tent because he could not afford the rapacious Swiss rents. The spokesman for the Secretary-General made a statement saying that a General Assembly Resolution prohibited the UN from paying its interns. The head of the UN Information Service said that David Hyde "may not have done his research" because the UN cafeteria offered discounts for interns.

The difference between the United Nations not paying its interns and a private organization doing the same is that the UN's own documents and labor body counsel against the practice. The UN Charter says: "The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration." The International Labor Organization's Washington Director: "Interns should be paid and should be supported."

So the UN violates its own principles here, but this is hardly news. As for the cafeteria in Geneva, I ate there regularly as an intern for the UN this past summer and a routine lunch would run a cool 11 Swiss Francs. It turns out that the head of the UN Information Service was the one who had not done his research.

But criticizing the United Nations for being hypocritical is like criticizing a politician for lying. There are other, broader issues around unpaid internships and what it means to be a worker in the 21st century.

The most glaring inequity in not paying interns is that the people who get these jobs--and jobs are what they are, despite the legal loopholes--are the privileged. The rich can afford the cost of living in cities like New York and Geneva and can swallow a negative salary (you pay to work rather than get paid for work) while the 99 percent cannot. If you are working or middle class, however, you simply cannot afford to work for free and therefore must search elsewhere for employment.

Defenders of the unpaid internship cite work experience has their irrefutable proof. It used to be the case that employment meant pay plus experience--the experience was part of the package, it would be tautological to even mention it since no form of productive employment was without its own valuable experience. 'Work experience' is not a bonus. It comes with the job, any job. A free coffee, a train pass, another check at the end of the year, these are bonuses. But apologists for unpaid work have converted work experience into some kind of distinct good that the intern should consider herself fortunate to receive.

When Organization X gives unpaid internships, it cuts its labor costs significantly and frees itself from the many legal obligations that would be owed to interns if they were classified as employees. This has a distorting effect on the job market, with free labor now displacing full-time workers. Normally when wages are slashed to zero, there will be fewer people lining up to do the job, but there is another intangible force at work here: Prestige.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists as its first definition of prestige: "a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture." The word comes from 14th century Middle French, "denoting an illusion produced by magic." There was a reason Christopher Nolan's epic film, The Prestige, was about magic, and crucially, about black magic. More commonly, prestige is what everyone else considers estimable, status-giving, heroic, the sort of thing one can humblebrag about. The prestigious nature of most unpaid jobs at places like the UN is why poor students still apply for them. The non-monetary benefit of interning at a prestigious place is technically priceless, and if you tried to put a price on it, you might be astounded. A six-week unpaid internship at the UN put on auction a couple of years ago went for US$22,000. The auction was for charity, but an unpaid job sold for 20 grand? Black magic, indeed.

For the less affluent youth who rightly recognize that prestige is an invaluable quality for their CVs, the unpaid internship is inherently exploitative. It is seductive for all the reasons that prestige is seductive, but it is also robbing them of any money that ought to be theirs. Something in our laws and customs and sense of decency has gone sour when a public organization subject to an extraordinarily favorable tax status pays its top directors hundreds of thousands of dollars with expensed meals and trips but will not pay a dime to the young people doing the grunt work.

What makes matters more complicated is that the definition of "work" has changed dramatically in the Internet age. Work used to be what you did in the office, or in the mine. Now, you can turn your car into a wage-generating machine with Uber and you can turn your home into a hotel with Airbnb. You can commodify and marketize yourself and receive handsome profits if enough of the Internet notices you on Instagram or YouTube. The serfs of the old feudal system gave way to employees in the capitalist system, and employees have given way to interns and contractors, hired and fired on-demand in the sharing or gig economy. The free-market has become the freelance market, with one estimate now putting the number of freelancers in the United States at 53 million. There is both a blessing and a curse here--a blessing because gigs give workers additional income or give jobs to the jobless, a curse because this sort of work is unstable and lacks the dignifying element of longer-term employment.

I have, in the past, been a disgruntled employee (in addition to the suit shop, also at a factory), an independent contractor (at a management consulting firm), a paid intern (in government), and an unpaid intern (at the UN). The last of these was possible only because of a generous grant from my university--a privilege most middle-class youth do not have. If anything has become clear to me in this current era of inequality and austerity, it is the illusion, internalized by millions of people, that working hard and playing by the rules lead to gainful employment and a fulfilling career. This is what I now call a Big Lie--a falsehood of colossal proportions which, unlike a minor untruth, is able to dupe the ordinary person who cannot conceive of being so grandly deceived. 'Working hard,' does not by itself produce anything if the market does not care about the work you are doing. Ask the laid-off or the about-to-be laid-off about that.

'The rules' are rigged, because the wealthy can obtain prestigious work experiences through unpaid internships, jumpstarting their careers in a way the poor and middle classes cannot. They are rigged for other reasons as well, larger structural reasons such as the wealth-gap at birth, the poor being punished with worse health and psychological outcomes because of the innumerable stresses caused by the lack of resources early in life. The outcomes multiple and metastasize into education, where poorer children hear 30 million fewer words and whose brains often underdevelop.

I do not say any of this to sound sentimental. Let's be as unsentimental as capitalism demands. Fine, this is all up to the invisible, agnostic hand of the market sorting itself out, determining who succeeds and who fails, who can intern at the UN and who cannot. But then let us also admit that the only level playing field that exists is in our heads. Albert Einstein said that God did not play dice with the universe. He or She certainly plays dice with human lives. The market won't correct for that, only government can.

Seventy years after its establishment, the UN should not be participating in an exploitative process while justifying it with self-soothing mendacity.

Empowering the poor, emboldening the just, enlightening the uneducated--if these are not the principles which lead the UN and other powerful institutions into the future, the poor and downtrodden may not suddenly start listening to Karl Marx, but they will certainly stop listening to Adam Smith.

Omer Aziz is a writer, Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He most recently interned in the Office of the U.N. Special Envoy for Syria. Twitter: @omeraziz12.

This post originally appeared on OpenCanada.

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The best way to be recognized by others as an expert in your expertise is NOT by calling yourself an expert, but rather by demonstrating it via placing yourself in an authority position.

Someone in an "authority position" is one who is identified as a leader in their field or industry. Who would you consider a key authority in your area of expertise? Have they published a book about their expertise? How does that help distinguish them from non-authors who are also practitioners in your area?

The authority position has attributes people aspire to. You project something in your public persona that people want. You have qualities that they recognize in themselves. They're thinking, "I understand this person. They have a similar backstory to me. This is somebody I want to work with."

The authority position is an educator and an advocate for those who they serve. You're there to protect your herd. You understand their problems and you want to help them overcome whatever their key issue is.

The authority position inspires confidence that the prospect's problem can be solved. You know the answer, and they trust you.

You can accomplish all this by imparting your knowledge in the form of a book. This will differentiate you from others in your field because it instills authority -- you literally wrote the book on your area of expertise.

Are you an authority in your space?

It really only takes three things to be an authority in your space: Do you know more than your prospects? Are you able to help them? And, most importantly, are you actually willing to help them? (The last one can be a stumbling block for some people. They just don't like working with others and prefer hoarding their information.)

If you can answer "yes" to all three questions, you are already an authority in your area of expertise, or as one of my mentors calls it, your "sphere of magic."

The word AUTHORITY begins with "AUTHOR." Indeed, creating a book gains you recognition in your field of expertise, gives you instant "expert" status.

For example, take the book "Crush It!" by Gary Vaynerchuk. He was a wine blogger who, once he put his book out about Internet branding, really propelled himself into the spotlight. He's gotten a lot of mileage out of his book, which contributed to making him one of the most in-demand keynote speakers in the U.S. as well as TV's go-to wine expert.

View image | gettyimages.com

Writing an authority book will help you attract new prospects by helping them with their problems. Adding 'Author' to your credentials is an invaluable investment that will put you in that coveted authority position.

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Every year the media is plastered with reports about the disparity in the amounts of money companies pay in taxes. Recently, WalletHub.com has weighed in on the subject with a report, noting that "With taxes and income inequality taking center stage in the recent presidential debates, the personal finance website WalletHub today released its latest S&P 100 Tax Rates report. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the 2014 rates at which S&P 100 companies -- collectively worth more than $11 trillion as of Sept. 30 -- are taxed at the state, federal and international levels."

With tens of thousands of pages in the US Tax code alone, determining what company pays what amount can be rather confusing. When you add multiple layers of taxes -- city, county, state, and (for most of these companies) international -- it becomes the fiduciary equivalent of pandemonium. Yet, somehow many companies mitigate this tax burden through political influence or due to excellent tax expertise.

The following is a list of the highest and lowest paying businesses when it comes to total taxes on all layers of government, according to the WalletHub report.

Companies Paying the Highest Taxes

1 Anadarko Petroleum
2 Occidental Petroleum
3 Devon Energy
4 Citigroup
5 Walgreens Boots Alliance
6 Unitedhealth Group
7 Exxon Mobil
8 Facebook
9 CVS Caremark
10 ConocoPhillips

Companies Paying the Lowest Taxes

1 Morgan Stanley
2 Amgen
3 General Electric
4 General Motors
5 Mondelez International
6 Celgene
7 QUALCOMM
8 Bristol-Myers Squibb
9 Time Warner
10 Medtronic

According to the report, S&P 100 companies pay approximately 24 percent lower rates on international taxes than U.S. taxes. This is among the reason some of the largest businesses in the US are considering relocating to other parts of the world and taking many jobs with them. Many countries around the world recognize the power of lower tax rates in making a country more competitive in attracting business.

Three companies on the lowest paying list; Morgan Stanley, General Motors, and General Electric actually pay a "negative" tax rate in the US. These businesses are essentially being subsidized by the US tax code.

The story behind the disparity can be attributed to several reasons.

"Regulatory capture" is often a factor in which mega businesses use their considerable lobbying influence and political campaign finance to get tax and other laws created both in the US and around the world that favors them. For example, many of the businesses that are among the lowest paying in taxes enjoy such a benefit because they have government recognized "green initiatives" that countries want to reward.

Other companies, such as General Electric, are legendary in their efforts at mitigating tax expenses. There is an enormous cost in time and money for such tax fighting actions, but businesses like GE have enjoyed the rewards. It costs a significant amount of money and human resources to prepare a 5,000 page tax return, as GE has done in the past, but obviously that is better to them than paying governments.

Meanwhile some countries around the world have a particular interest in attracting companies in certain verticals. Internationally, tech companies, including Apple, Cisco Systems and Google, have enjoyed special tax incentives. These businesses are still paying more than 25 percent lower rates abroad, continuing the trend from 2013.

There are certain things each of these companies have in common. They are all extremely large and influential. Most spend an enormous amount of time and money in consultants and professionals to mitigate the costs of taxes. Furthermore, most of these companies have significant political influence that makes it possible to save a fortune in taxes. The lessons we learn is that crony capitalism is alive and well and it can be found all over the world, and even in various tax codes.

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With the launch of the sustainable development goals last month, companies have started to look at ways they can get more involved to help end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and fix climate change.

One of the most obvious ways that companies are already partnering to work towards these goals is by encouraging and paying for their highly skilled employees to volunteer around the world.

These programs, like Microsoft's MySkills4Afrika, IBM's Corporate Service Corps, Pfizer's Global Health Fellows (to name just a few), have a history making a positive impact in the short-term while developing leaders more capable of leading us towards a more equitable world in the long-term.

To help highlight the benefits of these programs, I sat down with one of our partners, Matthew Farmer, Managing Director of Emerging World. He just published a new study, the Corporate International Service Learning Impact Benchmark, which examines the value that these programs deliver.

1. What classifies as an international corporate skills-based volunteering program, or as you call it, a CISL Program?

A CISL (or Corporate International Service Learning) program is an initiative with clearly outlined business objectives and employee development objectives. In these programs, employees travel across international borders to apply their skills to address a real need. In the process, they end up developing really valuable skills that come back to benefit the sponsoring employer

Companies run these programs for a variety of reasons, including leadership development, international market development and to increase employee engagement. We purposefully don't call these programs "volunteering" programs because the experience is so different from traditional programs, and its benefits much more vast. However, most ICV (International Corporate Volunteering) or Experteering programs can also be classified as CISL programs.

2. Some companies have been doing this for over 15 years... why do you think they started?

The first companies that started this kind of initiative started to do so in the mid-to-late nineties. What drove these very early adopters - such as Accenture, PwC and Zurich Financial Services - was surprisingly different in each case: like marketing, philanthropy, and employee engagement. However, they all learned that there are some potent benefits that were the same, regardless of why they started.

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It has been these underlying benefits - like market development, innovation, and employee development - that have brought more companies to establish programs. But the real accelerator in adoption has been driven by global megatrends facing all businesses, such as the increasing importance of emerging markets, increasingly diverse work forces, the growth of experiential learning and leadership development programs, and the increasing value placed upon corporate citizenship.

Simply put, it makes great business sense to create socially and environmentally responsible programs that create business value.

3. Why are more companies are engaging in these programs than ever before?

There is very robust evidence that these programs create benefits for all stakeholders. Our most recent study, conducted in partnership with five leading global companies - BD, Credit Suisse, EY, GSK and Microsoft and with responses from over 300 participants - clearly demonstrates how these programs develop skills in participants, make a positive impact, and are good for the business.

In addition, there are some greater forces at work, too. Consumers are demanding that companies engage in social change programs, and The United Nation's Global Goals for Sustainable Development are requesting that companies also take action. In fact, Global Goal #17 calls for global partnerships to end poverty, inequalities and injustices, and climate change.

As our study shows, CISL experiences - when properly constructed - provide the learning and development that's required to build this kind of leadership while creating environmental, social, and business benefits in the process.

4. When you say properly constructed, what do you mean?

The research shows that simply having the experience is not sufficient for it to be truly developmental from a career perspective. Factors such as the following are all critical to the program having an ROI:

The quality of matching assignments to participants

The degree of line manager engagement

The curriculum of support when individuals return to the workplace all affect how impactful the experience will be.

Properly constructed experiences take these kinds of factors into account. Their design helps individuals plan for the learning experience, reflect upon it, and then apply new learning to their work upon return.

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5. What are a few samples of CISL programs

Programs can be quite diverse. They vary in a number of ways including duration, seniority level, and whether for individuals or group.

Programs like the EY Vantage Program, Pfizer's Global Health Fellows and GSK's Pulse Programme are longer, from 6 weeks up to 6 months. Others such as the education assignment in Credit Suisse's Global Citizens program are shorter.

In the same way that length varies, group size varies, too. While EY's and Pfizer's programs are individual based, Microsoft Front Lines program, BD's Volunteer Service Trip and IBM Corporate Service Corps are group-based.

Another area is program design for scalability. While the Front Lines and Executive Service Corps programs are designed for executive level talent and curated in small batches, with a significant cost per head investment. Microsoft's MySkills4Afrika program is designed with technology in mind, using a matching platform to support scale, connecting people for about the price of a conference for 1-2 week project and based on a per-project application to anybody within the company.

6. What were the most surprising findings of your research?

On the whole, quite a lot of thought goes into designing and supporting a CISL program. In this research we were able to begin to look at which areas of support actually impacted the results that companies were achieving.

Interestingly, the perceived amount of preparation that participants received made no difference to the results they achieved but the degree to which people were supported upon return had a significant impact on a number of areas such as employee learning, retention, career mobility and upon employee engagement.

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We were also pleasantly surprised by how high the approval rating was. We made a very conscious effort to reach out to former employees of programs as well as existing employees and reached back many years to previous participants to obtain a balanced sample and while we knew that these programs were popular with participants, to hear that 99.7% of participants had recommended the program to at least one other colleague since participating was very interesting. I've not come across other programs with that level of approval. It equates to only one person in a sample of over 300 people not having recommended the program.

7. What was the least surprising finding of your research

I'm not sure if it is the least surprising finding but certainly the most reassuring one is the observation that the most impactful experiences for an employee (in terms of learning, engagement, career mobility and retention) are those in which employees felt there was genuine need for their skills on the project - On the one hand, this means that there are diminishing returns in creating assignments that do not meet real needs. This is good news for those people that want to see corporate engagement as a tool for achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development.

8. What is next for you and this research?

Our intent is to establish a benchmark against which companies can compare their programs against, while continuing to better track the social and environmental impact that these programs can have.

Our research indicates that every company should have a program like this, and we're going to continue to capture more evidence to not only highlight why companies should, but also how to make them the most impactful.

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9. What advice do you have for companies looking to get involved in programs like this?

The best programs align business objectives with social objectives. We also know from the research that the more these align, the more these will sustain and stronger the impact will be. But don't get stuck over-planning. The benefits are so consistent that we recommend piloting as soon as possible, just make sure to get senior sponsorship and be sure to include line managers in the program.

For more information, here is an article in DEVEX about why every company should have a program like this, and another in Triple Pundit with tips to easily pilot and scale one.

10. How can we learn more?

We have a number of online information sessions for people to join and find out more. Each session will also feature representatives from some of the participating companies to illustrate the findings from their own experiences.

If you have a general interest in this area of work and would like to understand more, please register for Insights into CISL Long Term Impact on 29th October 2015 10:30 EST, 15:30 GMT, 16:30 CET

If you have a Learning and Development interest in this area of work and would like to understand more about how CISL programs can develop global leaders, please register for Leadership Development that Lasts: Using CISL to deliver your Learning and Development goals on 12th November 2015 10:30 EST, 15:30 GMT, 16:30 CET

If you already have an international corporate volunteering, CISL or equivalent leadership program and are interested in benchmarking your program, please register for Building Stronger Programs: Insights into the CISL Impact Benchmark Study on 19th November 10:30 EST, 15:30 GMT, 16:30 CET

You can also download a summary report here.

11. How can my company's program be included in this benchmark report?

In our opinion, CISL is an important approach, not just for companies but also for the wider world, and the more data we have about its impact the more effective we can make it. The study has been designed so that companies with CISL programs can have their own initiatives benchmarked against other participating companies, at the same time as gathering an important dataset that they can use to communicate the value of their program to stakeholders.

Companies wishing to do so can contact us to talk through the options.

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Entrepreneurship is very in vogue today. Motivated by the wave of successful tech startups, the younger generations today all want to be their own boss and supersonic themselves into a life full of wealth and glamour. Television programs are furthering the allure of leaving corporate America and starting your own company in your family garage. The coolness factor for being an entrepreneur is probably at an all-time high. While I am an adamant supporter of entrepreneurship, I do have a responsibility to provide a dose of reality to anyone considering starting their own venture. Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart and there are a lot of risks involved with becoming one. I would argue that most individuals are not equipped to be an entrepreneur. Most think they are, but in reality it is an anomaly.

Entrepreneurship is like space exploration. It is a personal journey of you against the universe. If you are successful, it is an unparalleled experience. However, if you fail then you can end up marooned and with space dementia.

The below is a sample checklist of questions to ask yourself before you take the plunge and leave corporate life.

Are you mentally equipped to be an entrepreneur?

This is the most important question. Your family, friends, investors, and colleagues, all can give you advice on if you should do a potential venture. However, it doesn't matter at the end of the day what they say. What matters is if you are mentally equipped to be an entrepreneur. Is it in your DNA? How badly do you want this? You are the individual that will be putting everything on the line and will be in the trenches day in and day out. It isn't their lives or careers that will be risked but yours.

Can you handle failure?

You will statistically fail. It is a fact. You might be the smartest and hardest working individual in the world, but it doesn't matter. Darwinism gets the best of most startups and will always have the last laugh. A lot of top echelon individuals say that they can handle failure, but most haven't ever really been tested in life. It is up to you to know thyself.

Why do you want to be an entrepreneur? Why specifically now?

You really have to dig deep and understand what is driving you. When the going gets tough, (and it will) you need to grasp something pure that will carry you throughout the night.

Are you willing to change your lifestyle?

No honorable entrepreneur maintains their corporate lifestyle when starting a business. If you try to maintain a lifestyle, you are wasting investors' capital on frivolous non-business personal expenses and overall hurting your chances of success.

Are you prepared to potentially live in a lesser quality neighborhood? What about sell your car or downgrade? Are you going to give up traveling and eating at expensive restaurants? Will you care how society perceives you?

How will you financially survive? Savings? Salary?

Just as with a business, you need to calculate your "personal burn rate". The stakes are much higher I would argue in the "real" world of entrepreneurship than being insulated in corporate bubble. You need to price in a complete failure from the beginning to understand what could be at stake. This does not mean that you have to have a pessimistic attitude, but that you have the ability to risk assess a situation.

What is your stop loss?

How far down the yellow brick road are you willing to go? Are you willing to sacrifice everything or X% of everything? What are your metrics for pulling the plug? Is it time or money? Specifically what? What business milestones do you need to achieve to keep being an entrepreneur?

Are you a high level thinker or a hands on type of person?

I would argue that entrepreneurship is not for the high level thinkerl but the doers of the world. Are you the type of individual that will get on your knees and fix something if it is not working? This is the real world here. Nothing should be beneath you, especially if you are a founder of a startup. There are no safety lines here, and you can't simply call the tech department at your Fortune 500 company to get someone else to fix your problems.

Can you and your business survive for minimum 1 year?

If you don't raise enough capital to modestly last 1 year then don't even start the venture. Nothing gets done overnight, and it takes time to build, test, and rebuild ideas. Time, capital, your career, and personal relationships will only be impaired if you don't have the resources necessary to out of the gate. If you put your toe into the deep end of the pool, you need to be ready to go the entire distance for at least 1 year.

Are there any significant stakeholders in your life that this can affect?

You might have everything teed up, but there could be stakeholders that you need to consider. A family could be a great support network or an anchor. It is up to you to properly discuss and analyze those variables.

Some sub questions to ask or consider are:

Significant other: If you have a wife, is she the type that is ready to sacrifice a standard of living for this dream of yours? Is she the type that will stick it out with you? -- I have seen a lot of situations where starting a business can cause a lot of internal stress on a relationship.

Family: Do you have a family that you need to provide for? (kids, elderly parents, etc.) Will you be doing a lot of traveling? Is your family mentally prepared for that? Are you mentally prepared for this?

Therefore, these are just a sample of considerations to ask yourself before starting a company. You will probably learn more about yourself on this journey than by doing any other thing. Just make sure though that you know what you are getting yourself into. If you are ready to jump into the pilot's seat then make sure you buckle up. Good luck, as it is going to be a kick-ass yet bumpy ride.

Image Source:Computer Graphics 3D Genesis

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You're an entrepreneur, poised to make your mark on the world. And you've heard all about the importance of a personal brand -- its potential for generating income, creating power, and influencing others.

But where do you start? What are the first things you have to do in order to create this entity known as a personal brand?

Rather than make you wade through a full-length book on the subject, I've assembled this tactical, go-to guide that you can use as your brand-building blueprint.

How long will it take me to build a sizeable personal brand?

A personal brand is measured not by the number of followers or fans, but in the significance and depth of your connections. As with any type of relationship, this can take time to both build and curate. With six months of hard work, you can have an impressive personal brand.

How much time will I have to spend on my personal brand?

If you want to gain ground quickly in the creation of your personal brand, I suggest you spend at least ten hours a week on it. Ten hours allows you to build out your social profiles, add connections, write or create social media updates, and create one blog post. To go to the next level -- i.e., more content and advanced strategization -- you'll need to spend more time.

Eventually, you may get to the point where you need to hire an editor, social media manager, or ghost writer. Certainly you should use a social media automation tool like Buffer or Hootsuite. These resources will save you some time, but don't expect them to relieve you of the need to spend lots of time on your personal brand.

It's important to realize that brand-building does take time -- a lot of it. The entrepreneurs with massive personal brands spend enormous amounts of time developing and maintaining it.

What do I need to get started?

First, you need a vision for your brand -- who you are and what it is you'd like to accomplish. Second, like any marketing strategy, you need to define exactly who you're trying to reach with your brand. Once you've got these concepts firmly in place, you're ready to get down to work.

Create a personal website with your name.

The home of your personal brand is your website. This is what people will see when they Google your name. I recommend creating a website using your full name, such as neilpatel.com.

Collect email addresses.

Your website is one of the few places online where you can collect email addresses. Use a service like AWeber or MailChimp to build a mailing list. To collect email addresses, offer to send people spam-free updates via email.

Build a strong "About" page.

One of the most-visited pages on a personal website is the About page. Use your About page to describe yourself in the best light possible. Don't stretch the truth, of course, but focus on your accomplishments. Be sure to feature a professional photo.

Start blogging.

Writing is the single most time-consuming component of building a personal brand, which is why some entrepreneurs choose to outsource this task. I recommend that, at first, you be the sole writer of your blog and always maintain close control over what you publish. You can, of course, hire the services of a copyeditor or proofreader.

Your blog becomes the basis of your personal brand, defining who you are, what you stand for, your opinions, your trademark style, and your vision.

Develop an email address with your website URL.

Using your domain name, create an email address for yourself. Your first name is fine -- Mike@MikeWazowski.com (not a valid email address).

Customize your email signature to include links to your website and social media profiles.

A professional email address is essential for developing personal brand integrity. When you reach out to people personally, or send email updates, you want your email address to enhance your brand.

Create a Facebook fan page.

Your personal Facebook profile isn't going to accommodate all your eventual fans. You should create a fan page instead.

Build out your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn is the Internet's de facto public resume site. Optimize the heck out of every aspect that LinkedIn provides, including job descriptions, headlines, summary, showcasing your work, and earning recommendations.

Connect with as many people as possible, especially other professionals with large followings. Since LinkedIn displays a maximum of 500 followers in a user's public profile, you should aim for a minimum of 500 first-level connections.

LinkedIn is a powerful source of brand-building, and this includes more than just creating a profile. I recommend that you post regular updates, publish content, join groups, and interact with others personally (using messages).

Develop a Twitter profile and start tweeting.

Earning a Twitter presence is also critical. Stay active by posting updates several times a day.

Become active on Google+.

Google+ remains a viable platform for your personal brand presence. Be sure that you completely fill out all of the information you can.

Identify any other social media platforms to join.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ are the big ones, but they aren't the only ones. Depending on your niche and target audience, you may wish to join additional social media networks. For most entrepreneurs, I would recommend Pinterest, Instagram, Periscope, and Reddit.

All of your social media accounts should have a consistent handle. If you're "Bob Smith" on Facebook, you should be @bobsmith on Twitter and Instagram -- not @BobSmithFootballLover091.

Guest post on other niche sites.

Guest posting is where personal branding starts to develop its multiplication power. Everything that you've done so far is intended to create a solid and reputable foundation. Now, you're ready to expand. Provided you have a solid brand foundation, you will easily gain guest posting opportunities with other blogs.

Accept and create speaking engagements.

The more you become known, the more you'll be sought out for your expertise. Do your best to accept any speaking engagements, no matter how small or unpaid they may be. Additionally, you can create your own speaking platform by hosting free webinars or a weekly podcast.

Brainstorm and strategize further opportunities.

Eventually, you may be ready to go bigger and further with your personal brand. There are ways to land interviews, national TV coverage, and wide public recognition -- even your own TV show! As your brand grows, spend some time considering how to take it to the next level.

Conclusion

Building a personal brand is a lot of work, especially at first. But you'll discover that brand-building has a snowball effect. Although you'll spend a lot of time and effort on it at first, a personal brand eventually builds up its own momentum and ability to grow.

You may struggle hard for your first 10 likes, comments, or followers, but eventually, you may be growing by hundreds of followers a day without expending any additional effort.

In spite of the self-growing potential, a personal brand requires your constant attention. Just as you always make sure you're groomed and well-dressed, you must also ensure that your personal brand doesn't fall into neglect.

Careful attention and consistent effort will reward you with the powerful personal brand that you need.

What steps have you taken to build your personal brand?

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Google and Amazon have perhaps collected more employee data than any other modern organization. Both have come to similar conclusions about the key to being Purpose-Oriented and thriving at work.

The result of Google's research found that gratitude was the common ingredient in their successful employees.

Amazon found that 'lucky people', or what they later reframed as those that feel lucky in their lives, were the ones that thrived. Same concept, different word.

The core of this gratitude mindset is seeing the world as full of opportunity. It comes from being in awe of everything around us. It comes from developing the ability to see abundance in every direction, even on hard days.

This mindset is something we can all practice and develop. Harvard's Jennifer McCrea developed a simple exercise that she does with her kids at dinner every night to help us look at the world with gratitude. She calls it SIM (surprised, inspired, and moved).

Every day, take the time to reflect and ideally share with someone, "what surprised, inspired, and moved you today?"

It is a daily two-minute habit that allows anyone, in any job, to uncover purpose all around them.

So, what surprised, inspired, and moved you today?

This article originally appeared on Imperative.

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We've all seen them. Ads for hearing aids for $29.95! Sounds like a pretty good deal since Audiologist prescribed hearing aids can be pretty expensive (about $500, up to $7,000) and are not covered by most Insurance programs.

I cannot stand them! Infomercials or Companies selling hearing aids by mail!

Here's my list of why I despise them:

1. They cannot be adjusted to fit your particular hearing loss. Are you missing the low sounds, or the high pitches? These "instant hearing aids" will not cater to that specific loss, it will just amplify everything. Since they amplify everything, they could be detrimental to your hearing in the first place! If you only have a high pitch loss, and these hearing aids are amplifying everything, you'll soon lose the low pitches as well.

2. The "earmold" are not custom made to fit your ear. For a hearing aid to properly work, it has to fit snugly in the ear. These "plugs" often wiggle loose and fall out when moving your head (as read on a lot of customer review sites). .When this happens there's a lot of feedback noise of whistling and squealing that can be annoying to everyone around you.

3. Do you really know if your hearing loss is an ACTUAL hearing loss? It could just be from wax build up, an ear infection, or a sinus cold.

4. Exaggerated Claims! These infomercials claim "you'll hear a whisper across the room" Well that won't happen without amplifying the regular sounds near you louder! Or showing everyone cheering at a sporting event, and the wearer isn't cringing from the sound around them?

5. No more batteries! Sure, that's all great and good, but what happens when the hearing aid dies before you're ready to take it off and put it on the charger? If you're out with family and friends, you could just switch out batteries and then life continues. What about the instant hearing aid? You going to carry the charger everywhere? Or tell everyone to shut up while you charge it?

So if you think you have a hearing loss, go see your doctor to determine the actual cause. You may then be referred to an Audiologist for testing, there you two can determine the best course of action to improve your hearing. Not from some damn commercial!

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One of the most common challenges that leaders face is designing a meeting architecture. A meeting architecture is the overall cadence of who meets when and why. Many arise by accident rather than through intention. However, leaders who explicitly design them are better able to stay connected to their team, drive forward high priority work, and be visible within the organization - without getting stuck in meetings from dawn until dark.

Sadly, there's no one-size-fits-all perfect solution. The best meeting architecture reflects the values and culture of an organization, the nature of the work to be done and the maturity of the team. There are, however, some guiding principles that we use at Stop Meeting Like This to advise clients on the best design for their situation.

Guiding Principle 1: Beware the lure of the 1:1s

Reviews on the value of 1:1 meetings are mixed. While some notable leaders such as Intel's Andy Grove espouse their benefits, many other leaders give them mixed reviews. What is undoubtedly true is that a regular cadence of 1:1s can pack your calendar and if they aren't well-managed, create very little value for the organization. We suggest these alternatives:

Hold weekly office hours where your team is encouraged to drop by with a question, an update, or just to chat. Be in your office with an open door during that time so that you convey availability. Send a recurring calendar invitation to your team so they remember to take advantage of the time. If your team isn't co-located, log in to a collaboration platform such as WebEx so that they can drop into your virtual room.

Use the situational leadership framework to segment your team members. Schedule 1:1s only with the team members that need more guidance or coaching or who are running large, complex projects. Use office hours or less frequent check-ins to catch the other members of the team.

Build relationship and rapport with your team members by taking them to lunch or out for happy hour after work where you will have a chance to connect more informally. Or, follow in the footsteps of some of history's great thinkers, and take a walk.

Guiding Principle 2: Set a high bar for staff meetings

Staff meetings are legendary for devolving into a series of 1:1 updates between the leader and each member of the team while everyone else multitasks. In fact, one of our clients recently said about his staff meetings "They're my meetings and I dread them. They are the worst part of the week." Avoid the common pitfall of staff meetings by collecting updates in a shared online document (which also serves as the team's memory). Spend staff meeting time problem-solving emerging issues, communicating important updates to the team and thinking strategically together. Designate a note-taker who is charged with capturing key decisions, conclusions, and next steps and disseminating them to the team. If you block off the ½ hour prior to your weekly staff meeting, you can use it to review the updates and surface the key items you'll want to discuss.

Guiding Principle 3: Don't go unless you know

For all the standing meetings that are part of your meeting architecture, make sure you're absolutely clear on the purpose of each one and then design the structure to support the purpose. For example, if you're in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment or a fast-moving project, you may want to consider a daily stand-up meeting to quickly share information with one another and make sure you're aligned on the day's tasks. On the other hand, reviewing weekly KPIs and dashboard lends itself to a more traditional meeting structure. The pace of your work has everything to do with the best meeting architecture for the team. Think about the key conversations that need to happen to move the work forward. Think daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Then design. And like any good design, your meeting architecture should have only what's needed - no more and no less.

And finally, we say go slow and experiment. Start with a bare minimum and build up from there. Recurring meetings are a little like zombies - hard to kill once they're up and running! So start small and assess the value after a month or two.

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Is this déjà vu all over again? Nine years after the disastrous purchase of the landmark Manhattan rent-regulated apartment complex Stuyvesant Town - Peter Cooper Village by alt-investment funds Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Inc. for $5.4 billion, PE giant Blackstone Group and Ivanhoe Cambridge have inked a deal to take over the property for a reported $5.3 billion. The Tishman Speyer/BlackRock buyout was a costly failure for tenants who saw rents jacked up (illegally as it turned out) and were denied necessary repairs, for investors - including three public employee pension funds in California and Florida that lost a total of $850 million, and for creditors when the owners defaulted on the $3 billion mortgage on the property.

Private equity boosters like Private Equity Law360 are flattering the de Blasio administration for its cleverness in winning a side agreement with the new owners to maintain 5,000 of the complex's 11,241 apartments as affordable housing for the next 20 years and to phase in rent increases on another 1,400 apartments over five years after 2020 when these units are scheduled to be decontrolled. Flattery is PE's stock in trade - everyone who signs a contract with them is oh so clever and has extracted the very best deal from them. No mention at all in media reports of the 4,841 apartments on which the new owners are able to charge Manhattan prime real estate rents. Should we celebrate preservation of 5,000 affordable housing units or mourn the loss of 4,841 apartments that are priced out of reach for most New Yorkers?

Prices in the New York City housing market now exceed the levels attained at the height of the real estate boom and the deal for the city's largest rental property is important for Blackstone which gets to add massively to its strategic investments in Manhattan rental units. The property comes with tax breaks under the J-51 program that governs affordable housing units and the side deal with the de Blasio administration includes a $144 million low-interest rate loan from the city's Housing Development Corp. as well as a waiver of $77 million in mortgage recording taxes. Despite these advantages for Blackstone as well as lower interest rates and nearly twice as much rental income as nine years ago, the reported price to be paid for Stuyvesant Town - Peter Cooper Village has not budged from what the previous owners paid in 2006. Blackstone has to be pleased with the deal.

On the plus side, Blackstone and its partners - unlike the former owners - plan to finance the acquisition with a much more manageable 50 percent debt and they plan to maintain the complex as rental units rather than evict tenants and convert it to condos. But the transaction was described by Private Equity Law 360 as "a fast-moving transaction that came together in a matter of weeks." That's not a lot of time for the city's lawyers and housing market experts to study what is presumably a very complicated contract. It would be interesting to know what contingencies are addressed in the agreement the de Blasio administration struck with Blackstone, and what has been left out. As economists know well, it is impossible for contracts to be 'complete' in the sense that all future contingencies can be foreseen and addressed. Contracts rely on implicit agreements that are not able to be spelled out and on the assumption that the parties to the contract will deal fairly with each other. Trustworthy behavior by all parties is essential. On this score, private equity's track record has not been stellar, as outlined by SEC Chair Mary Jo White in a recent speech in which she specifically cited an SEC enforcement settlement with Blackstone over its failure to fulfill its contractual relationships with the limited partners in its funds.

Rumors that the apartment complex's caretaker owner had settled a dispute with a hedge fund that held some of the debt on the property led to renewed interest by developers and investors in buying it. One has to wonder why there was such a rush to sell it to Blackstone. Was this really the least bad deal city government could get? One thing is clear: For Blackstone, which views the rental market as an important investment opportunity, this is a sweet deal.

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It's said you die twice.

The first time is when you're soul leaves your body. The second time is when someone says your name for the last time. Some experience the latter a lot sooner than others. Which leads to my big question: what exists today that will be remembered in 250 years?

A good starting point is to ask yourself the inverse.

Who from around 250 years ago do you still know of? From a Western perspective, there's figures like Washington and Franklin. All of the Founding Fathers. Then there's Mozart and Bach. These figures all had a tremendous impact on human history. It's only natural that one would have to make an equal or greater impact to be remembered for such a long time.

Bill Gates, much like Andrew Carnegie, will probably be remembered more so for his tremendous philanthropic efforts then anything else. Buzz Aldrin, like the late Neil Armstrong, will certainly be remembered. There's President Obama and potentially Elon Musk if he can get us to the moon. Steve Jobs perhaps. Stephen Hawking. Richard Dawkins.

It's a short list.

The list is even shorter for brands and companies. Ames, the tools company founded in 1774 by Captain John Ames, is one of the few that comes to mind. Another, State Street Bank, which has $2.4 trillion assets under management, has been around since 1792. But I'd be willing to wager most people aren't too familiar with these companies. Then there's the exception.

Hennessy.

With the advent of the information age, virtually every industry on earth has evolved in some way. Most have flourished and the spirits market is no exception.

In 2014 the Distilled Spirits Council President and CEO Peter H. Cressy said "In the U.S. market, strong consumer interest in cocktails, along with continuing market access and modernization improvements, is providing the industry with a solid base for future growth."

With this surge in competition, you'd imagine the older brands would be scrambling to regain market share. Not Hennessy. They continue to produce 40% of all the world's Cognac supply.

Founded in 1765, the world's largest Cognac producer has stood the test of time almost with ease. To learn more about this timelessness I spoke with Rodney Williams, former Senior Vice President of Hennessy USA and current Executive Vice President of Spirit Brands at Moët Hennessy USA.

"Hennessy strongly believes in the notion of learning from one's past and heritage to inform one's legacy and future." he said. "Our legacy is built on the collaboration and shared passion of two families - Hennessy and Fillioux -- which uphold our brand values generation after generation."

Maurice Hennessy, Global Maison Brand Ambassador, is the eighth generation of the Hennessy family. The Fillioux family has been blending Hennessy Cognac for seven generations. They've been involved in the beginning and have ensured the company has maintained a central focus.

As a staunch advocate for millennial entrepreneurship (and an entrepreneur myself), the campaign of "never stop, never settle" struck a cord with me. It's what led to my conversation with Rodney. As it turns out, entrepreneurship is and always has played a big part at Hennessy. They're guided by "an entrepreneurial spirit that ever challenges us to find ways to delight and inspire our consumers." he explained.

But as with most large companies today, reaching millennials has proven to be a challenge. But here is another big component to the brand's timelessness: education, focusing on the long term and fostering peer to peer referrals.

"Once consumers are educated on Hennessy and interact with the brand, they love it. It's making certain that the education is done in a relevant and compelling fashion that is necessary to long term brand adoption."

So, what are the takeaways for would-be brand builders in it for the long haul?

1. Understand fluid dynamics. Over the course of a hundred years (or two) there's bound to be disruption. Markets change. Trends shift. Some industries rise, others fall. The key is to derive relevance from the disruption. Hennessy hasn't fought against the constantly changing markets and technologies, it's flowed with them, leveraging their power to educate consumers in new ways. Which leads to the next point..

2. Educate. Don't sell.. We react defensively to sales pitches. It's damn near instinct to distrust salespeople. But when you educate instead you alleviate fear without even trying. Even if the sale doesn't happen then, the prospect will walk away with a positive experience which positions you better in the long run.

3. Don't be all things to all people. Don't subscribe to the common notion that more is better. If you're loyal to everyone, you're loyal to no one. Focus all your time and attention on one project. Be extraordinary in one area instead of spreading yourself thin. A wider net catches more fish, but not more customers. It's no coincidence that some of the most valuable companies in the world, from Apple to Coca-Cola, and of course Hennessy, have a single area of focus.

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