Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i Entrepreneur Magazine

AT A CONFERENCE recently, a group of entrepreneurs asked me how to get an editor’s attention by email. They wanted coverage for their business, and, in true entrepreneurial style, they demanded specifics. How long are effective emails? they asked. How do they start? What do they contain? But here’s the problem: There’s no one way to succeed. There are, however, many specific ways to fail—and by understanding how things go wrong, you can better understand how to make them right. That’s why I just dug through my deleted emails and unearthed three pitches that represent three very common problems. Below are direct quotes from them—sorry if you wrote one of these!—and what every entrepreneur can do to avoid their fate. “Hi, I’m a huge fan of your articles and wanted…

THIS JULY, THOUSANDS of LSTN wireless headphones will roll out in Delta’s first-class cabins. (Note to fliers: You’re not supposed to take them home.) The partnership is a coup for any entrepreneur, but especially so for cofounders Joe Huff and Bridget Hilton. It’s the result of them rethinking their business—and abandoning everything they thought they knew about how to sell headphones. When they launched their West Hollywood, Calif.–based audio company in 2012, they thought retail was the surefire route to customers. “We figured, naively, that it was the only true way to scale,” says Hilton. Their first deal was with Whole Foods, even though most of its stores had never sold headphones. (“It was a mess,” Hilton says.) They hustled, went on the Today show and Good Morning America, and…

MICHAEL DUBIN occasionally allowed himself to envision the moment when everything paid off. He’d be ushered into a grand ceremony, where some conglomerate, eager to own his massively successful company, would offer him a fortune for the pleasure. “I thought we would pass a really nice pen around in a wood-paneled boardroom with portraits of men with white hair,” he says. When the moment actually came, on July 19, 2016, there was none of that. He was in his pajamas, lying on a bed at the Skytop Lodge in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. His lawyers had been working through the night, and now the sun was up and Dubin had his cellphone pressed to his ear. In two hours, he was set to take the stage in the hotel’s…

A PHOTO MAY BE worth a thousand words, but on social media, it can be worth millions of dollars. “Social-first” creative agency Beautiful Destinations, which has 13.5 million Instagram followers across 180 countries, has helped big-name brands like Marriott Hotels and Mastercard create a “Come visit this place” post. (After being tagged in one of Beautiful Destinations’ photos, one hotel brand saw mentions of its name spike to 800,000 and an immediate 10 percent jump in bookings.) Its team blends millennial adrenaline-junkie photographers, who capture breathtaking images, with data scientists who analyze and predict engagement down to the pixel. That formula goosed Beautiful Destinations’ growth 30,000 percent since 2014. We asked CEO Jeremy Jauncey and chief data scientist Tom Nielsen to unlock a shot of London. ANALYZE “The internet is…

06 Moblize “I almost pulled the plug on my business.” GROWTH HACKER STATUS: Growing despite its customer base in the oil and gas industry cratering by 26 percent. AMIT MEHTA was living on pennies. In 2005, after pouring his savings into launching his Houston-based startup, Moblize, which provides analytics to the oil and gas industry, Mehta had $3.13 in the bank and not a single contract for his business. He’d spent the past 13 months living in a shelter that was run by a local temple, desperately pitching potential clients in between free meals. “They thought I was crazy,” Mehta says of the shelter staff and residents. “They were like, ‘You’re educated! You studied at Cambridge! Go get a job!’” Burned out and broke, he finally decided to take their…

BACK IN 2010, trend-hunting foodies declared the macaron the “new cupcake.” The little French confection consists of frosting or ganache sandwiched between two meringues. They’re adorable but proved too delicate and subtle to sate America’s notorious supersize snacking needs. So in the years since, the hype wore off and everything from pies to doughnuts to cronuts to cake pops stole the coveted “new cupcake” title. But if trendseekers were looking at the bottom line, they wouldn’t be so fast to move on. The brand Woops! opened a pop-up shop in New York’s Bryant Park in 2012 and in nine weeks did $200,000 in sales. Macarons have been a winner for them ever since. “It was like, ‘Whoops, we have a business,’” says Raj Bhatt, co-CEO, who owns the company with…

CALL IT A TREND: Each year we see a rising number of new and established companies grow their brand through franchising. To wit, more than 22 percent of the 988 companies that submitted their information for Entrepreneur’s 2017 Franchise 500 ranking started franchising in the past five years. You’ll find the top 100 of them on the following pages. These newcomers are helping to shape the franchise industry’s future with innovative products and services, creative marketing methods, and ever-evolving technological tools. Bottom line: They offer new franchise owners the chance to latch onto the next big thing. The companies on this list are ranked based on the scores they received when run through our Franchise 500 formula, which is a comprehensive evaluation of more than 150 data points in the…

In the early 1900s, Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden were considered two of the first female celebrity entrepreneurs in America. They built competing cosmetics empires at a time when women were rarely welcome in the workplace. Now they’re the subjects of the new Broadway musical War Paint —and the Tony Award–winning actors who portray them, Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole , say their lessons are just as relevant today. Arden and Rubinstein became business titans at a time when women weren’t expected to have ambitions. What drove them to create these empires? CHRISTINE EBERSOLE: The social class they were each born into was a driving force. They weren’t born to the manner, so I think they wanted something better. They weren’t going to settle. PATTI LUPONE: In Helena’s case, she…

PEOPLE OFTEN WRITE ME and ask, “How do I know if someone is lying by email?” Then I ask them to forward me their juiciest, most private emails, purely for research purposes. (OK, that’s a lie.) These people’s anxiety is understandable. It’s hard to lie in person; it’s far easier from the privacy of a keyboard. Who hasn’t gotten an email saying, “Sorry I’m late; train got stuck” or “Your message must have gone to spam” and wondered if it was true? Here’s a scary number: Social psychology expert Jerald Jellison estimates that we are lied to as many as 200 times per day. That isn’t all by email, of course, but plenty of it may be—and even the smallest false details can impact the productivity and financial success of…

Wipebook Pro Sure, you can jot down ideas on a smart-phone all day long, but for many minds, nothing beats an old-fashioned whiteboard. This portable version, cleverly disguised as a notebook, allows for brainstorming on trains and planes and in cafés—no need to book a conference room. ($45; wipebook.com) Polymail Pro Most email apps are built as much for casual correspondence as they are for pushing productivity. This one is specifically for booming businesses. Polymail’s built-in features, including a wide range of templates, allow users to schedule and track emails plus monitor attachments via an always-on activity feed. ($9/month; polymail.io) Soraa Helia Smartlights Use light to hack your productivity! These white LED smartbulbs automatically adjust their glow all day. They leave you alert at work but subtly remove blue light…

WHEN S’WELL founder Sarah Kauss finally made the leap from making manual invoices in Excel to using Quick-Books, in 2010, she called in an accounting pro to get her set up. He looked at her statements—and the scant $2,000 she had left in savings—as well as the rent on her New York City apartment, where she was working and storing the 3,000 high-end water bottles she hoped to sell. “You know,” he said, after a long pause, “you could get a real job.” She didn’t. Instead, she spent two long years as S’well’s sole employee, bootstrapping her line of sleek, stainless steel water bottles with $30,000 in savings after a successful, hard-charging career in commercial real estate development. It paid off: The company’s overall sales hit $50 million in 2015—a…

Sebastian Rusk always wanted to be a professional speaker. “That’s why I was put on this planet,” he says. “To impact thousands of people.” He hadn’t reached his goal yet, but he had lived the kind of inspirational life that makes for great talks. He’d lost everything in the recession and, with only $80 in his pocket, founded a successful social media consultancy called SocialBuzzTV.com in southern Florida. But that next step—the one onto the stage—eluded him, which is why, in July 2013, he attended the annual National Speakers Association conference in Philadelphia. On the conference room floor, Rusk got to chatting with Adam Witty, CEO of a publishing company called Advantage Media Group. And Witty told Rusk that he was missing a crucial step in his path to keynote…

While older franchisors are just starting to use social media, many newer companies have embraced it from the start. These are the franchises on our list with the most Facebook fans and Twitter followers (as of press time). FACEBOOK FANS RENT-A-CENTER: 634,340 1-800-PACKOUTS: 489,762 BLAZE FASTFIRE’D PIZZA: 176,842 CHICKEN SALAD CHICK: 81,696 THE HALAL GUYS: 64,846 TWITTER FOLLOWERS 1-800-PACKOUTS: 42,253 BLAZE FASTFIRE’D PIZZA: 32,398 GYMGUYZ: 23,020 COUSINS MAINE LOBSTER: 13,600 SWEETFROG PREMIUM FROZEN YOGURT: 7,251…

In the early 1900s, cosmetics were used only by actresses and prostitutes. But two immigrants—Helena Rubinstein of Krakow, Poland, and Florence Nightingale Graham of Ontario, Canada—saw the same opportunity and seized it. Graham opened a beauty salon in New York in 1910 and called it Elizabeth Arden. (She adopted the name for herself as well.) Rubinstein opened a salon in the U.S. five years later. Both created skincare and makeup and sold the promise of transformation—a staple of advertising today, but a new concept then. “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones,” Rubinstein would say. Both became famous by putting themselves in their advertisements. Rubinstein would pose in a lab coat, conveying the promise of science to save your skin. Graham-turned-Arden marketed her way to the top of high…

1 KEEP IT SHORT. A brilliant idea means nothing unless you can distill down to a few moments of sheer power. The more concise you can be, the more effective you will be. If the investors are interested, they’ll ask questions. If they’re not, then you will have saved them (and yourself) some time. 2 TURN YOUR PITCH INTO A STORY. Storytelling is a scientifically-proven way to capture a listener’s attention and hold it. Investors are bored with spreadsheets, valuations and numbers. If they want that information, they can get it. Instead, offer the story and pathos behind your startup. Everyone loves a good story, even the most data-driven investor. 3 EXPLAIN YOUR REVENUE MODEL. Great products don’t sell themselves. You sell the product. Investors have to see an airtight…

PELOTON’S FIRST cycling studio wasn’t exactly an architectural masterpiece. “We created this 10-by-10 busted, back-office studio with some black curtains and cut a hole in one for the camera lens. We put eight really cheap bikes in the audience and a nicer bike on a pedestal, propped up on some bricks,” recalls cofounder and CEO John Foley. “This is where we recruited our instructors.” He seems, at least in part, horrified at the memory. “I can’t believe they left their jobs for us.” That was in 2012, when the bootstrapped startup was attempting to lure top-notch cycling instructors away from their current jobs at the Soul-Cycles and Flywheels of the world. At Peloton, they would record classes in a yet-to-be-built studio in New York City; classes would then be streamed…

IN THE SPRING OF 2016, Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck went on CNBC to make a bold prediction: Chipotle comparable sales would fall by 29 percent in its first quarter. The network’s anchor seemed skeptical. The fast-food chain was reacting to some health scares at the time, but no one was predicting nearly as steep a drop in revenue. “What is the technology here? What have you got that enables you to do this?” the anchor asked. Glueck was basically fishing for this question. Foursquare had reinvented itself as a location intelligence company for business, but it was in the painstaking process of shaking off its image as a forgotten consumer app. Glueck had been making the rounds for less than a year, seeding the market with all kinds of predictions…

Publishers send their books to magazines, hoping for coverage. Editors rarely open them (as is explained in our story). But today is different. We walked around the Entrepreneur office, grabbed four books indiscriminately, opened to random pages, and started reading. Here are the lessons we found. Good People: The Only Leadership Decision That Really Matters, by Anthony Tjan “Compassion is composed of three underlying traits: openness, empathy, and generosity. Openness asks that we eliminate biases, empathy demands that we push for a more genuine understanding of one another, and generosity requires that we perform an actual act of kindness.” Boss Bitch: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Take Charge of Your Career, by Nicole Lapin “Be an honest hustler.… Make sure to give your employer a heads-up that you…

LisaTubbsspent 20 years in the corporate world as a successful project manager, then finally succumbed to the itch to run her own business. She wanted to follow in the footsteps of her father, a commercial fisherman, and her grandfather, a plumber. So in 2016, she took a buyout at her job and then met with a career transition adviser to explore her options. His verdict was that she had an entrepreneurial spirit but maybe not the confidence to go it alone. Franchising was just the thing for her. Which franchise should she buy? Tubbs was eager to find the answer. She read up on the industry and visited the International Franchise Expo in New York City. But like many potential franchisees, she was overwhelmed by the sheer number of brands…

STARTING A BUSINESS You’ve got the idea and the passion; now learn what you need to know to hit the ground running Franchise Your Business Main Street Entrepreneur Start Your Own Business PLANNING Preparation is key to your success—uncover valuable tools to establish and grow your business The Marketing Plan Handbook The Tax & Legal Playbook Write Your Business Plan LEADERSHIP Your success is driven by your ability to lead—discover strategies and techniques to improve your leadership skills Real Leaders Don’t Follow Fueled By Failure Think Big Act Bigger SALES & MARKETING Communicating with potential clients and customers is a must—learn how to position yourself, attract new customers and keep them coming back Ultimate Guide to Local Business Marketing No B.S. Maximum Referrals And Customer Retention 80/20 Sales And Marketing…