Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2018 i Entrepreneur's Startups

Just 30 miles northwest of Detroit is the headquarters of a multimillion-dollar candy company called Zollipops. It’s housed in a plain-looking warehouse containing little more than boxes and boxes of sugar-free lollipops, hard candy, and taffy that’s sold online and in more than 7,500 stores, and is overseen by a team of six full-time employees and several independent contractors. But down a hall, fluorescent lights make way for the real magic of the place: a corner office decorated with sparkling pink dance trophies, paintings of smiling suns, and family trees made of construction paper—the handiwork of the company’s founder and CEO, 13-year-old Alina Morse. “ALINA HASN’T HAD FIVE OR 10 JOBS WHERE YOU HAD TO FOLLOW THIS RULE OR THAT RULE OR DO THINGS IN A CERTAIN WAY.” During the school…

Before consulting, I made my living as an editor in media. Each job I held taught me the same lesson: Digital growth is not about manipulating tools like search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. It’s about using them to reach customers. Then it’s your job to create a sustainable relationship off of those platforms. I’ll give you two examples of how those tools can go wrong. My first big job was fitness editor at a men’s magazine. Facebook was relatively new, and we built our following aggressively. The result was lots of “likes” but little direct revenue we could track. That audience eventually drove significant traffic to the website—and that was traffic we could monetize. After I left, Facebook changed its algorithm, and posts drove only a small fraction…

WHEN FRED STEVENS-SMITH and his cofounder, Russell Smith, were accepted into Y Combinator, they thought they had a brilliant idea: Help businesses track (and curb) money spent on Amazon Web Services. But when they got their program in front of beta testers, users shrugged. “It just wasn’t a big enough problem,” Stevens-Smith says. The duo built multiple prototypes to solve other problems for software development businesses, but each time, they heard the same feedback. “Most people were like, ‘I’d pay $10 a month for this.’” The founders needed a larger pain point. At a loss, they emailed their network: “What problem do you have in your development process that you would pay $1,000 a month to solve?” Multiple responses asked for the same thing—a way to test for quality throughout…

ADVERTISING/ MARKETING SERVICES Blastis Text marketing programs NO. OF LICENSEES: 45 COST: $3.99K, Financing: Yes Digital Marketing Training Group Digital marketing services NO. OF LICENSEES: 300 COST: $25K-$65K, Financing: No FireDrum Email Marketing Email marketing NO. OF DEALERS: 1 COST: $3.5K, Financing: Yes Live Your List Publications City apps NO. OF LICENSEES: 3 COST: $7.5K-$15K, Financing: Yes 99 Dollar Social Social-media management NO. OF DEALERS: 500+ COST: 99/mo.+, Financing: No Perks Nearby Daily-deal websites NO. OF LICENSEES: 150 COST: $995, Financing: Yes Social Xpand Social-media management NO. OF LICENSEES: -- COST: $299, Financing: No Today’s Senior Magazine Magazine for seniors NO. OF LICENSEES: 3 COST: $5.3K, Financing: Yes TravelHost Travel magazines NO. OF LICENSEES: 45 COST: $50K, Financing: Yes APPAREL & ACCESSORIES Cariloha Bamboo apparel, accessories, bedding, and home decor…

Dennis and Nicole Drake know how to motivate a workforce. The husband-and-wife team—a Defense Department adviser and an aerospace engineer, respectively—spend their days working in highly sensitive U.S. intelligence and defense facilities, managing projects and teams stretched across the globe. Then they turn to their side hustle, where those same skills are put to different use: They own and operate two Tropical Smoothie Cafe stores in Virginia, employing high school and college students preparing for their future. To keep their staff engaged and working hard, the Drakes have implemented programs, rewards systems, and scholarships to set up their employees for success—at Tropical Smoothie Cafe and beyond. Most of your staff are Gen Z. How do you recruit and hire? DENNIS: In this industry, you have a lot of companies vying…

In 2003, before “fast casual” became restaurant industry buzzwords, Erik Oberholtzer, Matt Lyman, and David Dressler had an idea: combine high-end ingredients with fast-food efficiency. They bet that this would differentiate their company, Tender Greens, and customers would be willing to pay a little extra for quality food. Sourcing those premium ingredients would be complicated, though. Most quick-service restaurants use large distributors, which source from a network of farms and wholesalers—a strategy designed to maximize scale efficiency. But those networks generally don’t include the chef-to-farmer relationship—and the higher-quality ingredients—Tender Greens wanted. To solve the sourcing problem, Oberholtzer turned to a valuable contact. Before Tender Greens, he was the executive chef at a luxury hotel in Santa Monica. There, he had worked closely with Scarborough Farms, a midsize local grower with…

There was a moment in 2011 when Tony D’Aloia considered his freedom to be a curse. In prison, where he’d just spent the better part of a decade, he could survive a full year on the $100 his mom sent him twice a year, on his birthday and on Christmas. But now that he was outside and back home in Washington State, he needed money to survive—lots of it. He’d heard of job openings with warehouses and construction companies, but nobody seemed eager to bring on a convicted felon. Then he finally found someone willing to interview him. A young Bellevue pizza joint called MOD was hiring a dishwasher. D’Aloia knew zilch about MOD and wasn’t excited about the work. But it came with benefits and a 401(k), which was…

Homebased/mobile Kiosk/express option DEALERSHIPS/ DISTRIBUTORSHIPS Individuals or businesses are granted the right to buy wholesale and sell retail the products of Business XYZ, but are not entitled to use XYZ’s trade name. An authorized Apple Computer dealer, for example, may have an Apple sign in her window, but she cannot call her business Apple Computer. While the terms distributorsand dealersare often used interchangeably, there is a difference between the two: A distributor may sell to a number of dealers, while a dealer usually sells to a retailer or consumer. LICENSING OPPORTUNITIES Trademark/product licensees receive access to the seller’s trade name as well as specific methods, equipment, technology, or products. If Business ABC has a special method for detailing cars, it will teach you its method and provide you with the…

Saima Khan had an epic string of luck. She was a banker in New York, and one day she ended up chatting with Warren Buffett at an airport. “We had a very personal conversation about love, loss, risk, home, and food,” she says. By the end, she’d offered to cook him a meal at her home. Buffett accepted, brought Bill Gates along, and ate well. Then the industry titans asked her to cook for their upcoming charity event, which she did—making large, shareable plates, harking back to how her Pakistani immigrant family fed guests. The event was a hit. More invitations followed. Soon, Khan saw opportunity. “People who were quite well-traveled were always looking for new dining experiences,” she says. So in 2012, she moved back to her hometown of…

Homebased/mobile Kiosk/express option Franchise can be started for less than $50K BEGAN: Year business began FRANCHISING: Year franchising began $K: Thousands $M: Millions OPERATING UNITS US: Number of operating franchise units in the U.S. CAN: Number of operating franchise units in Canada INTL: Number of operating franchise units in other foreign countries CO: Number of operating company-owned units COSTS/FEES COST: Startup costs as reported in the FDD, including franchise fee RTY: Royalty fee FINANCING: In-house or third-party financing available? QUALIF: Net worth and cash liquidity requirements…

In 2006, Jonita White quit her job in San Diego and moved to Texas. She did it to be closer to family, but she also saw it as a chance to pursue her dream of becoming a real estate agent. Then the housing market crashed in 2007, just as she’d earned her license, and White needed a backup plan—fast. She still wanted to work for herself, but launching a business in a troubled market wasn’t an option. That’s how she came to franchising; it was a way to be entrepreneurial, but with a proven playbook. She started researching opportunities. Since arriving in Texas, White had become a loyal customer at Christian Brothers Automotive. She had no experience with cars but was attracted to the company’s customer service, long history, and…