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WSJ.com: Independent Street


Overdosing on Your Company’s Stock
Small businesses often give company stock to employees, through employee stock-ownership plans, 401(k) matching contributions or as stock options. But while stock can be an effective motivator, it comes with perils as well, as my recent article, “Manufacturer Pushes Stock Diversification” points out. The problem: If a company’s stock performs well, employees tend to hold on [...]

Business Books That Aren’t Sominex
Are business books your cure for insomnia? I confess that I rarely crack a traditional business book. But I am a sucker for a good narrative, and these make up nearly the whole of my business-book shelf. OK, the ones I’ve actually read. Or listened to — I’m an Audible.com subscriber. So it doesn’t surprise [...]

How One Employee-Centered Company Went Wrong
Who doesn’t love a success story about an employee-owned company? Engaged employees, bottom-line contributions, increasing profits, and other win-win outcomes. You tend not to hear as much about the downside. Inc. magazine’s February issue has an absorbing piece about how a once-thriving employee-owned company foundered and now finds itself fighting for survival. Inc. editor-at-large Bo Burlingham takes a [...]

Being Big, But Acting Small
In the past two weeks, I’ve had two terrible customer-service telephone experiences, and one that was so good, I actually detained the rep to thank her. The two downers — with my wireless telephone and my cable provider — were typical of what consumers hate about customer service. You get mired in a computerized maze of [...]

Do You Care Who Owns the Brands You Buy?
“So how do we move from the ideal to the real without screwing up what we’ve created?” That’s what entrepreneur Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea Inc., asks in his blog this morning following an announcement that he’s selling a 40% stake in his organic bottled-tea company to Coca-Cola Co. for about $43 million. The deal [...]

Taking the Jargon Out of Your Business
We hear a lot from Indy Street readers about how hard it is for business-to-business shops to drum up media interest and buzz. Writes one frustrated BtoBer: “Many of us provide sophisticated services and/or products. And that’s where our real challenges lie. How can we get some market exposure without having a big marketing and PR [...]

Courting Bloggers — A PR Edge for Small Firms?
A story in today’s New York Times spotlights Target Corp.’s policy of not working with bloggers – or “nontraditional media outlets” on stories. Target’s rationale, according to the story, is that it must focus its limited public-relations resources on the big media outlets, like TV stations and newspapers, which reach large numbers of shoppers. A spokesperson [...]

Does a Bad Super Bowl Ad Keep You From Buying?
One of the biggest Super Bowl ad stumbles, according to blogs and media reviews, were two spots by InfoUSA’s Salesgenie.com. The Web site provides sales leads for customers, and small businesses are a key target audience. More than half-a-dozen ad executives found the company’s animation spots offensive, according to a WSJ story this morning. In one [...]

Small Businesses Score Big at the Super Bowl
This Sunday, I’ll be in Tampa, Fla., celebrating my birthday while watching the ads – er, the Big Game — on television. (I confess, I’m not big on the pros, but I do love my Terps football.) Super Bowl Sunday always seems to steal my thunder, but for some small businesses in Arizona this year, [...]

Should Uncle Sam Do More for Small Business?
What’s in the new economic stimulus plan for small businesses? The bipartisan package, touted by President Bush in his State of the Union Address, offers some tax breaks to businesses, including: Doubling the amount of money that businesses can write off on their taxes for their 2008 business expenses — such as machinery, vehicles, office furniture [...]