Welcome to the August 27, 2007 edition of carnival of entrepreneurs. Mike Harmon presents Five Steps To A Financial Recordkeeping System That Works posted at Basic Accounting, saying, “Here are five easy steps in creating a simple financial record keeping system: Capture, Check, Record, Review and Act-” Sue Massey presents Leadership – Allowing Others To Grow posted at Business Management Life, saying, “We grow by going through those situations that cause us to extend out of our comfort zone. When we take that experience away from people by micromanaging them, we remove this valuable tool.” Matt Hanson presents Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog » Blog Archive » Blog Advertising is Quickly Becoming The Choice... [Read more]

Companies that are successful in marketing invariably start with a marketing plan. Large companies have plans with hundreds of pages; small companies can get by with a half-dozen sheets. The plan should cover one year. For small companies, this is often the best way to think about marketing. Things change, people leave, markets evolve, customers come and go. Later on we suggest creating a section of your plan that addresses the medium-term future–two to four years down the road. But the bulk of your plan should focus on the coming year. You should allow yourself a couple of months to write the plan, even if it’s only a few pages long. Developing the plan is the “heavy lifting” of marketing. While executing the plan has... [Read more]

This week, we are interviewing Clarence Wooten from CollectiveX. Clarence is a serial entrepreneur with many successes under his belt. His latest venture, CollectiveX, is timed perfectly for the social networking wave hitting the Internet. In Part 2 of a 2 part interview, we discuss their living the Web 2.0 life, HR in the new web world and raising money in today’s startup landscape. Since your business model seems really aligned with the Web 2.0 style of site (where free is so prevalent.) Could you elaborate a little more on your approach to revenue creation? Revenue is very important for any company. Providing a lot of value for FREE is equally as important for any Web 2.0 company. Our business model enables us to do both – which... [Read more]

This week, we are interviewing Clarence Wooten from CollectiveX. Clarence is a serial entrepreneur with many successes under his belt. His latest venture, CollectiveX, is timed perfectly for the social networking wave hitting the Internet. In Part 1 of a 2 part interview, we discuss their new product launch, Groupsites.com and dealing with competition. Please provide us with a bit of your personal background in business and entrepreneurship. I was coined a “serial entrepreneur” by Entrepreneur Magazine in its February 2000 issue, since then I have launched and operated numerous technology-based companies since founding my first company, Envision Designs, while an undergraduate at John’s Hopkins University. In 1993, I co-founded... [Read more]

I recently had a conversation with Clarence Wooten, CEO of CollectiveX. He started his company in early 2006 with the goal of allowing companies and private groups to create personalized social networks that are closed to just those they invite. After growing this aspect of the business, Clarence has launched GroupSites which allow people to create public social networks and manage a personal and business profile allowing cleaner identity management. Below is a video that explains the site in more detail. One interesting feature is that they will be creating a directory of the public social networks so people can find similar interests and join them without creating redundant Groupsites. As an entrepreneur, Clarence is sharp and savvy with... [Read more]