The 6th Carnival of Entrepreneurs Rolls Into Town

Welcome to the 6th Edition of the Carnival of Entrepreneurs!

We’ve got a huge list of content to go through, with some great posts on topics ranging from motivation, inspiration, learning, making money online and failure. There’s a few themes running through the posts, which I find particularly interesting. It shows that people are thinking along the same lines at the beginning of 2007.

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Carnival Highlights

• Laura Young tells us about her bathroom habits. OK, not quite, but she’s got a great story to tell about being bold and grabbing opportunities when they come your way.
• GP suggests that you don’t try and learn everything when you first start pursuing your goals. Sure, it might be a natural reaction when starting something new; go out and learn everything to avoid mistakes, but those mistakes could be worth more than you realize. (Oh, there’s also a recipe for Comforting Rice Pudding.)
• Bill D’Alessandro asks, What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur? Of course we all want to know. Bill looks at some research, questions why so few young people go into entrepreneurship and concludes with some thoughts on whether entrepreneurship is a character trait or learned.
• Craig Harper takes a scientific look at success and offers up 10 things that he’s learned about successful people. Craig’s got a bit of a “take-no-prisoners” attitude, which is quite refreshing. The end of his post is brilliant.

Get Inspired And Succeed

• Lorenzo has a method for channeling inspiration which he developed after noticing that people often solve their problems, right on the spot, when speaking to someone about them.
• Jane Chin offers up Your Crucial Key To Success. If I’m not mistaken Jane has her own blog network called Chinspirations. I’m still laughing at the catchy name! Jane, do you write ALL of those blogs?
• Wilson Ng wonders how to manage our own indulgences. It’s a good question. A tough question. Any ideas?
• Adeolu Akinyemi is thinking along the same lines. He offers some suggestions on how to stay strong in moments of weakness.
• Emmanuel Olawutosin has the answer to your job woes: Fire Your Boss. Until I read “it’s a mental exercise” I was really hoping Emmanuel was suggesting that you literally fire your boss. Sadly, that’s not the case, but the article is well worth reading on how to improve your current job situation.
• Paul is thinking a lot about goal setting and how to achieve his goals. He’s looked at different methodologies, tackled goal setting from different angles, and perhaps finally come up with some secret sauce – focusing solely on ego-driven goals won’t work.
• Johan Holmberg is focused on entrepreneurial failure. Not the most positive topic in the world, but it’s important to understand failure and accept it. Well, don’t just accept it and roll over. Learn from it, please. Johan’s looking at research into entrepreneurial failure with a very detailed approach.
• John Peter says the key to success is all about attitude. Granted, John’s impression of success is making money, and I’d say there’s more to it than that, but your attitude certainly plays a big role regardless of how you define success.

Building Great Companies

• David Maister asks, What does a company need most? He gives you 7 choices and the discussion created is quite interesting.
• David Lorenzo provides The Foundation of Marketing a Business Start-Up. Visibility. Credibility. Differentiation. There’s the foundation. Now go read how to do it.

Practical Business Guidance

• Thom Singer tells us we should pay attention to the US pre-election campaign as it heats up. Why? Because Hillary Clinton, John McCain and John Edwards do a fine job of giving us a live business seminar throughout the process.
• Mary Emma presents, Branding Your Home Business. It’s a quick reminder that even if you work from home, if you’re trying to earn a buck from it, you should think about branding. It’s not just for big business.
• Charles Green suggests that you subsidize marketing with sales. The basic idea is to help others when the occasion makes sense, and you’re bound to create more than just good will and positive karma, including referrals, testimonials and buzz.
• John Ingrisano asks, Does your business have a disaster plan? He’s not asking if you have a plan for getting into disaster, but if you’ve got one to get out of it when it strikes.
• Derek has a strategy for planning pulled from the U.S army called the Operation Order. You have to love the title of his blog – Hope Is Not A Plan; very cool.
• Kelly Anderson has some tips for what you can do for your startup business in 15 minutes. She’s got some good ideas and really hones in on the fact that many stay-at-home mompreneurs (mom entrepreneurs) have to work in short bursts.
• Chris Johnson reminds us that it’s important to pay yourself first. He’s speaking about the fact that many people spend without tracking their income and are left at the end of the month breaking even, just getting by. He’s got some ideas on doing more than that. I’ve touched on this subject before as well with, Don’t Forget To Pay Yourself When You Start A New Business.
• Wayne Hulbert suggests that you admit your mistakes when you make them. Wayne’s got some good insights into how a company can develop a good culture around admitting mistakes and giving people the freedom to mess up and learn from it.

Interesting Reading

• Kavit Haria presents, Role of an Entrepreneur. Kavit has an interesting definition of an entrepreneur, and coins the term, “musopreneur.”
• H.S. Ayoub tells us that the biotech industry is a failure. This is an interesting read, even if you’re not that familiar with the biotech industry and there are some great lessons in here for all businesses and industries.
• Mike Buckley presents, Your Strategic Plan. It’s the 18th installment in a long series of posts based on a case study on the rebirth of small, independent retail in the US. Very interesting. I don’t think we have many retail-focused contributors here so this is a new twist on things. The gist of the post is that retail changes so quickly, it’s hard for management to keep up.
• Michelle presents, Immigrants Are More Likely to Become Successful Entrepreneurs & Business Owners. Michelle looks at some recent research on the subject of immigrant entrepreneurs and draws her own conclusions as to why there seems to be a real connection between immigrants and entrepreneurship.
• Almomento presents, The Hidden Power of Mastermind. I had never heard of Mastermind groups before, but it sounds interesting!
• Juuso Hietalahti has a funny story to tell about a pizza guy and marketing.

Online Entrepreneurship

• Erin Blaskie offers 5 Reasons Why You Should Create a Blog Site. Solid, straightforward advice.
• Ruben presents, Blogging for Profit: 2 of the Most Profitable Types of Blogs in the Blogosphere. If you’re looking to earn money from blogging it can’t hurt to find out what works well already.
• Kumiko Suzuki tells us how she achieved over 1,500 hits in my first two weeks. Of course she’s referring to her website, and offers some sound advice on site marketing and strategy.

That’s it for Carnival #6. Next week’s Carnival will be hosted right here on January 24th.

Next month the Carnival hits the road – I’ll be emailing a few people shortly about hosting – if you’re interested, please get in touch.

And don’t forget – we’d love a link over to the Carnival, or perhaps you’ll find a post you want to write about, pushing people’s ideas further and extending the conversation.