Spring 2012 YEP information
Long Beach Young Entrepreneur Program (YEP)
The Young Entrepreneur Program (In association with the SBDC in Long Beach) is a cost-free 10 week long training on how to start, grow, or sucessfully advance your current business idea(s).
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Fall 2011 class
In the works. There will be an announcement in the coming weeks for specific dates.
Spring 2011 Program
The Small Business Development Center through Long Beach City College is starting up their Young Entrepreneur’s Program for the Spring 2011.
There will be two courses offered this semester lasting 10 weeks.
Tuesday Evenings 7-10pm on the Cal State University Campus starting on March 1, 2011
Please email YEP@LBCC.EDU for further information and to get enrolled into this upcoming 1o week program.
YEP on YouTube
YEP Long Beach is on YouTube.
You can expect to see Documentaries on Local Small Businesses as well as Documentaries on Small Business ideas from current/past YEP Graduates.
Obama Outlines Plan to Increase Employment
WASHINGTON — In proposing a one-year, $33 billion tax credit for small businesses, the Obama administration is simultaneously seeking to stimulate hiring by reducing payroll taxes and to turn its attention to a constituency that has historically been associated with Republicans.
Hours after the Commerce Department announced that economic growth had picked up at the end of last year, President Obama visited a machine plant in Baltimore on Friday to promote the plan, which would give companies a tax credit of up to $5,000 for each new hire and reimburse them for Social Security taxes if they expand their payrolls. The credit is capped at $500,000 for each employer.
“Now is the perfect time for this kind of incentive because the economy is growing, but businesses are still hesitant to start hiring again,” Mr. Obama said at the Chesapeake Machine Company, which makes custom industrial equipment.
Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that reducing the payroll taxes of employers would be the most cost-effective approach — after extending unemployment benefits — to stimulating economic output and job growth.
Even so, the proposal, which would be the first federal wage subsidy since the New Jobs Tax Credit in 1977-78, met with a wary response from Republicans.
Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax matters, said, “A sprinkling here and there of a few poll-tested proposals won’t provide enough help or get small businesses hiring again.”
He said that business owners were alarmed about how Mr. Obama’s proposals on health care and energy would affect their bottom line.
Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who is the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement that “tax incentives that encourage job creation can help if they’re done right.” He added, however, that “Congress will be swimming upstream with tax relief if it doesn’t also do something about the bad environment for small-business growth.”
The National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business lobby group that has traditionally been close with Republicans, also expressed skepticism. It said the $5,000 tax credit for new hires would only benefit “a limited number of small employers” but said the payroll-tax credit had potential.
Administration officials said the proposal was intended to offer the maximum incentives for employers to add workers, as well as to increase wages and working hours for current employees.
With the unemployment rate at 10 percent, the administration also wants a policy that can have an immediate effect.
“The president’s plan is to make the credit retroactive to Jan. 1 of this year, so employers can go out and start hiring right now,” said Alan B. Krueger, assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy. Employers would have the option of receiving the tax credit on a quarterly estimated basis, which would get the money into their hands earlier in the year and provide an added incentive to hire.
Mr. Krueger said the plan contained provisions to prevent abuse by employers seeking to get the tax credit and wage bonus by, for example, replacing a full-time worker with two part-time ones making the same total salary. The rules would also prevent companies from renaming themselves or merging to claim the credit.
“We’re not going to let you game the system to take advantage of the tax credit, unless you’re doing right by your workers,” Mr. Obama said in Baltimore.
One criticism of wage subsidies like the one in the 1970s, which Mr. Krueger said served in some ways as a model for the Obama administration’s proposal, is that they benefit employers that would have hired new workers anyway.
At its peak, the 1977-78 program, established during the Carter administration, directly subsidized some 2.1 million new workers, the Congressional Budget Office found. But it is impossible to know what hiring would have been without the credit. Only a tiny fraction of employers that knew about the credit at the time said it had prompted them to hire more workers, one study found.
Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, said the new proposal addressed that problem by encouraging all forms of payroll expansion, not just hiring. “We have very much been emphasizing that you get a tax cut not only for hiring additional workers but also for raising wages, increasing work hours and creating better-paid jobs,” he said. “We view this as having all the benefits of a normal tax cut, plus the extra benefit of job and wage incentives.”
In combining a tax credit for new workers with a wage bonus for payroll expansion, the administration’s proposal resembles elements from other recent proposals.
Under a plan announced this week by Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, companies that hire an unemployed worker would not have to pay the Social Security payroll tax on that worker for the duration of 2010. Another plan, put forward last October by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, emphasizes expanding payrolls. It would refund 15 percent of new payroll costs in 2010 and 10 percent in 2011.
Timothy J. Bartik, an author of the institute’s plan, estimated on Friday that the president’s proposal would create at least one million jobs at a cost of $30,000 a job. “It will not solve the United States’ current employment crisis, but it will make a significant dent in our employment problems,” said Mr. Bartik, an economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.
The National Federation of Independent Business said it would prefer to see a payroll tax holiday extended to “all small employers, not just to employers that can afford to increase wages,” but the Obama administration believes such a plan would not do enough to stimulate hiring or wage increases. Such a plan would also provide a bigger benefit for higher-paid workers, while under the Obama plan, companies would not get credit for increasing wages on employees making more than $106,000, the maximum annual wage subject to Social Security taxes.
Even so, Mr. Obama himself left room for negotiation. “I’m open to any good ideas from Democrats or Republicans,” he said in Baltimore. “The key thing is it’s time to put America back to work.”
Come Explore the 1st TASTE OF DOWNTOWN!
You are invited to the first Taste of Downtown at the Waterfront. On March 24 – 25, 2010 from 6pm-9pm, some of your favorite Downtown restaurants will set out their best fare at the band shell at Pine Avenue Circle. Stroll from table to table and sample all that Downtown restaurants have to offer!
Tickets will be on sale at the event, $1 for 1 ticket or a booklet of 12 tickets for just $10 – if you buy two booklets or more, you’ll receive a free ticket to the Aquarium of the Pacific!
Tables and seating will be provided, but feel free to bring your own chair or blanket and enjoy the ocean view, while live music fills the air.
Participating Restaurants:
Aladdin Grill and Cafe
Auld Dubliner
Bubba Gump
Buono’s
Fuego at the Maya
Mai Tai Bar
Outback Steakhouse
Parkers’ Lighthouse
PF Chang’s
See you there!
How to get customers on Facebook and Twitter
When Jim Amos announced the opening of Tasti D-Lite‘s new store in Nashville last July, he got an unexpected publicity boost. Country music star and Nashville resident Taylor Swift took it upon herself to promote the opening, sending an enthusiastic Twitter message to her 800,000 followers on the social networking service. “We’re getting a Tasti D-Lite in Nashville,” Swift wrote. “YES!!”
Amos, who became CEO of Tasti D-Lite in 2007 after leading a buyout of the company, was certainly pleased, but high-profile endorsements of his product have become almost the norm. Since its founding in New York City in 1987, Tasti D-Lite, which sells frozen dairy desserts that taste like ice cream but are lower in fat and calories, had grown with the help of plenty of celebrity endorsements and prominent placements in television shows like Sex and the City.
But as Amos looked to expand beyond New York City, where most of Tasti D-Lite’s 60 stores are located, he decided to focus on winning endorsements of a more pedestrian kind: those made by regular customers on social networks. “The celebrities helped us with word of mouth before the technology was there,” says Amos. “But now with Twitter and Facebook, regular customers are having conversations that can be used to build our brand.” Amos imagined thousands of happy customers raving about his company’s low-calorie desserts to their online pals.
The strategy makes sense. Both Twitter, with some 60 million monthly users, and Facebook, with more than 350 million, encourage people to spread the word about rock bands, television shows, and companies they love. (Users do this by “following” a person or company on Twitter or becoming a “fan” on Facebook.) The services have helped turn C-list celebrities into hot commodities, insurgent political campaigns into well-funded machines, and struggling companies into hip brands. But how do you get followers if you are not famous? And how can you persuade people to endorse a seemingly mundane company or product?
It’s not easy. “Most people won’t spontaneously want to become fans of your company,” says Victoria Ransom, the CEO of Wildfire Interactive, a Palo Alto, California, company that specializes in helping businesses attract fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. “You have to give customers a reason to engage with your brand.” For anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars, Ransom’s company will build you a Facebook application designed to attract new fans to your company’s page. The applications typically try to entice users with a contest — say, a chance to win a $50 gift certificate — or a coupon. Once a customer clicks on the link, she is directed to a page that asks her to input her Facebook account information. When the customer completes the form, a link to the promotion typically will be published on her Facebook page, which can attract more fans.
Wildfire’s approach worked for Edible Arrangements, a Wallingford, Connecticut, franchiser that sells fruit baskets in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. In a ploy to boost holiday sales, the company announced in October that it would be giving away a coupon that could be redeemed for a $15 box of chocolate-dipped fruit to the first 100,000 people who became a fan of the company on Facebook. Within four days, Edible Arrangements had reached its goal. Many of the new fans went on to make a purchase. Sales were up more than 10 percent compared with the previous year. “The Facebook program exposed a lot of new customers to the company,” says Stephen Thomas, the company’s vice president of marketing. Edible Arrangements paid about $15,000 for the promotion, plus the cost of the free merchandise.
If you can’t afford to give stuff away, you can always just ask customers to give you some Facebook love for free. That was the approach taken by Powell’s Books, a bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Beginning in 2008, the company placed small graphics at the bottom of every page on its website and e-mail newsletters. These little advertisements entreated customers to “Find us on Facebook” and “Follow us on Twitter.” For a month, Powell’s even used the marquee in front of its store to ask for Facebook fans, which was surprisingly effective, says Megan Zabel, who manages the company’s social media efforts.
Over the course of a year, the company went from roughly 3,000 fans on Facebook to 38,500 and from a few hundred followers on Twitter to more than 12,000. Although the campaign has not directly produced a large revenue increase, Zabel says the fans’ and followers’ online purchases have more than offset the cost of the campaign. In addition, having a large fan base creates the impression of a vibrant community that she thinks will help Powell’s in the long run. “The more fans we have, the more people are proselytizing our brand,” she says. “Word of mouth is one of the most powerful selling tools.”
Tasti D-Lite’s social networking strategy represents a new twist on the approach taken by Powell’s. Rather than simply asking for followers, in January, the company began asking its customers to turn over their Twitter account information as part of Tasti D-Lite’s loyalty program. Frequent shoppers get a point for every dollar they spend and an extra point if they post a message about their purchase on Twitter. Fifty points gets a customer a free medium cone or cup.
To get points for tweeting, a customer submits his Twitter username and password. Then, every time he buys something at a store, he swipes a loyalty card at the register. Tasti D-Lite’s point-of-sale system automatically logs in to his Twitter account and sends a tweet informing his followers of the purchase. “I just earned 9 TastiRewards points at Tasti D-Lite New Rochelle,” was the Twitter message posted on the account of Drew King after he and his wife treated themselves to dessert in mid-January. It included a link to a website that encouraged King’s friends to sign up for the program.
Creating the world’s first tweeting cash register didn’t come cheap — Tasti D-Lite spent more than $10,000 to modify its point-of-sale system — but Amos expects the program to pay for itself as more customers sign up for it. “It’s going to be very profitable,” he says. “Word-of-mouth marketing has always been extremely important to this company, but Twitter has the capacity to increase word-of-mouth discussions exponentially. It’s like the difference between snail mail and e-mail.”
Follow Max Chafkin at @chafkin
Follow Inc. magazine at @incmagazine
The Way I Work: Matt Mullenweg (founder of Word Press and Automattic)
As a high school student, Matt Mullenweg worked on open-source software projects in his bedroom. Seven years later, he still does most of his work from home. Mullenweg, 25, is the founder of Automattic, the company behind the open-source blogging tool WordPress and a handful of other software projects. WordPress.com powers 12 million blogs, including those of The New York Times, which invested in Mullenweg’s company last year. Although Automattic’s headquarters is within walking distance of Mullenweg’s San Francisco apartment, he rarely visits the place. Instead, he spends his days either traveling the world to meet WordPress fanatics or holed up in his home office, where he often blasts Jay-Z and writes software code into the wee hours.
In the morning, I have certain aspirations. One of my goals is to avoid looking at the computer or checking e-mail for at least an hour after I wake up. I also try to avoid alarm clocks as much as possible, because it’s just nice to wake up without one. I leave my shades up a bit, so I usually wake up about an hour after the sun rises. I usually don’t eat breakfast, and I avoid caffeine. I’ve got enough stimulating things in my life already. I also avoid morning meetings: The earliest meeting I’ll do is 11 a.m.
I like to read first thing in the morning. I’m addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I’m not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months. Reading is my break. Otherwise, I go to sleep and wake up thinking about WordPress.
I travel a lot, but when I’m in San Francisco, I usually work from home. Everyone else works from home, too. We’re a virtual company. We recently got an office on Pier 38, a five-minute walk from my apartment. I’ll go to there once a week, usually Thursdays, and for board meetings, which happen about once every two months. We leased it so we wouldn’t have to keep borrowing conference rooms from our VC partners. It’s kind of sad; we have this great space right on the water — and six days a week, it’s empty. Of the 40 people working for the company, eight are in the Bay Area, but that’s just a coincidence. They could be anywhere in the world.
We all communicate using P2, something we launched that allows users to publish group blogs in WordPress. It’s a bit like Twitter, but the updates come in real time. With P2, we can share code and ideas instantly. There is a dedicated channel for each part of the company, and when there’s a new message, it shows up in red. It may be someone talking about development or what he or she had for breakfast. I also use Skype for one-on-one and mini group chats.
In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors — a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I’ll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC. I also have a laptop, which I have with me all the time, whether I’m going overseas or to the doctor’s office. I’m pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year. I keep a server for my home network in the closet. I really enjoy computer networking. I sometimes do tech support for our employees who live in the Bay Area.
One of my favorite programs that we didn’t make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I’m trying to reduce that. I have a WordPress plug-in that filters all my messages based on the sender’s e-mail address — so high-priority e-mails go into one folder and the rest go into others. Tim Ferriss, who wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, advocates checking e-mail twice a week, but that is too severe for me. Instead, I’m trying to implement Leo Babauta’s approach from The Power of Less. He suggests small steps, like checking e-mail five times a day instead of 10. It’s like dieting: People who binge diet gain it all back. That happens to me with e-mail.
I listen to music every day, a lot of jazz — Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins. I also like Jay-Z and Beyoncé. I have an analog stereo that was hand built in Japan by a guy who makes a few systems a year. The aural experience is mind-blowing. Music helps me when I’m coding, which is still my priority. When you’re coding, you really have to be in the zone. I’ll listen to a single song, over and over on repeat, like a hundred times. And I turn off instant message and e-mail. If you are taken out of the flow, if that little toaster pops up that says you’ve got mail — and you look at it, you’ve lost it. You’re juggling variables and functions and layouts. The moment you look away, it all falls to the ground, and you spend 10 minutes getting it all back in the air again.
I also manage the support, usability, and product development people who are scattered all over the globe, from Alabama to Ireland to Bulgaria. My management strategy is to find extremely self-motivated and talented people and then let them go. There’s no manager looking over your shoulder every day, so you need to be able to completely direct yourself. For every person we hire, we might get 800 applications. We always start people on a contract basis. And many of the people we’ve hired are contributors to the open-source project. It’s what they were doing for fun at night after they’d already worked for eight hours a day, only now they’ll get paid for it.
I’m also the primary person on Akismet, Automattic’s anti-spam software for websites, which we created from scratch. We just added the first engineer six months ago, but for the past four years, it’s been just me. I decided to do it because I was worried about my mom. She hadn’t started a blog yet, but I had this crazy fear that when she did, she’d be bombarded by spam for Viagra and think that had something to do with what I did all day.
I go out for lunch whenever I can. I really enjoy lunches. There’s something very personal about sharing food with someone. It’s a chance to develop personal connections with folks. Often, I’ll have lunch with Toni Schneider, my CEO. He and I get along superwell, which is one of the reasons I think the business has worked. He brings the gravitas because he’s a digital native — the former CEO of Oddpost, a webmail company Yahoo acquired in 2004. We’ll go to lunch at 12:30 and stay until 5. If I’m in town, I’ll get together with Toni as frequently as we can, because we really enjoy each other’s company.
I’m very disorganized. I’m wildly late all the time and really bad at keeping a schedule. That is one of the many reasons I love Maya [Desai]. Her official title is “anti-chaos engineer,” which is another way of saying office manager. She does a bunch of things for Automattic, including streamlining my schedule and arranging my travel. Last year, I was on the road for 200 days and clocked 175,000 miles. That’s seven times around the globe. The bulk of my travel is to WordCamps. We did the first one in San Francisco in 2006. We invited people from the local tech community to come talk about open source. Later, we decided that, rather than having everyone come to us, we would go wherever people want to have the camp. So instead of paying thousands of dollars to go halfway across the world, it’s 20 bucks to go down the street. And for that, you get a full day of great speakers, a T-shirt, lunch, and an open bar. Since then, there have been hundreds of WordCamps in countries such as Argentina, Japan, and China. We host one annually in the Bay Area, but the rest are organized by local tech communities.
Of the 45 or so WordCamps a year, I go to about half. If I went to all of them, I would be traveling practically every weekend. I open up each event with my “State of the Word” speech, which gives a broad overview of WordPress and the history of open source. I feel it’s my responsibility to spread these ideas, because they have had such a profound effect on my life. The smallest gatherings have 50 participants, and the largest have about 500. In the Philippines, people treated me like I was a rock star. After the camp was over, I spent two hours taking pictures and signing autographs. People were like, “Will you sign my laptop?” “Will you sign my badge?” “Will you sign my body part?”
I use my camera when I travel to document my day. The photos are autobiographical — because my memory’s so bad, I’ll often forget everything about a trip. Then, usually on planes, I process, upload, and edit those photos on my laptop and then craft a narrative of what I’ve seen throughout each day. It’s like a visual diary. But it’s hard to keep up with: I have photos from 2005 I haven’t posted on my blog yet. On a trip to Vietnam last February, I took 2,000 to 3,000 photos. They say the difference between an amateur photographer and a pro is the amateur shows you everything. I’m somewhere in between. I’ll post maybe a quarter of how many I took.
I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog. But now my attitude is, If I’m not blogging for myself, it’s not worth it. So I don’t post once a day, only when it feels natural. Some people complain — they say, “Write more about WordPress; we don’t want to see photos of kids in Vietnam,” but I don’t really care. I really like posting photos of places I’ve been. For my 25th birthday last January, I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. The Spanish is going all right, but I’m failing the cooking one. I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator, you will find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. But I will reach the photo goal. By March, I’d taken about 6,000 photos and posted 2,000 of them.
People write a lot of comments on my blog, and I actually read and manually approve every comment before it gets posted. I think the broken-windows theory — that a broken window or graffiti in a neighborhood begets more of the same — applies online. One bad comment engenders 10 more. I’ll happily approve a comment from someone who completely disagrees with everything I believe in, but if I get a positive comment with a curse word in it, I’ll edit it out. My blog is like my living room. If someone was acting out in my house, I’d ask that person to leave.
I look at our numbers every day — usually after 5 p.m. — via an internal dashboard, where we track 500 to 600 statistics, from the number of words people are posting to how often they’re logging in to WordPress.com. I wrote a lot of the software, and I’m most interested in the activity numbers — how many people use the site every day. All the numbers update instantly.
I do my best stuff midmorning and superlate at night, from 1 to 5 in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep. I actually do need sleep. I just sleep all the time. I’ll catch naps in the afternoon, or I’ll take a 20-minute snooze in the office — just all the time. Our business is 24 hours. Our guys in Europe come online at midnight. Sometimes, I will go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 a.m., and then go to work.
For WordPress, we’re trying to set up a community that will be around 10 to 30 years from now, that’s independent from the whims of the market. I feel like the nonelected benevolent dictator: It’s my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software project in a way that reflects their interests. Last year, I probably met 2,000 or 3,000 people who make their living from WordPress. We want to be like Google, eBay, Amazon — they all enable other people to make far more money than they capture. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create a movement.
My mom started a blog a couple of weeks ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my mom to use.
