This is a guest post by Tom Becker. Tom works at Money Choices, one of the leading comparison sites in Australia. You can read some of his work on their company blog.

Entering into a business venture of your own can be an exciting time in your life. A time filled with energy, optimism, and dreams of what lies ahead. And as you begin your road to business ownership, you might not want to consider the worst that could happen, however; it is often from the worst events that we can learn the most valuable lessons.

There are plenty of lessons that you can learn from running a business. There are certain things however, that unfortunately you might learn better from failure. This is where learning from others’ experiences can be an invaluable asset to the successful operation of your business. Rather than make the following five mistakes yourself, you can instead …

Before I tell you about my love hate relationship with marketing, I thought that I’d give you a little background about what I do. When I’m not blogging or helping my wife run our online store, I run a small electrical engineering team for a startup company in silicon valley.

Photo by Perigrinari

Most of my day consists of managing a small team, sitting behind a computer doing designs, architecting features to go into the next version of the product, giving presentations and going to meetings.

My primary focus at work is to put out the best product possible for our company but I’m never directly involved in selling it. In other words, I don’t do a lick of marketing at my day job.

Prior to starting my own business, I used to believe that putting out extraordinary products was the key to success in business. I used to believe that …

Before I even begin my review of “Smarter Faster Cheaper” by David Siteman Garland, I just want to warn you that I’m biased. I’m biased because I’m a huge fan of David, his television show and what he’s accomplished. He truly has a unique talent for public speaking, writing and getting people excited about entrepreneurship. That and he’s genuine, down to earth and easy to talk to too. It’s no wonder that he has a huge following to show for it. So, when he sent me a copy of his latest book for review, I was more than happy to read it and spread the word.

David and I started our blogs at around the same time and I randomly met him when he left a comment on one of my articles. That one little comment led to an email conversation and before you …

The other day, a friend of mine called to let me know that after a year of dragging her feet, she finally decided to take action on launching an online store. And I was ecstatic! One of the reasons I was so excited was that her story was so similar to ours when my wife and I first started out with our online business. Her goal was to start a family, quit her job and stay at home with her child without sacrificing her income. An online business would be perfect!

Photo By Mild Mannered Photographer

As we spoke on the phone, I became completely engulfed by her enthusiasm and her energy. And after about 5 minutes, she made me genuinely excited about her products which she wants to sell to the baby boomer market.
Oh Steve!! The best part is that I’ve made sooo …