Author Archive | ecompanies

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine. JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded […]

Starting a business is an exciting time, and its understandable that you want to introduce your new company to the world and believe that everyone – young or old, male or female, urban or rural, you name it – needs what you’re selling. As a small business owner, it’s important to feel enthusiastic about your […]

Small businesses are the backbone of most rural communities, but maybe more important than the businesses a community currently has is the ones it will have in the future. Will there be more or fewer? As another class of graduates leaves school behind, how many of them plan to run their own businesses? How many […]

    Getting ready to open the doors to your new business? Before you get started, you may want to spend some time evaluating what is important to you and your company. There are a million details that need to be attended to as a new business owner, and setting yourself up for success means […]

A lot of people think that starting a business is easy. This is not the case at all, in fact, it’s much harder than you’d think. After all, you need to think about the financial and legal repercussions, and even your reputation too. Be True to Yourself Before you even think about starting your business, […]

If a few years ago choosing a country to open a company was quite easy, nowadays competitiveness among governments has made the decision a hard one, especially when coming from a country like the Netherlands. While the Dutch already offer an excellent infrastructure and corporate taxation system, Europe has several countries which boast similar facilities […]

No company can do without the right collaboration tools. Wrong decisions can quickly lead to dead ends and cause growing pains. There are now multiple excellent tools for data sharing, teamwork or project management in day-to-day business. However, some software products are prohibitively expensive for startups in the early stages. We have selected ten cloud […]

Thanks to an always-evolving landscape and the nearly limitless availability of engagement resources, it feels like marketing gets more difficult with each passing year. This wealth of options, in fact, can put marketers in analysis paralysis while they try to figure out which direction to go. Social media, for one, has potential as a digital […]

The first Rocking the Daisies festival left its founders more than R400 000 in debt. Craig Bright and Brian Little decided to keep going anyway. It took four years to settle that debt, but they knew they were breaking into an industry notorious for low margins and even losses. When Brian and Craig first decided […]

What started out as a batch of greeting cards on Etsy is now a stationery brand available at Michael’s craft stores across the U.S. The characters featured in Cynthia Koo’s Wonton In A Million product line, which are based on dim sum foods like shu mai and dumplings, have attracted an enthusiastic fanbase. Koo’s mission […]