Entrepreneurial

Tina Bean’s wish for 2011 is that people will open their wallets more.

“People don’t want to spend money,” said Bean, the owner of Port Arthur, Texas-based pet food dealer, Five Star Feed Store. “They are buying necessities and that’s it.”

Annual sales at Five Star Feed Store have declined approximately $100,000 since the recession, said Bean. She has been forced to lay off three workers and has given pay cuts to the remaining five. The cutbacks have also had a personal effect. “For a long time, I didn’t draw a paycheck,” she said.

Bean’s experience is highlighted by recent financial data from Sageworks Inc., which showed a number of sectors are suffering from declining sales. The report analyzed 2010 sales, profit per employee and payroll as a percentage of sales data for private companies in six major industries: construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade, healthcare and education.

All the sectors except health and education experienced a decrease in annual sales. Manufacturing was down 3.6 percent, wholesale trade declined about 4 percent and retail trade dipped a little more than 1 percent in sales for 2010.

Construction showed the most marked decline as sales plummeted by more than 13 percent this year, but that was an anomaly according to Mike Lubansky, a senior financial analyst at Sageworks.

– Lisa Gansky is the author of “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing” and the Mesh Directory live. The opinions expressed are her own. –

Disturbed by the sight of dead Christmas trees lying on the curb after the holiday, Los Angeles-based landscaper Scott Martin had an idea. Why not rent people living Christmas trees?

He set up a website and offered different types of live trees in a variety of sizes. Customers specified which tree, what size and on which day it would be delivered and where. Scott and his team also offered decorations for the trees they rented. After the holiday, each customer selected a day for the tree to be picked-up and Scott and his team even recycled the gift wrap and packaging. The trees were either returned to the nursery to be cared for and sold later or donated. An all around joyful holiday win for the customers, Scott and team, the community and the environment.

– Domenic Rinaldi is president and managing partner of Chicagoland Sunbelt, a business brokerage firm that focuses on helping people buy, grow and sell businesses in Chicago and the surrounding Midwest area. The views expressed are his own. –

There were many brokers, accountants and wealth mangers advising clients to sell their business last year in anticipation of the Bush-era tax laws expiring on Dec. 31, 2010. It appeared until very recently that both the capital gains and ordinary income tax cuts would expire on that date, leaving owners subject to at least a 20-percent tax increase on their assets.

Those who are planning to sell in 2011 may be breathing a sigh of relief now that the tax cuts have been extended for another two years. But while two years may seem like a long time, it’s important for owners to begin considering when the right time for them to sell might be. Eventually, these taxes will expire and after this two year extension, we may never see rates this low again.

– Neil Patel is a serial entrepreneur that blogs about business at Quick Sprout and is the co-founder of KISSmetrics. The views expressed are his own. –

Is it me or is everyone these days trying to get rich quick? Not only am I meeting more and more people who don’t want to work hard to make money, but they are starting to get into new business ventures that they are clueless about.

I know the grass always looks greener on the other side, but it really isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, those lucrative businesses are making people millions of dollars, but it’s probably doing that for less than 0.3 percent of the people in that industry.

– Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. He is the author of “Mastering the VC Game” and writes the blog “Seeing Both Sides“. The views expressed are his own. –

One of my favorite business books of all time is Patrick Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”. Like all books by Lencioni, it begins with a short fable in a corporate setting of a management team that is operating dysfunctionally. Then he provides a framework that analyzes the situation and draws out the general lessons as to why teams operate poorly together and how to systematically combat it.

The following pyramid graphic summarizes his advice:

Each of the layers of the pyramid resonate with me (which is probably why I have this pyramid printed and hung up in my office), but the one that I always come back to and re-read is “Fear of Conflict”. Again and again, I see management teams and boards of directors shy away from conflict.

– Lew Prince is managing partner of Vintage Vinyl, an independent music store in St. Louis. He is also a member of Business for Shared Prosperity, which has circulated a petition against extending the Bush-era tax cuts. The views expressed are his own. –

As a small business owner for more than 30 years, I have to be reality based.

I budget and make decisions that consider both short- and long-term realities. My company wouldn’t last a week if we kept repeating mistakes.

The Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans were a big mistake. We should let them expire, not repeat the mistake by extending them. It’s an illusion that it will be easier to end them after a two-year extension.

– Kelly Phillips Erb is a small business owner and practicing tax attorney at the Erb Law Firm in Philadelphia. She is also the author of the popular Tax Girl blog. The views expressed are her own. –

Let’s get a few things straight from the start. I don’t like the so-called Bush tax cuts. I don’t believe in trickle-down economics. And I don’t think it makes good fiscal sense to make the tax cuts permanent.

Yet, as the calendar creeps closer to December 31, I find myself in support of extending the tax cuts.

– Jeremy Reis is the founder and president of That Network, an interactive publishing firm. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are his own. –

WikiLeaks is in the news due to their release of U.S. government files, but for many years the site has been releasing both government and corporate secrets – and with a pending release of files from a large U.S. bank, it provides an opportunity to think about the lessons this teaches business managers.

A business generates a lot of internal documents from the inane emails to complex, secret business processes that provide us a competitive advantage. Learn five lessons every manager should know from the WikiLeaks affair.

1. There are no completely secure systems

– Adam Hoeksema is the founder and CEO of startup consultancy firm ExecutivePlan. This article appeared on Under30CEO. The views expressed are his own. –

For most entrepreneurs these days, funding is nearly impossible to come by.

According to the report titled, “Important Things for Entrepreneurs to Know about Angel Investors” and distributed by the Angel Capital Education Foundation, only 1 to 4 percent of applicants successfully raise angel investment capital. So before you ruin your chance at securing investors, make sure you have not committed any of the following deadly mistakes.

1. Wait until you need it. So many entrepreneurs make the mistake of waiting until they need the capital “tomorrow” to begin the process of seeking funding. Make no mistake about it, the process of raising capital can take months and months. Even a simple loan will require enough paperwork to kill a small tree. Ironically bankers and investors are more likely to provide you with additional capital when you don’t need it. So don’t wait until you have an immediate need to begin the funding process.

Katharine Herrup is the Opinion Editor for Reuters.com. This is the last of a three-part series on Summit Series. Read Part I: “A new kind of currency” and Part II: “Entrepreneurs set sail”.

Every member of Summit Series sold their belongings or shipped them back home to their parents’ place so they could travel with just one suitcase and live in different cities every six weeks. The idea is to meet “interesting” people face-to-face who are doing something good.

“It’s a time in our life to see the world,” Summit Series co-creator Elliott Bisnow said. “And to do that and to live with your best friends and work with them is incredible.”