The Week in SmallBiz

I never cease to be amazed when I interview high-powered, high-profile individuals who can't readily spit out a three- or four-word description of who they are or what they do without hemming, hawing or resorting to jargon.

Honestly, it happens more often than not. "How shall I identify you in the interview?" is not infrequently met by an embarrassed admission that the person "doesn't really have a title" or isn't quite sure what his/her title is.

"What does your company do, in a nutshell?" often elicits stammering or - worse - a regurgitated sound byte so twisted with marketing lingo that it makes no sense.

If you can't fluidly describe you or your company in simple, engaging language, you can't get customers, investors or potential partners interested. And you certainly can't impress the press.

Last week, I attended a competition in which start up firms give the "fast pitch" their best shot. Read about it in my Smart Answers column.

In my Smart Answers podcast, I interview a fascinating guy who has written a book about how brain research should change the way we manage people and relate to clients.

I really liked his observation that thinking new thoughts actually changes our brains physically, as new neural pathways are forged.

Guess what? New ideas really can change us - and change the world!

Financial Downfall

The Columbia Journalism Review has a hard-hitting (read: highly critical) review in its current edition of the business press and what they did or didn't report on in the lead-up to the mortgage meltdown last fall.

While many reporters and publications have been defensive about the accusations that they did not do the kind of investigative stories they could and should have, CJR concludes that the accusers are largely correct.

The information about sleazy sub-prime mortgage lenders and their ugly practices was reported on by a few media outlets and was ripe for further investigation. Unfortunately, it went largely unexplored, the CJR review says.

There are a number of reasons for the failure to uncover the danger more fully, but no good excuses for why it wasn't done. The whole article is worth reading, but here's the conclusion:

First, the public should be aware—warned, so to be speak—that its interests and those of the business press may not be in perfect alignment. The business press exists within the Wall Street and corporate subculture and understandably must adopt its idioms and customs, the better to translate them for the rest of us. Still, it relies on those institutions for its stories. Burning a bridge is hard. It is far easier for news bureaucracies to accept ever-narrowing frames of discourse, frames forcefully pushed by industry, even if those frames marginalize and eventually exclude the business press’s own great investigative traditions.

One bright note in the piece is the shout-out to Los Angeles Times' reporter Scott Reckard, who did some great investigative work on Ameriquest in 2005. Scott and his family are friends; he and my husband worked at the same small newspaper way back when.

Chicken or Egg?

Remember when you were just starting out on your own and you couldn't get a credit card? You needed a good (or any) credit history in order to qualify for a card, the companies told you. But without a credit card, how were you supposed to rack up a credit history?

(Yes, I'm dating myself to the "bad old days." College students get credit cards mailed to them before they even leave the nest today - though let's hope that will be changing soon.)

It was one of those catch-22 situations that also face a lot of frustrated entrepreneurs. Read about it in my Smart Answers column this week.

My L.A. Times column answers questions about social networking, intellectual property and buying a recruiting firm.

Take The Oath

Honor. It's a word that you don't hear much anymore, except maybe in reference to antiquated notions of chivalry or, horrifically, as an Orwellian descriptor for murder in repressive, male-dominated societies.

So I was struck, late last year, how often the word came up when I interviewed Turney Stevens, dean of Lipscomb's College of Business.

We were talking about ethics in business, which became something of an antiquated notion itself in recent years, as we have all sadly discovered.

But dishonor, greed and outright fraud is nothing new. My son wanted to watch "The Smartest Guys in the Room," the excellent documentary about the rise and fall of energy giant Enron, so we rewatched it with him recently. All of us struck by how much of what it concludes applies directly to today's financial disasters and fraud.

The more things change, as they say, the more they stay the same.

There may be a fresh breeze blowing, however, among some young people who plan corporate careers but don't want to wind up as the stars of "bad guy documentaries" in 15 or 20 years.

This NPR story about a student-proposed "MBA Hippocratic Oath" gave me some hope that "honor" won't be such a rare word in the future.

Global Marketplace

What's the best way to configure your company website so that it appeals to international customers?

Check out the advice I dug up in this week's Smart Answers column.

Moms on the Net

Thank goodness there were no blogs back when my children were babies.

Not only did I not have time to sit down and read anything for more than a minute, I surely did not have time to write for any publication that wasn't paying me by the word.

And while I'm sure I had brilliant parenting insights at the time, I have a feeling anything I actually wrote down would have come out like a screed, a rant or a trough of self-pity. (My children are wonderful, but they were "active" babies and toddlers, to employ the proper euphemism, and "challenging" to raise.)

There is a whole generation of mothers today, however, who are recording their experiences online in so-called "mommy blogs."

Entrepreneurs are beginning to realize that these women can provide powerful marketing and sales boosts, but there are rules about interacting with them on behalf of your business.

Check out this week's Smart Answers column to read about some of them.

I Get Questions ...

Entrepreneurs are notorious optimists - they almost have to be, to take the risks required to start their own ventures.

I'm an optimist too, but I temper my sunny outlook with a large dose of realism. (It doesn't always save me from making dumb decisions, but it helps.)

I love assisting people who want to start their own businesses, and particularly relish hearing from those who took my advice and have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

But some of the inquiries I get seem to come from untempered optimists who need a reality check, or those who are so focused on bootstrapping that they may fall into the "penny-wise, pound-foolish" category.

My Smart Answers column this week deals with the latter possibility: A couple who run two businesses merged under one financial and legal umbrella. That's not a good idea, and not even necessary in this era of cheap, easy entity formation available online.

I recently got another question from a would-be entrepreneur who wants to start not one, but two companies: One in the television and film industry and the other in food production.

Ambitious, but tough. Starting one business is difficult enough, as any entrepreneur will tell you. And both the entertainment and the food industries are costly and complex to break into, particularly for those with no experience in or ties to existing businesses. It can be done, but it's not wise to do it simultaneously.

Another would-be entrepreneur wrote me to ask about starting a social networking site, tossing out as an afterthought: "Oh yeah, I have no money."

Well, it's easier to start a home-based, online company with no resources than it is to open a brick-and-mortar firm. However, it's always smart to save, beg or borrow startup capital before starting a company.

The number one reason businesses fail, the experts say, is because they don't have enough money to get them through the year (or more) it may take to become profitable. In most cases, it's better to hold off your startup until you get the information you need, do the research that will improve your odds and amass the cash that will allow you to set your company up right.