How Midlife Crisis Helped Spark A New Business

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http://heartschallenger.com/ 

I had my midlife crisis early, at age 25. I was designing uniforms and interiors for Andre Balazs Properties, including the Standard Hotels and the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. I got the job when I was a single mother - it was good money, but after four years of feeling that I'd end up working for someone else forever, I decided to launch a truck-art empire, an idea that came from pondering the typical ice cream trucks of childhood.

Why did they sell only one type of product? It didn't make sense - an American truck with no international flavors, considering all the nationalities that make up this country. I liked the idea of a shop on wheels that sold a mix of art, ice cream and toys - an entertainment source outside a venue.

I do taste tests in different communities to find my products. I go to Armenian delis and Little Tokyo and buy the novelties, then work backwards, tracking down distributors online. Our stock depends on what's available at that moment to be shipped from overseas, and includes Japanese ice cream mochi balls, Russian ice cream bars and white-chocolate hearts filled with raspberry sorbet. Some can be shipped to the U.S. only three times a year.

My first big gig was ArthurFest, a two-day music festival held in Los Angeles two years ago. More than 3,000 people attended, and it was just me standing on piles of empty cartons. I didn't stop working for 12 hours, serving a line of 40 customers the entire show.

Now I have three trucks and ten employees. We charge customers $350 to $3,000 an hour for us to be at an event; some clients, at after-hours parties and bar mitzvahs, buy out the truck's inventory.

At gigs like music festivals, we sell our treats at cost, turning a profit on nonperishables such as buttons and CDs from local artists. We don't park and sell products on the street. We just did South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin and are booked to work festivals in London, Paris and Tokyo this year.

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Online Business Survival: 3 Ways to Boost Your Internet Startup Profits

Pablo Francisco - Jackie Chan/Jet Li (Stand-up Comedy)

With business opportunity abound on the Internet, more and more people are looking to start an online home based business of their own. Lured by the ease and low cost of doing online business, they hope to either supplement or totally replace their offline incomes. Unfortunately, many Internet startups fail within 5 years as they cannot generate sufficient profits to sustain their operations. These virtual business owners have neither the profit generating skills nor knowledge to do so. In this article I'll will explore 3 strategies you as an online startup owner can adopt to increase the profits of your virtual business and thus boost its chance of survival.

Out of the many ways to generate income, developing and hosting a virtual community requires minimum content input from the business owner. Look for example at MySpace or YouTube. The contents of these sites are all provided by the communities. You instead concentrate on the supporting frameworks and structures to facilitate the interaction amongst the members. With a massive community, you can then improve your profits by selling advertising space or earning pay-per-click income and so on. Another good way to profit from the captive audience is to encourage them to subscribe to your online newsletter.

Offering your prospects and customers a free subscription to your newsletter will help you achieve higher volumes of sales. A prospect normally needs to be contacted 5-7 times regularly before making the first purchase. The email newsletter serves as a convenient and low cost solution to keeping in touch with the prospects. It is also an avenue to remind existing customers to replenish their supplies of regular purchases or to promote new products to them. You should not communicate solely through newsletter though and should explore other means as well.

Your customers are sophisticated and comfortable with handling and receiving information from a wide variety of channels. Email is the easiest and the most wide reaching means as everyone online has at least one email account, with many having two or three or even more. Blogs and RSS feeds are two other common communication channels to reach the buyers. Rising in popularity are audio and visual communication as evidenced by the many podcast and video blogging everywhere. Different buyers prefer to acquire product information through different communication means. Presenting the same information in different formats also enhances the product experience of the buyers. It makes sense, therefore, to use as many of the communication channels as you can to reach existing customers and gain some new ones.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of strategies to raise the profits of your online business for its survival. Nonetheless, adopting these straightforward ideas of hosting a community, starting a newsletter, and communicating in various channels, either together or individually, will help improve the bottom line of your Internet startup. After you become familiar with these strategies, you can explore other ways to expand and increase your online business profits. Eventually, you will succeed in living off entirely from your online incomes.

KokPang Yeo, an Internet marketing junkie, strongly believes in the future of online business. He runs a membership site that provides step-by-step marketing instructions, free traffic generating reports, and discounted resell rights products. Check it out at http://www.eMoney-Wants-You.com to take advantage of these cool stuff and more.
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