Beginning Business Blog

Amanda  Plays a Mean Blues Harp When Amanda Grzadzielewski was four years old, her parents purchased her a piano and paid for piano lessons.    Three years later she was with her parents visiting Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market when she heard two musicians playing and talking with a crowd of listeners that surrounded them.   Her reaction was to say to herself, “I want to do that.” Fast forward to 2012, and Amanda and parents have moved permanently to Poulsbo near Seattle and the University of Washington where her father studied mathematics.   True to her dream, she’s busking for passersby at Pike Street Market to earn an income, to find performance opportunities and to find students in her three instruments of choice, piano, guitar (since age 14) and harp (the past three years). Arriving in Poulsbo just this past June, she went to work introducing herself to business owners and civic associations, printing up a business card then dropping by...

Busking at Seattle’s Pike Place Market If you’re not familiar with the terms “busker” and “busking”, well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary the word busk is an English verb dating to a 17 th century French word meaning “to sell” that came to mean “to play music in the street or other public place for voluntary donations” in 19 th century Britain.   So a busker plays music in the street. . . you get the idea.   And busking can be a profitable business for many street performers, at times the musician’s only source of income. One place in this country with a strong busking tradition is New Orleans where musicians, often world-class players, set up in the streets of the French Quarter with a hat on the sidewalk for tips - usually seeded by the busker with a few one and five dollar bills to suggest an appropriate donation.   Over one three week period I watched a succession of wonderful musicians busking in front of the world-famous Cafe' Du Monde'. ...

A set of Gerber-12 steak knives circa 1950.   Source:   houseinprogress Y ou might think this is the story of a struggling knife maker making it big through sheer dint of effort.  The story of Gerber Legendary Blades is one of serendipity and the Christmas of 1939.  The name Gerber in hometown Portland, Oregon, is often associated with the regional advertising agency started by Joseph Gerber in 1910.  The agency dealt in advertising, which in those days required the agency have their own printing presses in addition to the standard staff of writers, artists and account managers.  By 1939, Gerber Advertising was one of three large agencies in Portland, with a staff of around thirty employees. As a present to the agency's clients, Joseph Gerber, commissioned a knife maker to create 25 sets of steak knives which were delivered at Christmas that year.  The knives were such a hit that catalog retailer Abercrombie & Fitch made a big o...

I passed this business some months ago, then found this story on the West Seattle Washington blog.  It is reprinted here due to the interest of so many people - lots of hits ~ Meet West Seattle’s “Psychic Barber”: He KNOWS you need a cut R ick Cook, owner of Rick’s Barber Shop at 5251 California SW (in West Seattle, Washington), has inherited both a sign and a claim to fame: “Psychic Barber.”      You’ve probably laughed, driving along California SW, when out of the corner of your eye you caught a glimpse of two white neon signs next to each other: “Psychic” “Barber.” That reaction was partly by design; after a psychic moved in next door to Rick’s Barber Shop, Rick had a matching white neon “Barber” sign made by the same person who created the “Psychic” sign.      Now, Rick owns the “Psychic” portion of the signage as well, and his front window proudly announces “Psychic Barber.”   The Psychic Barber attention came after Rick had ...

The Burning Man question: " What makes life worth living ?" ~ Larry Harvey , founder, The Burning Man Festival This is not a question economists know how to ask let alone answer.  Yet it is the driving question you must answer when making any life decision such as whether or not to start a business.  Why?  How do you quantify or measure quality of life with numbers?  Figure that out and you'll win a Nobel in Economics. Rather, economists spend their careers quantifying what they can and of necessity ignoring any aspect of quality of life that cannot be set to numbers.  So in the dismal world inhabited by economists, the ONLY reason to start a business is growth as defined by increasing (or decreasing) some numbers of "things", usually money or jobs or efficiency or productivity.  Economists have no language for discussing the core reasons for starting and running a business.  Take Mr. ...

A rnold Schwartzenager once said in a TV interview that “there is so much opportunity in America that most Americans can’t see it” or words to this effect.  Is there a reason that of all American citizens, first and second generation immigrants are by far and away the most likely to start a small business?  They walk onto our shores and see nothing but opportunity to create their own future in their own terms.       Opportunity in the United States (and Canada, too, for that matter) is like the Force in the Star Wars movies -- it surrounds us, binds and gives us our power.  But like anything else, we become satiated and saturated, oblivious to the opportunity that floods our daily existence.  An Opportunity Search is the process seeing opportunity where it lurks, and it lurks all around us. *  *  *       Get a pad of paper and pencil or set a binder to note ideas and to paste articles and ads from magazines ...

“ Choose a business you love and  you will never work a day in your life ”                                 after Confucius T he key to finding the best small business for you is to match your skills, knowledge, experience and aptitudes with a business type most suited to you.  This requires that you develop a very basic marketing skill at finding and identifying business opportunities I call “Opportunity Thinking”.  This is a skill anyone can learn.  Yes, some people will be better than others spotting opportunity, but anyone can learn. What it Opportunity Thinking?   It is the practice of looking at the needs, wants and desires of the people in your community or across the country, and seeing how a product or service can fulfill these needs.  To help you get the idea, let’s look at some examples of...