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Blue Entrepreneurs - Building Teams Tuesday

Dear [fname],

BUILD TEAMS.  You can't do it all yourself. Especially if you seek funding.  What strategies, resources, programs, and sites like Build It With Me and Fair Software do entrepreneurs and business owners use to recruit and manage teams?  Come find out at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Feb. 9 over lunch.

The Roundtable features reduced pricing from our regular seminars and events. Online registration is only $15 for Gold and Tribe members, $25 for everyone else, and includes lunch, through 9PM today. Register now at Dallas Entrepreneurs.com. If you're registering on-site the day of the event, reply with a note or check the web before you leave for any changes.

BUILD CUSTOMERS. In a down economy the #1 source for new business ... is your current customer base. Marketing and lead programs cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to generate a single customer.  Wouldn't you rather spend a few dollars to keep an existing one? 

The Feb. 16 seminar How to Exceed Customer Expectations will show you how to keep your customers with the “Four Circles” of Service and Six steps of customer recovery. Sign up now at DallasBlueSuccess.com.

F*REE RADIO PUBLICITY. I'm working with a commercial Dallas business radio show that has 50,000 listeners on an upcoming episode.  We'll feature a local Blue member that can share a success story that involved some aspect of DallasBlue live or LinkedIn networking.   If selected, you'll be interviewed live on the show!  Please reply if interested in this free promotion with your story.

ARE YOU READY? Get FREE entrepreneur consulting at Taste of the Tribe every other Monday.

Building Your Success,
Marc Freedman

IN THIS ISSUE

Dallas Entrepreneurs

• Next Meeting - Dallas Entrepreneurs Roundtable: Building Teams
• Blue Events

All Entrepreneurs

• Tribe Powwow: Printing Money – The Revenue Typhoon
• Venture News & Tips: Irish statup raises money through LinkedIn
  
• Venture Spotlight: BestReach
• New ideas: Miniloans in minutes
• Free Publicity

NEXT MEETING - Dallas Entrepreneurs Roundtable: Building Teams

No venture is an island. No man or woman can do it all. Angels and VCs won't invest without a team.

This Roundtable is for all business phases, whether you're a founder seeking partners or operating business filling key roles.

How do you recruit people?  Where do you find them? What is the right mix of personalities? What incentives can you provide when you can't pay a competitive or even any salary? In what order should team members be recruited and when? How do you communicate, motivate, and manage team members? If you seek capital, what do funders expect?

Learn and discuss this and more at our Entrepreneur Roundtable!

The Entrepreneur Roundtable is your guide to learning from experts to tune your operations and build a successful business.  It's an interactive discussion on crucial startup and business topics where we address your issues and answer your questions.

TRIBE POWWOW: Printing Money – The Revenue Typhoon

At Tribe Blue and our on-on-one consulting we teach that building your business is a process. Strategize, plan, execute, measure, and reload. Generating revenues is the same.

Sales consultants like to talk about the funnel. A bushel of leads enters the funnel. The leads are winnowed after qualification and prosecution until only a few exit the funnel as actual sales.

But the focus on a funnel is short-sighted. Let’s say you’re the guy in charge of sales. Your goal is 10 sales this quarter. You’re damn good and know that you can close 20% of qualified leads. Marketing generates 50 leads. So you’re set, right? No. That’s a separate funnel. If 20% of gross leads are qualified, you can only expect 10 qualified leads and to close 20% of that, or 2 sales. Marketing actually needs to generate 250 leads for you to make quota. Uh-oh!

Tactical funnels don’t exist in isolation. There are a series of operational marketing and sales funnels that encompass and qualify markets, prospects, leads, and accounts. Indeed there is one huge funnel that stretches from mass markets of tens of millions of business or consumers customers to the individual customers that trickle out the other end.

When you build a manufacturing plant, you don’t just engineer one machine. You design the entire layout, including machines and production line, from raw materials to finished product.

It’s the same in marketing and sales. Each step in the master funnel must be managed to ensure maximum sales. We call it the Revenue Typhoon because it’s the secret to printing money.

Experience the Typhoon - reply or contact us for consulting, get a Taste of the Tribe, or learn about and apply to Tribe Blue.

VENTURE NEWS & TIPS: Irish statup raises money through LinkedIn

A lot of people try to use LinkedIn to raise money. Many have made valuable introductions to investors and found partners or Board members. This one succeeded big time. 

--> Irish Startup Raises $230000 Using Only LinkedIn

Visit our promo page to learn how YOU can be featured FREE!

BestReach is a contact management aggregator. BestReach allows a user to download and consolidate all of his or her contacts in one place, whether the contacts are obtained from the user's own Outlook, Lotus Notes or similar contact list, or from the user's network for LinkedIn, Viadeo or a similar social networking site.

BestReach is the latest venture from Michael Hascheck and  Seamless NWS, a developer of contact management software for the social networking community. Seamless previously developed VicoContact Retrieval Software and Notes Solutions to Integrate your contacts. 

Semaless seeks funding to finish development and commercialize BestReach. Contact Michael Haschek on LinkedIn or directly via email. Full DallasExecs/MyLinkNetwork profile .

Mini loans in minutes
Financial services
Technology makes the world move ever faster, and a British startup aims to bring that velocity to the world of financing: Wonga offers tiny, instant loans through online-only applications.

Touch-screen Coke machine for interactive vending
Food & beverage / Marketing & advertising
Developed in conjunction with Sapient, Samsung's uVending touch- screen technology brings a whole new level of consumer interaction to automatic vending.

Tuning into a personalized radio tribute
Lifestyle & leisure / Entertainment
Launched in November 2008 by two British radio presenters, Fauxshow creates personalized radio shows that put a recipient in the spotlight.

Media agency focuses on low-impact advertising
Marketing & advertising / Eco & sustainability
Curb creates branded sand sculptures of all sizes; burns patterns and logos into wood using magnifying glasses; and offers a ‘logrow’ service to cut logos as big as 30m wide into turf.

High-five the panda to connect online
Lifestyle & leisure
After meeting and greeting in the real world, users who want to connect online can whip out their Poken keyrings and 'high five' them to exchange details by RFID.

Wind-energy mapping tool now covers the world
Eco & sustainability
When we last wrote about the FirstLook mapping tool for new-energy entrepreneurs, it covered only the United States. Now, the wind- mapping service has expanded to cover the whole world.

Follow these new ideas and more in Iconoculture and Springwise.

Highlight your venture to 1,500 readers. You can be in Dallas or anywhere in the world. Submit your listing now!

Blue: The Business Network Marc Freedman Founder and CEO Blue: The Business Network and DallasBlue (972) 200-3490 marc@dallasblue.com http://www.DallasBlue.com Find me    Twitter • Blog • Profile/LinkedIn Dallas   Tribe Blue • Entrepreneurs • DFW LinkedIn Group • Our mailing lists The World    Blue LinkedIn group • LinkedIn info & support • All our sites & LinkedIn groups DallasBlue MyLink LinkedIn services and web sites are independent resources for users of LinkedIn networking, and are not affiliated with or endorsed by LinkedIn.