I’m working on a project @ Belmont University right now that is trying to raise money for the Junior Achievement of Nashville. Our goal is to raise $3 from friends, family, and local businesses in order to match the $3 we originally put in the fund.

Click Here to Donate via Paypal

We are trying to raise the money before Thursday the 25th of February. Please help us raise money for this organization by matching our $3. Your gift will be greatly appreciated by the organization here in Nashville. We’ll report how much money we’ve raised on Thursday.

What is the Junior Achievement?

It is the world’s largest and fastest growing non-profit organization dedicated to educating young people about business, economics, and free enterprise. Classroom volunteers teach JA’s programs in both the United States and in nearly 100 countries worldwide.  For more information, visit our national web site at www.ja.org.

Thanks everyone for your support!!

John Price

The Harvard Business school did some research on how we can be more productive while working.

When we search for anything online, we typically have to sift through pages of information, some relevant but most not. And often, we’ll start out by searching for one thing and then bump into something even more intriguing and veer off in that direction. We often repeat this pattern many times. Before you know it, the search for “tickets to Hawaii” that you started at 8 pm has morphed into a search of “great battleships of the Pacific” by 10 pm…then “movies by Stanley Kubrick” at 11…and so on ad nauseam. Meanwhile, your wife is angry because you promised to help your son with his homework hours ago and everything else you had planned that evening didn’t get done, such as responding to your sister’s text, friending your old college buddy on Facebook, and responding to someone who flamed you in their forum. You may ask yourself, well…how did I get here?

1. Sleep well: A well-rested brain is less likely to be distracted.
2. Eat well: Good nutrition is important to brain functionality.
3. Minimize stress and anger: it tends to ramp up production of brain chemicals such as norepinephrine and cortisol, which can lead to problems.
4. Watch out for time wasters: It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole while reading blogs (except this one of course) or online forums. Stay focused by setting time limits for online activity.
5. Work smarter, not longer: If you’re working too hard or long hours without a break, your brain will seek out diversions at some point — whether you want it to or not. Schedule breaks in advance; you’re better off putting in six productive hours than of 10 hours of mindless search engine trolling or social networking.

http://shar.es/aaPMp

So I took the opportunity and about 4 months later the tour was wrapping up. Keep in mind that I began this in the summer and it had led into the fall semester of school which I was not attending. What was I going to do  for the next few months before I would start back up in the spring. Needless to say I started my company called Lifetime Reel and grew the business over two years before again returning to school. I’ll have to write a post just on those two year “dreams” my business partner and I shared.

Was I playing it by the books. Heck no! I had professionals, professors, friends parents, and others telling me and my business partner not to do it. I don’t play by the books and I never plan on coloring between the lines. I won’t follow the rules because as soon as you begin, you’ll never see the opportunities anymore. I’m not saying that all opportunities are good ones, but being able to still chase some is where I get my adrenaline

You might have considered trying something on your own – Perhaps owning a local boutique, restaurant, online business, etc. The problem most people run into is their risk level (wall) comes up and says to you – “Don’t do that, it might be too risky”

Not all of us have the need to take some of the risk associated with owning a business but all of us have the opportunity to start something – Even if it’s small at first! Here are some tips of raising some start up funds”

Entrepreneur Start-Ups said, With the economy in the grips of a major recession and credit crunch, many entrepreneurs have little choice but to tap friends and family members for their startup capital. But that doesn’t mean you should treat them like “friends and family.”

Nobody gives you money to start a business. People either loan you money–which you must pay back with interest over a specified time period–or they make an equity investment in your business–buying the right to receive a percentage of your future profits. Without proper documentation, there’s no way of knowing whether your uncle is making a loan or an investment. If your business becomes successful, he will want a piece of the action. If your business fails, he will want his money back with interest.
Let’s talk about how you can get started!!

• Make a to-do list and stick to it. A to-do list is a great way to outline the work to be done for the day. This list should be prioritized accordingly as well. Chances are that small business owners will deviate from the list from time to time when a pressing situation emerges. However, the list will serve as a focal point to return to once pertinent matters have been addressed.
• Delegate tasks accordingly. Sometimes small business owners just need to relinquish some control and allow employees to assist with getting projects done. It’s better to delegate a critical task to one person who can put a sincere effort into it, rather than try and multitask yourself and generate mediocre results. Recruiting and hiring talented individuals who can take on a great deal of responsibility will alleviate the feeling that small business owners need to be involved in every single facet of business operations.
• Use business process outsourcing. Small business owners can outsource critical tasks – such as payroll and invoicing – to save time and money, and avoid multitasking on a regular basis.

Source

In 2007 an article was written on this company.

Online radio that’s cool, addictive, free, and-just maybe-a lasting business.

Tim Westergren is due to take the stage in an hour, yet he seems half asleep. His shoulders are rolled forward, his hair floppy and unbrushed, and he’s wearing loose blue jeans and scuffed hiking boots. He ambles around the auditorium he’s rented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art while the staff of Pandora, the online radio company he founded, buzzes around him. The salespeople smile at the advertisers, the biz-dev folks pump the arms of partners, the engineers form a nervous little knot. Meanwhile, the crowd gathering outside the auditorium doors keeps getting larger.

Pandora has been around in one form or another since 1999 and has spent most of its existence on the brink of shutting down. Yet Westergren has always found a way to rescue his company and infuse it with new hope, new direction. Tonight is one more of those times: Pandora’s biggest product launch since its debut. The company is announcing a move into mobile products, which will let listeners access their personalized radio stations over Sprint (NYSE:S) phones or Sonos and Slim Devices in-home music players.

Finally, at 6:45, the doors open and Westergren, 41, snaps to life. Most companies have customers. Pandora has fans. Nearly 300 of them stream in to hear what Westergren has to say. There are guys in short-sleeve button-downs, a red-haired middle-aged woman who’s brought her digital camera, a man with long ropey dreadlocks, a girl with highlighted hair and precise bangs, and a couple with a tiny baby sucking a pacifier. They look more like they’re headed to a downtown wine bar than to a high-tech product launch. The fact that they’ve given up their Tuesday night to listen to Westergren suggests that he has built something unique.

With almost all the seats filled, Westergren takes the stage. He’s donned a jacket for his moment in the spotlight, although it’s teal, zip-up, and made of fleece. “I’m Tim Westergren, and I’m the founder of Pandora,” he says. The audience claps and shouts. “So I’ve done a bunch of these town halls, and I am jacked up,” he says. “Ask any questions you have about the company. The more we can, sort of, talk to each other, the better.” He means it. As Westergren details the battered history of his company, the crowd laughs and claps and oohs and aahs. Westergren has that rare talent of seeming chatty and intimate with an audience of hundreds. Listeners raise their hands and suggest ways that Pandora might outwit regulators; others volunteer to view more ads on their Pandora radio players if that will help the company make money. It’s tough to imagine even the most rabid consumers, like Apple’s customers, offering to view more advertising. Now it’s up to Westergren to turn that adulation into action to save his company once again.

He’s in a common enough position. He’s trying to make a real business of this product he passionately believes in, but he’s never quite gotten his baby out of start-up mode. Still, after eight years of being tossed around, Westergren isn’t talking about just making Pandora turn the corner. He wants to make it huge.

Pandora has developed a proprietary method to analyze music–Westergren calls it the music genome–that lets users create online radio stations generated by the software’s recommendations. Tell Pandora your favorite song is “Casey Jones” by the Grateful Dead, and within seconds it will create a station–Casey Jones Radio–that streams nonstop songs from artists such as the Youngbloods, the Byrds, and the Beatles, along with stuff you might not expect, like R.E.M., the Jam, and Tom Petty. It’s undeniably cool and completely addictive, but Pandora has never quite found its footing as a business. Indeed, the company has been through an almost unbelievable number of setbacks, a series of blows that would make the most determined entrepreneur throw in the towel. Westergren has run out of money, which forced to him to lay off his entire staff (except for those willing to work for free). He’s been rejected some 350 times by venture capitalists. He has faced bankruptcy, haggled with anxious creditors, and been sued by employees. Deal after deal has fallen through at the last minute.

Yet somehow Westergren has managed to amass more than eight million very enthusiastic listeners, advertisers like Microsoft and Lexus, and a database of some 500,000 songs. Over the years, he’s raised more than $30 million in funding, most recently an undisclosed amount from Hearst Interactive Media, the media company’s venture capital arm, in 2006. “I’ve got to give Tim the all-time award for persistence. I probably turned him down at least three or four times,” says Peter Gotcher, a venture capitalist who eventually participated in a $12 million round in 2005. “I liked his passion and entrepreneurial spirit.” Call it passion, spirit, an obstinate refusal to quit. It’s kept Pandora alive.

But now, just when Westergren thought he’d finally moved Pandora into safe territory, he’s facing his biggest battle yet: steep hikes in music royalty rates that were announced earlier this year. Every time Pandora plays a song, it must pay a small fee to the music’s publisher, songwriter, performer, and label. Westergren has lobbied Congress and organized a grass-roots campaign of millions of Internet radio listeners. Why the urgency? The rate hike has sent Pandora’s operating expenses soaring and threatens to silence Pandora for good.

Westergren plays the piano, the bassoon, the recorder, the drums, and the clarinet. His personal Pandora stations are based on songs by Muddy Waters, Ben Folds, Josh Fix, Oscar Peterson, Art Farmer, Elvis Costello, and James Taylor. He studied music at Stanford–Stan Getz was one of his professors–and graduated in 1988 with a deep understanding of music theory and computer applications for music, and a notion that he could somehow make money as a musician. He played piano in a series of taking-themselves-seriously acoustic rock bands called Late Coffee and Oranges, Barefoot, and Yellowwood Junction. But after years of driving a van all over the West Coast, crashing in friends’ basements, he became frustrated with how hard it was to get noticed. Band life fell apart in 1995.

By Stephanie Clifford

I’ve been traveling a little for Hunting Square – One of our online classifieds section for outdoorsmen. We just went up to the QDMA ( Quality Deer Management Association ) and gain about 200 members from the show! Great success for us.

I’ll be writing soon to tell you about the next project I’m working on once I have the final beta site up for viewing…no sneak peeks yet. Also working hard to sell a dotcom business we’ve been working on for the past year.

Time to focus – To be continued…

I’ve been productive and I can’t wait to share with ya’ll what I’m working on right now. I’ve just made it through two brief business plans prepared for some investors and I’m starting to write a lot on the blog. Obviously not online! I’m heading to Europe for three weeks and I’m hoping to come back to the states with some fresh new ideas.

I’ll update with the new thoughts soon enough. I’ll need feedback.