Springboarders Blog: A refreshing view on business planning

Are you an armchair entrepreneur waiting to open your dream business but don’t have capital to do so? Are you waiting for the ‘right moment’ to jump into the deep, dark world of business? Wonder what it’s like to ‘bootstrap’ a new business? If you answered YES to any of those questions, you want to hear the inspiring story of my newest guest, Priya Sharma, founder of Toronto Custom Suits. Join us as Priya talks about her initiation by fire into entrepreneurship and her adventures in the fashion world…

Faheem Moosa: Thanks for joining us, Priya. Tell us about Toronto Custom Suits and why you started it. What makes TCS different from other players?

Priya Sharma: Toronto Custom Suits is a men’s custom suits business that I started a little under a year ago. I have been a part of the corporate fashion world in Toronto for sometime now, but like many other people I wanted to start my own business and to have my own line one day, but there was never a right time for that. When the recession started in 2008, many people in the industry were victims to downsizing and I was no exception. Suddenly I found myself with no job and I was pondering, “Do I apply for a job that I don’t really love just so I can be secure and go through the motions? Or do I take the opportunity to follow my dreams?” It’s not as though I was giving anything up first place. I decided to go with the latter and wondered, “What can I do that will allow me to use my experience and my knowledge in fashion and be profitable in the Toronto market?”

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If you’re a FreshBooks (online invoicing service) user, you know how obsessive these folks are about customer service. The benefits of delivering a great customer experience are obvious – more loyalty, leading to more sales and (hopefully) more profits. But how do you even begin to build a customer-centric company culture? How do you remain consistent, especially when your company’s growing really fast and things keep changing at the drop of a hat? Can you measure something as vague as ‘good customer service’?

These are questions that kinda keep me up at night. Being a FreshBooks customer for several years, I’m convinced that an awesome customer experience is the single most important factor that catapulted the company into the spotlight in a fiercely competitive industry. Since launching in 2004, FreshBooks has over 1.25 million users! I’ve always wondered what it is that really goes on inside FreshBooks that allows its team to deliver exceptional customer experiences. So I invited the devil himself – Mike McDerment, CEO – to find out:

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This post first appeared on Mixergy.

When Joe Cirulli reached in his pocket for some money to buy a soda and discovered that he had only 12 cents left to his name, he was embarrassed. Then he got angry that he allowed himself to get in that position.

Soon after, Joe wrote down a list of 10 goals. The list included “Save $1 million,” and “Own a Mercedes-Benz like the one driven by the Six Million Dollar Man” and “Own a health club in Gainesville.” (See the full list below.) He read his list every morning and every night. Then, one at a time, he achieved all of those goals.

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Regular readers of this blog might remember my interview with Rahim Fazal, Founder of Involver, a few months ago. If you missed that interview, you can check it out here.

Andrew Warner of Mixergy recently caught up with Rahim and engaged him in a fascinating conversation, primarily revolving around how brands can get the biggest bang for their buck on Facebook. Here’s what Andrew had to say, followed by the interview:

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This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

Noah Alper is open about his setbacks. His previous company, which aimed to sell giftware from Israel to born-again Christians, “was a total and absolute failure,” he admits. But things change fast for entrepreneurs and just 6 months after he closed that business, he launched Noah’s New York Bagels and “had a tiger by the tail.”

In this program, you’ll see how he did it by being a mensch, a Yiddish word which means “a person of integrity.”

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This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

Lloyd Ernst introduced Australians to the internet by getting the country’s most tech savvy into hotel ballrooms and blowing them away by showing off how email worked. He was introducing them to the future. That’s what he does.

It started when he hooked up a computer in his garage to a phone and created a bulletin board called PowerUp. At first, only one person could log in at a time, but as the business grew he paid for more modems and more phone lines and pretty soon his customers could talk to each other. Then the internet came and PowerUp let its customers connect to the world. But how do you explain something so new? That’s where the ball rooms came in.

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This interview first appeared on Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.

When he was 16, Ryan Allis wrote and framed a big goal: to build a company with $1 million sales by the time he was 21 years old. “I missed it by 18 days,” he says. “But I sure as heck would have missed it by 18 years had I not written down that goal and figured out how to align the people in my life and the knowledge and resources I needed to bring into my world in order to make that happen.” Ryan says you can get there too.

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This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

“The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur” is what Forbes called Zoho’s co-founder, Sridhar Vembu. He’s become a little less unknown since that article came out, but when it bubbled to the top of Hacker News recently I read it I wanted more details about how he bootstrapped Zoho into a profitable online application provider.

So I invited him to Mixergy to tell us the story of how he built his company.

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This interview first appeared on Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.

Oprah showed how dramatic the transformation was for internet entrepreneur, Gurbaksh Chahal. In the before pictures, she showed a tiny Indian kid with a turban, who was picked on by other kids and how’s family struggled financially. In the after shots, she showed an adult with a stunning penthouse, hot car and confidence to spare.

I invited Gurbaksh to Mixergy to talk about how he did it. In this program, you’ll hear how at 16 he got the idea to create ClickAgents, the ad brokerage business. And how he funded it by selling ads before he could even run them. You’ll hear why he sold the business. And how he made his next startup, BlueLithium, profitable within 3 months. You’ll hear why he sold that company to Yahoo! and about his vision for gWallet, his latest startup.

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I really appreciate the comments and emails from many of you about the usefulness of this blog. I know I’ve been inconsistent with my posts lately and have none to blame but myself. Part of the reason for this is that Springboarders, my business planning company, has been commanding much of my attention lately. And of course that’s a good thing – business is terrific and no complaints! However, I am a bit frustrated at my inability to post interviews frequently and don’t want to let you down, especially those of you who enjoy reading my interviews with successful entrepreneurs. So, today I am going to try something different.

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