Beyond the Pedway

Many of the creative entrepreneurs I’ve chatted with here at Beyond The Pedway have had some pretty ambitious goals. But when I sat down to chat with Sam Davidson, I realized his company Cool People Care might be the most ambitious I’ve encountered yet.

Sam and his community are out to save the world. But Sam didn’t exactly set out to do this from birth. In fact, Sam and his Cool People Care co-founder Stephen Moseley both had jobs in the non-profit sector that they were happy at. Becoming entrepreneurs wasn’t exactly the plan all along.

So how did Sam find himself working to save the world? Watch my video interview with Sam to find out!

What if you were able to find like minded folks at your local coffee shop, list a free classified ad there, discover new local music, or find deals from local merchants? What if you had something that was like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Groupon and all combined, but extremely local?

Jason Goodrich and his wife Gretchen Goodrich are doing just that with their new site, A Space Apart. They want to help local cafes and coffee shops, and the people that frequent those cafes and coffee shops, to have a place to connect within the physical space.

I interviewed Jason and Gretchen to learn more about how the run a startup as a husband and wife team, and why you need both an organized brain and a visionary brain to run a startup.

When I first discovered Jason Sadler and his website IWearYourShirt.com, I was amazed. Jason created a business that lets him get paid to wear a t-shirts – literally!

How did Jason come up with this idea? How is he able to be sold out 8 months in advance and have only a handful of days left to sell for this year? Why hasn’t anybody been able to duplicate Jason’s success?

I interviewed Jason to find out!

In November of 2009, with the economy in a less than ideal state, some of CEO Gini Dietrich’s employees feared possible layoffs at her company Arment Dietrich. This simply wasn’t true, so Gini reassured her employees in an all staff meeting that nobody would be let go. Unfortunately, over the holidays, a few of Arment Dietrich’s key clients cut back their budgets and Gini had to make a tough decision: either let some people go and cut costs or keep everyone on staff and worry if they could make payroll next month.

Tough months followed for Gini and Arment Dietrich. For a long time, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to make payroll the next month.

But today, Gini and her company (and their amazing blog Spin Sucks) are regarded as one of the leading authorities in the PR and communications industries. Spin Sucks was named PR Blog of the Year this year and Gini has been traveling frequently speaking to all sorts of audiences about digital communications.

So what changed from a year ago until today?

Yesterday, I received an email asking if I would be able to shoot a speaker presentation next week. The presentation was to last about 45 minutes, followed by a short Q+A session. About two hours total, I was told.

The only catch was the person could only pay $50 for the whole thing.

When I explained this seemingly horrible scenario to my wife at dinner last night, she suggested the person may have honestly thought that $50 was a reasonable rate for such work. Her reasoning was that the person may have figured an hourly rate of $25 or so and with the 2 projected hours, thought that $50 should cover it.

And to tell you the truth, that does make sense. So in the interest of learning from such a situation, let’s open this one up for discussion.

When you’re a creative entrepreneur starting your business from the ground up, the first inclination is usually to get as many customers as possible. The more customers you have, the more money you make.

But customers that are lowering the morale of your staff and making them feel like crap aren’t keeping you in business. The effects of their behavior will ripple throughout your company, as employees start becoming demotivated and don’t work to the best of their ability.

If a customer is being verbally abusive to a member of your customer service team, are they really worth the business? Should you get rid of abusive customers or just suck it up and keep’em happy?

A few months ago, Jill Felska and Jenn Korducki quit their jobs at a large PR agency in Chicago and started their own social media branding and management company. They decided “to enter the grad school of life” and learn the intricacies of business by simply doing it.

At first glance, this idea might seem absolutely crazy. After all, Jill and Jenn are both young. Neither have a business degree. Jenn’s even getting married soon! (congrats again, Jenn!)

But these two bright women are anything but crazy. In this interview chock full of nuggets of wisdom, Jill and Jenn share what they’ve learned thus far from starting their own business.

When you’re an entrepreneur, swimming against the flow (or trying to convince others that the flow should be going the other way), you need this kind of support. Someone to support your good ideas. Your bad ideas. Your crazy ideas. Your crazy-but-hey-wait-that-could-work ideas.

Who’s picking you up from the train station?

We don’t have the capacity, the financing, the team, or most importantly the experience or know how to build on these big ideas right now. So we sit and we wait, and we wait, and nothing happens. Our ideas are so big and grandiose, that we wait for the perfect time to get moving on them…and that time never comes.

Your big ideas are paralyzing you from moving forward, on anything.