Cinventure – For the Cincinnati Entrepreneur

A potential customer walks in the door to buy your product but you notice she is holding an ad from one of your competitors.  Does this make you excited?  Or anxious and nervous?
We should all be excited when someone walks in our door to buy from us, especially when we see they are serious about [...]

March is an exciting month if you are a college basketball fan, and there’s no reason why it can’t be an exciting month for your business, too.  Not too long ago I posted an article about setting New Year’s resolutions for your business.  Well, it’s been two full months since the year began and we’re [...]

People often make fun of the fast food industry and you especially see this group used as the setting for jokes and sketch comedy on tv.  We can look closer at this group and learn some important lessons about customer service and marketing.

The phrase Do you want fries with that? is actually a great example [...]

As advertising reaches new levels of intrusivness, people are honing their abilities to “tune out” and ignore it all. When it comes to marketing your startup, mastering the art of Permission Marketing is a necessity. Even so, you must first attract a potential customer’s attention — even if only for a breif moment — so [...]

If you are just starting your business and don’t want to deal with the hassles of invoicing, online invoice management services can save you a lot of precious time. These services help you create professional-looking invoices that are easy to manage and distribute. PostBubble provides a nice overview of three major players in the online [...]

Here is a quick customer experience blurb that shows how technology will help to produce not just adequate customer service, but potentially amazing service. Not sure if the story is true, but even if not, it represents a great model for what we should strive to achieve.
I’ve just landed at La Guardia Airport in NY, [...]

Issuing a zero-balance-due invoice is a great way to give away a product or service for free without allowing the customer to assume it will always be free. There are two ways to accomplish this:
Method 1: Same Line Item
1. Description: Replacing light bulb / Quantity: 1 / Price: $10.00 / Total: $0.00
Total Balance Due: $0.00
[...]

Unusual Business Ideas That Work tells a story with an important underlying lesson: More people with more money have more varying tastes – it is easier than ever to exploit a small portion of consumers by focusing your energy on a defined niche:
Reading a business magazine in the doctor’s office inspired Joseph Tantillo to try [...]

OnStartups.com provides us with this great list of 17 Pithy Insights for Startup Founders. The first five are listed below, make sure to visit the site and see the entire list:

Seek transparency and understanding with your partners early. Issues get harder as time passes

Startup founders work long hours for a reason. There’s more [...]