Author: blogger
Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 14, 2015 /PressReleasePing/ – Thrive15.com, the online business education platform for entrepreneurs, business owners and employees looking to improve their business skills, launches out of beta, after nearly three years of development. The online education platform is already disrupting the business school pricing and value proposition model. According to Bloomberg, the least expensive business schools such as the Illinois – Urbana Champaign School of Business and William and Mary Mason start at over $34,000 per year and many business schools like Cornell University are priced at over $50,000 per year.
“We’ve worked very hard to make our business school $49,400 less per year than other business schools and much more entertaining, engaging and interactive so you will actually retain what you are learning,” says Thrive15.com Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Clay Clark.
Thrive15.com currently has subscribers in 33 countries has been attracting the attention of both non-college graduates and college graduates who are amazed at the quality and the practicality of the website’s ever growing content. One Thrive15.com subscriber and a private Ivy league Graduate from Southport, Connecticut says, “I think if you were to go to one of those websites that evaluates schools, my school would rank in the top 3 in the U.S. However, theres no training on how to be an entrepreneur and run a business. What is provided is not considered to be important by the students. They have professors who have never built a business, but are giving them critiques on their work. When go out in the real world, you enter this foreign world of entrepreneurship.
Thrive15.com’s Founder, Clay Clark says, “We think Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder and former Pixar CEO) was correct when he said, “It is absurd that American classrooms are still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.”
Thrive15.com’s business education platform offers courses in 20 areas of business mastery including leadership, capital, accounting, marketing, sales, legal, and more. Thrivers rate themselves and their current proficiency in each area and can then choose from the ever-expanding course catalog consisting of thousands of business education videos.
Even proud pillars of academia such as Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen, see a brewing storm for America’s colleges, “Generally universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse, but I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.”
Thrive15.com videos are taught by world-class mentors including NBA Hall of Famer turned successful entrepreneur, David Robinson, the former Executive Vice President of Operations for Walt Disney World Resort, Lee Cockerell, the New York Times bestselling author and publicist of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, P. Diddy, Charlton Heston, and countless celebrities, Michael Levine, and countless other experts.
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Quick Facts Thrive15:
Thrive15.com provides 15-minute practical online business courses taught by millionaires, mentors, and everyday entrepreneurial success stories.
Thrive15.com features many celebrity mentors including:
David Robinson, NBA Hall of Fame Basketball Player and founder of Carver Academy charter schools and Admiral Capital Group, which currently has a valuation of over $250 million; Lee Cockerell, the Former Executive Vice President of Operations for Walt Disney World Resort who once managed 40,000 + employees; Michael Levine, the founder of Levine Communications who has been the publicist of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, P. Diddy, Charlton Heston, Cameron Diaz, and countless other celebrities; David Nilssen, the cofounder of one of the nation’s largest small business funding solutions, Guidant Financial and; Jonathan Barnett, the founder of the 400 + OXI Fresh franchise.
Thrive15.com has teamed up David Robinson and the U.S. Chambers, Hiring Our Heroes Program, to provide free subscriptions to U.S. military families as part of the 1 for 1 HandUp Movement.
Thrive15.com has been mentioned in Forbes, Pando Daily, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and numerous media outlets since launching in BETA.
Thrive15.com offers best practice and practical online education in the core areas of business mastery that every entrepreneur must know including: legal, real estate, investing, execution, purpose, mindset, networking, business modeling, overcoming adversity, capital, branding, marketing, sales, customer service, product/service development, quality control, accounting, management, human resources, and leadership.
Thrive15.com was founded by Chief Operating Officer and Oklahomas former U.S. Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark.
The Chief Executive Officer of Thrive15.com is doctor, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, Doctor Robert Zoellner.
Thrive15.com offers points instead of grades and gives its users a chance to win a business boost package of over $10,000 every six months to the Thriver with the most points.
Thrive15.coms content is created by combining entertainment, gamification, and best-practice practical business education to increase the retention of training provided on the platform.
Press Contact:
Deedra Determan
D2 Branding
1609 S. Boston Ave
918-520-8012
http://www.d2branding.com
What is a strategy map? Is it just a nice presentation demonstrating company goals? Well, some top managers and business owners think so. In fact, this is not true as an effective strategy map shows both goals and ways to achieve these goals. Besides, some strategy maps are very difficult to understand since they contain complex terms and formulas from strategic management theory. An effective strategy map must be easy to understand even for a person without even elementary knowledge of strategic planning. Such a person should see goals and how these goals will be reached. All the rest is unnecessary. An effective strategy map and shows cause and effect ties between goals and measures. For example, if a strategy map contains just one goal of making much money and no ways to implement it this will be a useless document. At the same time, if such a strategy map demonstrates how this goal will be implemented and what needs to be done in several stages, this strategy map can be considered effective. In
this article well talk about hotel management strategy maps.
First and foremost a hotel should develop comprehensive and realistic strategy. It means that strategic goals have to be ambitious and achievable at the same time. On top of that, making a lot of money can be hardly called a strategic goal. A strategy is about future vision, and hotel industry is not an exception here. Thus, a good example of strategic goal would be gaining particular percentage of market share, improve and loyalty of existing customers and attraction of new ones, improving hotel business image and recognition throughout the world and of course increasing profits. Of an effective hotel management strategy map will show what needs to be done to achieve these goals. Balanced Scorecard is perhaps the best tool to design strategy maps that demonstrate cause and effect ties.
All financial goals can be implemented if some improvements are performed in other spheres. As known, Balanced Scorecard consists of four categories which are interrelated: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. A hotel strategy map will show cause and effect ties between all categories and key performance indicators that each category contains. For instance, in order to increase revenue (financial), it is necessary to attract new customers (customer) which is possible on lee through introduction of new services and improvement of internal procedures (internal business processes) while this is only achievable through improvement of personnel professional level (learning and growth). This simple example demonstrates cause and effect ties between Balanced Scorecard categories and key performance indicators. For example such key performance indicator as customer loyalty directly affects revenue growth since loyal and satisfied customers are more likely to stay and the same ho
tel again. Thus, the hotel strategy works in the long term which contributes to competitive advantage in the market. It needs saying that Balanced Scorecard will perfectly work and the hotel will improve its performance only if improvements in the four categories are achieved. This means that the hotel should be ready for changes.
Why start a Gourmet Popcorn Business? Its one of the few businesses that can be started with a small investment and can bring big returns.
Starting a your own popcorn business has many advantages.
You can work from home.
You can work part time or full time.
You can keep your full time job.
You choose how you want to sell your Gourmet popcorn products.
You can start out small.
You dont need any inventory to start.
It allows you freedom.
You may have more tax breaks.
Now is a great time to start your own popcorn business. There are many different ways to market popcorn you are selling. You can work county and state fairs with a kettle corn pot or with a mobile popcorn cart or in a concession trailer selling fresh popcorn and popcorn balls. Maybe you prefer to market your own brand of gourmet popcorn flavors to sell over the Internet or in local stores. If your a people person you may wish to sell to the crowds at ballgames, fairs or carnivals.
Many online popcorn companies drop-ship the product for you. This is an ideal way to operate a Gourmet popcorn business without having to stock products or make your own popcorn.
You can keep working your regular job and operate your Gourmet Popcorn business at home. When you are ready you can take your business full time.
When you buy popcorn at a ballpark, fair grounds, amusement park or a mall? Have you noticed the volume of people and the amount of sales? Have you ever wondered how great their business is?
It is a very profitable business. You can make a 80-90% profit margin!
Now think back to how much you paid for a bag of some fresh cheddar cheese popcorn or caramel corn. Calculate the cost of popcorn kernels, popping oil, some caramel glaze or cheese powder. It’s clear to see that there are serious profits being made.
If this is such a Great business, why isn’t everybody doing it?
The people in the Popcorn industry DON’T want you to know!
What you need to get started is a successful business formula. This formula should include a compilation of tools, resources, research and materials that have been used for starting a popcorn business through the years. The following contents for the gourmet popcorn business success formula are:
Business Planning
Financial Planning
Marketing
Wholesale Supplier
Gourmet Popcorn Recipes
Software
Tools & Materials
The business planning package gives you the foundation and direction to start your new business. It should include a business start up check list, a self evaluation checklist, a business template and a retail planning book.
The financial planning package shows you how to write loan proposal that you can use to obtain a loan. The marketing package will help you present yourself as a professional business owner right after starting your new popcorn business.
A wholesale supplier package will give you a list of good reliable popcorn suppliers to work with. The Gourmet popcorn recipes package will give you at least 100 great gourmet popcorn recipes. You can ad your own recipes too!
A software package will give you inventory management software. This helps you manage your popcorn inventory and track your sales and profits. You will need graphics software for your ads and website.
The tools and materials package will give you some guides, checklists and formula information you will need to keep your business on track.
Before starting out, talk to a qualified tax or legal professional to help you with any tax laws or business questions.
Business correspondence is being defined as a way of communication through the exchange of letters. These are the letters written or received by two or more parties which may come in the form of letters, emails, text messages, voicemails, notes or post cards.
By just looking at the above definition, we can generally conclude that business correspondence is a very important factor in the business community. It is like an exchange of events to and from the different points which are the involved business parties.
Business correspondence, being one of the most powerful tools in business agreements and other business deals, is actually evolving nowadays. We are now living in a computer era thats why it is very understandable why there are gradual changes in the methods of business correspondence, from the way that is being written to the process of exchanging letters.
The product of the innovated technology when it comes to the business correspondence aspect is the electronic mail. Because of the email, the conventional ways of business correspondence are being phased out and the use of email is still being developed.
However, the use of paper is still not out of the scene. There are countries that still utilize this kind of method. Although email is on the big screen compared to the other types of business correspondence, let us still take a look with the different kinds of business correspondence.
The different kinds of business correspondence that we use nowadays are business letters, memos, faxes and emails. Let us have an overview of them all.
Business letters are the most established type of business correspondence. No one can ever imagine how long it has been in the business community. In fact whenever business correspondence is being talked about, business letter is the very first thing that would enter to our minds. The very respectful and most technical phrases that we can still see nowadays are first brought by the business letters techniques. It is also profoundly studied at schools especially when it is time to discuss technical writing.
Business memos are not as deeply discussed in school compared to business letters. They are being considered as secondary or just a by-product of business letters. Business memos are less formal and have a more conversational tone.
Business faxes have been around much longer than business memos but because fax machines are not that available to most of the people before, it was not recognized until 1980s. There are no established rules in writing faxes because it is being written the way that everyone considered appropriate. However, because there is now such a thing as faxing via computer, fax machines are now facing a slow death.
Email is a fruit of technology and can be considered as a blessing because you can actually send all the workplace communication and the like in just a blink of an eye! It is now the most widely spread type of business correspondence in the modernized business community. Because of emails, we can now say goodbye to a lot of inconvenience that other types of business correspondence give us. Although we can say that email is still in its infancy stage and there are still a lot of things to be realized, email has now definitely changed the flow of communication in the business world. We can also see that email is actually tremendously influencing the other types of business correspondence.
With the never ending demands and never ending searching for a more convenient way of life, it is not impossible that there will be other types of business correspondence that will arise. Improvements with the things that we have now are very imaginable. For as long as it aids in the success of the business world, without harming anyone, our all out support must be given to them.
How many times have you heard someone talk about successful business strategies or ‘taking a strategic approach’? What do you think they actually mean by the use of the word strategy? Most often the people using it are trying to convey the fact that they have given the subject a bit more thought than usual, that they have looked a little further ahead than normal. If a consultant uses it be very wary. Strategy costs more than mere ideas or tactics. How much would you pay for consultants who have’ kicked around a few ideas’ or ‘come up with some tactics they think might work’. Depends how good they are. But if they come back with ‘strategic business advice’ you expect it to be very good and of course very expensive.
Why expensive? Because you would hope that a consultant or colleague would have used some kind of intellectually robust framework, that they would have tested their assumptions and developed more than one solution which they evaluate rigorously before making their strategic recommendation. This takes time and expertise and both are expensive. Let’s assume they have done all of this – does that make it strategic business advice rather than tactical advice?
Not according the dictionary. The dictionary definition of strategy is very clear and military. It defines strategy as “the art of war – disposing troops etc in such a way as to impose upon the enemy the conditions for fighting (time and place) preferred by oneself”. If we accept business is in effect a war – you develop successful business strategies because you define success as beating the competition – there is no reason why this definition of the overused word, strategy, is not appropriate for business strategy. It requires all that planning and testing of assumptions discussed already. Some kind of robust intellectual and very honest framework will certainly help to develop and evaluate options. Even the lazy use of the word strategy – giving it a bit more thought and thinking ahead – would be implied by the military, dictionary definition. But there is an extra dimension to real strategy. It requires you to do all this and come up with something that changes the rules in your favour – in other words it requires creativity.
And there is one other aspect to this more demanding kind of strategic thinking. It is about people and their behaviour. In order to ‘deploy the troops’ and change the rules you have to understand how people tick. If being creative involves changing behaviours then you have understand how those behaviours were formed in the first place and how they might be changed if you want a successful business strategy.
Before putting the dictionary away (the definition of strategy above was taken from the Oxford English Dictionary) just go forward to tactics. You will discover that the definition is exactly the same as for strategy with one addition. Tactics involves the all-important stage of implementation, putting the strategy into practice. So it turns out that far from tactics being less weighty and valuable than strategy they are actually the most valuable thing of all. A sound strategic plan that is successfully implemented includes, indeed demands, tactics.
The use, and overuse, of strategy in business is more often than not pretentious over-claim by people who do not really understand what they are talking about. It certainly does not mean giving something a bit more thought or thinking a bit more long term. It absolutely demands a thorough and honest assessment of your assumptions and your options. At the risk of being melodramatic, sloppy thinking in military strategy costs people their lives. In business it just wastes time and money. Strategic thinkers will of course use frameworks based on their experience. They will break a problem down so they can think about each component of it but they will look to change the rules not just apply them. And the true strategist understands that strategies are aimed at people and changing their behaviour. Their strategic business advice will be based on an understanding of human behaviour. Just as in war, a strategy does not just get the job done, it enables you to beat the competition, to deliver higher returns than ever before, to win and win big for the least expenditure of resources.
So whether you are undertaking a brand planning strategy, a new business launch strategy or any other kind of strategy remember what this really means and remember to include the tactics which are just if not more important. Then you can charge accordingly.