How To Start A Successful Multi Million Dollar Yearly Business With Two Days of Market Research

No body knows how, but here is the amazing story of an Austrian immigrant who did it.. I hope you will find his story inspiring.

Stephen Klein 31 arrived in New York from the Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. Upon his arrival he literally spent two days in New York researching the chocolate buying habits of New Yorkers.

He observed that Americans bought the sweet chocolates more. Instead of selling sweet chocolates he decided to launch bittersweet, Viennese-type chocolates.

The Launch Model was simple too. He made a batch by himself and started selling door-to-door himself in the garment district of New York. The garment district was filled with immigrants and Klein’s continental candy turned out to be an instant hit.

In one year he brought his wife and brothers from Vienna and partnered with a local attorney to create a candy business. In 1940 Barton’s Inc started with one store. Within one year there after Barton’s had four stores. By 1951 Bartons was a near $7 million dollar business with fifty three stores.

Yes Barton is a thriving business today and is still producly doing business after 111 years. ie, One Hundred Eleven Years.

You can read the entire story of Barton’s history by visiting their site BartonsCandy.com Their site doesn’t talk about the humble beginnings of Stephen Klein and his heroic entrepreneurial pursuits.

Stephan’s story touched me and there are many lessons that can be learnt from it. Here are a few of my take homes.

If you really know what you want to do all you have to do thereafter is validate. A lot of entrepreneurs spend their valuable time chasing money instead of validating their ideas. Stephen Klein is an example, how you do not need to spend valuable time in extensive market research and pay hefty to analysts to prove the viability of a market.

Why sell the same thing that others a selling? why not sell some variety. Stephen observed what others were doing and just did the opposite. He sold tasty continental bittersweet candy to the sweet loving public. Talk about risk..:)-

Not sure if your product is going to click? Just create small quantities and sell it yourself. You don’t need a salesforce. Stephen made the candy and sold it by walking door-to-door.

Not sure how to target your markets, learn from Stepehen. He only sold his candy within an area where there were a lot of immigrants. Immigrant candy, Immigrant Consumers.

New to the area or the idea? Find a good partner. Stephen was probably lucky to find an attorney who understood candy business as well as the entity structuring & taxation well.

What are your take homes from this story. Share them here. Leave a comment

Become Omni Present Across Numerous Social Networks With One Click

Looks like no matter which way I try avoid writing about social media sites.. I am dragged to blog more about them. You see how far this social media thing has taken us. How deep this has entered into our blood, veins and arteries.

On this post I want to answer another burning question that many of my readers have asked and i,e How To Manage So Many Social Media Sites At Once.

You see the problem with social media sites is.. As long as you are not on them, You are considered ignorant( and sometimes shy). Once you get on them but don’t keep your act current, you will be termed as lazy or laid back.

I can give a 100 lessons on how to make facebook work for yourself and for your business. Now don’t ask me how many of them I use in my business. The answer is hardly any.

And the reason is simple.. I JUST DON’T HAVE TIME.

Not that I don’t have the intent. My heart is there in place always trying to share, learn from all my friends and their extended networks.

But.. I JUST CANNOT MANAGE MY TIME ACROSS SO MANY NETWORKS.

In the process of seaching a solution I came across two different tools that I found to be worth talking about..

I am currently using both of them extensively to post my status to mulitple social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, bebo, Plurk, Meemi, Myspace, Pownce, Plaxo, tumblr.. and many more.

The first tool is www.HelloTxt.com. You can make one post on Hellotxt.com and your posts will show up across all the networks that you pre-configured on Hellotx

Ping.Fm is the second tool that pretty much does the samething. I had problems using Hellotxt.com for sometime but Ping.fm has proven to be reliable and has higher uptime.

Now here is the thing. Just don’t read this post and pick one over the other. Use Both. Higher Uptime in Social Netowrking world is a bad thing..)-

The problem with tools like these or social networking sites for that matter is, they all have underestimated or overestimted their growth. No one has clear estimates on projection on their growth numbers. So if anyone of them experiences astronomical growth(like Twitter) the chances are they will have down times.

So More Downtime means..the company is viable. Chances are it will stay around.

FaceBook Account or Facebook Group. What Makes Sense!

Have you ever wondered if you should setup your facebook account as an individual account or a group. Well this is one of the main issues that many of my customers raised to me. By no means I am a facebook expert and certainly my explanation to this question is limited by my experience with facebook.

One of the main concerns: There seems to be much less flexibility as a group rather than an individual. You can’t become friends with other groups or people, you can’t set up as detailed profiles and items like photos aren’t as easily organized, and your friends don’t get notifications when you change your status, etc… which otherwise is easy with an account.

Usually my answer is:

A Facebook account is more or less like a blog. With this account you typically can do most of the things, if not all that you otherwise do on your personal blog i.e, post videos, audios, pictures and also chat with friends(Your blog probably doesn’t have a chat function but facebook does).

With your facebook group, its your customers, followers and other visitors who will be writing content. What this means is, your own participation on your group should become minimal with time. As long as the members are interacting, you should be good.

If done correctly your group will develop into a strong community. Your goal should be to move the group to a point where people are contributing content and the whole interaction pattern becomes indispensable for each one of them.

At this point, I see more confusion on their faces.

The bottom line is both have their own use and purposes. It comes down to if and how you should use them.