Blog

By: Maria Brown | December 9, 2014 --- How men and women, especially those with children under age 18, spend their leisure time has changed over the last 50 years. For the entrepreneur whose product or service falls within a disposable income, leisure time category, watching these trends and addressing a niche may be crucial to success.

By: Jenny Nepper | December 8, 2014 --- Being an entrepreneur can be a risky venture. Diana Kander, serial entrepreneur, bestselling author and senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a successful entrepreneur, having founded and sold a number of ventures. Kander’s book walks through four keys for de-risking your idea or startup so you can generate real revenue.

By: Lois Kirkpatrick | December 4, 2014 --- The time to save money on taxes is before April 15. Here are two key things small business owners can do by December 31 that can reduce the amount of taxes you'll owe next spring.

By Jamie Hofling | July 18, 2014 --- The air fills with the smell of smoking sausage and scones. People stroll amidst fresh flowers, vine-ripened tomatoes, and aged cheeses, chatting with farmers and artisans.

By Kate Hodel | May 2, 2014 --- Exporting boosts overall sales for small and entrepreneurial companies. Research shows that the greatest barriers to exporting are not knowing where to begin and not knowing the resources available for assistance. Here are 10 tips to help you get started.

By Sarah Mote | May 1, 2014 --- I’ve invested in a lot of Kansas City-based early-stage ventures. One of the first companies I invested in raised a quarter of a million dollars to take advantage of a purchase order that would ultimately make them millionaires over the course of five years. Without getting into intricacies of the business, the product they were selling was marketed to youth soccer players. We spent months coming up with ideas, whiteboarding strategies and building a roadmap.

By Sarah Mote | Mar 06, 2014 --- A plan in your head is good. A plan on paper is even better. Writing a business plan doesn't have to be intimidating or complicated.

By Lois Kirkpatrick | Jan 28, 2014 --- Despite budget cutbacks and sequestration, the federal government awarded $83 billion in contracts to small businesses last year, and plans to spend about the same amount in 2014. One way to gain access to federal contracts is to participate in a federal Mentor-Protégé Program.

If you haven’t read E-Myth by Michael Gerber, it’s worth picking up. The main idea is that many startups are very technically oriented in their business- whether that be cake baking or software development- but they are not so skilled on the other end of spectrum, entrepreneurship and management.

Three SourceLink affiliates around the country just completed their own Battle of the Brands competitions. During Arkansas’s Battle of the Brands, many matchups were between large corporations steeped in tradition and small homemade startups. A lot of the time, these smaller businesses would beat out the larger companies for votes.