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The Rise to Wealth interviews Steve Kaplan

February 7, 2011 By Clark Leave a Comment

One of the books I really enjoyed reading recently was BAG THE ELEPHANT! by Steve Kaplan (New York Times’, Wall Street Journal’s, USA Today’s, and Business Week’s bestseller list).

In seven years, Steve grew his marketing company SCA from a start up to $250 million in sales with offices in 14 countries. One of the ways Steve achieved this feat was through landing huge clients, also known as bagging elephants (300 of the Fortune 500 companies have been his customers). As a business and success expert, he has appeared on MSNBC, NBC, CBS, Fox Television and has spoken to thousands of college students at various business schools across the country.

Steve is now an elephant himself, having owned 30 businesses across many industries and sold 26 of them. He currently owns businesses including: Steve Kaplan Live, The Difference Maker Inc., and Kaplan Enterprises LLC.

I was fortunate to bag an interview with Steve who generously agreed to share his vast and experienced business advice below:

TRTW: Which aspects of your company SCA do you attribute to its huge success? What were some of the marketing and promotion strategies that worked best?

SK: Success is the [Read more...]

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Purple Cows get noticed! Marketing advice from Squidoo creator Seth Godin

December 3, 2010 By Clark Leave a Comment

The below video is a very informational, entertaining, and funny presentation from Seth Godin, the creator of Squidoo.com (one of the 500 most visited sites in the world) and author of Free Prize Inside (Forbes business book of the year in 2004).

This is excellent information for anyone interested in marketing and advertising, or more specifically how to “get your idea to spread”. He touches on specific examples from cars, to soymilk to dvds and the success of people like Steve Jobs and bands like Pearl Jam.

Seth also dissects how people make purchasing decisions despite having more choices and less time. He stresses that what gets purchased is what is remarkable, in other words “worth making a remark about” and also that, when it comes to marketing being safe is risky.

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Low on Capital? Start a small business with only $500.

November 19, 2010 By Clark Leave a Comment

Below is a brief but excellent video on Harvard Business School graduate Dal LaMagna, founder of Tweezerman.com. After graduating HBS with a huge student debt load, LaMagna decided becoming an employee would take too long to pay off the debt. Thus, LaMagna decided to build his own business on the cheap (not only on the cheap but with a six figure debt load!). LaMagna managed to create a novel brand out of a very familiar yet unpopularized product. In the video below LaMagna explains how to stay organized, focused, and frugal.

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Building a Skateboarding Enterprise: The Rob Dyrdek Story

November 18, 2010 By Clark Leave a Comment

Rob Dyrdek grew up in Ohio (not the typical skateboarding Mecca), and after discovering the skateboard became ingrained in the small but passionate local skate scene. Quickly becoming a pro, he moved to San Diego to engulf himself in the real skateboarding Mecca at the time, San Diego, and received lucrative sponsorships.

Most interesting about Rob’s rise to wealth is that during his early career he would negotiate a small equity stake in his sponsors (similar to Jay Z’s approach when dealing with interested record labels). After this, Rob began to branch out his business enterprise but was unsuccessful in his first few ventures, one of which was a skateboarding retail store (similar to Mark Cuban’s first few ventures failing).

In this video below from Inc., Dyrdek describes his upbringing, and also some of the important lessons he learned while pursuing different business opportunities.

One of the first ventures to really burst Rob’s popularity and exposure was [Read more...]

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Richard Branson: Five Secrets to Business Success

September 20, 2010 By Clark Leave a Comment

This is an essential article for any young entreprenuer begining a business. Branson’s bullet points are simple and direct. His approach to building a business and rise to wealth was born from simple fundamentals. Notice that creating a huge corporation was not his initial goal. Read, enjoy and learn.

“Richard Branson: Five Secrets to Business Success”, this is a great article from entrepreneur.com. Click HERE to read it.

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