A quote for the aspiring entrepreneur...
"I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come."
- Abraham Lincoln, Age 20

We hope you enjoy issue twenty six of the Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!

Download Ryan's Presentation from the 2005 CEO Conference in Orlando: "How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales: Before You Graduate" [ Download Here ] Feel free to post on your own web site, send to colleagues, or use excerpts with attribution in your own presentations

1. Premier Sponsor
2. News Update
3. Welcome to Issue Twenty Six
4. The Power of Ideas
5. Securing Your Intellectual Property
6. Update from Ryan's Poverty Blog AntiPovertyCampaign.org
7. New Email Marketing Whitepaper by Ryan Allis
8. Content for Your Web Site
9. November Discussion Forum Highlights
10. Recommended Book List for Entrepreneurs
11. Updates from Ryan's Blog
12. Featured Organization of the Month: American Red Cross
13. Closing Notes
14. Recommended Products & Books
    

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Want to feature your organization in the Entrepreneurs' Chronicle? Visit http://www.zeromillion.com/advertise/ to learn more.

Broadwick recently passed 3400 clients for its permission-based email marketing software IntelliContact. We also have welcomed QA Engineer Khalid Yahya and Support Representative Rainy Kolar to the team since the last issue. We are very excited to bring Khalid and Rainy on board! We're now looking for four PHP, MySQL, and Linux Web Application Developers. If you're interested send your resume to hr@broadwick.com.

Our new whitepaper "Best Practices for Email Marketers" is a 31 page guide to building strong relationships with your clients and prospects through permission-based email marketing. Written by Broadwick CEO Ryan P. M. Allis. [Download Now Free]

Virante continues to grow and expand its client-base offering strategic web marketing consulting to high potential start-ups and established Fortune 1000® organizations looking to launch a new brand or build online sales. If you need any assistance with search marketing, CPC management, link building, online ad spend management, or email marketing campaign development contact contact Malcolm Young at myoung@virante.com or (919) 459-1088.

Sales of Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales hit a record high in October. Key endorsers include Jay Levinson, author of Guerilla Marketing and David Chernow, President of Junior Achievement Worldwide. We encourage you to discuss the book in our entrepreneurship forum. Buy your copy of the book now from Amazon for just $10.85.

We hope you enjoy this month's informative Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!

The first article, "The Power of Ideas", discusses the importance of ideas, where they may come from, and how they evolve around the situation within which they were created. The second article, "Securing Your Intellectual Property" defines what Intellectual Property is and explores some of the benefits and drawbacks associated with them.

Finally, we have an update on my new Anti-Poverty Blog, an update on the Zeromillion.com Discussion Forum, a section that provides free content you may use on your web site, and a list of our book recommendations for current and aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or would like to contribute content to be published in the newsletter or online, I encourage you to contact us at myoung@virante.com. Please do feel free to forward this newsletter on to your colleagues and associates. On behalf of the Zeromillion.com team I thank you for being a subscriber.

Yours entrepreneurially,

Ryan P. M. Allis, founder
http://www.zeromillion.com
The Top Entrepreneurship Resource Online
Author: Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales

Note: This is an authorized except from Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales. Learn more about the book and purchase your copy today from Amazon.com for $10.85.

The Power of Ideas
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Just after 9:00am on April 19, 1995 a bomb exploded in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. One hundred sixty-eight people, including 19 children, were killed. The building was damaged to such an extent that it was later demolished. The death and destruction demonstrates not only the power of the bomb but also the power of ideas. That day the power of neo-Nazi ideas about “white power,” “racial purity,” Jews, and other “inferior” races and ethnic groups was shown.

At 8:45am on September 11, 2001 a fuel-filled American Airlines plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. At 9:03am a second plane hit the south tower, instantly killing hundreds and causing dozens of others to choose between jumping to their deaths or suffocating. Sixty-two minutes later the south tower fell, followed shortly thereafter by the north tower. Simultaneously, a plane crashed into the Pentagon while another crashed in the Pennsylvanian midlands. Three thousand sixty six young professionals, tourists, firemen, police, and children were killed that day. Killed because of a hatred of liberalism and humanistic secularism. Killed because of nationalism—the belief that all Arabs belong to a single nation. Killed because of the power of ideas.

At the University of North Carolina, there is an innovative educational program called the First Year Seminar. These semester-long seminars bring together a group of about 20 undergraduate freshmen with an upper-level professor in a specific academic discipline that greatly interests both student and teacher. Through this program I took a class with a distinguished economic professor by the name of Dr. Steven Rosefielde. At registration before my freshman year, I had to select among sixty-two such seminars and I am sure you can understand why I chose the one I did. However, there was another seminar that caught my attention by the name of “Money as an Economic, Cultural, and Social Institution.” But it was not the title that caught my attention the most. It was the first two sentences of the description; “There is no social institution more amazing than money. Over time people have developed the willingness to exchange valuable goods and services for ‘useless’ pieces of paper.”

While I have been aware since high school economics class that U.S. dollars have not been convertible to the gold since August of 1971, until I read those two sentences something now obvious did not hit me. Money is only an idea. In fact, everything that man has ever accomplished, everything tangible that we have created all stems from an idea. Two weeks after reading this seminars description, I read the following paragraph in the book Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki…

One of the most important technological changes in the history of the Western World took place during the Crusades, when Christian soldiers came across the Hindu-Arab system of numbers. The Hindu-Arabic system of numbers, so named because the Arabs found the numbering system during their invasion of India, replaced what we call Roman numerals. Few people appreciate the difference this new system of numbers has made upon our lives. The Hindu-Arabic system of numbers allowed people to sail farther out to sea with greater accuracy, architecture could be more ambitious, and time keeping could be more accurate. The human mind sharpened, and people thought more accurately, abstractly, and critically.

Imagine this. Just from a simple idea to use a base of ten and to simplify the visual representations of numbers came a greatly improved world and many more ideas since. Just think how hard it would be to read a profit and loss statement in Roman numerals. Such difficulty is illustrated in a quote from Robert L. Heilbroner is his book, The Worldly Philosophers:

"France. The year, 1305…But inside the tents we meet a strange sight. Books of business, open on the table, are sometimes no more than notebooks of transactions; a sample extract from one merchant reads: “Owed ten guilden by a man since Whitsuntide. I forgot his name.” Calculations are made largely in Roman numerals, and sums are often wrong; long division is reckoned as something of a mystery, and the use of zero is not clearly understood."

The power of ideas has been illustrated vividly over the past century on the economic front. In 1867, a nearly fifty-year-old Karl Marx published Das Kapital. His thesis within was that the working class and wealthy would be in eternal conflict, leading to what he termed as Communism, under which capital would be owned in common and there would be no exploitation of the working class.

This idea, five decades later, caused a revolution in Russia. Soon, intellectuals throughout were impressed by the strong Gross National Product growth of the U.S.S.R (though it was later determined the majority of these numbers were not accurate) and communism quickly spread to countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. With the market failures of the Great Depression in America, at times, Communism was thought to be the way of the future by a likely majority of the world.

By the 1960s, if a country was not communist, it was surely socialist or at least had a mixed economy. In the early 1970s, conservative Republican president Richard Nixon even put price controls in place in an attempt to lower inflation, a technique often used in socialist countries.

Since, an even greater ideological struggle has taken place. In 1979, a lady by the name of Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of England. Following the guidance of Oxford graduate Sir Keith Joseph and the ideas of Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek, Ms. Thatcher began to swing the pendulum back toward Capitalism with “Thatcherism”, a belief in the market economy.

Her premise, influenced greatly by the Chicago school of thought, was based on four beliefs:

1. While state-owned enterprises may have once been necessary to obtain the economies of scale needed to industrialize, they were now breeding inefficiency and waste since they had no incentive to be profitable.
2. A market economy was more efficient, better-allocated prices, and created a wealthier society than a socialist or communist economy.
3. By privatizing the majority of state-owned industries and creating the proper incentives and laws to spur entrepreneurial activity, jobs would be created, there would less dependency and reliance on government, and the economy would be much better off.
4. With economic freedom comes real freedom.

"This is a book about a handful of men with a curious claim to fame. By all the rules of schoolboy history books, they were nonentities: they commanded no armies, sent no men to their deaths, ruled no empires, took little part in history-making decisions. A few of them achieved renown, but none was ever a national hero; a few were roundly abused, but none was ever quite a national villain. Yet what they did was more decisive for history than many acts of statesmen who basked in brighter glory, often more profoundly disturbing than the shuttling of armies back and forth across frontiers, more powerful for good and bad than the edicts of kinds and legislatures. It was this: they shaped and swayed men’s minds."

Within business, the power of ideas has been exemplified numerous times. In the mid 1970s a nineteen-year-old by the name of Bill Gates came up with an idea that has made him the wealthiest man in world; that computers would need software and an operating system. And it was a computer company started out of a dorm by Michael Dell that has dwarfed the goliath at that time, IBM. How? With simply an idea – the idea to sell personal computers directly to customers instead of through distributors and retailers.

On a smaller scale, a lady by the name of Ruta Fox started a diamond ring company a few years ago. One would think that the barriers to entry and the competition in the diamond jewelry business would preclude a young lady with just $3,000 in savings from building a successful company. However, it is often not the amount of money, but rather the quality of the idea. Instead of going the usual route (developing a line of products and perhaps putting them in a catalog or trying to get her line picked up by department stores), she decided she would focus on one product.

Ms. Fox had an inspiration one day. She figured, “Married and engaged women had their rings, but what about the single woman?” She decided to do something about this and came out with the “Ah Ring” as she called it, the ring for Available and Happy single women.

Well a few weeks later, friends at fashion magazines invited her to their offices to present the rings for sale to staffs. One day while at the headquarters for "O," Oprah Winfrey's magazine, an editor liked the idea and sent a ring off to Oprah. It turned out that Oprah loved the idea and mentioned it in her next issue of “O”.

By the end of that first year, Ms. Fox had turned her simple yet novel idea into a company with revenues in excess of $1 million. The point is simply that it is not how hard you work; it is how smart you work and how good your ideas are. For anyone struggling with this concept, I would suggest reading a book by Napoleon Hill by the title of Think and Grow Rich.

Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of permission-based email marketing and list management software IntelliContact (www.intellicontact.com), and CEO of Virante, Inc. (www.virante.com), a Durham, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 21, is currently studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an economics major and Blanchard Scholar. Additional information on the author can be found at www.ryanallis.com.

This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains

Note: This is an authorized except from Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales. Learn more about the book and purchase your copy today from Amazon.com for $10.85.

Securing Your Intellectual Property
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Intellectual property (IP) is all the intangible assets of your company. These can be trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, or patents. In the United States, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the organization with whom you will have to file record of your IP. An overview of the major types of IP is provided here for your convenience.

Copyright

A copyright is the right to govern the use of creative works and obtain the economic benefits from the use of such work. One can copyright computer code, images, books, works of art, or any original works of authorship. However, one can only copyright the tangible expression of the work, not an idea behind such work. While the act of creation gives copyright, one can receive additional rights if he or she registers a copyright with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In the United States, copyrights last seventy years after death for an individual.

Trademarks™& Service Marks

If you have a company or product name, you may wish to protect it with a trademark. One can trademark slogans (i.e. Where do you want to go today?), letters (i.e. HP), symbols (i.e. logos), and sounds (i.e. Apple Macintosh start up sound). You can register a trademark with either a state or with the federal government. To obtain protection throughout U.S., however, one should register with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO bases its decision to grant a trademark based on distinctiveness and whether you are in the same industry as holders of similar trademarks or not. Once you receive your trademark, no one else can use that trademark without your permission. You can also file for a service mark if there is a special name for a service you provide. If you are in the United States, you can file for a trademark yourself at www.uspto.gov or use your law firm. The fee is $335 for a trademark.

Patents

Holding a patent can give a business a significant advantage over its competitors and be a big plus for potential investors. Patents give the right to a person or entity to be the only one that does something in a certain way. Most often it is new inventions or new processes that are patented. To be eligible to receive a patent, the idea or invention has to be novel and non-obvious. Obtaining a patent is not cheap, however. It usually costs between $5000 and $10000 and usually takes 18-24 months to be approved. Once you do receive a patent, however, you have the right to be the only one to use your idea for seventeen years.

Trade Secrets

One problem with a patent, however, is that after your seventeen-year protection period, anybody can use your idea. As you have to explain the idea in detail when you file and these records are made public, a patent often does not offer the lasting protection a company needs. Due to this, trade secrets can often be better than patents as they never expire. A classic example of a trade secret is the Coca Cola® formula. In order to protect a trade secret, there must be a high level of security. All employees must be forced to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, and information should only be provided on a need-to-know basis. Such protection is essential, as once a trade secret gets out, it is no longer a trade secret.

Protecting Your IP

In order to protect your intellectual property, make sure you have all employees and contractors sign a non-disclosure, non-compete, confidentiality, and assignment of invention agreement before they start work. Make sure you make clear what is confidential information by always marking it with the word ‘Confidential.’ Also, when an employee leaves, be sure to hold a de-briefing session to remind the employee of his or her responsibility to not reveal your trade secrets and confidential information.

Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of permission-based email marketing and list management software IntelliContact (www.intellicontact.com), and CEO of Virante, Inc. (www.virante.com), a Durham, North Carolina based web marketing consulting firm. Ryan, who is 21, is currently studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is an economics major and Blanchard Scholar. Additional information on the author can be found at www.ryanallis.com.

This article may be republished online as long as the byline remains

In September I started a new blog at AntiPovertyCampaign.org so I would have an outlet for my passion of finding ways to reduce poverty in developing counties. Check it out at www.antipovertycampaign.org. Below are some of the topics I've discussed so far. If you want to contribute to the blog just email me at ryan at virante.com and I'll set you up as an authorized contributor.

Topics To Date:

1. The Top 8% of the World's Wealthy
2. Interesting West Wing Presidential Debate
3. Join The Anti-Poverty Campaign Team
4. John Edwards Has It Right About Poverty, Mostly
5. Props to UNC-Chapel Hill for Having their Own Live 8
6. A $23 Lesson in Selling
7. The List of Leaders -- Which Ones Will Take Action?
8. Interesting West Wing Presidential Debate
9. UN Millenium Development Goals

Our new whitepaper "Best Practices for Email Marketers" is a 31 page guide to building strong relationships with your clients and prospects through permission-based email marketing. Written by Broadwick CEO Ryan P. M. Allis. [Download Now Free]

If you have a web site that has to do with business, entrepreneurship, marketing, web marketing, ebusiness, personal development, or economics and would like high quality free content for your web site, you may syndicate the following articles from our web site. These articles are stored in zip format and can be downloaded by clicking on the appropriate link. We simply ask that you keep the author byline at the bottom of each article per the instructions included with each zip file. If you choose to use any of the articles we ask that you notify us at ryan@zeromillion.com.

48 Articles - Authorized Excerpts from Zero to One Million

45 Articles - Articles by Ryan Allis, June 2002 - July 2003

Members: 1132
Posts: 1516
Location: http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/

In November we saw some great topics come up for discussion in the Zeromillion.com Forums. Some highlighted topics included:

• Entrepreneurs - Head the Call
• One Life To Live, So What Are Your Goals?
• How Would You Convert $100,000 to $200,000?
• Getting Business Deal Advice
• Using a Lawyer to Trademark Our Name
• Marketing Using PPC
• A New Business Idea
• Studying Macroeconomics
• Survey for my Business Idea
• Member Introductions
• Handmade Jewelry Biz
• Want to start e-biz but no ideas
• What is a broker?
• Young Man Looking for Guidance in Entrepreneurship

The following books are recommended for reading by aspiring and current entrepreneurs and business leaders. The books in bold are must reads. Please email any recommendations for additions to this list to myoung@virante.com.

Globalization & Economics

• The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman
• The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
• Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal by Ball and Dagger
• The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L Heilbroner
• Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan
• The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto
• Economics by Stanley and Brue
• Macroeconomics by N. Gregory Mankiw
• Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter
• International Business by Charles W. H. Hill
• Against the Dead Hand by Brink Lindsey

Entrepreneurship

• Zero to One Million by Ryan P. M. Allis
• Zero to IPO by David Smith
• Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
• Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki
• New Venture Creation by Jeffrey Timmons
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
• The Young Entrepreneurs’ Edge by Jennifer Kushnell
• The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting and Running a Business by Steve Mariotti
• The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship by William D. Bygrave
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• At Work with Thomas Edison by Blain McCormick
• Multiple Streams of Income by Robert G. Allen
• On Entrepreneurship by Harvard Business Review
• Entrepreneurship.com by Tim Burns
• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• Fire in the Belly - an exploration of the entrepreneurial spirit by Yanky Fachler

Marketing

• The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines by Ryan Allis
• What Clients Love by Harry Beckwith
• Building Thousands of Links to Your Site by Ryan Allis
• Net Results 2 by Rick E. Bruner
• Protégé Training Program by Jay Abraham
• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
• Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
• Principles of Marketing by Kotler and Armstrong

Personal Development

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey
• Succeed and Grow Rich Through Persuasion by Napoleon Hill
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons by Napoleon Hill
• The Student Success Manifesto by Michael Simmons
• Secrets of the Young & Successful Jennifer Kushnell
• Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
• Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins
• The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D

Follow the journey of young entrepreneur Ryan Allis as he builds his second company, Broadwick Corporation to one million dollars in sales, publishes his first book, Zero to One Million, travels the country as a web marketing consultant and speaker on young entrepreneurship and personal development, launches his non-profit organization, and lives the life of a bootstrapping entrepreneur. Read Ryan's Blog Now.

Recently Ryan posted updates with the titles of:

• Need Your Vote for BusinessWeek's Top Entrepreneur Under 25
• Report from the CEO Conference in Orlando
• Presentation: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales
• Broadwick's Corporate Values
• Internet 2.0

You can read the blog now at http://www.ryanallis.com/blog/.

The Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) wants to support projects by young people who are creating impact with innovative solutions to social problems. Especially those using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development. The mission of YSEI is to empower young social entrepreneurs in developing countries with the necessary knowledge, resources and networks to realize their dreams. If you are a young social entrepreneur (age < 30 ) in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Philippines or Malaysia in search of support and opportunities YSEI may be just what you need. Please visit www.globalknowledge.org/ysei to learn more.

Past Highlighted Organizations:

November 2005 - American Red Cross
September 2005 - American Red Cross
August 2005 - Grameen Foundation
July 2005 - Oxfam International
June 2005 - Habitat for Humanity
May 2005 - National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship
April 2005 - Opportunity International
March 2005 - The Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization
February 2005 - United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
January 2005 - United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
August 2004 - Youth Development & Entrepreneurship Foundation
July 2004 - Lead America
June 2004 - Students in Free Enterprise
May 2004 - Junior Achievement

This concludes issue twenty six of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you January 1, 2006. If you are not subscribed and would like to subscribe, please visit http://www.zeromillion.com. If you would like to contribute content, become involved with the zeromillion.com team, make suggestions, or provide feedback please feel free to contact us at info@zeromillion.com. We encourage you to participate in our discussion forum at http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/.

This newsletter is published by www.zeromillion.com with support from the Entrepreneurs’ Coalition. The newsletter is sent using the IntelliContact web-based email marketing and list management software.

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Archives online at: http://www.zeromillion.com/echronicle/

Zero to One Million Guide for aspiring entrepreneurs on how to build a company to one million dollars in sales. Price: $10.85 | More Info

Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines The book the professionals use to consistently obtain top search engine rankings. Price: $37.00 | More Info

IntelliContact is web-based email marketing and surveying software that makes it easy for organizations of all sizes to add a newsletter sign-up form to their web site, send out personalized HTML or text emails, create unlimited lists, schedule messages, and view complete reporting metrics for each campaign including open and click-through tracking. IntelliContact v3.0 includes the added features of an Autoresponder and List Segmentation. With plans starting at $9.95/month and a free fully functional fifteen day demo, IntelliContact is a top choice for list management software. We encourage you to sign up for a free 15 day trial or learn how IntelliContact can benefit your organization. If you have any questions about the software feel free to call toll-free 1-877-968-3996.

Virante provides web site design, web marketing consulting, and search engine optimization services. Learn more and request a quote at www.virante.com.

All Contents Copyright © 2005 by Zeromillion.com, the top entrepreneurship resource online

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."
Vincent Van Gogh