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

Happy 2006! We hope you enjoy issue twenty seven of the Entrepreneurs' Chronicle!

Free Audio Samples of Zero to One Million Title Length Size Introduction 8:29 8MB Chapter 1 - How I Began 15:21 14MB Chapter 2 - Out on My Own 25:44 24MB > Buy Book

Subscribe to Ryan's Podcast to get the rest of the Audiobook Chapters as they are published. Just add the feed url to an RSS reader such as Feedreader or Thunderbird or to a Podcast player such as iTunes.

1. Premier Sponsor: Virante
2. News Update
3. Welcome to Issue Twenty Seven
4. The 20 Most Important Business Lessons I Learned in 2005
5. Where I'll Be in 2006
6. Content for Your Web Site
7. Powerpoint Presentation Downloads
8. December Discussion Forum Highlights
9. Recommended Book List for Entrepreneurs
10. Update from Ryan's Anti-Poverty Blog
11. Updates from Ryan's Entrepreneurship Blog
12. Featured Organization of the Month: American Red Cross
13. Closing Notes
14. Recommended Products & Books
    

After spending two years focusing its efforts on growing one main client, Virante (the publisher of this newsletter) is now accepting new clients. Virante provides interactive marketing services including search engine optimization, web site development, web marketing consulting, print design, and much more.

Virante's Services Search Engine Optimization Online Ad Spend Management Web Site Developmet Online Reputation Management & Crisis Response Buzz Marketing Corporate Blog & Wiki Deployment Email Marketing Campaings High-Quality Link Building Flash & Graphic Design Print Design Web Marketing Consulting

If your organization needs assistance in any of these areas, contact Virante Vice President Malcolm Young at (919) 459-1399 or by email at myoung@virante.com or Submit an RFQ.

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

Broadwick recently passed 3700 clients for its email marketing software IntelliContact. Broadwick added 2,400 new clients in 2005 and grew its revenues by 438% over 2004.

Virante continues to 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 and is now accepting new clients. If you need any assistance with search engine optimization, CPC management, link building, web site development, online ad spend management, or email marketing campaign development contact contact Malcolm Young at myoung@virante.com or (919) 459-1399.

Sales of Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales hit a record high in December. 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. Download an audio introduction.

Ryan has made the cover of a Nigerian Magazine called SuccessCoach and has been named a "2005 World Changer" for his leadership in entrepreneurship and poverty reduction by the Nigerian state of Yobe. Read the magazine article here.

The Anti-Poverty Campaign, an organization founded by Ryan in September 2005 to 'consign absolute poverty to the dustbin of history by 2025, has published its mission and would love feedback from readers.

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

Our feature article, "The 20 Most Important Business Lessons I Learned in 2005", provides twenty lessons that I learned (some the hard way) over the past year. The newsletter also contains an update on my Anti-Poverty Blog, an update on the Zeromillion.com Discussion Forum, a section that provides free content you may use on your web site, links to powerpoint presentations from past speeches I've given, 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

The 20 Most Important Business Lessons I Learned in 2005
by Ryan P. M. Allis

Near the end of each year, I always create a "Year Review" document in which I list memories from the year, new people I've met, the progress I've made on my goals, business results, and the most important business lessons I've learned. Per my 2005 Year Review, here are the twenty most important business lessons I learned in 2005.

1. Listen to that little voice in the back of your head. It's usually alerting you to something that might come back to bite you if you don't listen to it.
2. Don't let non-communication lead to the de-generation of a relationship.
3. Full-on bias toward action is great. But only when you have little to lose. Once you have something to lose, you must balance having a bias toward action with analysis, due diligence, and care.
4. Don't avoid doing things just because they are hard or may cause conflict.
5. Consistently look for bottlenecks and inefficiencies in communication flows and organizational behavior.
6. Integrity is what matters at the end of the day. There will always eventually be an audit or a lawsuit that has to look into what you're doing RIGHT NOW. So make sure at all times your actions are above board and in good faith.
7. The business world can be harsh and often times there is someone in your life that you trust that you should not who will eventually try to screw you over.
8. As CEO, if there is a layer of management between you and the person you need to speak to, speak to that person's manager first to make sure it is okay to speak with him or her or just relay the message through that person's manager.
9. As CEO, try to avoid assigning work to people you do not directly manage to avoid priority conflicts.Rather, in all cases except emergencies give the task to that person's manager to assign.
10. Recognition and praise can be just as big of motivating factors for employees as salary and bonuses.
11. Finding the right people when you need them is a significant challenge and can take longer than you would think.
12. Always communicate openly, fully, and quickly with your customers during any negative events.
13. Quality assurance is a critical part of the software development process. Don't release a new version of your product until it has been thoroughly tested by both an in-house QA team and a subset of your customer base. Bugs that make it into a released version are much more costly both in lost sales and loss of brand goodwill than spending the money needed to fix them up front
14. Raising funding for a company usually will take longer than you expect.
15. Make the call. It's often better to call than email if you're trying to get a project done quickly.
16. It is better to prepare for the worst when things are going well rather than when they're not.
17. Sometimes you just have to let go. Get the right people, train them, and then trust them.
18. Just because you have a detailed plan in your head doesn't mean other members of your team know it. If you don't consistently communicate your vision and plans, people may think you don't have vision and have failed to plan.
19. Be very nice to merchant account processing limit review officers and give them the information they need to review your limit well before you hit it.
20. Building a business is truly like trying to push a big horizontal wooden wheel. It takes hundreds of small pushes to get it moving, and hundreds more to get it going quickly, but once you get it going quickly inertia starts to take over and your continued efforts have a greater and greater effect.

Ryan Allis is the CEO of Broadwick Corporation, a provider of email marketing 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 taking time off from 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

Want to meet up for lunch or hear me speak? Here's a listing of where I'll be in 2006:

Have an event you'd like me to speak at? Contact Malcolm Young for rates and details.

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. Video on Microfinance
2. What Would God Think?
3. Economics is the "Sexiest Trade Alive" According to Newsweek
4. Some Success in Hong Kong is Good News
5. The WTO and Farming Subsidies
6. The Relative Value of 37 Million Americans Against 3000 Million Non-Americans
7. The Role of the Youth of Africa in Reducing Poverty
8. The Top 8% of the World's Wealthy
9. Interesting West Wing Presidential Debate
10. Our Mission -- Ending Extreme Poverty in Our Lifetime
11. One of My Favorite Quotes
12. Join The Anti-Poverty Campaign Team
13. John Edwards Has It Right About Poverty, Mostly
14. Props to UNC-Chapel Hill for Having their Own Live 8
15. A $23 Lesson in Selling
16. Props to CNN for covering "A Global Summit with President Clinton"
17. A great comment in today's Financial Times
18. The List of Leaders -- Which Ones Will Take Action?
19. 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 just ask that you notify us by emailing ryan [at] virante.com.

• 48 Articles - Authorized Excerpts from Zero to One Million
• 45 Articles - Articles by Ryan Allis, June 2002 - July 2003
  

Download Ryan's Presentation from the October 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

Download Ryan's Presentation from "Creating a Life of Purpose, Passion, and Prosperity" presented at Danville Community College in April 2005. [ Download Here ] Feel free to post on your own web site, send to colleagues, or use excerpts with attribution in your own presentations

Members: 1638
Posts: 1448
Location: http://www.zeromillion.com/talk/

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

• Religion, the Christian church, and entrepreneurship
• How to operate a beauty salon?
• Teaching entrepreneurship
• Frustration as a young entrepreneur
• 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 World is Flat 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
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• 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 ten 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:

• The 20 Most Important BusinessLessons I Learned in 2005
• Been Up All Night
• 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:

December 2005 - Youth Social Enterprise Initiative
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)
February 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 seven of The Entrepreneurs’ Chronicle. We'll see you February 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.

Comments/Suggestions: myoung@virante.com
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Inquire About Services: myoung@virante.com

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 email marketing 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 © 2006 by Zeromillion.com, the top entrepreneurship resource online

"I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come."
- Abraham Lincoln, Age 20