Billionaire entrepreneur and best-selling author Richard Branson has become an icon in the eyes of many aspiring business owners. His inspirational advice has helped steer many startups, simply by learning from his vast experience building the Virgin empire of businesses. Here, we capture nine of Branson’s best strategies for success — from branding and customer service to leadership and learning to let go. Read the rest of this entry »

Nineteen years ago, I returned from my family’s winter holiday, unlocked a small, empty, rented office, and started my own tax and financial planning firm.

I knew what it would take for my business to succeed. I would have to become the best financial adviser I could be. I would also have to attract enough clients, and the right sort of clients, to support a growing company, as well as my young family, since my wife was then staying at home with our 6- and 2-year-old daughters. And, at some point, I was going to have to build a staff that could take the business to places I would never reach alone. Otherwise, I would not be creating an enterprise; I would merely be keeping myself gainfully occupied until retirement. If I had wanted to do that, there was no reason to leave my former job at a big accounting firm in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

We recently had the pleasure of catching up with Jake Nickell, the founder of Threadless and author of the new book by the same name. Not only is the Threadless book visually stunning, entertaining, and mind-bending, it’s full of great information and views about the creative process.  As it should be, as it’s written by a guy who has taken an idea and turned it into a $30 million+ business without following any of the normal tenets of big business success.

Jake is as unconventional a CEO as you’ll find anywhere, and it works!  Enjoy the interview, then go order the book.

Young Entrepreneurs: Threadless is so much more than a T-shirt company – it’s a community. To what extent has the community aspect played a role in the company’s success? Was building a community what you had in mind from the outset, or did it just happen?

Jake Nickell: Threadless started as a project within another online community called Dreamless. Had that community not existed, Threadless never would have existed.

At first, it sounds like another startup fairytale. A 19-year-old Princeton freshman starts a company with the hopes of making a tangible difference in the world, and it grows into a global, multi-million dollar venture.

 But stories like TerraCycle founder and CEO Tom Szaky’s are never as they seem.

Click here for a photo tour of TerraCycle’s Incredible 99% Recycled Office >

It takes more than just a genius idea to succeed. Businesses that are looking to make a transformational global impact require hard work, incredible business savvy and the courage to press on when everyone calls you crazy.

TerraCycle began as a sustainable fertilizer company, making the product out of worm refuse and putting it in used bottles. It even got a license to use Coca-Cola bottles (which have a patented contour shape). Read the rest of this entry »