Take Five With Frank Farwell
Frank Farwell founded
WinterSilks, a Wisconsin-based online apparel retailer, and helped it become an
Inc. 500 company. Now he’s written a book titled
Chicken Lips, Wheeler-Dealer, and the Beady-Eyed MBA: An Entrepreneur's Wild Adventures on the New Silk Road. As the title suggests, the book has plenty of attitude, including the assertions that venture capital isn’t needed to seed small business growth and, more controversially, his panning of private-sector unions. Perhaps a combination of “tude” and unconventional wisdom is exactly what entrepreneurs need to navigate these economically troubled times, especially since Farwell is candid about his own mistakes and what he learned from them.
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Buying and selling the old-fashioned way
As reported in the pages of In Business magazine.
"Hey man, do you have a corkscrew?" asks a long-haired, pleasant fellow who has probably lived in the Williamson Street neighborhood for
decades. Ricardo "Rick" Paoli, 51, owner of
Rick's Olde Gold looks at him from behind a glass jewelry counter. "Man, you know I buy and sell gold and silver. Why are you asking me that?"
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E-Commerce: Tax Issue Begs for National Fix
As reported in the pages of In Business magazine.
If anything other than the deficit and the national debt is screaming for a national solution, traditional retailers believe it's having Internet-only retailers collect sales taxes on their online purchases. Virtually every state government in the United States was running a deficit at the start of the year, and uncollected taxes from Internet-only retailers such as
Amazon.com can amount to hundreds of millions in lost revenue per year, per state. Cash-strapped state governments are attempting to require Internet retailers to collect sales taxes at the point of sale and remit them to the state where the customer resides – something consumers now are required to do – but they are being met with both constitutional and commercial resistance.
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Career opportunities: Franchising can be a viable option for entrepreneurs who don't want to go it alone
In Business magazine
When economists use the term "creative destruction," it can often sound callous and cold. After all, what they're often really talking about is "job destruction." And though glimmers of hope have recently started appearing on the economic horizon, many people are still feeling the sting of one of the most "creative" eras since the Great Depression.
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