There’s a myth out there about how easy it is to make money on the Internet. It goes something like this: The Internet has made it easy for anyone to make a fortune, or at least an extra thousand dollars every month or so. All you have to do is start selling stuff on eBay and you’ll be rolling in dough.

As savvy entrepreneurs know, making money on the Internet—or anywhere else for that matter—is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it and no one would be making money by professing to hold the sacred key to yet one more vault of entrepreneurial knowledge. The truth is, the only surefire way to make money on eBay or anywhere else is to plan your work and work your plan. Other people might call it ‘working hard’ or ‘working smart’ but no matter how you cut it, you have to be smart enough to know that without a plan—without a roadmap—and without hard work and dedication, you will fail.

While technological advances and the Internet have put business ownership within the reach of more people now than at any point in our nation’s history, more people it seems are failing as business owners. What the guy who lives in Missouri and sells movies on eBay may not understand is that relatively speaking, he has to work just as hard if not harder than the guy down the street who owns the local video store. For starters, if he’s selling on eBay, there’s a community of buyers who are more than willing to share their experiences (with the seller) with other eBay buyers. Imagine walking into your local video store and being able to ask all of the store’s current and previous customers to rate the store’s performance on price, customer service and value, right in front of the store’s owner and right in front of every other potential customer. On eBay and other Internet sites, that’s exactly what happens, and if you take your job lightly—and it is a job by the way—your customers are going to shout it from your rooftop, and before too long you won’t have anyone buying your DVDs.

Don’t be too fooled by the promise of eBay. Sure, a lot of people are making a couple extra grand every month or so on the site (and a select few are making a lot more than that), but it’s not because they’re not working for it. For every eBay success story, I’d bet you dollars to donuts that there are at least 1,000 or more absolute failures. I believe that the people who are making a killing on eBay—and even those who are pulling down a few extra grand every month or so—are the same people who would have been successful back in the 1950s selling Tupperware, or who would have persevered and made something great happen during California Gold Rush of the 1840s. Why? Because they had a plan and they worked hard to achieve their goals.

Unfortunately, a lot of people get sucked into pipedreams (and I’m not talking about the type where they promise you you’ll make millions by selling candles or handmade baskets through direct sales parties). The biggest pipedream of all is that if you post it on eBay or display it in the front window of your store, that someone will buy it. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the broadest sense, the typical eBay seller’s expectations are wildly exaggerated, while at the same time, their understanding of what it takes to be successful—in terms of man hours—is nowhere near where it should be.

Sure, the Internet as a platform has made it a lot easier to start a business. When compared to opening a bricks & mortar operation, the start-up costs are negligible… you don’t have to sign a multi-year lease, there are no ‘tenant finishes’ to borrow money to pay for, and now-a-days with drop shipping becoming more and more popular, you can even get by without carrying any inventory. But all of that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll succeed in an online marketplace.

First of all, far too many eBay sellers—and other business owners as well—attempt to compete on price and price alone; and as any adjunct B-School professor will tell you, competing on price gets you nowhere in the long run, especially when there are Wal-Marts or dollar stores on just about every other street corner. Sure, if you’re an attorney and you can offer your customers solid legal advice at a lower price-point than your competition, you just might scrape by. However, trying to match the lowest-priced lawyer in town is nasty business. Unless you can match her dollar for dollar on human resources and overhead, you’d better offer something she can’t, like superior service, better turnaround time, or savvier advice, all priced appropriately, of course.

With so many people chasing their dreams now a days on the eBays of the world, I strongly recommend that you take the time now—if you haven’t done so already—to plan your work and work your plan. Even if you create just a one to two page business plan that identifies the basics—like target market, points of differentiation, product mix, and basic financial expectations for the next six months—you’d be further along than 95 percent of online retailers. Follow your plan according to your vision and adjust when and where necessary, and work hard or smart or however you want to call it, and you’ll be in the top one percent of eBay/online retailers before you know it.

For many American’s, Memorial Day means the opening of swimming pools, the unofficial start of summer vacationing, barbeques with family and friends, and the annual running of the Indianapolis 500. Somewhere along the way, most of the citizenry forgot that the holiday is supposed to commemorate the men and women who died in military service for our country.

Take a look at these figures:

American Revolution (1775 to 1784)
- Participants: 290,000
- Deaths in Service: 4,000

War of 1812 (1812 to 1815)
- Participants: 287,000
- Deaths in Service: 2,000

Indian Wars (1817 to 1898)
- Participants: 106,000
- Deaths in Service: 1,000

Mexican War (1846 to 1848)
- Participants: 79,000
- Deaths in Service: 13,000

Civil War (1861 to 1865)
- Union Participants: 2,213,000
- Union Deaths in Service: 364,000
- Confederate Participants: 1,000,000
- Confederate Deaths in Service: 133,821

Spanish-American War (1898 to 1902)
- Participants: 392,000
- Deaths in Service: 11,000

World War I (1917 to 1918)
- Participants: 4,744,000
- Deaths in Service: 116,000

World War II (1940 to 1947)
- Participants: 16,535,000
- Deaths in Service: 406,000

Korean Conflict (1950 to 1955)
- Participants: 6,807,000
- Deaths in Service: 55,000

Vietnam Era (1964 to 1975)
- Participants: 9,200,000
- Deaths in Service: 109,000

Gulf War Era (1990 to TBD)
- Participants: 3,800,000
- Deaths in Service: 9,000

As you can see, literally since the birth of our Nation, no one generation of Americans has been spared the awesome responsibility of defending our freedom and way of life via show of force. Nearly 50 million American citizens—both men and women—have served our country in times of war, and close to two million have died as a result.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not some ultra conservative, flag-waving nationalist who blindly agrees with every action our elected and military leaders choose to pursue. Like the best people I know, I believe mistakes and miscalculations have been made (especially as of late), and I accept that we do not live in a perfect nation. That having been said, on my drive back from Wyoming—where my 2-year-old daughter, Kaitlin, and I had an awesome Adventure Buddies outing—I did take lots of time to reflect just how lucky I am to have been born and raised in the USA, where the American dream (which includes entrepreneurship) lives on because of the sacrifices American servicemen and women choose to make.

With this weekend being a long one and with my wife headed down to southern Utah to visit her side of the family, our daughter Kaitlin and I are headed north to Jackson, Wyoming, for what’s sure to another epic version of Adventure Buddies. The plan for this trip is to camp out tonight in the Bridger Teton National Forest, and then head up to Jackson tomorrow morning where we’ll find a hotel to store our non-essentials and perhaps take a quick shower and bath, and then take off to explore the Grand Teton National Park, followed by a trip on Sunday up to Yellowstone National Park to show Kaitlin the buffalo (she’s been talking about “the buffalo�? for over a week now, so I’m realy hoping that “the buffalo” will choose to cooperate by making an appearance or two, or three or four).

Some people might think it’s a little nutty to take a 2-year-old to Grand Teton National Park and/or to Yellowstone, but when you stop to think about how outdoor-minded parents who live in the local area choose to spend time with their children on the weekends, there’s really nothing all that out of the ordinary about it (aside from the fact it’s now late-May and the weather forecasters are calling for snow in the region both tomorrow and Sunday). In any event, rain-snow-or-shine, we’ll be back home on Monday with just enough time left in the day to still enjoy Memorial Day off from work

Here’s wishing everyone a great weekend, and if I’m not back in time to post something on Monday, Happy Memorial Day!

In most major cities across the United States, if your company chooses to set up a conference or trade show exhibit booth at a hotel or convention center, chances are that you’re going to run into a company like GES Exposition Services or Freeman. Technically called a show ‘decorator,’ the Freeman’s and GES’s of the world are hired by conference or trade show organizers–or they have exclusive contracts with hotels and convention centers–to provide infrastructure-type products and services to exhibitors.

Often, companies like mine have no choice (because of preexisting union-type agreements) but to contract with these decorators for things like booth set-up and teardown, carpeting, display tables and skirting, and chairs and cleaning services. Why should any of this matter? Take one look at a decorator’s price sheet and you see exactly why!

Here’s a short list of prices (charged by Freeman—the only game in town—for a 3-day conference they’re ‘decorating’ at a union hotel in California):

• Black Leather Sofa: $807.05
• Matching Loveseat: $726.86
• Matching Chair: $540.85

Okay, so maybe you’re thinking, “What’s the big deal… who needs a leather couch?? Fair enough. How about a standard table and two plastic chairs (every exhibitor needs a table and a couple of chairs, right?):

• 6’ Table (undraped): $137.85
• 2 Black Diamond Side Chairs: $218.00

Wow, that’s something, isn’t it? And the list of over-inflated prices doesn’t end there (not by a long shot). Want your booth vacuumed at the end of each night? That’s going to run you an extra $93.00. Want your trashcans emptied before your booth opens the following morning? That’s going to cost $71.45 (but don’t forget to pay for that trash can: $85.65).

If you ship your booth to the show ahead of time, the decorator gets away with charging you between $600 and $2,000 to deliver your booth to the exhibit hall (from a storage room, mind you, that’s less than 100 feet away from your spot in the exhibit hall). And since the hotel and decorator are both union shops, you–as the owner of your booth–are not even allowed to set-up or tear down the display yourself. Instead, you’re forced to pay $78.80 per hour on a weekday–or double that on Saturday or Sunday–for the privledge of having a union worker handle a job that you could accomplish in half the time with the care and touch your display deserves.

My point is this… these so-called ‘decorators’ are about the most anti-competitive forces I’ve ever encountered as a small business owner/entrepreneur. Trade shows and conferences are such a key component to small business success that I for one would like to see an Elliot Ness-type of effort to shut down what has so clearly become The Trade Show Mafia.

A few weeks ago, in a post titled “Pick a Brand, Any Brand,�? I mentioned that Doba had just emerged from an exhaustive brand migration project. For the first three years in the life of the company, we called ourselves Wholesale Marketer. Then, last year, because we wanted to be able to define for ourselves what our company does and what we stand for, we decided to rebrand.

To most everyone on the planet, “Wholesale Marketer�? means something, and at the end of the day, we felt pigeonholed by the name. After a lot of thought, internal team discussions and more than a few disagreements, we chose “Doba�?, which aside from being a small town in the southern part of Chad and an obscure character in a Star Wars role-playing game, means absolutely nothing to 99.999 percent of the Homo sapiens roaming the planet today.

While picking a new name may seem like child’s play, I can tell you firsthand that a rebranding campaign is anything but a simple matter. From updating corporate papers and vendor agreements to educating your customers and employees about why rebranding is necessary, before it’s all said and done, you’ll literally find yourself tearing into every single facet of your business to complete the migration.

If your company is thinking about rebranding, keep these tips in mind:

• Rebranding means more than just creating new graphics. Rebranding usually involves significant changes to your company name, mission and vision statements, brand logo, image, marketing strategy, advertising themes, sales presentations, collateral materials, company documents, staff recruitment and retention strategies, and employee training programs, just to name a few. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that rebranding just means creating a new logo.
• If you’re going to rebrand, consider being original. Go the extra mile to see if there’s value in being unique. Sure, you could call your funkadelic lampshade company, “The Lampshade Company,�? but you could also call it “Funkadelic,�? which is scalable and may resonate better with both your target customer and staff.
• Identify a clear leader for managing the brand migration process. Once you have your new brand in hand, you’ll need to assign someone to coordinate the project and make appropriate “go�? & “no-go�? decisions. The key here… avoid groupthink. Be clear about what you intend to accomplish, and give the leader the authority to manage the task at hand.
• Form a task force. Rebranding affects all of your employees, every department at your company, 100 percent of the customers you’ve ever had, and all of your business partners and vendors. Right from the get-go, establish a task force whose membership is representative of each and every stakeholder you serve. Charge the task force with looking out for the unique needs of each demographic, and make it their job to drill down and narrowcast their efforts, leaving no stone unturned in the effort to migrate to the new brand and communicate the impending change.
• Charge the brand migration task force with generating and monitoring a giant list of all the small and large changes that will be required for full brand migration. Beware: This list will be big and feel totally overwhelming, but once you have it down in an Excel spreadsheet (or in another task tracking tool), it will be relatively easy to monitor the brand migration’s progress. Items to include on the list are: changes to merchant credit card processing accounts, logos, web site copy, job descriptions, press releases, better business bureau listings, telephone directory listings, outgoing telephone greetings, legal filings, employment contracts, business cards, brochures, etc. Remember, no item is too small for this list.
• Set a deadline for the migration and stick to it. No matter how big or small your company may be, rebranding is a big undertaking, and someone will always be able to generate valid reasons to shift the launch date. Trust me…you need to set a deadline and you need to stick to it. At Doba, even after we knew we were going to rebrand, we procrastinated for quite a while. Finally, we set a somewhat arbitrary deadline and just pushed to get it done. If it helps, think about the timing of your biggest trade show or sales presentation of the year. Prepare a soft launch three months in advance (that way you allow yourself enough time to work out the kinks before the big show or presentation).
• Communicate with key stakeholders before the launch. Internally, make sure every single employee—from members of the management team to the people you entrust to answer the phones—understands why rebranding was necessary and what it means to the company moving forward. Externally, inform your customers of the impending change, and seek your business partner’s and vendor’s cooperation early on in the process in adjusting external links back to your newly branded web site and name.

These days, companies like mine have to realize that for our brand and business strategies to be aligned, our brand cannot be driven solely by the activities of one department within the company verses another. Delivering bottom line results against the promises of our brand strategy requires that every level of our organization lives, breaths, and owns the Doba brand. Hopefully, the tips I’ve provided here can help you achieve similar results.