If your small business isn’t maximizing the benefits of being present online, you are not alone. However, many of your competitors have built a credible online presence and as a result, are likely pulling ahead of you.

Why are many small businesses still largely ignoring the Internet?

We are living in an age dominated by digital devices. Looking around my workspace I can see two laptops, a tablet and an iPhone. If I look into the office next door I’ll find another laptop and a second smartphone. I’m sure you can see a similar picture if you look around yourself.

Many businesses are using this to their advantage, connecting with new and existing customers in entirely new ways. But, for a surprising amount of small business owners, creating an online presence requires exploring unknown terrain and opportunities, like settling a new frontier.

If you’re one of those business owners, we’re here to help.

In this article we’ll share several compelling reasons why you need to expand your online presence and we’ll also give you actionable tips to help you do it.

What is an online presence?

An online presence for a business is the business’s website, social profiles, online memberships in directories, and any other places on the Internet where customers and potential customers can find you. It’s the collective sum of all identities you’ve created on the Internet.

Many businesses limit their online activities to their website, where customers can find them using a single address (a URL).

A case for getting online

Some companies must have a physical presence. The nature of their business demands it: hair salons, restaurants, bouncy-house play centers for kids, bakeries, drugstores, gyms, furniture/appliance stores.

But even the most traditional businesses may be missing out if they don’t have an online presence.

Steve Goedeker is the owner of an appliance and furniture store in Ballwin, Missouri. He was motivated to go digital when sales slumped in the wake of the 2008 recession. But, what he first viewed as merely a survival technique turned out to be so much more.

In a March 2015 article in Entrepreneur Goedeker confided:

We thought if we could do 5 percent of our business online that would be enough to get us through the hard times… Now we understand that online is where the business is. That’s where the growth is.

What began as an entirely brick and mortar enterprise with 15 employees and decreasing sales is now a thriving online business employing 90. Today, Goedekers.com generates a whopping 92% of Geodeker’s total revenue.

Still not convinced? Let’s talk about four reasons why it’s absolutely essential for your business to establish an identity online.

1) An online presence establishes credibility and trust

Online website builder Weebly surveyed several million consumers. The results? About 56% of consumers don’t trust a business that doesn’t have a website.

Think about that for a moment. It’s not that consumers just prefer that a business have a website. More than half of consumers won’t trust your business if it doesn’t have an online presence.

Consumers who don’t trust your business are unlikely to become customers.

The simple act of creating a website will make your business more appealing and trustworthy to a wide group of consumers. But, more than that, you can leverage your online presence to actively create a trusting relationship between your business and potential customers.

As Jes Gonzalez of Scibendi puts it,

The beauty of having a site, blog, and social media accounts is that they enable reviews and comments about your products. As an expert in your business, you’ll be able to answer any queries quickly and thoroughly. Any glowing praise that is publicly available will build your online presence and show even brand-new customers that you’re a reputable business.

2) Having an online presence gives your business a voice

“Brands have less control over what is said about them online. Users have access to the opinions of other users, which heavily influences their purchase decisions.” says Ryan Davies of Media Vision.

Just because your business doesn’t have a website, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t already online. Review sites like Yelp allow consumers to discuss their good and bad experiences with businesses.

If you’re not a part of that conversation you’re missing a huge opportunity.

Creating a website allows you to have a voice for your brand on the internet. If you communicate your brand effectively, your website can say a lot about who your company is and what you do.

In addition to offering a platform to bolster your brand, the Internet gives you the opportunity to literally take part in the conversations happening about your business by responding to customer praise and complaints on your business’s reviews. Jes Gonzalez of Scibendi argues that:

It’s better to know about an unhappy client so you can make amends and carry your name forward, rather than having an angry customer sharing their distaste for your business without you even knowing they were unhappy in the first place.

Websites, social media and online reviews give your business a voice to speak directly to consumers.

3) Putting your business online improves the customer experience

Keeping your customers happy often helps to prevent bad online reviews. That’s why it’s essential to create a website that can act as an ambassador for consumers when you’re not physically able to.

In a recent Entrepreneur article, Sherry Grey wrote about a business that has reaped the benefits of what an online presence can do for your customer experience:

Cowboy Charters in Key West is a family-owned charter boat business with a small staff, but you can chat directly with the owner any time. When the website loads, a LiveChat window pops up and invites you to chat. If you respond, your chat goes directly to the owner’s cell phone for instant response. Captain Mark told me that that it’s super cheap — $20 per month — and incredibly effective. Their customer service is so impressive, they book two out of three people who inquire on the spot!

Cowboy Charters created a unique customer experience that is only available online, and their business has thrived because of it.

4) E-commerce is growing

Online sales have been growing for years and it looks like they will continue to do so. A recent report from Forrester forecasts that “US online retail sales will reach more than $500 billion by 2020, up from $373 billion in 2016”.

Considering this vast potential for revenue, you owe it to your business to get online and start competing for your share.

With the tantalizing thought of getting your share of that $500 billion still fresh in your mind, let’s talk about how to create an online presence.

Plan your branding strategy

Start by considering what Jon Acuff of Knowledge Center calls the 3 C’s: Clarity, Consistency, and Commitment. He asserts that keeping these three guidelines in mind will help your brand stand out from the crowd:

Clarity – know who your business is and communicate that identity clearly.

Consistency – maintain your branding and messaging between all platforms (online, in print, and in-store).

Commitment – give consumers time to get to know your brand.

Build your website

Once you’ve given some thought to your 3 Cs it’s time to take action. A website is a critical first step in establishing your online presence. According to a report from Verisign:

Globally, two-thirds (65 percent) of small businesses with an online presence said they elected to create a company website because it makes their company look more credible, and 60 percent said that a website is critical for a small company’s success. Overall, 82 percent of small businesses with an online presence would recommend investment in a website to other small companies in their industry.

Though the benefit of having a website for your small businesses is clear, SCORE reports that just 56% of small businesses have a website in 2017. The other 44% are falling further behind their competitors.

Check out our article, 10 Web Design Tips for Small Businesses, for tips on how to get started and best practices for small business web design. If you’d like professionals to design (or redesign) your website, consider enlisting the help of crowdSPRING’s creative community with a web design project.

Whatever choice you make in designing and building your site, make sure to get your own domain name. This is part of maintaining consistency.

Even if you start with a minimalist website, you can expand your site over time. As long as your domain name remains the same, your customers know where to find you and they’ll recognize your brand as one that they trust.

For more tips on securing the right domain name for your small business, check out our article Supercharge Your Startup or Small Business With A New Top-Level Domain Name.

Establish a social media presence

Social media marketing is a complex topic that we have covered many times on this blog. Social media can lead to decreased marketing costs, stronger consumer interaction, and increased brand recognition and loyalty.

Nearly every small business should absolutely maintain a social media presence, though many don’t. SCORE reports that only 48% of small businesses use social media.

With so many different social media platforms available, it’s easy to feel lost. And if you’re just getting started, it’s important to know where to focus your efforts.

Facebook remains one of the most important social media platforms for small businesses. Kissmetrics reports,

The average value of a visit from Facebook is over 4 times more than a visit from Twitter. It is clear that Facebook is where small-medium e-commerce sites should focus their attention.

If your business is just getting started online, place your efforts there. We recently covered some new ways to engage with your audience on Facebook including creating video content easily with Facebook Live and engaging with your audience through Facebook Messenger.

You should also maintain a presence on the most popular business review sites, and Yelp is a great place to start. Wordstream’s Complete Guide to Yelp Reviews is a valuable resource that is regularly updated with the newest tips for getting the most out of your Yelp profile.

Social media is just that— social. It welcomes the consumers to interact with your business. A little time spent on Facebook and Yelp will go a long way.

Don’t forget the importance of design.

Finally, don’t forget that the internet is a visual medium. This means that design plays a big role. As noted in our article Five Reasons Entrepreneurs Should Invest in Design Early:

During a study at Carleton University in Ottawa, participants were shown websites for only 50 milliseconds and asked to rate them for visual appeal. The participants were then shown the websites for a longer time, and asked to rate the websites again. The study found that the participants rated the websites’ visual appeal consistently, regardless of how long they were shown them.

What does this mean for small business owners? You have 50 milliseconds to make a good impression on your potential customer, and quality design will play a major role.

Make sure that your business is represented just as well online as it is in person by utilizing quality design on your website and social media profiles. If you need some help, our community of over 200,000 creatives can give you dozens of options for a professionally designed website and social media presence.

Small businesses have so many compelling reasons to create an online presence. With so much to gain, we hope we’ve inspired you to brave the online frontier, too.

Ready to invest in a website for your small business? It’s not as expensive as you think! Many businesses in the U.S. and from around the world have turned to crowdSPRING to create professional, unique website designs for as little as $899. crowdSPRING’s Web Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your needs and allows you to work with multiple designers to find the perfect web design that reflects you and your brand.

A style guide is a set of rules to follow any time a member of your organization wants to publish, present or promote content for your brand. It answers questions like:

What font does your logo use? What colors are approved? When you need an image for a project, what tone and feel should it have? Should writers use “email” or does your organization prefer the hyphenated “e-mail?” What is your stance on the Oxford comma debate?

These seem like small details, but if they’re not captured in a style guide your beautiful brand can quickly drift into an inconsistent experience for your customers and employees.

Fast Company’s Delia Bonfilo noted consistency as a critical part of  crafting a sustainable identity, and your style guide can play a major role in maintaining this consistency: “It’s consistent manner of use will evoke a sense of dependability and professionalism.”

Who benefits from a style guide?

Well, everyone:

New Hires

It’s likely that at one point or another, you’ll have more than one person creating content for your brand. You’ll hire new people, your teams will grow and change, and everyone will need to know the ‘rules for your brand’. Vieo Design’s Melanie Chandler said it best:

“Branding style guides are helpful whether you are a small company with only one designer, or are well over 100 employees. They ensure that every visual element produced by or about your company is consistent, so a new hire doesn’t decide to take their own creative spin on your brand.”

Outside Help

External contractors need to quickly be able to pick up on the correct tone and language for your brand, too, and a style guide allows them to do that. It also saves them the time (which as everyone knows is money) trying to track down this information from other sources.

“Visual language is like any other language. Misunderstandings arise if the language is not shared and understood by everyone using it. As a product or team grows, the challenges within these modalities compound.” – Airbnb’s Building a Visual Language

Management

Managers and editors benefit from a solid style guide, too. The less time they have to spend making edits to their employees’ work, the better. Removing uncertainty from a brand discussion (“The logo’s background color is cerulean blue!” “No, it’s deep sky blue!”) saves time and reduces frustration. Having a definitive guideline to refer to allows everyone to feel confident that they’re staying on-brand.

The Customers

Making sure that you define the visual experience throughout all of your communications will lead to a better customer interaction with your brand. Having a style guide ensures that you avoid inconsistent messaging, which is confusing and isolating to your audience.

How to Create a Style Guide

Feel ready to embark on assembling your own style guide? Great! It’s not as overwhelming as you think. How many elements and items that make up your style guide will be based on the size of your company and your branding needs. While your list may expand, here are six basic items that should be on your style guide:

Image courtesy of Foursquare

Brand Overview

What is your brand? What does it stand for? What are your goals and vision for your company? These are all important things to define early, as they will serve as the guidepost for the overall flavor you want your brand to incorporate.

Image courtesy of CI Studio

Logo

Your logo is the most essential element in your guide. A logo represents the aesthetic of your company’s brand, is the first thing people notice, and the piece that they remember later on. A good logo can help define the culture of your company at a glance, and it should be consistent everywhere it’s used.

Image courtesy of Apple

General rules for the logo include specifications about the size, placement, how much negative space is around it, and the places your company considers appropriate usage.

Image courtesy of NASA

Color

Color is a powerful part of your brand. Properly used, it can make your brand feel exciting, mysterious, smart, light-hearted, or luxurious. To make sure your brand’s colors aren’t subjected to an over-zealous designer’s pastel or glow effect, your style guide should have a detailed color palette. It should clearly show what colors are permitted, where certain colors should (and shouldn’t) be used, and what colors should be avoided. This should include the specific color values (RGB, CMYK, and even Pantone) to remove uncertainty when creating collateral for the web, print, and other media.

Image courtesy of Mailchimp

Fonts and Typography

Your typeface and font are important, as are the rules that you assign to them. Headers, quotes, copy and any fine print all need the right color choice, sizing and style, with font choice of critical importance. Stop that new intern from replacing your carefully chosen typeface with the dreaded Comic Sans MS by detailing all of your brand’s typography in your guide.

Image courtesy of Medium

Images

Your style guide should include image guidelines: what’s allowed, what’s not, and when a specific image should be used. You can even include instructions on where images should be sourced from, and if you have a particular aesthetic, what form it takes. Some companies prefer images with people in them, others standardize on sweeping landscapes and vistas. Whatever you’ve decided for your business should be spelled out in your guide.

Image courtesy of Spotify

Voice

Style guides aren’t just for visual elements. The lexicon your company chooses can help define your brand’s personality and can have a profound effect on how your customers interact with you. Words are everywhere, from social media posts to sales brochures and product information, and serious brands take words seriously. Apple and Yahoo! both have well-regarded guides for how they use words, and while you don’t need a weighty tome, capturing the general sound of your company’s “voice” can make the difference between an anything-goes approach and something more measured and unique.

Image courtesy of Google

Getting started

“A style guide should do just that—guide, but never restrain, creativity,” – Barbican’s Brand Guidelines

Ultimately, style guides are not about crafting hard and fast rules for every little piece of your brand. they’re meant to be guidelines that create consistency and help your company project a unified presence.

There are a number of tools available to help you create your own style guide, including Frontify and ZippyPixel’s printable brand guidelines template. There is also seemingly endless inspiration available to help you learn from the work of others.

Like businesses, brands are “living documents” that evolve and grow over time. By capturing the essence of your own brand in a style guide you can maintain and nurture your own brand while ensuring it’s delivered consistently and concisely.

Your style guide is only as good as your current branding. If you think your logo could use a refresh or you have yet to design one, consider enlisting the help of our community of over 200,00 creatives that have worked with thousands of business to build standout branding. You can get dozens of design concepts for as little as $199.

Technology has helped close the gap between small businesses and startups and the larger, better-financed competitors they have set out to disrupt. Today, inexpensive and free small business marketing tools, outstanding small business applications from Google, and crowdsourcing have made it possible for startups and small businesses to level the playing field. In some situations, being smaller can even be a competitive advantage.

Crowdsourcing empowers startups and small businesses to avoid the time-consuming process of finding a graphic designer, negotiating a contract and a fee for the work, and the wait to review one or several design choices. Simply put: crowdsourcing is quicker, less expensive, easier, and offers you far more choice than working with a single freelancer or agency.

There are literally dozens of different types of designs that can be crowdsourced.

In this video, we’ll discuss five designs that startups and small businesses should crowdsource to further level the playing field against better-financed and larger competitors:

1. Logo Design
2. Web Design
3. Flyer Design
4. Stationery Design
5. Banner Ads

Watch the video for more detail on how you can crowdsource these five designs and compete with better-financed and larger companies.

How many business owners have thought: “I want my brand to be very bland so that my company is indistinguishable from anyone else!”

Not one.

A great logo design can be the difference between blending in and standing out from the competition. But while we often recognize the value of a great logo, we don’t always prioritize it.

New business owners often incorrectly believe that a good logo will cost thousands or tens of thousand of dollars.  As a result, they sometimes buy pre-made logos in an online logo store or try a do-it-yourself approach.

In fact, entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones who make the mistake of using generic logos- businesses of all sizes sometimes use logo shortcuts, only to find out that it’s even more expensive to rebrand later. After all, memorable logos are 13% more likely to get consumers attention, and 71.6% more likely to get a positive response from consumers. In a world of noise, that can make a big difference.

In certain industries,  generic logos have become extremely problematic. The epidemic of similar fonts, glyphs, and swishy people leaves a weak first impression on customers and is unmemorable. We’ve even talked about the legal and branding dangers of these generic logo symbols in The Logo Store Nightmare: Ready Made Logos Harm Your Business, Even though some of these generic logos may help a person identify the industry itself, the generic logos also detract from the originality and story of your specific company. Generic logos even break the core elements of good logo design: memorable and unique, making them poor choices for any company. In an effort to avoid that, we took a look at four industries to see which ones fall prey to

To give you some perspective on what we’re talking about, let’s look at four industries and the types of generic logos we often see in those industries.

1. Real Estate Generic Logos

Image source: dm243

Many logos in the real estate industry show a house or some buildings with the company name underneath it. It’s like putting the picture of a shoe on the logo of a shoe company!

The colors are usually in serious tones: reds, grays, and dull blues. The logos are literal but people already understand that a real estate company will deal with the buying and selling of houses. When people choose a real estate agency, they assume that! What they don’t know is what makes a real estate company different, whether that is a personal touch or high-quality agents. Real estate companies that use generic elements in their logos completely miss the opportunity to stand out.

You’ve probably seen many variations of the logos above, with different companies names and some stylization. If your logo has those elements, there are probably thousands of other businesses with similar logos. But you are also unlikely to recall any of those companies! When you look at generic house after house, you don’t learn what the company is trying to communicate. However, not every company in the real estate industry has fallen for the generic logo epidemic, some of them do a great job of breaking the boundaries!

The problem is that consumers can’t recall any of those companies. There’s nothing distinguishable about the design.

Not every company in the real estate industry has fallen for the generic logo epidemic, some of them do a great job of breaking the boundaries! We love this one as an example of a strong, unique real estate logo:

2. Finance Generic Logos

While at first glance each logo may look slightly different, most logos in the finance/consulting services industry look very similar. They focus heavily on the company name, often using a serif font in an attempt to show seriousness and trust. While there is some variation in font size, the words are usually stacked and bolded to show emphasis. The symbols don’t add much- they are mostly buildings and graphic lines.

Overall, many logos in this industry end up conveying exactly what people already think: boring, serious, money focused companies. While the seriousness and focus part of the message is usually intentional, a boring logo lends itself to customers not necessarily caring or knowing which company they prefer. Again, the companies all blend together and the first impression is weak.

Smarter financial companies focus their logos around characters or rounder, friendlier fonts (an overall trend in logo design). Many financial companies are taking the opportunity to simplify their logos, including shorter versions of their name or relying more on a symbol to make their brands more memorable. In an industry that screams complication and confusion, simple logos can go a long way. This Brazilian credit card company proves that even financial companies can have simple, memorable logos:

3. Medical Generic Logos

Another industry that suffers from generic logos is the medical industry. From insurance companies to hospitals to private practices and holistic treatment centers, medically-focused companies often end up reusing the same symbols, fonts, and colors.

Blues, reds, and greens are common colors in the medical industry. They often mirror colors that are serious and focused on the human body. But yet again, these colors and font choices seem extremely serious. People already understand that a doctor’s office or insurance company will be focused and professional. When most people are trying to choose a medical provider, they look at the extra steps they take when they provide services, their customer service, kindness, and ability to be calm. Much like the color and font schemes, the traditional symbols don’t help . When every logo in the industry is a variation of one design, it makes it hard to remember which company is which and makes branding look like an afterthought.

The medical industry is slowly starting to evolve their branding. Smart medical companies that want to stand out are thinking more about their branding.

4. Technology Generic Logos

Even the most innovative industry struggles when it comes to logo design.

Many technology companies struggle to break out of the circular, swooshy glyph and name combination- much like many companies in the finance/consulting industry.  Not only are many tech companies’ symbols almost identical, but the colors tend to trend towards greens and blues in an attempt to look progressive, serious, and scientific. But even more shocking is the lack of variety in font choices. Almost every font is dramatically spaced out. Many of the company names are in all caps, and the fonts are traditional with little creativity. The stack of the symbols and fonts is formulaic too, making the companies seem inaccessible and unimaginative.

Smart startups have become more creative when it comes to logo design. They opting for friendlier, more creative logos as they try to communicate the innovation behind their company- not just their ability to leverage technology well. By using different fonts and playing with different images, innovative technology companies are able to present themselves as interesting and engaging to all types of consumers. We love Github’s logo as an example of playfulness and innovation:

Let us know in the comments if you have any specific pet peeves with generic logos in other industries. Clearly, it’s important to invest early in an original, well-designed logo- especially if you operate in any of these industries. Be memorable, and let your company’s voice shine through its brand.

If you are ready to create a quality logo for your business that inspires trust and confidence in your brand and helps your business stand out from the competition, consider enlisting the help of our network of over 200,000 creatives to give you great options. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize this gem submitted in this packaging design project:

The challenge of this project was to create a packaging design for an all natural snack. It needed to be flexible enough to work with different flavors while keeping the same theme. This design has us ready to break out the snack bowls.

Let us start the slow clap for Gernet. Check out more great work on Gernet’s profile page.

Nicely done, Gernet, nicely done!

People who love to read know that cracking open a new book often leads to a new adventure.

A good book is memorable long after you finish reading it. A great book can change your life.

We wanted to know what books helped to shape the lives of some of the world’s best entrepreneurs. If you’re ready to reinvent your life, these six books may be a good place to start.

Steve Jobs  (Apple Inc.)

Autobiography of A Yogi – Paramahansa Yogananda

Steve Jobs was best known for being the visionary behind Apple Inc. But, we now know that there was a visionary behind the visionary- Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi. Walter Isaacson shares in his biography Steve Jobs that Jobs read the book for the first time as a teenager and re-read the book every year until his death. In fact, Jobs gave a copy to each guest who attended his funeral as a parting gift.

Autobiography of a Yogi is exactly what it claims to be; but, Yogananda was not only a yogi. He was also a businessman. The book discusses yoga, meditation, and spiritual matters. But, it also talks about how business intersects with an insightful, intuitive life. It’s easy to see how Yogananda’s teachings might resonate with the young man who grew to become one of the world’s most inspired entrepreneurs:

“Most of you have had the feeling that you could be great, and do great things; but because you have lacked intuitive power, that potential has, for the most part, remained dormant. To progress and avoid the misery of mistakes, you have to find what is the truth in everything… In your relationships with others, in your business, in your married life, in every part of your life, intuition is essential.” – Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks, AXS tv)

The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand

According to  AynRand.org, Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand’s books, “portray businessmen, inventors, architects, workers and scientists as noble, passionate figures.” Is it any wonder then, that a some successful entrepreneurs and politicians have embraced her books?

Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks and ABC’s Shark Tank is one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Cuban is a self-professed fan of Rand’s work, choosing The Fountainhead as his first literary crush. The Fountainhead follows protagonist Howard Roarke, an architect who seeks to remain true to this creative integrity in the face of social adversity.

“In Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the uniquely Ayn Rand hero, whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as ‘he could be and ought to be.’” – AynRand.org

Rand’s vision of the ideal man clearly resonated with Cuban. He said of the book,

It was incredibly motivating to me. It encouraged me to think as an individual, take risks to reach my goals, and responsibility for my successes and failures. I loved it. I don’t know how many times I have read it, but it got to the point where I had to stop because I would get too fired up.

Brian Chesky (Airbnb, Inc.)

High Output Management – Andy Groves

Brian Chesky is largely self-taught in the world of business. He didn’t train to become an entrepreneur- rather, he dove in and then taught himself the ropes on the go. So, it’s no wonder that one of his favorite books is a practical guide on management.

Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher describes Chesky’s self-education in “The Education of Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.” She notes, “His primary book source on management technique is Andy Grove’s High Output Management.” Grove’s book is known for its down-to-earth practical management advice.

Washington Post’s Jena McGregor describes the book as,

Void of the pop theory and formulaic fads that make up so much of the genre, it’s written by an iconic CEO who has a PhD in electrical engineering and a lifetime of experience… It takes on the day-to-day stuff of management—meetings, performance appraisals, interviews, compensation—and deconstructs the process and goals of being a manager.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is also a fan. In a tribute video honoring Groves, Zuckerberg said: “His book really played a big role in shaping my management style.”

Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Productions)

The Seat of the Soul – Gary Zukav

Oprah Winfrey has been very open about her love for Gary Zukav’s book The Seat of the Soul. In fact, Zukav has joined Oprah on her show 34 times since their first interview together in 1998. What is it about Zukav’s work that keeps Oprah coming back? And how did it impact her life as an entrepreneur?

Seat of the Soul posits that humanity is in a place of transition between external power based on our physical senses and what Zukav calls “authentic power” based on spiritual insight and empathy. Oprah’s favorite quote from the book reflects her desire to embrace Zukav’s concept of authentic power,

Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect… In this most profound way, we are held responsible for every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.

In a 2015 interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Winfrey explains how she translated that quote into an actionable business philosophy:

The number one principle that rules my life is intention, and I probably discovered that around 1989, after reading Gary Zukav’s book and then bringing him on the show… After reading Gary’s books, I literally had a big meeting with all my producers, and I said, ‘We’re now going to be an intentional television show… ‘We’re only going to do shows that come from a motivation that we’re going to show people the best in themselves… the idea behind it–the vision–is that we’re going to be a force for good … that’s the bottom-line intention.’

Bill Gates ( Microsoft, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street – John Brooks

Bill Gates and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet both agree that John Brooks’ Business Adventures is the best book on business they have ever read. The book is a collection of twelve stories featuring iconic companies such as Ford Motor Company, General Electric and Xerox at critical moments in their history. In addition to entertaining, Brooks offers insight into human nature through each of the included tales.

Gates avows his appreciation for the work in his post, The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read. Gates asserts:

Brooks’s work is a great reminder that the rules for running a strong business and creating value haven’t changed. For one thing, there’s an essential human factor in every business endeavor. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect product, production plan, and marketing pitch; you’ll still need the right people to lead and implement those plans.

He goes on to say that:

Business Adventures is as much about the strengths and weaknesses of leaders in challenging circumstances as it is about the particulars of one business or another. In that sense, it is still relevant not despite its age but because of it. John Brooks’s work is really about human nature, which is why it has stood the test of time.

Jeff Bezos  (Amazon.com)

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

“If you read The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favorite books, you can’t help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret.” – Jeff Bezos

The Remains of the Day is not a business book; but, it  had a profound impact on Jeff Bezos’ life and business. The Remains of the the Day is a novel that investigates how one defines a life well-spent. The book takes you on an introspective journey touching on themes of self-doubt and regret as it examines the life of a retired English butler named Stevens.

It’s easy to see reflections of The Remains of the Day in Bezos’ own life. When trying to decide whether to take the leap and found Amazon.com he considered what he called in a 60 Minutes interview a “regret minimization framework,”

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have… I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.

Entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey and Jeff Bezos may seem like they are cut from a different cloth than the rest of us. But, like every other human, they learn and they grow.

Each of these six books helped to create some of the world’s smartest and most successful entrepreneurs.

Can these books change your life?

Have you been wondering how to unlock the next level for your business? The crowdSPRING Small Business Resource Center is full of actionable insights on how to start, operate, and grow a successful business. 

Color is everywhere, and the way we interpret it can be categorized into pretty clearly defined areas. Did you know that red can excite you while blue has been shown to soothe? Black breathes an air of sophistication, whereas a bright yellow feels playful and fun. With that in mind, it is no surprise that understanding the impact that color has on a person is important when selecting the colors for your company’s logo.

A brand’s logo is its principal design element, acting as a visual representation of the company and its values. There are plenty of things that go into a well-designed logo (10, to be more specific), but one of the most important of these is color. It may seem like an artistic decision, but the primary color you choose for your design actually has a serious psychological impact on how people perceive it.

In a widely-cited study called “The Impact of Color on Marketing,” research found that people make a subconscious judgment about products within the first 90 seconds of seeing it. The majority of these people evaluate these products on color alone: almost 85% of consumers cite color as the main reason they buy a certain product, and 80% of people believe color increases brand recognition.

So while maybe your favorite color is grass green, it’s good to know how it may affect your customers before you choose it as the main color of your logo. Take a look below at how people perceive different colors, and how twenty-one brands have used this to their advantage:

Red

Red is a powerful color. It’s the color of love and rage, bringing to mind intensity, power, passion, and action. Red encourages people to take risks, according to renowned color expert Pantone and anyone who has ever run with the bulls. It demands your attention and increases your heart rate, and it may incite feelings of love, ardor, or aggression.

Retailers like Target use red because the color’s sense of urgency may drive people to make purchases, whether on impulse or because of an urgent call to action like the final hours of a flash sale.

Interested in using the power of red to improve conversions, marketing automation company Performable A/B tested the difference in performance of a red call-to-action button versus a green one. The red button showed a 21% increase in conversion.

We can’t be 100% sure that simply changing the button to red was responsible for the increase. Perhaps it was just that red contrasted better with the green. Still, the difference is notable and worth considering when thinking about color for your brand.

Yellow

Bright, sunny yellow attracts attention: it’s a color that won’t be ignored. Its association with joy, happiness, and energy has been shown to encourage mental activity, generate muscle energy, and on the whole, cheer you up. Take a look at the brands that use yellow–they’re happy, cheerful, and lively.

McDonald’s’ golden arches are kid-friendly, fun, and recognizable all over the world. Diner-styled Denny’s has a bright yellow logo, inspiring pictures of happy families eating breakfasts served under sunny skies. Remember AIM? That little yellow figure brings back memories of late night laughs shared over the AOL chat platform.

Blue

True Blue has been shown to calm the senses and even lower blood pressure. It soothes and reassures, promoting feelings of trust, security, order, and tranquility. Blue is the most oft-cited favorite color for both men and women, and is the most popular choice for logo designs by a significant margin. Some tests show that people are at their most productive in blue rooms, and you’ll find many companies using the color to capitalize on that.

Technology brands like Intel and Dell use blue to relay their security and reliability; no one wants to purchase a computer that frequently crashes. Brands selling machines use blue: GE and Ford use it, relaying their solidity and reputability. VISA uses it for their iconic text based logo, because it falls in line with the security and trust that people associate with blue. If you’re a company that prides itself on its professionalism, trustworthiness, and dependability, blue might be the hue for you.

Purple

Purple is the color of nobility and kings, so its long connection to wealth and luxury is traced through history. Redolent of this history and tradition, purple is at once commanding and opulent, lavish while maintaining its regal narrative. It is also evocative of the fantastic, suggesting wisdom, creativity, and imagination.

The Hallmark company, with its slogan “When you care enough to send the very best,” uses purple to relay grandeur and opulence. Purple leaves the impression of royalty, expense, and a certain enthralling splendor, which is most certainly augmented here by the crown stately positioned over the type. Cadbury’s purple logo embraces the decadence of its chocolate products, conjuring images of something rich and sumptuous with its luxurious purple script.

Orange

Orange exudes playfulness and exuberance, standing out as a beacon of youthful enthusiasm in every brand that employs it in their logo. Orange is vibrant, and its lively energy is perfectly suited for companies looking to attract a younger (or young at heart) group.

Nickelodeon’s bright orange logo stands out in a crowd, emphasizing its buoyant, lighthearted spirit. Fanta and Orange Crush have brilliant orange logos, and it perfectly captures the fun of grabbing a soda on a hot afternoon.

Green

Green is considered “rejuvenating and natural,” and is a popular color for companies advocating for healthy lifestyles. Associated with well-being, growth, and nature, green is the color of choice for promoting environmental issues, natural or organic product companies, and banks (money is green!).

John Deere and the Girl Scouts both use the color green, reminding people that they are deeply connected to the earth. Whole Foods emblazons their text in a strong green, taking advantage of the fact that people associate green with health and natural foods. TD Bank? Also green.

Black

Much like a little black dress, black is timeless, elegant, and sophisticated. Using black in your logo is a bold move, letting consumers know that your product stands for itself. Classic and refined, a simple black logo is a surefire way to represent yourself as an exclusive, high-end experience.

Chanel’s logo is chic and tastefully understated, and instantly recognized in the fashion world. The dignified BBC logo is similarly minimalistic, and their refined black styling gives it a sense of authority and respectability worthy of a world class broadcaster.

Research has found that deferring to consumer’s feelings about color appropriateness in relation to your product is more important than the individual color choice itself. So don’t get too hung up on the rules for color–there’s room for interpretation on how a color choice is going to be received, and as always, you simply can’t please everyone all the time (I’m never going to like pastel purple. It’s not going to happen).

That said, even if you really love it, electric orange may not be the best color choice for the logo of your mattress company — maybe that’s a decision you should sleep on.

A good logo needs more than just the right color. If you are ready to create a quality logo for your business that inspires trust and confidence in your brand and helps your business stand out from the competition, consider enlisting the help of our network of over 200,000 creatives to give you great options. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

A good logo is a major contributor to making that crucial first impression on a customer. They convey your company’s values, tell a story, and even help people trust your brand. If your logo does not convey the right message to a prospective customer, your company is at an immediate disadvantage. It could even mean the difference between selecting the competition over you.

When reviewing your current logo or getting started with a new business, make sure your logo has these 10 crucial elements:

1. A great logo is strong and balanced
2. A great logo is simple
3. A great logo is memorable
4. A great logo is flexible

Watch the video for more detail on these four important elements plus six more:

What do Google, eBay, Whatsapp, Instagram and thousands of other successful companies have in common?

They were each founded by an immigrant entrepreneur. According to Partnership for a New American Economy, 40% of the top Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrant entrepreneurs. Smaller businesses are heavily impacted by immigrant entrepreneurs too: 1 out of 10 immigrants owns their own business.

Over the past several years, the rate of new immigrant-owned businesses has increased by over 50%. In many industries, this has created even more disruption and innovation as immigrants combine their individual perspectives from home with the new opportunities they find in the US. Even more importantly, immigrant entrepreneurs have contributed to our annual Gross Domestic Product with over $775 billion dollars in revenue per year.

Immigrant entrepreneurs face a variety of challenges when starting their own companies. Most entrepreneurs, including immigrants, struggle with raising capital, understanding rules and regulations, or growing their business. Immigrant entrepreneurs also face unique challenges. For example, some do not speak English fluently.

Despite these challenges, many immigrants share a drive and perseverant attitude critical to their success. We took a closer look at 3 successful immigrant entrepreneurs to find out how being an immigrant helped shape them as an entrepreneur.

1. Mike Krieger,
Instagram

Originally born in São Paulo, Brazil, Mike Krieger came to the US to study symbolic systems at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Krieger met Kevin Systrom who had been working on a simple photo sharing app. Together, in 2010, they developed Instagram, a company that changed social media.

By simplifying photo sharing, Instagram created a community and space for millions of people to create their own personal brands, allow people into their lives, and focus on visual content. Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012.

Krieger and Systrom continue to run the company independently. Today, Krieger focuses on the technical side of Instagram.

The booming success of Instagram didn’t come without a struggle. Krieger remembers having a hard time obtaining an H1-B visa, which would allow him to stay in the US to continue working on Instagram. He recalls:

I had moments where I was like, ‘Maybe I should just tell Kevin to forget about it and find somebody who is easier to hire’…It took less time to build Instagram than it did for me to get my work visa.

Krieger’s situation isn’t uncommon; H1-B visas are notoriously difficult to obtain. While some people believe that H1-B visas take away jobs from Americans, stories like Krieger’s prove that immigrant entrepreneurs can create amazing companies that create many jobs.

There’s no telling if Instagram would have existed without Krieger, and there’s no doubt that it’s been a game changer in social media. But because of Krieger’s persistence and dedication to work hard, he was able to obtain the visa and help create a tech giant.

2. Eren Bali,
Udemy

Eren Bali started Udemy, an open marketplace education platform, because of his experiences in Malatya, Turkey.

After facing frustrations as a child trying to study math and science in a small village, Bali discovered several forums and websites for Math Olympiads when his parents bought a computer. In college, Bali met Oktay Caglar- a peer who would become his friend and co-founder. Bali and Caglar combined their frustrations and technological expertise to envision a company that would empower people all over the world to learn whatever they wanted to, regardless of geography.

In a few years, Bali would see the incredible change that Udemy would make for students in places like Malatya. But Bali’s path to success wasn’t easy. When Bali and Caglar started Udemy, they were living in Turkey. According to Bali, after deciding to move to the US, the co-founders faced difficulty raising money for their startup:

We first created a product with Udemy’s vision 6 years ago in Turkey. We failed. So we packed our bags and moved to Silicon Valley to give it another shot. We were rejected by more than 50 investors before we launched the company in the Valley. But through it all, we didn’t give up because we believed in the power of the Internet to change how people learn.

Moving to the US and persevering through many challenges allowed Bali to grow Udemy into the educational resource it is today.

3. Alberto “Beto” Perez,
Zumba

As a child in Cali, Colombia, Beto Perez always loved dancing. He worked as an aerobic instructor for several years in Colombia. But one day Roberto forgot the tapes he always used to teach his class and had to substitute for what he had with him: salsa and merengue music.

Perez did not speak a word of English but moved to Miami and marketed, taught, and energized the US exercise market with an exercise program known as Zumba.

Fast forward several years, and Zumba would become something Perez describes as “exercise in disguise”, a class that can be taken by anyone.

Zumba also helped many other immigrants build their own businesses based off of Zumba.

Betsy Dopico, an immigrant from Cuba, said Zumba has helped her build her life in the US, “It’s become my small business.”

Perez created Zumba with the intention that he would be able to certify instructors all around the US, and eventually the world, to make the fun exercise class accessible to everyone. By doing that, Perez enabled others to follow in his footsteps and become an entrepreneur. Zumba provides certified instructors with marketing materials, music suggestions, and lots of support to help them create their own fitness business.

But helping others establish their own businesses and creating a fitness empire didn’t come without its challenges. Beyond not speaking much English when he came to the US, Perez says that his biggest challenge was actually keeping Zumba relevant and exciting. To stay popular in the exercise industry, Perez and his team have introduced a variety of Zumba programs tailored to different abilities and fitness levels- keeping Zumba alive for years.

If you’re an immigrant entrepreneur or know one, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

If you’re ready to start your own business or grow an existing business, check out our newly published ebook, Stand Out: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business or visit our Small Business Resource Center.

Image source: Samuel Schneider

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize this gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a fresh logo for an IT podcast. They wanted something that would work for Podcast Cover Art, Website, Business Cards and swag. This lovely image says it all!

Let us start the slow clap for square69. Check out more great work on square69’s profile page.

Nicely done, square69, nicely done!

There’s a revolution going on in the world of entrepreneurship. Though business is traditionally considered a man’s world, the 2016 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report shows that the number of women-owned businesses in the US has grown at a rate 5 times faster than the national average over the past 9 years. And women-owned businesses are estimated to generate $1.6 trillion in revenue annually.

Women entrepreneurs are thriving like never before and their success isn’t limited to the business world. Many female entrepreneurs are using their businesses (or the wealth those businesses have created) to make the world a better place. Below you’ll find 13 women entrepreneurs who are changing their own corner of the world.

Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Productions, OWN Network)

At this point in her career, Oprah Winfrey needs no introduction. Founder of both Harpo Productions and the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), she is a media mogul with a net worth of approximately $3 billion. Winfrey’s rags-to-riches life story serves as an inspiration to many; and, she came in second on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women in 2016.

But, it’s not just Oprah’s unequivocal financial and popular success that won her spot on this list. She is also a well-regarded philanthropist, giving generously through self-founded charities. Winfrey founded Oprah’s Angel Network in 1998. The charity’s goal is to “inspire individuals to create opportunities that enable underserved women and children to rise to their potential.” Oprah’s Angel Network supports charitable projects and provides grants for non-profit organizations that support that goal.

The Oprah Winfrey Foundation was formed to operate the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. The Academy is a residential school for girls with strong academics from disadvantaged family backgrounds. Attendance is free. Oprah founded the school in the hope of providing a strong education for girls who wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise.

Julia Taylor Cheek (EverlyWell)

Julia Taylor Cheek had an impressive resume before she ever decided to strike out on her own. But Cheek was destined to grow beyond her roles as Director of Strategy and Operations at the George W. Bush Institute and Vice-President of Corporate Strategy and Global Communications at MoneyGram International.

Today, as CEO and founder of EverlyWell, Julia Taylor Cheek is empowering patients by reinventing medical testing. EverlyWell provides at-home medical testing kits. These kits allow patients to gather samples in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. Test results are then shipped to labs for analysis by board-certified physicians. The easy-to-read results are posted online in just a few days.

Cheek’s efforts at EverlyWell are demystifying medical testing and making the process more comfortable and accessible to patients. Tests available include: Cholesterol and Lipids, Sexual Health, Food Sensitivity, Vitamin D and inflammation, among others.

Amanda Signorelli (Techweek)

Jordan French of CIO.com says, “If you haven’t heard of Techweek yet, you’re bound to at some point in 2017.” Techweek, brainchild of CEO Amanda Signorelli, is a conference and media company striving to help local tech businesses network and grow. Success, their website claims, “is contagious.”

With this philosophy in mind Techweek has chosen 8 cities across North America in which to hold weeklong conferences throughout each year. Signorelli’s goal is to create self-sustaining communities of technology entrepreneurs. Part of that strategy revolves around the idea of “hero companies” which Techweek defines as,

“…high-growth businesses that achieve a substantial and sustainable impact and incubate talent, ideas, and most importantly, spinoffs. This theory posits that the spinoff process is the most effective method to spur dynamic hubs of growth, innovation, and wealth generation.”

Techweek’s approach brings a collaborative spin to the all-too-frequently competitive world of technology.

Sofia Vergara (LatinWE, Raze)

Long before Sofia Vergara was a household name,  or her role in the hit sit-com Modern Family, she co-founded Latin World Entertainment. LatinWE is the premier hispanic talent management agency in the United States. Founded in 1994 with her partner Luis Balaguer, Vergara saw a need for Latin talent to be represented in the entertainment marketplace.

Today LatinWE offers talent management, endorsements, branding, PR and social media marketing and more. Growing from LatinWE’s success, Vergara and partner Balaguer joined forces with former president of Fox Television Studios Emiliano Calemzuk in May 2016 to form a new company-Raze Latin Media.

Variety’s Todd Spangler reports that Raze will work with LatinWE to produce new shows for the Hispanic American market on various platforms. Vergara has made a career of representing Hispanic talent. Raze is a logical extension of her work with LatinWE as it creates a vehicle where latin talent can shine.

Logan Cohen (Küzoo)

Logan Cohan wasted little time after completing her own education before she sought to improve the experience for others. In 2014 the recent Florida International University grad founded Küdzoo.

“KÜDZOO is a free mobile application that rewards students with deals, giveaways, scholarship opportunities, concert tickets, and once in a lifetime experiences based on students’ grades and achievements. KÜDZOO works together with schools and businesses to improve student engagement while bringing communities together with an educational focus.” – Kudzooapp.com

The app brings more value to student’s school experience by incentivizing them to work hard. In addition to their good grades and improved learning, they take home Küdzoo cash that they can redeem for prizes of their own choice through the app. It’s a win/win for students, parents and educators.

In a ringing endorsement of their endeavor Cohen and her co-founder Trevor Wilkins were featured on Forbes 2016 list of 30 Under 30 in education.

Tory Burch (Tory Burch)

Tory Burch is not just a wildly successful fashion designer and female entrepreneur. In addition to founding and managing a “global business with more than 150 freestanding boutiques and a presence in more than 3,000 department and specialty stores”, she’s also established herself as a leading champion for breast cancer research and champion of female entrepreneurs.

Burch is a director on the board of directors for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. And, she regularly raises funds through her own e-commerce site ToryBurch.com on their behalf. Burch explains,

“For us, it’s a year-round cause. Our company and the Tory Burch Foundation work on partnerships and events with the BCRF and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center throughout the year to drum up more support for the cause.”

Burch also gives back by supporting other women entrepreneurs through the Tory Burch Foundation. The foundation has partnered with Bank of America to help female entrepreneurs with sustainable businesses get affordable loans.

Lisa Wang & Yin Lin (SheWorx)

Five-time national gymnastics champion Lisa Wang and her marathon-running partner Yin Lin, bonded over their shared drive, self-discipline, and cultural background as Asian Americans. When these women met they had already each co-founded a company, watched it grow to profitability and then moved on.

Both Lin and Wang witnessed gender inequality in their earlier business ventures, inspiring them to address those issues through their own partnership. Wang and Lin co-founded SheWorx-a global collective of female entrepreneurs. SheWorx provides mentoring, networking and events for female entrepreneurs with a focus of providing practicable, actionable advice.

“In today’s environment we all need to be lifelong learners. SheWorx has been structured to provide women with access to critical information. Our goal is to build a stronger startup ecosystem…where founders can discuss challenging topics and then develop actionable strategies for moving their companies forward when they walk out the door.” – Yin Lin

In their first year, Wang and Lin have organized more than 70 discussions featuring successful investors and founders, and attracted 3000 members to SheWorx. A truly global presence, Sheworx events have been held in London, New York,Singapore and Tel Aviv.

Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post, Thrive)

Arianna Huffington is best known as the creator of The Huffington Post. In the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election, Huffington felt the need to contribute to the political discourse.

“What began as a left-leaning answer to the Drudge Report, comprised primarily of aggregation and blog posts from friends, morphed over the years into a major news organization and digital media company that’s expanded into 15 countries. The site recently drew nearly 200 million monthly unique visitors globally.” explained Michael Calderone in an August 2016 Huffington Post article.

Huffington Post became a prominent, recognized voice for leftist ideology, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. But, Huffington was not content to rest after conquering the political media landscape. In 2016 she left Huffington Post to pursue a new business endeavor born of her newfound passion for wellness.

Thrive Global, named after Huffington’s 2014 book Thrive, includes a media platform, e-commerce site, and corporate wellness programs all focused on encouraging its audience to take control of their health.  According to Business Insider, as of January 2017 the newly launched Thrive Global had already doubled its target revenue for the year. Huffington reflects,

“The connection between well-being and performance: that’s the key. That’s the entry point to convince people that if they take care of themselves — through sleep, meditation, recharging — they are not sacrificing their work or careers.”

Shireen Yates (Nima)

CEO and co-founder of Nima, Shireen Yates has been leading a gluten-free lifestyle for the past eight years. Common wisdom states that the best ideas for starting a new business come from solving your own problems-and that’s exactly what Yates has done.

Nima is a discreet, portable food sensor that allows celiac and gluten-intolerant diners to test their food for the presence of gluten. The tests takes only about 3 minutes to perform and results can be shared via app so that users have access to a growing database of information.

Nima’s website proudly claims, “For us, it’s personal. We’re on a mission to change living with food allergies, forever.” And, if Yates achieves her goals (listed as “to alleviate stress around unknown food ingredients, deliver social freedom, and make mealtime enjoyable again”) she will certainly deliver.

 Atima Lui and Nancy Madrid (Nudest)

The world of fashion has never given the color “nude” enough credit- at least, not until Atima Lui and Nancy Madrid arrived on the scene. Nude has traditionally referred to the beigey skin tone associated with caucasian women. This very limited view of what nude means in fashion has left people of many ethnicities deeply underrepresented.

When Meg Oliver of CBS News asked Lui what “nude” had meant to her when growing up she responded,

“It definitely meant beige. I have a lot of stories of wearing beige, nude hosiery and just having ashy legs,”

Lui and Madrid are tackling the nude color inequality head-on with their company Nudest. Nudest offers a variety of fashion staples in a wide range of skin tone-inspired shades of nude. They have partnered with 11 companies that currently offer products in a wide variety of flesh tones. And, their site features a nudemeter that allows shoppers to match their own skin tone with available products.

By representing a wider range of consumers, Madrid and Lui are endeavoring to correct a vast and pervasive failing in the fashion industry. Lui asserts,

“The current definition of nude, the beige tones, do not match 84 percent of the global population… So the opportunity is big to fix this.” – CBS News

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon Ltd.)

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, India’s richest self-made woman, is a superstar of the global female entrepreneur community. She makes regular appearances on Forbes’ annual billionaires list; and, she’s been awarded France’s highest civilian honor for her contributions to bioscience.  Her company Biocon Ltd. is the largest producer of insulin in Asia, and has recently sent new biosimilar cancer treatment drugs for review in Europe and the United States.

Despite her many achievements, Mazumdar-Shaw is not content to focus only on her business. Instead she has made it a personal battle to fight cancer after the disease struck both her husband and best friend. According to The Economic Times she founded the Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Center in Bangalore, India with Dr. Devi Shetty in 2007. In 2013 the Mazumdar-Shaw Medical Foundation launched a program designed to monitor for cancer in rural populations with the goal of catching and treating cancers sooner.

Most recently, Mazumdar-Shaw became the second Indian entrepreneur to join Bill Gate’s Giving Pledge. The Pledge invites billionaires to commit to giving more than half of their wealth to philanthropic causes. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw has pledged to give more than half of her wealth to support cancer research and improving primary health centers in rural India.

“My philanthropic efforts are largely directed towards making a difference to global health care, especially in the developing world. I am particularly concerned about the unbearable financial burden that debilitating diseases like cancer impose on patients in poor countries…” – Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Are you inspired by these amazing female entrepreneurs? Do you want to join their ranks and make your own difference in the world? Then now might be a great time to check out our free e-book: What Are You Waiting For: A Guide for Mom Entrepreneurs on Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business.

Coming up with a great company name for your new small business or startup can be challenging and time-consuming. Coming up with a memorable tagline or slogan can present an even greater challenge.

A tagline is supposed to communicate to your customers and potential customers what sets you apart from your competition and also your brand’s focus.

Whether you leverage crowdSPRING’s community to help with a memorable tagline or slogan or come up with one on your own, you might find the following 10 tips useful:

1. Make your tagline unique.
2. Make your tagline simple.
3. Make your tagline concise.
4. Make your tagline timeless.

Watch the video for more detail on these four important tips for writing a great tagline, plus six more.

A client walks into a bar.
The bartender asks, “What can I get you?”
“A soft drink,” replies the client. “and make it pop.”

Why do some entrepreneurs fail while others succeed? Why are some lawyers or doctors better than others? Why do we prefer working with certain people (designers, accountants, plumbers, electricians, etc.) and avoid others?

The answer might surprise you.

It’s true that we favor people who do a great job. But it turns out that people who do a great job also often share a common trait: they’re good communicators.

The 200,000 designers and writers working on crowdSPRING have helped tens of thousands of the world’s best entrepreneurs, small business owners, agencies, Brands, agencies and non-profits with logo design, web design, graphic design, industrial design and naming.

After more than nine years and tens of thousands of projects, we know with absolute certainty that if a client wants a great result in a design or naming project, they need to do two things well: (1) draft a good creative brief (we help with that if you post a project on crowdSPRING), and (2) provide good feedback throughout the project.

Good design requires an iterative process. Just like writing, a design’s “first draft” often needs refinement and revision, editing and exploration. Your continued presence and feedback are critical to this process, and knowing how to communicate with your designer effectively is an important skill to have.

“Strong reasons make strong actions”
– King John / William Shakespeare

If a designer’s job is to take your challenges and craft solutions, your job is to provide effective, purposeful feedback.

How can you make sure you’re providing useful feedback? Here are 7 simple rules that will help ensure that your project stays on the right path.

Is your feedback specific and concise?

It’s important when you provide clear and specific feedback. One of the best ways a designer can figure out what works and what doesn’t work with their design is through your comments. “It needs more zing,” is not just vague feedback, it doesn’t give the designer any direction or explain why it needs more “zing” in the first place. You don’t want your designer to guess what you mean. Make your designers swoon with useful feedback like: “the colors you’ve picked aren’t vibrant enough – we know our target audience prefers lively, bright colors like yellow and pink.”

“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”
– Andrew Grove

Are you presenting the problem or prescribing a solution?

“Doctor, I have stomach pain. Give me a prescription for an antacid and tell me to sleep on it.”

You’re working with a designer because you want their expertise. As tempting as it can be to make suggestions (“Make it like this design I created in Powerpoint last night…”), providing your designer with just the problem that needs to be solved is more effective. As subject area experts your designer has access to information and solutions that you are probably not aware of.

You want to tap into that knowledge and importantly, their creativity. Your designer doesn’t expect you to describe the issue and design the solution: that’s what they’re there to do.

How does your feedback help designers reach your objectives?

Providing specific feedback is one thing; ensuring that your feedback helps you and your designer reach your goals is another. As the saying goes, “you are not your customer.” Your opinion might represent a section of your audience, but taste is subjective.

You may hate the color brown, but if your market research shows that brown most effectively communicates your brand to your customers, that information should lead the way. (For more on color psychology in branding, check out how 21 brands use color to influence people.) Ultimately, your designer is looking for the best solution to the problems you’ve given her to solve.

Are you leaving your designer hanging?

The success of any relationship starts with communication, and design feedback is no different. Dumping a bulleted list of changes on your designer without explaining them at least minimally can leave your designer without valuable context and information. Discussing your feedback is also an important way for both of you to ensure you’re keeping the project’s objectives in mind.

Does your feedback address key issues, or is it mired in small details?

This may seem straightforward, but countless projects have been thrown off the rails fussing over tiny changes. You might be as detail-oriented as your designer, but nit-picking minor things is a great way to introduce the dreaded “scope creep”. There is even a term (“bikeshedding”) and a law (Parkinson’s Law of Triviality) devoted to the tendency for organizations to devote too much time to trivial issues. Don’t be a bikeshedder and make sure you’re focussing on the primary objectives.

“Members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues”
– Parkinson’s Law of Triviality

Is your feedback balanced enough?

It’s one thing to find issues, but designers also need to know what’s working, so make sure your feedback includes those types of comments. The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) recommends the “love sandwich” as a good way to provide balanced feedback.

“The best way to approach critiquing someone else’s work is to sandwich the feedback with love. If you think of your critique as the sandwich, the bread would be what you “love” about the work and the middle—the fillings—would be what you didn’t like as much.” – AIGA – How to give and receive a good design critique

Are you treating your designer with respect?

Design projects are a collaboration: you provide the problems, the context, and the guidance, and your designer provides solutions based on best practices, research, and experience. The best partnerships are formed when both sides appreciate the value they bring to the table, and respectful discussions are a key part of that. Cliches about catching more flies with honey aside, you want your designer to do their best work, and being considerate can help them achieve that.

Does your feedback move people to action?

In the end, both you and your designer have the same goal: you want the project to be successful, and you want your problems solved. Your designer can’t read your mind – they need your input and comments to help them craft the right solution. Skills, experience, and technology may be essential tools, but your guidance and your feedback are even more important. As entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki said, “the goal is to provide inspiring information that moves people to action.”

(The posters in this article showing real client feedback are courtesy A Creative Catharsis.)

Do you ever wonder why one entrepreneur fails while another succeeds?

Sometimes, it boils down to luck.

But, success and failure is about more than luck. It helps to have an advantage when starting out.

Over the past two decades, crowdSPRING Founder and CEO Ross Kimbarovsky has spoken with thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners about their startup ideas and existing businesses. For the past six years, he has also mentored at Techstars and at Founder Institute.

Here’s what he observed: too many people are scared of what it takes to start or grow a business.

To help people deal with the fear of starting or growing a business, Ross has taken the lessons he learned over the past several decades and shared them in a free, 100-page ebook called STAND OUT: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business.

In the book, he lays out 23 years worth of personal, actionable insights to help you start your new business or grow an existing business.

This book will help you learn how to:

• Find Your Great Business Idea
• Name Your Company
• Brand Your New Company
• Create a Strong Online Presence
• Raise Money for Your Business
• Negotiate Successfully
• Hire and Fire Employees
• Be a Great Leader
• Stay Healthy
• Execute 21st Century Marketing
• Make SEO Work for You
• Accelerate Your Growth
• Avoid Costly Legal Mistakes
• Avoid the Fear of Failure

A Sample Chapter from the Book:

Here’s a peek at a page from the third chapter of the book: Branding Your New Company:

Grab your free copy right here, and when you have a chance, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Ready to Stand Out? Download the ebook now.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize this gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a strong and simple logo for a fitness website that will focus on nutrition, workout plans, meal prepping and more.

Let us start the slow clap for sionxxx. Check out more great work on sionxxx’s profile page.

Nicely done, sionxxx, nicely done!

We are bombarded by thousands of electronic notifications each day.

On an average day, people check their phones over 150 times between 6:00 am and 10 pm. And that’s just their phones!

Many people believe that notifications help us to stay on track. Paradoxically, they don’t. Notifications actually hurt our productivity.

Blogger Sid Savara says that notifications don’t just distract you temporarily, but they actually change your work habits, “Rather than actively setting an agenda, email forces you to react to items as they come in – regardless of their true priority.”

In fact, science proves that notifications are mostly bad for us. According to a study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology, interruptions as short as two seconds long are enough to double the number of errors made in a task. Such brief interruptions were found to be extremely disruptive because they broke the flow of the task by diverting attention, making it difficult for participants of the study to properly focus on the task at hand.

To compensate for the problems caused by notifications, we pretend to multitask, trying to assess reminders about future events or answer questions, while still completing our work. This too often becomes counterproductive (not to mention, error-prone). Multitasking costs the economy $450 billion dollars annually because this loss of productivity often increases stress and creates a cycle of disruption.

To combat this loss of productivity, business experts and entrepreneurs have begun practicing something called “monotasking”, or single tasking.

While this seems easy at first glance, it takes a lot of discipline to turn off or ignore notifications. Manoush Zomorodi, the host of WNYC’s Note to Self podcast explains:

Our gadgets and all the things we look at on them are designed to not let us single-task. We weren’t talking about this before because we simply weren’t as distracted. Humans have a finite amount of neural resources. That’s why you feel tired at the end of the day, you’ve used them all up.

So the reality is that we actually can’t handle all of the daily notifications we receive because they cause us to shift our attention away for too long. It turns out that periods of deeper focus are more likely to result in productive, high-quality work.  But you have to create an environment that allows you to focus more deeply. Here are our tips for pairing your notifications down to just the essentials.

1. Identify what you really need to know.

Image source: Robert Wiedemann

Make a list of all of the notifications you have now, including your phone and computer by looking through your notification settings. Then, begin to categorize the apps in groups of importance. Odds are pretty high that you are receiving notifications that you’re constantly ignoring or deleting. But they are negatively impacting your productivity, even if you think they’re not. Spend a few minutes and kill them so that you never see them – before they kill your productivity.

2. Know your notification options.

Image source: Rami Al-zayat

Often, there are many notification options you can choose from. Make sure you understand the difference between alerts and badges and know that you can completely turn them off. When you know your notification options, you can choose which apps need which kind of notification based on your earlier categories. And remember that you can also turn off notifications completely but manually turning them off or setting a schedule during certain hours when you don’t want to receive any notifications.

3. Pick unique sounds or vibrations.

Image source: William Iven

Depending on if the notification is on your phone or computer, you can pick different sounds for different notifications. For example, you might use a bell for email and a whistle for texts. This way, you don’t even have to look at the screen when deciding how critical a notification is to look at; you can just identify it by the sound. If you were waiting for an important email, you can now avoid the distraction of the text.

4. Delete all unnecessary notifications.

Image source: NeONBRAND

Maybe you have notifications for sports scores, or a specific Twitter account. Maybe you have multiple emails on your computer and let all the notifications come in at once. No matter what your situation is, there are plenty of notifications that are simply unnecessary. Think about how often you actually look at those notifications, and if it isn’t easier to just open the app itself. If you find yourself only looking at the information within the app, then you don’t need a notification.

5. Find times during your day to practice true single-tasking, or deep work.

Image source: Gabriel Beaudry

These are the moments in your day where you should turn every single notification off, and work on tasks for large chunks of time. This is undisturbed work time, where your focus and productivity is at its highest level and there is no chance of distraction. And if you can’t stand the silence, studies have shown that music is a great way to increase your focus. For more information on deep work and focusing, check out Cal Newport’s book Deep Work.

Remember that notifications are designed as reminders. But if notifications constantly cause you to lose focus, then the notifications become a distraction and a big liability. Save your brain from information overload and think critically about what you really need to know, and when.

Featured image source: I’m Priscilla

Entrepreneurs and small business owners typically don’t believe they can learn anything useful from the biggest and most successful companies in the world. After all, brand building at-scale is typically very different than brand building in the startup and small business world.

Nevertheless, smart entrepreneurs and small business owners pay careful attention to important market forces and trends that shape some of the world’s best brands. These entrepreneurs and small business owners know that despite the many differences between large and small companies, important insights that can help shape their marketing strategies.

BrandZ publishes an annual most valuable global brands report. The 2016 Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report offers important branding lessons for startups and small business.

Google is listed as the most valuable global brand, with Apple, Microsoft, AT&T and Facebook rounding out the top five. It’s remarkable that all of the top five brands are technology companies. In fact, the only non-technology company in the top 10 is McDonald’s (at number 9).

In this video I outline 7 key takeaways from the BrandZ 2016 report (and the important lessons for small businesses and startups) including:

1. Disrupt yourself before you become disrupted.
2. Integrate your marketing efforts.
3. Have a clear and consistent brand purpose.
4. User experience is a key differentiator.

Watch the video for more detail on these four important takeaways plus three more.

Time. Money. We all wish we had more of them. This is even more keenly felt by business owners and entrepreneurs, for whom time really is money. Finding ways to more effectively use the amount of time available to us is a classic productivity problem.

As our lives and careers become increasingly mobile, countless apps and services have flooded the market attempting to solve that problem. There are now so many options available that finding the right one for your personal needs has almost become a productivity problem in and of itself.

In the spirit of saving you time, we’ve compiled some of the top mobile apps and services used by business owners and entrepreneurs. Because as Shirley Temple (yes, seriously) once said, “Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble.”

Calendars

You would think that once you’ve seen one calendaring app, you’ve see them all, but some app developers would beg to differ. In addition to the typical calendar apps there are now some very innovative solutions that turn the classic calendar and timeline layout on its head

With a tagline like “a calendar with a different perspective,” Rolo Calendar (iOS) doesn’t mince words. It turns your calendar and events into a circular visualization that allows you to see “how your life is divided up up into, say, work, learning, fitness, and play.”

Vantage (iOS) is another app that reimagines how events can be displayed. It’s “built to be highly visual for the best possible view of your life.” Tech2’s review liked its “better, smarter layout,” comparing it favorably to Star Wars’ famous “opening crawl.”

If you prefer a more traditional calendar layout, Microsoft’s Outlook (iOS / Android) is an excellent choice. On top of its strong email and contact features, Outlook also boasts integration with a number of popular apps and services, thanks in part to Microsoft’s purchase and merging of features from the popular Sunrise app (RIP).

Email

Try as we might to purge it from our lives, all signs point to email sticking around long after we’ve skipped this joint and moved to Mars. Thankfully, there are some very good options available that extend and reimagine email.

Polymail (iOS / Mac) was the darling of the Product Hunt community when it launched, and for good reason. It’s an attractive, powerful take on email that includes such business-friendly features like email tracking, undo send, contact profiles, and more. DailyTekk’s enthusiastic review echoes the praise heaped on Polymail, calling it “the very best Mac email app,” thanks to “a clean design and a TON of really useful and interesting features.”

If you’re a heavy user of Google’s online services then MixMax might be perfect for you. It’s a Google Chrome extension that adds a bevy of features to Gmail, including email tracking, send later, email templates, integrated polls and surveys, and many others. TheNextWeb reviewed Mixmax positively, noting that it was “clearly targeted at businesses that want to improve productivity and reduce emails bouncing back and forth trying to organize simple meetings or to get feedback.”

Newton Mail (iOS / Android) boasts a similar list of features but is not limited to working just with Google’s products. It has mail tracking, undo send, and extensive integration with other popular services such as Trello, Evernote, Salesforce, and Zendesk. It’s available for IOS, Android, and Mac, and a free 14-day trial is available.

Video chat and conferencing

It’s hard to believe that a few years ago, reliable video chat and conferencing seemed like a far off future. These days, tools that enable remote collaboration and communication are more popular than ever. More organizations encourage their employees to work at the time and place that works best for them, and video is big part of that.

Joining video chat veterans such as Skype, Google Hangouts, and Zoom are new, often free options that work in your web browser, on your phone, and wherever you might be. “Move over,” said Makesusof.com’s Matthew Hughes, “Appear.in is here, and it’s really good.”

Appear.in’s appeal is its simple setup and robust set of features. All you need is a supported browser (Firefox, Chrome, or Opera) or the free mobile app and you’re ready to host group video chats and share your screen.

Gruveo claims to be “the world’s easiest video calls,” and has a similar setup and list of features as Appear.in. It distinguishes itself by offering both video and audio calls, and by being broadly available. You can use Gruveo in your browser, on mobile, and even integrated into Canadian chat juggernaut Slack.

Amazon, not wanting to be left out, recently threw its rather sizable hat into the video chat ring with their new Chime “communication service.” Gene Farrell, AWS vice president of enterprise applications told Fortune that “the biggest thing we heard from customers was that their voice and conferencing software was not easy to use, clunky, and expensive and no one tool works for all tasks.”

The jury is still out how Chime compares to market leaders like Skype and Cisco WebEx, but if Amazon’s domination of cloud web services is any indication, its future could be very bright.

To-do / Personal Planning

If there’s any app that best personifies “effective productivity,” it’s probably to-do and notes/planning apps. There are countless options available with design and features to fit every tastes and need, and here are few we consider, pardon the pun, notable.

Workflowy may not have the name recognition of more popular personal planning apps like Wunderlist or even Trello, but it’s been around for a long time and has built up a dedicated following. It’s the app of choice for well-known entrepreneurs such as Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, and Blogger / Twitter / Medium founder Ev Williams, who said “I love WorkFlowy. It fits the shape of my brain better than any other list/note-taking app I’ve ever used.”

Another acclaimed to-do app is Todoist. Khoi Vinh, the former Design Director for the New York Times, is a documented long-time user of it. In 2013 he wrote, “it remains a ridiculously simple bit of software that takes just moments to learn, and it’s still extremely effective.”

Since its initial release as a web-only app, it has grown to encompass an impressive number of platforms, from MacOS and Windows all the way to Android Wear and Apple Watch. It’s a testament to its ease-of-use and simplicity that it’s one of the longest-lived productivity apps with an equally dedicated audience.

Calendar apps aren’t the only place where innovation happens – to-do apps have their share of unique and innovative designs, and Habitica is a great example. It was one of the first app to use gaming concepts as a key motivation method, which we now know as “gamification.” It reimagines your tasks and habits as a fantasy role-playing game, with achievement badges, gold, and virtual equipment such as potions as incentives. Based on its popularity this approach is very effective, as Gadgette’s review noted:  “Habitica is a brilliant app for helping add an extra layer of motivation for the inconsistently motivated.”

Health and Self-Tracking

No matter how organized and effective you may try to make your life, your personal health and awareness is a critical part of Getting Things Done. It’s hard to knock down to-dos like a boss when you’re wasting time procrastinating or, (ahem), spending it messing around with productivity apps.

Lifecycle (iOS), by the developers of the very popular Sleep Cycle alarm clock, is an app that tries to help you understand where you spend your time. It does this by tracking where you go, how long you spend in transition between places, and how long you sleep. It then displays all of this information in attractive charts and graphs, which help you figure out “where your greatest time expenditure is, sleeping more, working less, finding a shorter commute to work,” according to its web site.

The problem of procrastination, especially procrastination from messing with our mobile devices, is a problem tackled by the app Forest (iOS / Android). It’s a simple app that tries to keep you present and off you phone by letting you plant seeds that slowly grow into trees. The catch is your tree only grows as long as you keep the app open – as soon as you leave the app, your tree dies. The National thought its simplicity was a success, writing that “while it might seem a little childish, I was surprised how much this visual representation of success helped to motivate me to stick to my non-phone time and focus on what I was doing.”

Go Forth, and Be Productive

The challenge with any of this is figuring out what apps (and what methodology or process) works best for you. As Khoi Vinh stated so succinctly, “What matters is that task management is highly idiosyncratic. Everybody wants a system that works in a very specific way, that matches their own particular cadence for interacting with such a system, that complements other tools, etc.” If you’re still on the lookout for the right solution for you, sites like Product Hunt and StartUpCollections are excellent places to start looking.

If you have an app or service you use that you think the crowdSPRING audience should know about, share it in the comments. And keep knocking down those tasks and to-dos!

Ready to do something with all this new-found productivity? Why not take the first step to start your own business, or take your existing business to the next level with our latest ebook? crowdSPRING founder and CEO Ross Kimbarovsky has taken the lessons he learned over the past several decades and shared them in a free, 100-page ebook called STAND OUT: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business. Download it here.

“How did you come up with that? I could never think of that.”

Creative people are often viewed as mysterious, whimsical and ineffable creatures. And yet, the innovation and solutions creativity generates have incredible value. What if I told you that there is a method to the madness? That you, too, can innovate and problem-solve with the best of them?

Enter “Design Thinking”, a strategic method used every day by designers and creatives. Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems for clients. Or, as I learned to think of it when I was getting my degree in design: “The Process.”  

What exactly is the process? While there’s plenty of wiggle room within the basic structure; it boils down to just four basic steps: empathize, brainstorm, prototype, and test.

The design thinking process may have originated with designers, but the business world has started to take notice because of the agility, speed, and innovation that it promises. Let’s take a look at three companies that have embraced design thinking to great effect and how you can, too.

1. Empathize

It all starts with empathy. “Strategic design thinking has one single goal: to understand and solve a problem for its consumer,”  says Rakia Reynolds of Skai Blue Media. And in order to understand and solve a problem, one must start by empathizing with the people who are experiencing that problem.

Dutch fabric manufacturer Vlisco was a company in danger until their design thinking team discovered new avenues for business growth by empathizing with their consumers. Vlisco products had dominated the African fashion textile market for most of their roughly 170 years. However, evolving technology in fabric manufacture and a subsequent increase in Chinese competition had Vlisco worried. According to Karen von Schmieden of This Is Design Thinking,

Vlisco recognized the necessity to transform from a traditional trade oriented business into a value adding business.

The key to this evolution turned out to be the first principle of design thinking- empathy. Empathizing with your consumer allows you to better understand their needs; in turn giving you the tools to meet those needs. Vlisco formed an Innovation Team responsible for finding a solution to their predicament. This team focused on understanding their consumers’ experience as the starting point.

“We did a lot, and I really mean a lot of ethnographic research,” said Betty van Breemaat of Vlisco’s Innovation Team. “We spent a lot of time with our actual consumers, talking to them, understanding their problems and filming everything. Something that hadn’t been done before within Vlisco.”

By mapping their customers’ experiences Vlisco was able to discover the challenges their consumers faced. Understanding and solving these challenges provided their path forward. As a result of Vlisco’s design thinking process, they developed two new services.

Image courtesy of Vlisco

The first new service- Prêt-à-Couture -supports their consumers through the process of having their Vlisco fabrics transformed into wearable garments. The second service is the Style Configurator, an app that allows customers to preview fabric prints in different style silhouettes to help them determine how they would like their finished garment to be designed and constructed.

These innovations are a direct result of the design thinking model they followed. Taking the first step of empathizing with their customers gave Vlisco the insight needed to serve their consumers in a new way.

“By adding value to our product and embracing the African fashion industry, Vlisco secures its future. Africa is changing and we need to change as well, it’s the only way.” – Betty van Breemaat

Ask Questions to Understand

So how can you follow in Vlisco’s successful footsteps? Ask questions. Question consumers, question experts, especially question the things that everyone assumes are a given.

By asking these questions you can begin to develop a complete picture of the situation. Asking these questions (“why” questions are particularly useful) can often reveal new facets of the problem- or even new problems to solve. At this stage, there are no stupid questions except the ones left unasked.

During this time, don’t be afraid of things getting… emotional. Jon Kolko of the Harvard Business Review notes,

 …organizations that “get” design use emotional language (words that concern desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience) to describe products and users. Team members discuss the emotional resonance of a value proposition as much as they discuss utility and product requirements.

2. Brainstorm

Once you’ve truly wrapped your head around the logistical and emotional challenges your consumers face, it’s time to use that newfound understanding to brainstorm possible solutions.

Swedish telecom giant Ericsson has developed their own internal design thinking-based innovation system called Innova that they use to brainstorm and workshop ideas. Its aim is to harness the raw entrepreneurial talent of their employees. Eric Chang, head of strategy and operational development for Ericsson, says, “ It essentially functions like a startup incubator within the company. ”

Innova began as an initiative for the Ericsson product development teams in San Jose but spread to the whole company.

It was one unit introducing design thinking in their organizational structure and it became an innovation practice. A practice that they now share with the whole company.

Image Courtesy of slideshare.net

So how does it work? Employees submit their ideas via the Innova platform where they are discussed. Promising ideas that generate excitement are selected to move forward with a prototype. Ericsson’s Innova has embraced design thinking and empowered their employees in a big way.

In the first three years of the program’s implementation, Innova has gained 6000 users and logged 4000 ideas. 450 of those ideas received first round funding and 45 received second round funding. Chang reflects,

Innova aims at setting free an entrepreneurial spirit amongst Ericsson’s Employees.

At Ericsson, design thinking unleashed the untapped potential their employees had always possessed. Your company may not have its very own design thinking software, but you can still follow Ericcson’s brainstorming lead.

Create a Safe Environment for Innovation

Guide your brainstorming by first posing a question. Forbes contributor Jeena Cho recommends the following format, “How might we help [our user] with [her specific need] given that [insight you’ve gained into her situation]?”

With your question framed, you can begin to start collecting ideas. To truly get the most out of your brainstorming sessions, encourage all answers, all ideas. This is not the time to edit. Creating a safe environment for all solutions- no matter how crazy they might sound- is vitally important. True innovation needs a safe environment to flourish.

Only after you’ve exhausted your well of ideas should you begin to sort and edit. The final step of your brainstorming session is to choose the most promising ideas to carry forward and prototype.

3. Prototype

Prototyping may be the most unique element of the design thinking protocol. It requires you to create a tangible model of your idea. Prototyping is also the stage in the process where you begin to fully flesh out your idea. Giving it some kind of form requires that you think through all aspects of the idea, plan or product. And this is important- the prototype should be executed simply and quickly. Warren Berger explains:

Whether it’s a napkin sketch, a prototype carved from foam rubber, or a digital mock-up, the quick-and-rough models that designers constantly create are a critical component of innovation — because when you give form to an idea, you begin to make it real.

In 2015 the San Francisco Opera discovered the value of fast prototyping and became a speedier, more agile organization in the process. Like most of the world’s oldest opera companies, SFO is an organization steeped in tradition (and superbly high production standards). But tradition combined with perfectionism can have a way of slowing a company down. Matthew Shilvock, SFO’s General Director described their perfectionism as,

our blessing in allowing us to produce moments of exquisite theater, and our curse in terms of not giving us the flexibility to adapt quickly.

The SFO is a non-profit organization that survives mostly on donations, endowments, and grants; with ticket sales making up only a small part of their revenue. One way of growing ticket sales is to pursue the prized white whale of opera attendees- younger audience members. Two students of Stanford’s d.leadership: Design Leadership in Context class, David Zena Barakhat and Madhav Thattai decided to take on that challenge with the SFO.

Over the course of their time together Barakhat and Thattai encouraged the members of the SFO team to embrace rough prototypes – a concept that was particularly challenging in the SFO culture. This process led the team to plan a number of informal events that were popular with their younger potential audience.

The experiment’s success encouraged “a new commitment to innovative thinking and creative brainstorming” at the SFO according to Shilvock. Building on their success, SFO formed new innovation teams called iGroups to continue their momentum after their project with Thattai and Barakhat was complete.

General Director Shilvock reflects on the experience,

Design thinking is liberating for a company tightly constrained by contracts and expectations!” He also noted that it “opened the door for us to be a more creative, questioning, and iterative organization, a little more willing to try and fail.

Create Quick and Dirty Prototypes

What can you learn from SFO’s experiences? First off, create prototypes of your ideas. You’ll be amazed by how much you will learn during this modeling process.

Second, avoid sinking tons of time, money and effort into your prototypes. Investing little time and effort provides flexibility; and, by keeping the stakes low a prototype can succeed or fail and either result is okay. This means that you’re free to test more prototypes- leading to greater learning and more potential solutions.

4. Test

Once you have your prototype(s) it’s time to test. The form that your tests take will depend on your field and your goals. The SFO held several prototype events and gathered feedback from their attendees. Ericsson tests the ideas pitched on Innova offline and then reports the results back on Innova. Vlisco tested their Prêt-à-Couture services with consumers within one of their retail locations.

When Testing, Failure Is an Option

Again, these tests should be executed as quickly and inexpensively as possible. As my design professor liked to remind me, “Don’t get too precious with it.” Jeena Cho elaborates more fully in Using “Design Thinking” to Navigate Uncertainty,

Designing is an iterative process. Don’t expect to hit the nail on the head on your first try.

This is a very important concept: failure is okay.

No really. Let that sink in for a minute… A failed test teaches us something. That information can allow us to eliminate or modify a prototype, saving a company (or designer) from a costly mistake on a larger scale. Jon Kolko points out of Apple (a company known for its design thinking approach) that, “The company leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.”

If your prototype does not test well, you may circle back to re-evaluate, modify and re-test; or you may pursue a new prototype for a different idea entirely. Either path is okay. John Kolko explains.

In a way, the design-thinking process is circular. The testing phase allows us to gather additional insights that perhaps didn’t surface during the initial discovery phase.

If your tests are successful- great! Now you’re ready to use the information you’ve gathered to refine and launch your new product or initiative.

Empathize. Brainstorm. Prototype. Test. That’s all it take to join the design thinking movement. These fours steps can make your business more agile, more innovative and more successful. Go ahead, try it. Your business will thank you.

Are you excited by the agility and innovation design thinking can bring to your business? We have even more great tips for starting, growing, and managing your business in our latest ebook titled STAND OUT. Download it here.

Logo design is often one of the first tasks an entrepreneur needs to outsource when starting a new business. Used to doing most of the work themselves, it can be hard for a small business owner to justify the expense of a professionally designed logo.

Though cheaper options such as ready-made design stores and designing your own logo exist, they rarely produce the type of quality design that is expected in today’s business landscape. In some situations, these options can even harm your business.

When it comes to design, investing in quality as soon as possible is the best way to get the most growth out of your business. Otherwise, you may find yourself working harder than necessary to earn customer trust and stand out from the competition.

Here are five reasons that investing in design early influences business growth:

1. First Impressions Matter
2. Communicate visually with your customer
3. Make your business memorable

Watch the video for more detail on these three reasons to invest in design early plus two more: