Salt Lake City, Small Businesses, Entrepreneurs in UT

May15

“When you are looking to sell anything to an end user and you don’t plan for the fulfillment and shipping, then you are just planning to go out of business.”

Jordan Guernsey

Molding Box

Founder

http://www.moldingbox.com/

Jordan Guernsey is the very successful Entrepreneur behind Molding Box, an innovative company that provides shipping, printing, handling, and disc media production services. Jordan started Molding Box in his mother’s basement and has grown the company into an Inc. 500 list member. He truly focuses on the client’s experience and gives all employees the power to make a difference. Jordan stresses employee loyalty and engagement and is extremely active in charity. He is constantly looking for ways to better the world. For example, Molding Box is a flagship company for the Utah Defendant Offender Workforce Development program and offers second chances to paroles.

MO: You started your company in your mother’s basement. Tell us how the early days of Molding Box came about.

Apr30

No Comments

“Ultimately we would like to offer the Grow America program within all 50 states.”

Alan E. Hall

Grow America

Founder

http://www.growam.com/

Grow America is a national organization emerging from Utah to support, encourage, and strengthen entrepreneurialism wherever and whenever it is found. Its mission is to align the partners, vendors, mentors and capital entrepreneurs require to create and grow tomorrow’s successful companies. Beyond the creation of new businesses and the expansion of early stage and growth companies, Grow America’s ultimate goal is to put America back to work, step-by-step, one company and one community at a time.

Alan E. Hall is the founder of Grow America. Alan has achieved major successes in the world of entrepreneurship and business and also has established a foundation with his wife, Jeanne, that gives grants to registered charities. Alan takes risks and gets things done.

MO: Welcome to Mo.com, Alan. Why is the mandate of Grow America important to you?

Feb8

No Comments

“Technology has turned publishing on its head”

Karl Beckstrand

Premio Publishing & Gozo Books, LLC

Publisher/Author/Speaker

http://premiobooks.com

An engaging presenter and consultant, Karl Beckstrand has experience in high tech, public policy, marketing, TV, radio, and film. He has lived abroad, been a Spanish/English interpreter, and he enjoys volleyball and kayaking (usually not at the same time). Karl’s activity books, Spanish & bilingual books, ebook mysteries and nonfiction stories feature minority characters and have been lauded by national reviews such as the Horn Book blog review, School Library Journal, Midwest Book Review and ForeWord Reviews (see Premiobooks.com/press). He has had three titles on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in Spanish list, two in their top ten for Spanish language children’s and one in their top ten large print children’s titles. She Doesn’t Want the Worms! was named one of the top ten books of 2011 by ForeWord Reviews.

Premio Publishing has been delighting readers since 2004. Their picture books are about fun and learning—at any age. Whimsical stories and vivid illustrations engage and surprise readers. Their activity books (including a cookbook for kids), Spanish & bilingual books (text & pronunciation guide in English, Spanish, or both), and historical non-fiction books hold reader attention (child or adult) and make them repeat readers.

MO: Can you tell our readers how you were suddenly forced to take over the publishing and marketing of your first book rather unexpectedly?

Feb1

No Comments

“Sell, Design, Build”

Brandt Page

Launch Leads

CEO

http://www.launchleads.com/

The beginning of 2009, Brandt Page brought to market a business that people actually needed and wanted: a way to get more leads and sales opportunities and Launch Leads was born. He bootstrapped from day one working from his living room. Even with five employees they were still in his house: two people on the couch, one at the kitchen table, another on his card table and he found himself with a cheap Ikea desk. He didn’t buy expensive business cards or spend money on a website or a cool car — he focused his time, energy, and money on growing the business. He also did not take a single paycheck for 14 months. Yes, that sounds crazy, but that is just what a bootstrapping entrepreneur does.

Launch Leads, fills its clients’ sales pipelines with qualified leads and scheduled sales appointments. Launch generates targeted lead lists, qualifies each lead, and schedules sales opportunities on behalf of its clients. Basically, Launch does all of the heavy lifting of cold calling, prospecting, and lead qualification, so their clients can focus on closing more sales. Launch primarily works with companies in the software/technology space and gets paid on a “pay for performance” basis, (pay per appointment) so the risk is on them, not you.

Besides the outbound calling approach to B2B lead generation, Launch also provides immediate lead response and qualification to companies who are receiving 100 or more inbound leads per month. Simply put, as soon as someone inputs their data into the form on your site, Launch responds on your behalf within minutes, typically catching that person still in front of their computer and on your site. Launch then asks them some key qualifying questions and schedules an appointment for your company, if and only if that lead meets the criteria you and your company are looking for.

MO: How did you manage to stay motivated and inspired while working with 5 employees from your living room?

Dec12

No Comments

When a Good Employee is No Longer a Good Fit

Levi King

Lendio

President and COO

http://www.lendio.com/

Mike: Hey everyone, I’m Mike Sullivan. Thanks for joining me. Today with us is our subject matter expert from Lendio. Typically, we have Brock Blake here. Today we have with us the President and COO, Levi King. Levi’s going to talk to us today about some experiences he’s had with the uncomfortable subject of letting people go. There are different circumstances that lead to this. Levi’s going to talk to us about some of those and some of his learnings over the years. So Levi, thanks for joining us and over to you.

Levi: Today, I want to just give a few pieces of advice. When I say advice, obviously in business there are a lot of times you can do things right or wrong, but there are a lot more scenarios where there are two or three or more ways to do something right and just as many ways to do it wrong. Anyone who ever gives me advice in business I typically try to look at it through the lens of how relevant is that to what I do. So that’s my disclaimer before I give any advice on this topic.

Sep27

No Comments

Lendio – Making small business loans simple.

Brock Blake

Lendio

CEO

http://www.lendio.com/

Mike: Hey everyone, it’s Mike Sullivan and this is MO.com. Joining me today is Brock Blake of Lendio. He’s our small business expert, and Brock is here to talk to you about small business loans. Brock, thanks a lot for joining us.

Brock: Glad to be here with you again today. We’re excited about working with MO talking about small business loans. There are so many business owners out there in the United States that are going through this process of I want to grow my business and I want to be guided on how I get a business loan.

Jul8

1 Comment

The State of Small Business Lending

Brock Blake

Lendio

Founder & CEO

http://www.Lendio.com

Joining us today is our subject matter expert from Lendio, Brock Blake. He’s the founder and CEO. Brock is going to talk to us today a bit about small business lending in America. Brock, thanks for joining us today. I’m excited to have you.

Brock:
I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about the state of small business lending across the United States. There is a tremendous amount of conversation happening, both in Congress, in the press, and on the streets of Main Street America about the difficulties of business owners getting small business loans.

It’s an interesting conversation right now, because what’s happening is you’ve got two conflicting viewpoints. You’ve got the banks and the credit unions across the United States that are saying, “Hey, we’ve got more capital to lend than we’ve ever had…”

Apr22

1 Comment

“We have nearly 3,500 lenders throughout the U.S. that are looking to make a small business loan.”

Brock Blake

Lendio.com

Founder and CEO

http://Lendio.com

Mike:
Hello, I’m Mike Sullivan for M.O., where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs and then bring you tips, perspectives, and insights on what it takes to be successful. Today we’re featuring Brock Blake, the founder of Lendio. Lendio matches loans with entrepreneurs and small business owners so that they are matched with the right loan for them.

Brock, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in this industry?

Brock:
Yeah, I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, super passionate about helping entrepreneurs and had started a few companies during college while I was there. I had studied a class, there was a class called “Financing New Ventures.” I was super passionate about that class.

It was all about helping entrepreneurs get angel financing or venture financing or debt financing. I really enjoyed it. I ended up being the TA of that class and was teaching that while I was at Brigham Young University. From there, what had happened was I won an entrepreneurial competition just right out of school where it’s kind of like the TV show “The Apprentice” without all the glitz and glamour. Where they had 100 entrepreneurs, they selected 20 to go through kind of an eight-week boot camp, and then out of those 20, there were 5 that were selected that were given $50,000 to start a business.

I was one of those five and used that money, partnered up with a gentleman named Paul Allen and my current partner, Trent Miskin, to launch, well, originally we were Funding Universe and our goal was to connect entrepreneurs to angel investors. At the time, I used that $50,000. We launched Funding Universe, and just to kind of connect that back to Lendio, we found out early on that connecting entrepreneurs to angels was very difficult because there were only a few entrepreneurs that were really a good fit for an angel investor.

We realized that more entrepreneurs are a better fit for SBA loans or working capital loans and those types of things. So we made the transition to Lendio. That’s kind of a little bit of my background and kind of an overview of how we got to where we’re at today.

Spotlight: Salt Lake City, Utah

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Spotlight Interview: David Allen

Spotlight Interview: Chris Babel

“When you are looking to sell anything to an end user and you don’t plan for the fulfillment and shipping, then you are just planning to go out of business.”

“Ultimately we would like to offer the Grow America program within all 50 states.”

“Sell, Design, Build”

When a Good Employee is No Longer a Good Fit

Lendio – Making small business loans simple.

The State of Small Business Lending

“We have nearly 3,500 lenders throughout the U.S. that are looking to make a small business loan.”

MO Partners

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