Professional Business Network

As Walmart expands its international business, the company wants to bring ideas from South Africa’s Massmart to other markets, company executives said Thursday.

Walmart’s hotly debated $2.4-billion purchase of a majority interest in Massmart will put Walmart in the building supply business, one of a variety of Massmart store formats. The company expects the acquisition to close in June.

Almost all of Massmart’s stores — 263 of them — are in South Africa. But JP Suarez, senior vice-president of international business development, said the world’s largest retailer intends to expand Massmart’s footprint in Southern Africa, where the chain operates in more than a dozen countries as far north as Ghana and Nigeria.

One priority is to offer more refrigerated food, a category lacking among Massmart and its competitors, Suarez said.

“It’s going to be a real win for the customer. Read Full Post…

I particularly liked Jim Blasingames Wonderful World of Niches in one of his weekly emails last month. Jim is The Small Business Advocate, and he does a daily show on Internet radio.

I think most of us are already on to this, but still, Jim says it very well:

For the past 30 years, the marketplace has increasingly become like that Best socket wrench; every year, it acquires more notches. Except in the marketplace, notches are called niches As niches have increased in number, so have entrepreneurial opportunities, resulting in the most dramatic expansion of the small business sector in history.

Thats a good reminder. Strategy is focus. Its not who has the largest target market, but who has a narrow and well-defined target market that loves what they do.

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I watched a very interesting video on Tech Crunch TV the other day where venture capitalists David Lee and Ron Conway discuss some of the key attributes of their most successful portfolio company investments. The video is definitely worth a watch if you have a spare 15 minutes or so. You can find the video here as well as my own take below.

While the businesses that I encourage readers to start on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com are not crazy startups where you’re working 16 hour days, trying to hit a home run and earn millions and billions of dollars, there are many parallels between a lifestyle business and a venture backed startup.

In other words, many of the same traits that make a venture backed startup more likely to succeed apply to small businesses as well. H

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Internet service is necessary for most small businesses, but it can be quite expensive to install and maintain. Fortunately, internet service is one of those areas where you can cut costs. Here are a few tips on how to find cheap internet service for your business.

Shop Around

Shopping around is the single best way to find affordable internet service. Depending on where you live, there may be numerous providers in the area. Take time to research every available option so that you have a clear view of which company offers the best service for the lowest rates. There are several sites on the web that provide information and quotes from multiple companies. You may also be able to find listings for potential internet service providers in the telephone book and through Google searches. Finally, consider asking neighboring businesses which ISP they use.

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Almost as soon as Steve Ballmer took over as chief executive of Microsoft in January 2000, the stock crashed. It wasn’t his fault; the dotcom crash pulled every tech stock down with it, including the Seattle software empire that, the previous year, had been the world’s most valuable at $612-billion.

This is the sort of mistiming that has dogged Ballmer’s tenure: always arriving a bit too late and overseeing a collapse of a promising lead. It happened with internet search, with tablets, with cellphones, with music players.

Ballmer last week faced calls for his removal from David Einhorn, a powerful Wall Street hedge fund manager famous for his early warnings about the weakness of doomed bank Lehman Brothers. Though sources on the company’s board backed him, investors know that Ballmer does not have a free pass just because he joined in 1980 as employee number 30.

“Bill Gates is ruthless,” said a fund manager at one of Microsoft’s largest shareholders. Read Full Post…

With Dominique Strauss-Kahn otherwise engaged, the IMF needs a new boss—and France’s finance minister is planning a world tour to prove she’s best for the job. Christine Lagarde will stop in China, India, and Brazil to offer her platform, which focuses on giving emerging countries more say at the fund. But she faces hurdles; some say a European shouldn’t take charge of a fund that’s trying to give emerging countries a bigger voice, particularly when Europe’s debt crisis is forcing worldwide damage control, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“I would certainly prefer to be endorsed by a very large majority, rather than being the European candidate pushed by the Europeans,” Lagarde says. Others note that Lagarde is a lawyer by trade, not an economist. She says one sh

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This past month, I’ve been asked to critique several online store websites (. These days, I rarely have time to take a look at random reader’s websites simply because I’m swamped with other things and taking care of little people aged 3 and below. Also, since I run an ecommerce course, I reserve most of my non-family time for my students.

But I felt compelled to respond to these review requests because all of them had the same or similar mistakes.

And when 4 consecutive websites have the same problem, I feel compelled to write about it. Here were the problems that I found with the stores I looked at this past month.

Whenever I land on an unknown store while surfing the web, especially a site where I might be spending some of my hard earned cash, the first thing I look for is what’s in it for me. Why the

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