American express open is here to help. Thats why were proud to present your business on msnbc. Hi there, everyone. Im jj ramberg, and welcome to your business, where we help you fulfill your entrepreneurial dreams with information and advice to help your Small Business grow. Now when i started my company, like many entrepreneurs, my office was my kitchen table, and when i hired my first employee, we were still at my apartment, but nobody in the outside world knew it. Today there are so many things you can do to keep your Company Looking professional, even if you may be having snacks out of your home refrigerator. Desk, chair, computer, a Typical Office setting for a growing business, but in this case, the room next door isnt another office, its a bedroom. When you start from such humble beginnings, you kind of make do with what you have. In 2011, john and two classmates started 501 auctions, a Charity AuctionManagement Company that takes the entire process digital, providing an Online Auction site for each event, a mobile bidding system, and support throughout the entire process. They found their system works. We take them from pen and paper to the mobile format. The average improvement is 38 . Like many entrepreneurs, these founders are starting up with very little, with most funds going into the immediate needs of the business, theyve taken up headquarters in the cheapest place possible, home. It was really just a function of necessity. We needed a place to work, and the home was the best option for that. But how do you present yourself as a Reputable Company when your Conference Room doubles as your dining room . Well, for starters, nobody has to know what your office looks like. These days, most people find you first online, so its important to make sure your site looks professional. Our first website was i think you could have drawn it with crayon, i think it was, thats what it looked like. Upgrade your website. Thats the first thing you can do to professionalize your offering. I dont think people will go with something thats too bare bones. If you have an established name, you can get away with it, but if its something clients arent already familiar with, prospective clients, you need to have a nicelooking site. And you can be strategic with your phone number. In this case, the founders got a 1800number. Youre going to want somebody who works locally and if you have a 800number, that goes into a call center, so youre not cutting yourself out of that business. As for facetoface meetings, they go to their clients on site or go to their customers offices. If we can kill two birds with one stone, do an onsite walk through and talk about the event itself, it means we can have that office space somewhere else. It allows 501 auctions to be in multiple markets without paying multiple rents. Teddy is based out of new york, while john is in richmond. Its a matter of being close to where our clients are. For me to meet with clients in rich monday, coordinate staffing for an event in any of those locations is invaluable. Ultimately, people trust people. As they expand, there are plans to bring on more employees in the major markets. There are so many options around the country were looking to expand and grow into new cities. When we bring someone on in that market, theres going to be an expectation they find what happens for them, whether its a home office or working out of their home asis, or gaining a place in a shared space. Theyve brought on one employee in new york. Some may find it disconcerting to work out of their bosss home, but the home environment helps create the companys culture. Youre building a lot of things that are new, and that requires constant dialogue and being in your home gives you that sort of convenient and comfortable space to interact with your peers. And the new employee has given some structure to the work day. Suddenly, they have office hours. When we hired eric, who works in our office, as well, that changed the dynamic, where youre starting earlier. Theres a lot more structure. But because theres no distinction between home and work, the founders are available pretty much 24 7 for their clients. You dont have to go through a process where somebody goes back and asks somebody else a question, when you have a question, everyone knows the answers, which has been great. The fact theyve been able to move so quickly has been important to us. So far, the home office has been working for the founders, thanks in large part to technology. We try and get anybody whos working remotely to come together and Work Together for at least a couple days out of the month. I think thats so important to getting everybody on the same page. If you cant do that, video conferencing, google hangout, skype, ichat. I think just seeing facetoface and working facetoface goes a long way in improving communication. Though they do have future plans to grow in office space, they plan to hold on to the nimbleness and resourcefulness theyve developed for now in their home offices. Youre creating something out of nothing, right, so the biggest thing you can do is make do with what you have, whether thats bartering, whether thats renting a space in somebody elses garage. Running a business from your home can be a great way to lower your overhead costs, but in the long run, could it hurt your credibility with potential customers . Lets turn to this weeks board of directors. Barry mulch is a Small Business consultant, you can find him online. And angela is the cofounder of savor the success. Great to see both of you guys. Great to see you. I was having flashbacks, because i started my company in my apartment and had employees come to my apartment and it looked just like that. And i, for one, am happy we moved up. We did a lot of things so the outside world had no idea where we were working. You do the same, right . Your office really is so fluid in todays world, and your office really is i always say your website is your storefront. Just as he said, you have to invest in a great website. And i think what he did with the phone number was important also, right, so you have a 1800 number. It can look professional, sound professional, and go directly to your phone. Not only the phone number, think about your email address. Is your email address barry9199 hotmail. Com . Thats easy to set up, if using gmail or hotmail, shows this isnt just a hobby, youre ready for business. That said, i do think if somebodys hiring you for Something Big and find out youre working out of your living room, they may start to think, okay, this companys not big enough. Right. But i also think there are positives to that, as well, as the gentleman said on the clip, it can add to the company culture, it can be a lot of fun. Is your personal space delineated carefully from your personal quarters . I think there are ways to make it work. I dont think people really care, jj. Folks want to know, who have you done this with before, who are your customers, what kind of references you have, if you have brand names as references, they are not going to care where you work. On the personal side, i would roll out of bed in my pajamas, work all day, and it would be 11 00 at night and id still be in my pajamas at my computer. Do that enough, and it gets hard. As an entrepreneur, you can go crazy. I like to call it a hard stop. Wine at 5 00. That is the boundary. 5 00, all right. Set office hours for yourself and make sure it does look like an office, put up your diplomas, have your trophies there. Then when you have to do something else, take them all down, if you only have one room. There you go. So many people are doing this right now. You still work from home. I have an office space, i have a spa, and i have home, its very fluid for me. An office can be starbucks or a coffee shop, right . You want to do that because you have to keep your fixed costs low and thats perfect. If you can get rid of rent. Thats a fun topic to talk about, because all of us have experienced it at one time or another. You know, there is another Small Business that we want to tell you about, and this one started in a basement in a home in michigan and its become a nationwide phenomenon. If youre a parent, im sure youve seen the colorful rubberband bracelets all the kids are wearing. I keep finding them all over my kids room. As nbcs jenna wolf reports, he and his family have sold more than 1 Million Units of the toy, thanks to youtube and the internet. Coming soon on a child and parent near you, rubber band bracelets, a trend made on a 19th century style loom by 21st century tweens, and designed not by the toy industry, but by a family who built a business out of their basement. This started from a weekend project with my daughters and thats when they say, dad, this is so cool. The family posted howto videos on youtube to sell it online and assembled rainbow loom kits from their home. I would put rubberbands in the bags. They had so many orders, they had to install an elevator to get boxes up to their garage. Its mind blowing, because we didnt realize the product would get so big, so fast. When michaels stocked them, they oversold immediately. Rainbow looms have more than 3 million hits on youtube and homemade howto videos have now popped up all over the United States. Kids are making bracelets for themselves, their friends, even their parents. How easy is that . An old skill with a modern twist, turning the simple rubber band into all the rage. From gmail to hangouts, google is definitely more than just a search engine. In fact, if you know where to look, you can find really useful resources to help grow your businesses. Here are google tools to help you in your everyday marketing and business operations, courtesy of ink. Com. One, google trends. Language is important when marketing, both online and offline. Consider plugging in some of your companys key words to see how searches have changed over time. Two, think with google is a free marketing resource that gives you insight on useful Consumer Trends and industry research. Three, gomo. Take your existing website through a diagnostic test to make sure its mobile friendly for your customers. Four, youtubes my business story. After updating your clips and photos on youtube, the tool will guide you through templates to add graphics and music. And five, trusted stores. If you offer an Online Shopping experience, trusted stores have to pass a test for Reliable Shipping and customer service. When you pass, you earn the right to display a trusted store badge. When we come back, what yowl need to know about creating banner ads that work. And well talk about women who are moms and entrepreneurs can deal with potential customer prejudice. And angela and barry will have less than a million second when is they face off in an actionpacked edition of our biz quiz. Has its ups and downs. Seasonal. Doesnt begin to describe it. My cashflow can literally change with the weather. Anything that gives me some breathing room makes a big difference. The plum card from American Express gives your business flexibility. Get 1. 5 discount for paying early, or up to 60 days to pay without interest, or both each month. Im Nelson Gutierrez and im a member of the smarter money. This is what membership is. This is what membership does. There is an art and a science to creating banner ads that actually work. And the beauty of the web is that you can test. Try one thing, see your clickthrough rate and try something else. Miles younger is the ceo of canned banners, a company which helps advertisers quickly and easily create banner ads for online campaigns. Hes here to give us some tips on how to create effective ads. Nice to see you, miles. Thanks, jj. The important part, as i said before, test things. Youre going to give us tips, but trial and error, trial and error. Absolutely. You know, thats part of the beauty of online advertising, it is very, very easy, especially with banner ads, to, you know, split test them is what its often called. Test one idea against another, see which does better and keep iterating over there. Okay, lets give some easy tips. The first you say is dont use gimmicky fonts or weird colors, right . Its typically something you want to stay away from. This banner ad were looking at right now, James Carpenter is in a font called comic sans, then below it, you know, just for fun, i used an old english font. Unless youre selling jagermeister, theres not a call for that. Then script font, impossible to read unless you squint. Someone who just learned you can change the fonts for the first time. You got to make your banner ad something people can see. Lets move on to the next idea, make sure that your ads look and feel like your website so its not jarring when you go from the banner to the website. Yeah, yeah. You want to make that transition really as smooth as possible for whoever has clicked your banner ad. You know, a good analogy might be a Fast Food Restaurant that has one logo on the sign outside, another logo on the employee uniforms, and another logo on your drink cup. Its going to turn people off. And if you do that kind of thing with your banner ads, people are going to land on your website and leave. What else is interesting about that, look, the clickthrough rate is going to be low, it just is across the industry. At least this way you get some branding out there. Yep. Thats true, as well. You know, also to the point that the click through is low, thats absolutely true, so you want to get the most value out of the clicks you do get. Now you talk about creating differentsized ads. Why . So the three most common banner ads size are 160x300, 300x250 and 728x90. Those are pixel dimensions in width by height. They are an industry standard, virtually every website will run at least every one of those, but not all websites are going to run all three. As were seeing now, theres with these screen shots, theres different websites that run different combinations of those ads. Do any work better than others, miles . I feel the big ones across the top might work the least effectively. You know, thats not true. It really depends on the campaign. You know, i have seen tests that have shown that the 300x250 have done the best, but thats also the most common, so really the best idea and whats going to give a business the best coverage is to run all three. Okay. Then finally, have a call to action. Give people a reason to click through. Whats an example . So an example would be, you know, if you have an ad for a pizzeria, you know, and the ad just says delicious pizza, that doesnt really do much. Then were looking at an example here where, you know, were showing them an offer of a large twotopping for only 9. 99, and the call to action is to order a pizza online. Its clear what the customer is supposed to do. Then i love your final point, which says, ignore all of these points, break all the rules. Absolutely. For everything we discussed here, there are 1,000 very successful exceptions. Theres the dancing belly fat ads that you see all over the web, and they are highly effective, but really offensive to the eye. Whoever made those ads, tested them heavily, im sure. Miles, thank you so much. It was great to talk to you today. We love getting this advice from you. Sometimes you may need to be able to make a presentation on the fly. Well, for those moments, check out our app of the week. Mighty meeting is a free app you can upload presentations and product videos to the cloud and access them nearly any time, anywhere. Using the feature, meeting members can see your slides from their own device as you present, also interact using the whiteboard. Its time now to answer some of your business questions. Barry and angela are with us once again. This first one is about entrepreneurs who are trying to break the mold. Three women in our 30s who have founded a company and my cofounder, dana, has a toddler at home, im about to give birth next week. How can we sort of disrupt the sort of business communitys mindset that the typical entrepreneur needs to be, you know, single and working night and day . I will obviously with you on this one, angela. You have a 3 1 2yearold at home, youre a entrepreneur doing all kinds of stuff. Do you find it hard . Not so hard. I call it my gorgeous chaos. I think, you know, when i learned as a concert pianist is time expands. So if i had two months to learn a concerto it would take me two months. If my agent would call me and say can you learn this in two weeks, i would learn it in two weeks. You to accomplish in an hour what others need to accomplish that takes them all night, you know . I have to say, i have spoken to some female entrepreneurs out there looking for funding who have gotten pushback from funders, venture capitalists who say im worried about you having a kid, you may be pregnant, about to be pregnant, you may have a baby at home, how do you deal with that . They want to know do you have paying customers . If you do, you could be green living on mars and be married to a tree and people wouldnt care. They want to know do you have cash flow. I would say also guilt. Com, the women who started that had children while they were funding it. You have children. I was working from, you know, middle of the hospital the right investors. Great. Next up, a question about the potential pit falls of crowd funding for the owner of a hardware startup. A lot of Times Companies put kick start campaigns online without really fully fleshing out their supply chain and their business model. And they end up committing to things that they cant deliver. And so we want to figure out if thats the right path for us or if its not. I think hes asking if crowd funding is the right path for him, not whether he should not have the supply chain. I think crowd funding is just another form of marketing. It is certainly not a panacea. Most people on kick starter or india go go they raise less than 10,000. It is just a way for you to get your message out to the people you already know to leverage your own network. Right. And how do you think this slides, if it is the right way for him to go . I think he needs to figure out if this is the right marketing machine for him and strategize. Put out an x amount of product he can deliver the perks and when can he deliver it by the dates . And then there are websites through the that can help you determine if this is the marketing method you want to follow, crowd fund with ease. Com is one of them. All right, okay. Lets move on to the next one. A question about getting customers to keep shopping small. How do you attract new customers when introducing a new product line without alienating existing customers . Youve introduced lots of product lines. How do you do it . You have to speak the language to that target client. I always say a great business has a tiered business model. The top tier is always the vip, and then you how do you serve the masses from that . You need to be able to speak the language of each target client. I think one thing you dont do is offer the new customers a lower price than the existing customers. Cable, Television Companies do this all the time and it is a problem. What you have to do is you got to roll out the right product for the right customers, you may have two different brands. For example, in the rental car industry, hertz has one brand for Business People and dollar and thrifty for the budget conscious consumer. I was just speaking to a woman who has a product, jewelry, she made a cheaper line and she decided to keep it all under the same brand, which i thought was a really interesting decision for her to make. With save it success, we have this premium members and saver circles. I think you can put it under the same umbrella, but you have to give them a different title and for a different and know when youre getting paid for. Thank you for all that advice. Dont go anywhere. Were having you back for the your business biz quiz. If any of you have a question for our experts, go to our website, the address is openforum. Com yourbusiness. Once you get there, hit the ask the show link to submit a question for our panel. That website is openforum. Com yourbusiness. Or if it is easier for you, you can email us your questions and your comments to the address is yourbusiness msnbc. Com. Now social media to find out what is trending on twitter from some entrepreneurial leaders. It is important for all of us to reevaluate our businesses to move forward. If it is not broke, break it. Small Business Expert and attorney Nina Kauffman with this good advice, surprise people, take on the unexpected task and projects and deliver a great result. And frequent your business panelist Dave Anderson tweets some inspiration. Great ideas are normally killed not by outside source, but the ideas originator talking himself out of trying. Go for it. Now that we heard great tips on how to improve your business, lets get great ideas from Small Business owners like you. Youre usually never going to get it right the first time so you really have to make sure you have the team and the resources and the skill sets in place to learn from your data after the first generation and make iterations accordingly. Very important to understand that youre not making the product yourself. Our hunch was the more products we had inside the application, the better User Experience it would be. But what we heard from our customers after we started really going off and talking to customers is people dont necessarily want more options. At the end of the day, it is really just a numbers game and you want to expose yourself to as many potential customers as possible. So just either say hi to them at an event or reaching out to them via email or through the telephone. It is really the only way to get new customers. So dont be afraid of the no. Its not that bad. It is time to put our panelists Small Business knowledge to the test. We are pitting barry and angela against each other in the your business biz quiz. May the best entrepreneur win. You ready . Yes. Question number one, according to the nfib in july 2013 what was the single most important problem facing Small Business owners . Taxes, cost and availability of insurance, quality of labor or poor sales . Barry . Id say b. Nope. Can i go . You get a chance, angela. C, quality of labor. No, 00. It was taxes. Surprised me also. In a recent ecommerce study, which of the following is the top source of life long loyal customers. Facebook, organic search, twitter or banner ads . Angela . Facebook. Facebook, no. Id say organic search. Organic search, 1 for barry. And number three, which of the following metro areas has the highest tech startup density. San jose, seattle, washington, washington, d. C. , or boulder, colorado . Id have to say seattle. No. But smart of you not to pick the first one. That was too obvious, right . Angela . What was first choice . The first choice was san jose, sunnyvale and sunnyvale. That was all one. San jose, first one. No, thats the one i said would be too obvious. Can i get another shot . Im terrible at this. Another try, barry. I would say boulder. You got a 50 50 chance. Im giving you half a point for that one. Okay. So i have 1 1 2 now . You 1 1 2. Angela has 0. You can save yourself. All right. Which of the following was the main source of funding for new businesses in 2012 . Family, friends, personal savings or banks . Family and friends. No. Personal savings. That knocks out a and b. Personal savings. You won, barry. 2 1 2. Im terrible at this 0. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you learned a thing or two. If you missed anything, all you have to do is click on our website, openforum. Com yourbusiness. Youll find all of todays segments and web exclusive content with a lot more information to help your business grow. You can also follow us on twitter. It is msnbcyourbiz. Please do not forget to become a fan of the show on facebook. Next week, we pay another visit to main street, usa, to find out why Small Business owners in one town knew they had to Work Together in order to save their community. One of the very first meetings we had, someone brought a picture that a local elementary student drew of our downtown. And it was a picture of walmart. We just said, you know, we have to do something now. Well take you to bedford, pennsylvania, where a main street manager is leading the charge. Until then, im j. J. Ramberg. Remember, we make your business our business. Building animatronics is all about getting things to Work Together. The timing, the actions, the reactions. Everything has to synch up. My expenses are no different. Receipt match from American Express synchronizes your business expenses. Just shoot your Business Card receipts and theyre automatically matched up with the charges on your online statement. Im john kaplan and im a member of a synchronized world. This is what membership is. This is what membership does. Can you be against authorizing the use of force in syria and the new deal to avert military action . It has been another weekend of fast moving developments as washington reacts to yesterdays surprise agreement between the u. S. And russia. Proposed deal that calls for syria to destroy all of its chemical weapons by the middle of next year. The United States and russia are committed to the elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons in the soonest and safest manner. We agree that syria must