♪ hi there everyone. i'm jj ramberg. welcome to "your business." the show dedicated to give you tips and advice to help your small business grow. this happens awful the time. someone has a great idea, turns it into a company and nobody is interested. the founders of flight car wanted to minimize risk. they had a crazy idea that rethinks the entire way the rental car industry works. so before spending too much time or too much money, they launched their company with the bare minimum to see what people would think. ♪ >> just four hours after they launched their company, the founders of flight car received a cease and desist order from the san francisco airport. >> it wasn't even frightening. it was like this blows. we just launched and we had to change the model. >> he's part of the three-person founder team of flight car. he and his partners are disrupting the rental car industry. basically, they took a look at how things currently work and thought there's got to be a better way. >> there are two parking garages at the airport, one where people are paying a lot of money po park and one where a lot of people are paying a lot to rent cars from. it doesn't make sense. there's a lot of inefficiency. >> these three 18-year-olds put off college, telling harvard, m.i.t. and princeton they would be busy and set off to change an industry. here's how it works. instead of dropping your car off at long-term parking, you drop it off with them for free. while you're gone, they'll rent your car out to someone else, charging less money than companies like hertz and avis. they'll give you a percentage of the fee. it's definitely a new way of thinking. it's part of what's dubbed as the sharing economy and the way necessity launched their company is modern as well. instead of waiting until everything was perfect, they launched with as little in place as possible. with what's called a minimum viable product or mvp. >> well, if i'm going to do this, what do i need? i need to have people who can help with the transactions. i need to have the insurance squared away. and preferably a parking lot that doesn't have to happen. >> that's right. they launched their company with no official place to park the cars they were collecting. in the beginning, they would meet their clients right at short term parking on airport property, which is why they got that cease and desist order from sfo. you knew that would happen. why not skip that part and launch once you launched in a place you knew you wouldn't get a cease and desist. >> then we'll we'd be launching today or tomorrow. at that point we would have given up a lot of traction and time. >> the idea behind their strategy was to launch fast and lean. no employees, low overhead. their one required large expense was insurance and few systems perfectly in order. just get the idea out there and see how people react. >> imagine if flight car didn't work. then we would have spent three more months like setting everything up, we would have done things like get land together, gets expensive and time consuming. we would have spent all that time working on something that we could have tested and ended up not working. ♪ >> as it turns out, flight car is working. but it's already been through a few iterations in its still very young life. now they have their own parking lot. before that, they changed their drop-off point multiple times. >> how did you get people to trust you when you're not telling them a place to come until they call you? >> it's talking to the customer and being honest about we're trying out this concept. >> that culture of understanding is one. key reasons the flight car team decided to launch it in san francisco. jim newton was one of their first customers. he explains it best. >> in silicon valley there's a mind-set to be more accepting to startups. give them a little slack. >> even jim, who simply tried out flight car because he thought it sounded like a neat idea had a moment of hesitation the second time he signed up to drop off his car and they told him to meet them somewhere new. >> i was like, i'm supposed to go where? i'm supposed to meet a guy. it was like late too. it was like midnight or something like that. i was like, okay, well let's see how this goes. >> there are a lot of people who might think this is crazy. your first interaction with a customer is your most important interaction with a customer. for them to see something that isn't perfect might hurt you down the road. >> i mean, that's why i think it's been important for us to meet the customers. you know, when you tell them, meet them, you're the founder, you give them the card. they completely get it. >> regardless of what was happening behind the scenes, the founders were adamant about providing a good experience. because for their customers, that's the only thing that counts. >> what's great about the start of a business is that there are so few customers that you can provide really, really good customer service. >> excellent. >> it was easy. they knew who i was. they picked me up. >> since they launched their mvp, things have changed at flight car. now they have their own parking, employees and systems in place. and it's represe-- they opened boston. they told me luckily they didn't have to use the mvp system. >> this is crazy if we have to do this again and again am we'll age like presidents. i think that we've locked down kind of a good model. ♪ >> i find this idea of the minimum viable product fascinating. it's the way we launch things in my company. how can you pull it off and does it make sense for every business? let's turn to the board of directors. alfred edmond is at black enterprise and anson barnes is a partner at -- and he blogs at sneaker head.com. first round capital invest north dakota flight car. >> great to be back. >> i found out about this company actually from a colleague of yours. i thought it was such a good story. this idea of the mvp, minimum viable product, turns on its head the way people used to do business before. >> that's right. >> we met these guys and many of the entrepreneur that is we meet, one thing we live is the idea of build, break, learn. do that as fast as you can, turn the feedback loops into shorter and shorter loops and be able to grow your business with as few dollars as possible and ultimately that leads to a strong foundation and to the biggest business. >> we do this in my company as i said. it pains me to put stuff out that's not perfect. we build it, get it out there, get feedback. when i get it, i think i want to tweak that. it's a little heartbreaking even though i know it's the right thing to do. >> you're not the person, even though you're making it that decides whether it's perfect or not. the final judge is the marketplace and the consumer. you can fool yourself into thinking it's not right, it's not right but you don't know until you put it out there. it's better, especially the way things move so quickly to get it out there. >> i put stuff out there and i thought people would hate this, it turns out to be the thing they love. >> we also put things out we thought was perfect and they say i hate it, i don't want it. >> as long as you have a way to find out why they hate it or why they love it. ultimately, you have to know that your final product, the one you go to the mass market with and reach the most consumers with will be perfect in their eyes. >> minimum viable product. how do you figure out what that is? >> as an entrepreneur, you want to maximize learning per dollar. you should do that with every experiment you run, every decision you make. think about the dollars you're putting to work against this experiment and how much you'll learn from that experiment. optimize learning per dollar. minimum viable product sometimes is on paper, interviewing a customer and other times you have to actually write some code and put something on a website. or with the case of flight car, they needed to figure out how to get some cars in a lot and have people come and rent them. >> that was fascinating to me. they started a place where someone is going to give them their car, a new way of thinking and they had no parking lot. literally, one day they said drop it off here and the next day just call us on your way here and we'll tell you where to drop it off. >> not only started in a market with people willing to take the risk but there was a reward factor to the risk. i can pay less money, not have my car sitting in a lot and get paid for the process. it was a worth while risk for a percentage of the marketplace. >> it's fascinating. i think. i loved meeting these guys. i'm excite today see how the company does. i hope they do well for your sake. >> this is really sort of a new way of thinking. flight car. if we think back on old ways of marketing, old ways of thinking, a lot of them still work too. i'm talking in particular about e-mail marketing which a lot of people think is old school but still helpful for a lot of companies. here are five ways to ignite your e-mail list. growth without ending up in the spam folder courtesy of matchable.com. one, make it easy. don't just position the facebook and twitter icons prominently on your website. make sure the e-mail invite option is also front and center. two, don't stop at just one. add more opt-in forms throughout your site and in various placements. test these locations to find the combination that works best. >> three, collect e-mails at your stores. ask customers for information at your checkout counter or when requesting an e-mail receipt. or make it mobile. make sure your mobile site asks visitors for their e-mail. keep it sthort and simple. >> and five, consider implementing social sign-on. users can sign into your website using their log-in information from facebook or twitter instead of creating a separate log-in account. a couple of weeks ago, i went back to stanford business school for my 15th differentment things are quite different than when i went there. while a lot of us are entrepreneurial, there's a lab dedicated to startups. technology has changed everything, making it much easier to start a small company. i chatted with a bunch of professors and asked them what would i learn if i were sitting in that seat in your class today instead of 15 years ago. garth was my strategy professor back then. today he's dean of the entire school. i asked him about running a small business has changed in the last decade. >> i think innovation is in the air more so than 15 years. >> take it out of the university setting. i'm a dry cleaner in cleveland. is it important for me in the same way that you intermix with other departments for that person to intermix with other businesses? >> i think it's very important for them to get new ideas and to have an infusion of ideas that maybe come from businesses that look unrelated. but may have an idea that you can apply to your own business. i think just looking at your peers and being stuck in hey particular paradigm can be very limiting. >> how do you foster innovation. if you're not naturally innovati innovative, how do you foster that culture? >> within your organization, first of all, you have to embrace experimentation. that also means that you need to embrace failure because when you experiment, not everything goes well. you need to have a culture where you try things. if they don't work, you actually celebrate those. in my team, we have a little celebration where every time we pronounced something dead, we would clink on a little glass and smile and celebrate it. because we tried t you also have to be good at shuting down the things that aren't working and be honest. embracing failure paradoxically is a significant part of success. >> how do you teach that? you have a bunch of very ambitious students who want to be very successful, have been successful enough to be admit today this school so far, how do you teach them that failure is okay? >> we expose them to lots and lots of entrepreneurs. i think that's the keyway you do it. weave entrepreneurs come into the classes. the classes are written around people who start a business and some are written fairly early on. you don't know whether they're going to be successful. what they will say is i failed in that business but if you look at my career, i had a baseball analogy, i struck out, i had a base hit and then eventually i had the home run. it's really about that kind much track record of your life. >> you have about 11% of people who graduate here and go on to start something the next year and then countless more years down the road. >> what's one piece of advice you give to people as they start something new? >> the way of starting a business has changed. we encourage them to emphasize customer 'em path i. this is about focusing on your customer and their needs. in the old days, you would sit in your lab and invent something you thought was a great idea and flesh it out and take it out too to market and hope it succeeded. that's not the philosophy anymore in silicon valley. figure out what you think the customer wants, build something in a simple prototype and rapidly innovate on the prototype. >> ultimately, it's all about the customer. >> you can think whatever you want. if this isn't satisfying a real customer need and if they're not resonating with your product and as much as, it's not going to succeed. >> i sat in your class 15 years ago and it was nice to be there then. it's great to talk to you now. >> thank you so much, jj. it's a real pleasure. when we come back, how involved do you want your investors to be in running your small business. and the head of the pennsylvania beer dine industry talks about the flow of -- in this week's learning from the pros. has it's ups and downs. seasonal... doesn't 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. i'm nelson gutierrez and i'm a member of the smarter money. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. when america's eeld he's brewery opened its doors, it -- now 184 years later, the company produces more than 2 million barrels a year at three facilities and it's still run by the ying ling family. the fifth generation owner talks about a good product at an affordable price. remembering your backyard and the next generation in this learning from the pros. >> ♪ i think any small business has to really watch their cost. i've always watched costs here from the time i was a kid when i was 15, 18 years old. i kind did everything years ago. now we have plant managers and production managers and they're forever wanting more and more employees. i tell them you can't get too many more employees. you have to run efficiently and do it with what you have. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. if we can run a can line with five people, that's what we have on the can line. you know, we don't run as fast as the big breweries. they probably run 2,000, 2400 cans a minute. we run 890 cans a minute. we do it with five people. for us, that's good. that's as good as i can do. you can't expect any better than that, your best. >> ♪ >> we have a capacity problem on how much beer we can really handle. we don't want to sell more than what we can make because then you run into product problems and it's not necessary for this company to operate that way. we probably haven't grown fast enough but you don't want a lot of unused capacity in your manufacturing facility. so we grow in accordance with opening new markets. years ago, we had an opportunity to go into new england markets and just kind of throw our beer out there into any market willing to receive us. we pulled away from that as we started to grow in the pennsylvania market. we got good wholesalers. grew into maryland and new jersey, delaware and kind of grow in adjacent markets now. we build a brand of reputation for that brand. consumer likes it, so we move to the next state where it's already known. remember our backyard. just remember where you came from. we just kept this company alive by not forgetting where we came from. they've supported us here. not just in our potsville area, but harrisburg and philadelphia. we've sold beer in those markets for many, many years. i call us a local regional brewery. we depend so much on the local area, we wouldn't want to lose that. wouldn't want to lose the support regionally. it's your backyard. this is the oldest brewery in the united states. ♪ >> you can't sell the young ling brewery to joe smith. we hope one of the family members will take it over. the next generation is jennifer and wendy. they've shown a great interest on their part to learn and take over and i think they see some of the things that i do. sometimes they don't understand why. but they're learning. it's a learning experience for them. they're getting to the age that pretty soon, and i'm getting to the age also that pretty soon, they're going to be running this. ♪ it's time to answer some of your business questions. alfred and fin are back with us now. the first one is about courting potential investors. >> when we're considering investment, should we consider investments who want to be really involved in our business or investors who trust us to handle it? >> what do you think, alfred? >> there's smart money and dumb money. smart money comes with advice, connections, mentorship and if somebody is investing in your business, chances are they know a bit more about the industry maybe than you do. so i would say that all things being equal, you want the person who has an interest -- >> the key is smart. if someone has an interest in your business and thinks they're smart but they're not helpful, it's more of a hindrance than a help. >> you want to look at is it a person who invested in this industry before or run a business in this industry. not just somebody, i like your business. you want somebody who is smart money. >> bring it back to something familiar. which is hiring. so when you chose your co-founders, your first employees, you have a way you look at what they bring to the table, a way to understand their skill set and to know how they'll impact your business. you can do the same thing with investors. far too many entrepreneurs view themselves on the sell side of an investment partnership. they should spend more time on the buy side evaluating their source of capital and will it have value beyond the green. >> unlike, hiring, you can't fire them. once they're invested, they're there. >> you don't want someone who you are beholden to but doesn't understand your business. >> or the same goals for your business. let's move on to the next one. this is a question about targeting the audience. >> how do i best reach small business owners in the urban community to provide them a service such as business management? >> so i think this is interesting. she's trying to reach one particular type of person. but it's really a question about how do you reach them in general. >> the best thing to do is deeply understand your customer and to walk in their shoes and really know the way they view the world. then you have to figure out a way to deliver a, wow. something that shocks them, goes well beyond what they would have expected so they talk about, they want to come back. i think you're delivering deep value for them. >> how do you figure that out, though? you want to reach these people get in there, you want to figure out the wow for them. >> it takes some real research. you can't do it from 30,000 feet. i'm trying to reach entrepreneurs with business management services. that's a very broad description of the customers an the service. you narrow it down to the services i provide. now i need to identify the types of business that is need those services and demonstrated willingness to pay for them. that may be a very different person than the person you thought in when you thought urban and the services they may want may be a different menu of services you were initially thinking they wanted. you have to dig deeper. >> get out of build and go talk to them. >> okay. finally here is a question about incorporating your company. >> would the panel agree with me that any small business should at least be an llc if not a c corp. itself and any business that's netting $200,000 a year or more should definitely incorporated? >> would the panel agree with him? >> i think if you have $200,000 a year coming in, you can afford a lawyer and talk to a good one and figure out what's best for your specific situation. sole proprietorship, et cetera. >> i get nervous around words like always, every, any. these absolute terms. the reality is, you should have an attorney, you should have a tax pro on your side and have a financial adviser to figure out what's best for your business. i think he's generally right. you really need to tailor it to what's right for your business. >> can i ask you a question about that. what if you are developing an app, right? you don't know if it's going to turn into a business. you have this idea, you don't want to spend this money legal, hiring a lawyer, et cetera. do you need to turn it into a business right away or do you wait to see if it's successful? >> i think you can get something out in the market and see what happens as a sole proprietor. >> absolutely. >> you should have in mind certain objective milestones that say at this scale i'm ready to talk to a lawyer. >> okay, great you guys. a lot of good advice. if any of you out there have a question for our experts, all you have to do is go to our website. the address is open forum.com/your business. once you get there, hit the ask the show link to submit a question for our panel. once again, it's open forum.com/your business. if it's easier, send an e-mail. the address is your business@msnbc.com. alfred, you sent a nice tweet the other day. i wrote it down here. you wrote, fear of success is the fear of the unknown. too often we cling to failure because we are familiar it imt what inspired you to write that? >> my own life. i'm big into trying different things and not allowing the fear to stop me from doing it and not worrying about failure. failure is fiction. mistakes are myths. >> you try that all the time. >> my bow tie line. bodybuilding. people that follow me on twitter know i was into bodybuilding. i like proving over and over again you have to decide what is worth your time to do. >> i find twitter a good place for advice. we wanted to share with you some things people are saying about small business. here are the latest. small business consultant rob bass owe asks, are daily deals good for the small businesses? >> they can be. airli carol roth a says the one thing you need for successful delegation, set clear expectations. usa today small business columnist, rhonda abrams suggests say stay ahead of the curve, identify rob be problems before they occur and save your biz from unwanted surprises. so we'll continue to follow all of those people and you guys and share them with our audience. you had great advice today. now we'd love to get great ideas from small business owners just like you. >> we started customer appreciation program. it's called our fabulous 100 where at random intervals we provide them with gifts, incentives and other little acts of kindness. this program has been so successful that that group of customers more than doubled in sales last year. my tip to business owners is to take advantage of tools out there. you can use microsoft excel to make control of your stock instead of buying expensive software. >> one thing we like to emphasize is that because of our small size we can constantly communicate with our staff. a good way to do that is have a friday lunch with your staff and make sure you're open to sharing ideas and talking in a casual atmosphere. you'd be surprised what you can learn about your own business talking with some of your employees. between your e-mail inbox and social networking sites, it is hard to filter out what's important from the rest. well, if that's your problem like mine, check out our app of the week. close helps you filter through the noise and goes to the messages relevant for you. it gives relationship scores based on when and how you communicate with them. it will make sure your key people are never lost in the shuffle. that's an interesting idea. alfred and finn, so great to see you guys. thank you for coming on and letting me pick your brains for the day. hope to see you soon. >> thanks for having us. if any of you want to revisit any of today's segment, you can see them online. open forum.com/your business. we've posted web exclusive content with more information to help your business grow. you can also follow us on twitter at msnbc, your biz. don't forget to become a fan of the show on facebook. next week, should it stay or should it go? how do you know when it's time to stop selling a product? >> if there's a thick coat of dust, it's really not moving. >> when it's down at the bottom shelf and it's all the way to the left or all the way to the right, it's on its way out. >> we'll find out when the time is right to give your not so best sellers the boot. until then, i'm jj 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. receiptmatch on the business gold rewards card synchronizes your business expenses. just shoot your business card receipts and they're automatically matched up with the charges on your online statement. i'm john kaplan, and i'm a member of a synchronized world. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. >> this is the fourth day of the shutdown. the democrats are trying to pulling rabbits out of hats to try to save the republican party. >> good afternoon madam speaker, ladies and gentlemen, we are announcing something good today. we are about to rescue the republicans who have gotten themselves in the unhappy position. >> john dingell of michigan announcing the new democratic

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