I’ve been doing my own businesses off and on for almost 5 years now and while I am no where near what I would consider a success (yet), I have learned a lot from my previous failures. There are many common mistakes first time entrepreneurs fall victim to. I see the same pitfalls over and over again. I’ve decided to start a new series of blog posts documenting some of my boneheadedness in hopes that [...]

It seems like ever since I returned to Kauai, I’ve watched business after business close up shop. Many of the local businesses still operating are still struggling more than ever. These businesses are family owned and operated and have been gone through multiple generations. When asked why sales are so poor, they always cite outside sources; Costco, Wal-mart, K-mart, Safeway, the economy, etc. How can they compete with these big box stores with huge national [...]

Business is not easy. If it were, everybody would do it. Living your dream life is not easy, if it were, everybody would be living theirs. The only difference between those who are successful at business or life for that matter and the people who aren’t is successful people choose to be successful. Choosing to succeed is more than just stating emphatically you will. Choosing to be successful is consciously embedding the belief of success [...]

When I discovered a month ago that Verizon Wireless was getting an Android device by the end of the year, I became very excited. I had been sitting on a contract renewal for some time now but did not want to renew just yet because there really weren’t any cool phones available from Verizon. Historically, Verizon has always had the lamest phones of any major carrier but almost everyone on Kauai has Verizon so it [...]

In college, I was an avid weight lifter. I also was probably a little overweight. Hard to believe if you’ve only met me in the past few years as I am currently about 10-20 lbs underweight and very scrawny. For all my professional life, I’ve worked a desk job, the last 2 years on Oahu in a cubicle and probably never walked more than half a mile each day. Since I graduated from college in [...]

Two services that I use daily to gauge other websites are compete.com and alexa.com. I have both toolbars installed in my firefox browser and it provides me an easy way to get a generalized idea of how much traction a site has. While the numbers provided by these services are far from accurate, they do allow you to for the most part, gauge the web presence of your competitors to your own presence. The reason [...]

Recently Ukulele Underground lost a member of our family that was loved by a great number of people. Vincent Rooney aka Captain Google passed away on July 6th, 2009. The announcement came on the following day from a friend of his who signed up to tell us of the news. Needless to say, everyone was shocked to find out that not only was he just 19 years old when he passed, he also had been [...]

When this qualifies as a business trip, you know you’re doing something pretty cool.

In March I was approached to redesign the website for the Kapaa High School Foundation. The Foundation was started in 1995 to provide financial support for students and programs at Kapaa High School (my alma mater).  Despite the size of the group, which is just a handful of individuals, the foundation has been able to do tremendous things for the school, creating scholarships, awards for outstanding educators, and field donations for athletic programs and events [...]

Being that today is Mother’s day, I came up with an idea for a way for a flower shop business to increase their yearly revenues. Offer a subscription service targeted at men that reserve flowers for them for all important dates. Standard package would include, Valentines Day, Mothers Day, for additional fees birthdays, anniversaries, etc. The payment is a yearly subscription and will guarantee that there will be a flower arrangement available for each subscriber [...]