Member Since 2015
Spread Great Ideas
Sioux Falls, South Dakota Area
Raised in East Tennessee, Brian got an early start as an entrepreneur. He launched his first business, Brian's Windridge Lawn Care, with a rake, a mower, and a dream after his father showed up with a riding lawn mower in the back of the family minivan instead of the yellow mountain bike that Brian craved. At 16, tired of applying aloe to sunburns, Brian stopped cutting grass and started recycling printer cartridges when he co-founded Cash4Cartridges USA. He grew the company while at the University of Tennessee and sold it shortly after returning from living a year abroad in Argentina. After college, Brian moved to Silicon Valley to be part of the original leadership team at Inflection. Thanks to several amazing mentors, he learned how to build and profitably scale web properties. To date, he’s helped launch four multimillion-dollar digital brands, including Archives.com, which was bought by Ancestry.com for $100 million cash three years after its launch. Now, Brian is focused on helping e-commerce brands grow with his digital marketing fund, Spread Great Ideas, which privately invests capital and sweat equity into select digital brands in order to help them reach a larger audience, profitably. He also writes and publishes on the world’s great ideas, as he researches time-tested philosophical wisdom as confirmed by modern scientific research. Personally, Brian has been semi-nomadic since 2014. This started after he sold most of his possessions - except for his Piaggio (Italian for macho scooter) and his beloved treadmill desk - to pursue a more holistic lifestyle. He's lived on 4 continents, and traveled to over 40 countries. He's currently based in Europe. Inspired to make our world a better place, Brian loves to connect and collaborate with talented people all over the globe.
The rise of artificial intelligence is revolutionizing various industries, including content writing for businesses. However, the use of AI tools to generate content has sparked a heated debate in recent times. Advocates argue these tools offer numerous benefits, such as increased efficiency, improved productivity and cost savings. On the other hand, critics express concerns about the potential drawbacks, including the loss of human creativity, ethical issues and the risk of bias.
Of all the resources companies monitor and allocate on a regular basis, time is perhaps the most important one. In the business world, saving time can also mean saving money, and time can often be the difference between a happy customer and an angry one or a successful launch and a failed one. This makes finding ways to save time a top priority for any entrepreneur.
While there are numerous benefits to remote work—schedule flexibility, lack of commute and a more relaxed workspace, just to name a few—isolation is still one of the downsides to remote work that many employees regularly report. However, these feelings can be mitigated with a few key changes to their routine and the support of their leadership.
When it comes to business cybersecurity, there's no such thing as "too small a target." If your company uses poor cybersecurity practices, leaving sensitive customer or company data at risk, hackers can exploit those vulnerabilities to accomplish their goals—no matter how big or small your company is.
It can be argued that any company that collects and handles customer data has the responsibility of leveraging strong methods to protect it, but a similar point can also be made about the company’s responsibility to educate consumers about malware and cyberattacks. Safe customers are happy customers, and helping to ensure your customers follow cybersecurity best practices can help keep them that way.
When you’re a small-business owner, you’re likely doing all you can to manage your schedule, stay on top of your to-do list and handle other vital tasks. Especially if you have a small team or a limited budget, you may be trying to tackle all these different tasks at once, wearing as many hats as you can to ensure your business has what it needs to be successful.
An entrepreneur with a fresh and successful idea might consider establishing a franchise, but it's not always the best move. To give them confidence in their decision, they’ll want to consider an industry which is already showing success with the franchise model.
Networking is a scary prospect for a lot of people. Seeking out events, speaking to new people and trying not to feel imposter syndrome while doing so can be intimidating for new entrepreneurs (and even seasoned ones). And while many entrepreneurs will give networking their best effort, they may end up accidentally sabotaging their efforts if they’re not careful.
For brands that are trying to better their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, there’s no better partner to help you than your own customers. Often a diverse group themselves, your customers are a valuable resource to help you learn what they’d like to see from your company, what you can do to ensure their happiness and how you might improve your initiatives moving forward.
As employees grow more concerned with inflation, employers may be left wondering what they can do to help. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, and wrestling with the uncertainty that comes with rising prices and economic turmoil can leave any professional feeling a little off their game. So what's one effective way employers can help support them?
As businesses recover from the pandemic-fueled events of the last few years, as well as grapple with the uncertainty of today’s economic climate, entrepreneurs are likely to feel cautious and unsure of how to plan for the success of their businesses going forward. After all, how can you plan for something you don’t know is going to happen?
Executive team leaders serve as role models by supporting the company mission, maintaining a high standard of work output, encouraging individual growth and leading the company to success.
Many professionals look up to entrepreneurs for their determination, perseverance and freedom to have more control over their day-to-day lives. But even entrepreneurs have role models they look up to. Whether they’re other highly successful entrepreneurs, billionaires or simply inspirational people, the world is full of those with amazing stories who serve as inspiration for today’s business leaders.
While increasing the number of visitors to your site is always the goal of any e-commerce business, it’s a goal that can quickly become overwhelming if your site isn’t properly set up first. As your e-commerce business and your customer base grows, a sudden spike in traffic or just a gradual increase in purchasers over time can result in slower load times, unprepared customer service agents, irritated customers and even a total website crash.
When your business rolls out a new product or service, you and your team hope that it's effective and meets the needs of your customer base. Unfortunately, there are instances where that product or service simply isn't working as intended for your buyers — and it's up to you as a business leader to determine whether this is the case.
Becoming an overnight success is every entrepreneur's dream, but when it actually does happen, it can rapidly turn into an overwhelming nightmare if you aren’t prepared for the influx of new customers and orders. Rather than allowing yourself to be buried by the consequences of your success, finding a way to scale your business quickly can ensure you keep up with rising demand.
Video is big for consumers—in fact, video watching has doubled since 2018—so those businesses that are not yet taking advantage of this key marketing tool are missing out on potential opportunities and leads. As the top video-sharing platform across the globe, YouTube is a great place to get started. But what exactly should businesses do?
Whether it’s an unhappy complaint or a five-star review, customer feedback can be an invaluable resource for company leaders looking to improve upon their products, services or business operations. This feedback can spark either minor or major changes, but both can have a big impact on customer satisfaction and overall sales if implemented correctly.
With the end of the year looming, companies across all industries will begin scheduling end-of-year performance reviews with their employees. But rather than stick to what was always done, even if it wasn’t very effective, leaders can strive to generate more meaning from these reviews and give their team members more actionable, personal feedback they can take with them into the new year.
In an effort to be unique, informative and persuasive, many businesses can end up with overly complicated and wordy websites that may be doing more to push customers away than pull them in. When it comes to building an effective website, often simplifying its content and design is the most effective approach, giving visitors the space they need to find the answers to their problems.
All businesses need some sort of investment to get started. Whether that money comes from the entrepreneur, their family and friends, an investor or some other solution, if you don’t have experience raising money, it can be easy to fall into certain traps or attempt certain strategies that may seem like smart moves at the time but actually end up sabotaging your efforts later on.
Expanding your business can be exciting and a real show of success. However, there are many factors to consider when deciding on a second location for your brick-and-mortar store.
Cybersecurity becomes more important with each passing day, as advancements in both technology and the methods used to hack into it continuously evolve. But while the tech world continues to move ahead at a fast pace, not all business leaders are able to keep up. Though they may have a basic understanding of how to keep their technology and data safe, they may not be aware of all the various strategies they could employ to improve their cybersecurity efforts.
From DiSC to Myers-Briggs, there’s no shortage of personality tests available today. While leaders often use these tests to better understand their current teams, personality assessments can also provide critical information on prospective hires.
No matter what industry you're in, it's important to ensure that you have enough capital to maintain your business year-round. However, this is especially important if demand for your products or services ebbs and flows based on seasonality, such as with pool accessories or holiday decorations.
Sharing bad news with your company's employees or stakeholders is never easy, especially when the bad news may directly affect them. Because of this, it's important to strike the right balance between remaining calm and professional while delivering the news in an empathetic manner.
As they plan for this year's holiday season, many business leaders are looking for something new to shake up their current marketing routine. It’s easy for holiday marketing to grow stale, especially when relying on old gimmicks or traditional strategies of years past. To stand out among the sea of other eager businesses looking to increase sales, companies will have to think a bit more creatively.
Whether you run a global business or you simply live far away from your vendors and clients, maintaining quality relationships with your business’s stakeholders is key to your business’s success in the short and long term. Ensuring the happiness of your vendors, clients and team often means avoiding miscommunications, preventing problems and streamlining processes that will help maintain the smooth running of your company.
When a potential employer reads your resume, they often have a checklist of items they’re looking for. They may want to see that you have the right certifications or degree, that you have a certain number of years of experience under your belt or they may be looking for a particular set of skills. But even if you qualify on paper, the employer may still have a few lingering questions they’ll need answered before they can decide to move forward with your application.
Choosing the right software as a service (SaaS) tools for your business can prove to be a Herculean task. Whether it's for accounting, marketing or HR, it's important to choose software that will grow with your business and offer ongoing support for your questions and needs. It's also important to consider how well your SaaS selections will integrate and communicate with each other.
A company’s culture—or its shared values, behaviors, goals and beliefs—can be one of the most difficult aspects of business for an entrepreneur to build. It involves bringing together employees from different backgrounds, with different experiences and with differing goals, and determining commonalities and a unified vision that everyone can agree on and strive toward. Naturally, this process can involve a few bumps along the way.
When you hire great talent, you do so with the hope that they will be effective and productive in their work, overcoming challenges and meeting and exceeding goals. But even the best employee can’t accomplish much if they aren’t given the opportunities or the tools to do so. As a leader, you can help empower your staff to do their best work—but first, you’ll have to figure out how.
To encourage sales, your product—and the platform you're selling on—needs to be appealing to prospective customers. Hard-to-use platforms or unattractive site designs that make a consumer pause should be avoided at all costs. But what seems intuitive to you and your team may not be so to the average user.
Choosing an investor for your business is like choosing a business partner: Their resources and input are going to have a major impact on the way your business functions and the potential it has for success. Determining the right investor for you, then, is not an endeavor to take lightly.
While they may be effective in drawing in more customers, many ad campaigns come and go, doing just enough to catch audience attention and increase brand awareness. However, there are other campaigns that truly stick with an audience—be it a niche group or even an entire generation. These campaigns are not just memorable, but they’ve often become part of popular culture.
Negotiating your salary—especially when you haven’t officially gotten the job—can be a frightening prospect. Obstacles like imposter syndrome or inexperience can make you feel as though you should just accept the company’s original offer and move on, but it’s important to know your worth and to advocate for yourself if you believe you deserve a higher salary.
One-on-one meetings can be powerful opportunities for employees and managers to connect on goals, reassess tasks and brainstorm ideas, but they can also turn into wasted time if not leveraged properly. If there’s no agenda to follow or neither party is sure what to discuss, the meeting may end early and without any real progress made.
There’s a lot of great business advice out there—but there’s also an equal amount of unhelpful advice. While many people think they have the answers, only you can know what’s right for your business. However, it can sometimes be hard for new business owners to know what advice is worthwhile, leading to costly mistakes.
A new business won't survive long if it doesn't have solid cash flow and a good accounting system in place. Unfortunately, some of the most common financial problems stem from simple mistakes new entrepreneurs may make the first time they're tasked with keeping the books.
Creating and maintaining a website is often one of the most important parts of running a successful business. Without a website, customers will have a hard time discovering and purchasing your products or services, so it’s key to ensure your website is up and functioning properly. When you’re a solopreneur, however, and all of the work falls on your shoulders, it can be all too easy to let website maintenance fall by the wayside.
No matter how busy your workday seems, you can always carve out a few minutes to take a breather.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council share marketing methods you can use to get potential customers interested in your new mobile app.
There are many crises that a company can face during its lifetime, and they happen for many different reasons. Whether it's a financial crisis, an economic crisis, an environmental crisis or any other type of crisis, it's important for business leaders to have a plan in place to manage the situation quickly.
Global workplaces are a melting pot of cultures, work styles and professional backgrounds. Having a global team is an incredible opportunity to learn more about other individualized experiences and even boost your team's worldly viewpoints.
As a leader, you likely have a hand in many different sectors of your business, whether it's overseeing employees or directing specific projects. Because of the amount of time you have to devote to so many different activities, you may be losing time jumping from project to project. But there are ways that you can optimize your workflow without risking burnout and still get the same amount of work done—if not more—with time to spare.
A negative mindset can be poisonous in the workplace. It can lower morale, decrease productivity and spread to other members of the team, leading to toxic work culture.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council offer their best advice for moving your physical retail store online.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council discuss why you might not be seeing a good ROI on your business's mobile app.
When you're starting a new business, it can be easy to get lost in the excitement. Instead of carefully planning next steps, you may end up taking shortcuts or rushing to advance, which can ultimately have a lasting negative impact.
More and more businesses have made the shift to cloud computing in recent years, and it's not hard to see why. There are countless ways the cloud can benefit a company, from cost savings and sustainability to greater work location flexibility.
The last couple of years have forced leaders to step up, set good examples and make tough decisions that impact those they lead. Whether they were braving the economic battles brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic or examining diversity, equity and inclusion policies, leaders have been forced to adapt and learn new skills to manage today's most challenging situations.
In recent years, automation has become a common tech solution for many aspects of business operations, from marketing to data analytics and reporting. Automating monotonous and repetitive tasks gives you and your team that chance to focus on other duties in need of your undivided attention. Business automation is also a tool you can leverage to scale your company and promote growth.
High turnover rates are a tell-tale sign that something is wrong within your business. Whether the turnover rate is in a specific department or company-wide, it’s important for business leaders to address the issues that are occurring to prevent any further issues. Not addressing a high turnover rate can be problematic for a business and will likely lead to an unsuccessful team, a bad reputation, and low company morale.
Chief operating officers (COOs) are important assets to every organization. This critical C-level role oversees the day-to-day administrative and operational functions of the business they serve, as well as manages departmental leaders under their areas of purview.
As your company grows, you might face challenges maintaining the same level of transparency across departments and teams as you had when your company was small. However, doing so is crucial to cultivating a healthy company culture with every employee on the same page.
After more than a year of staying at home, many people are excited to travel again -- including entrepreneurs. In fact, getting some space from your business can really help clear your mind and prevent burnout. However, many business owners are still facing lingering challenges due to the pandemic, and it can be difficult to find time to step away from work.
Businesses have access to a treasure trove of valuable customer data, from how their audience is engaging with a social media post to their feedback on a product or service. When properly collected and analyzed, this data is invaluable for improving the customer experience — but you need to be collecting the right data.
While many large companies may have the resources to offer funded relaxation retreats or other extensive mental health perks, it can be difficult for small businesses to find ways to offer similar benefits without those same resources.
An individual who factors self-reflection into their everyday development is on their way to becoming a great leader. To advance, managers have to ask themselves regularly if their performance is in line with their leadership goals. The evidence can be in how well their team is performing and the results they have achieved.
As a business leader, you may already possess ideal traits, such as assertiveness, adaptability and conscientiousness. But perhaps you've noticed that you're lacking in other areas in which you could become a better leader. The first step is to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Taking on the leadership role of a manager can be daunting the first time. You're in charge of an entire team, and their successes and failures fall largely on your shoulders. Even though it can be intimidating, it's important to start on the right foot.
Hiring talented new employees can help a company grow. Young employees, in particular, often bring fresh perspectives, new skills, and lots of creative energy to the businesses they join. However, it can be difficult to attract young talent, especially in today’s competitive hiring environment. Here, 10 members from Young Entrepreneur Council share how your business can attract the best young professionals.
Some work environments are healthy and result in an open sharing of ideas and techniques. Unfortunately, others can be decidedly more toxic, but it’s not always easy to notice when it’s your everyday reality. Because a daily work environment can be fluid and dynamic, it's sometimes hard to spot the red flags that denote a toxic environment. Most entrepreneurs may not even realize one is forming around them.
Getting quality guest posts on your website is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your brand gains added visibility. The more high-quality sites post to yours, the better search engines will rank you and the more positive relationships you’ll build.
When your business starts seeing success, it's natural to want to ride the momentum and build upon it. However, it's possible to grow too fast, too soon.
Thanks to the explosion of tech, there are many new skills a small business owner must learn in order to be successful in the modern world. However, there are also a whole host of necessary basic skills that stand the test of time.
Small businesses, like any business, have finances that need to be kept in order. Owners can deal with these duties to a point; however, small businesses tend to grow, and hiring an employee dedicated to keeping the company's finances in check is often a necessary next step. Luckily, many small business owners can hire someone on a part-time basis. This route carries a lot less overhead in terms of time and money compared to hiring a full-time employee, but it also comes with its own challenges. That’s why we asked 11 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:
Trying to get people interested in your startup may seem like fighting a losing battle. The early stages of a startup have several challenges to getting customers involved in the business. Advertising to a large market can be expensive, and you have to figure out if your strategy will even work with your core audience. Standard marketing campaigns can be useful, but audience responses can be lackluster for something they've seen dozens of businesses try before.
With the current corporate focus on remote work, file-sharing and syncing services have become an essential part of the modern office. While some companies have bespoke designed solutions that meet their needs, these can be complicated and clunky to implement, requiring cybersecurity and IT administration input.
These 20 entrepreneurs discuss the best features for remote management of a displaced workforce.
With the sheer amount of productivity hacks and life hacks on the market today, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Even with all of these, it can be hard to figure out which ones work and which ones are just myths.
Motivation works cyclically. There are moments when you feel as though you can take on the world, punctuated by moments when you feel like it makes no sense to do anything. If you've been feeling unmotivated at work recently, you're not alone. Workers worldwide go through the same moments of "boom and bust" when it comes to their motivation.
“Thought leadership” is a big buzzword in the business world right now, and it’s easy to see why it’s become such an important focus for leaders. When others look to you for your expertise and insight, you can become a leading, recognized voice in your industry.
As a small to medium enterprise owner, it can be challenging to find time for anything. Even in your supposed downtime, you invest time into ensuring the company runs smoothly. Work-life balance as an always-busy professional can be hard, if not impossible, to find. When you don't focus on your well-being, both your health as well as your relationships suffer. Being busy is essential for success, but so is knowing when to stake a step back. In such an active lifestyle, however, how does an entrepreneur know how to balance work and pleasure? That’s why we asked 10 members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:
One of the most significant elements in helping a business get to know its customers is their data. Over recent years, consumers have started to take notice of how businesses use their data. While many aren't bothered, a few are against a company getting its hands on their information. As a result, they are averse to sharing access to their data.
Employees who work on small teams may need to play multiple roles to ensure everything runs smoothly. With such limited resources, you may not be able to have a dedicated full-time marketing person to help you reach your full potential as a brand. That's why we asked members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following question:
All entrepreneurs are excited to see their businesses grow, but this growth isn't infinitely exponential. Occasionally, the company's growth may become stalled. This contraction might happen due to any number of factors affecting either the business itself or the industry as a whole.
Internal meetings can be a fantastic strategic tool to help a business get all stakeholders of a project on the same page, but they can easily turn into massive time sinks if they are not properly scheduled and managed. Unfortunately, many companies don't strategize their meetings. The result is a once-weekly report that doesn't have any noticeable impact on the business.
19 entrepreneurs delve into where online freelance talent is most readily found
The new spin on the ancient philosophy is little more than an open-source lifestyle brand.
Though there are downsides, the pros can outweigh the cons -- if you do it right.
If you want to improve the odds of success with your online business, learn first what consumers are willing to pay for, then tailor your business to match it.
Having the right people in your council is critical to your success as an entrepreneur.
Spread Great Ideas is an amalgamation of sorts: For some, it’s a digital marketing fund which helps e-commerce brands reach a larger audience, profitably. For others, it’s a content marketing team which helps transmute the world’s great ideas - those time-tested gems of philosophical wisdom as confirmed by modern scientific research. For all, it relies upon unabashed curiosity, operational excellence, and the Socratic Method ’s promise of intelligent non-conformity in order to make that amalgamation work.
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