There’s an immediate opening here at Technosailor.com for a writer on entrepreneurship. Steve Fisher, who has provided a tremendous amount of insight and knowledge over the years of covering the Venture Files beat, is retiring to bigger and better things. You can keep up with him over at Network Solutions on their Solutions are Power blog.

In the meantime, I’m looking for a passionate and knowledgeable editor for the Venture Files portion of the site. The topic is entrepreneurship and includes marketing, business and the world of Venture Capital from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

This is a great opportunity to create a name for yourself, and increase your visibility using the Technosailor.com brand and platform. If you’re interested, drop me an email at aaron@technosailor.com.

The last few years have really seen a push toward making everything “green”. Generally this means supporting efforts and organizations that help the individual offset their “carbon footprint” or the environmental impact they have on planet earth. On the business side, large companies in the past did things like installing systems to make their buildings more energy efficient or improve sustainability. What characterizes a green business is that it is run in such a way as to conserve natural resources, eliminate waste and remain ecologically in balance. So where does that leave small businesses?

Small businesses which comprise up to 97% of the businesses across the United States (Source: SBA) have been kind of left out because it requires large investments that are not really feasible. In support of “Green Week” here at Technosailor, we have taken a look at different ways small businesses, even a one-person shop, can “be green” while not negatively impacting their bottom line. We have come up with five simple things that businesses can do to “Be Green”.

Promote Telework at least one day a week

During these hot summer days, running the A/C in many offices is extremely expensive because of rising fuel prices. As winter will be fast approaching, heating bills will be going up which means you might have to raise prices or not hire someone because you can’t afford it. Keeping the power off and having everyone telework from home or a coffee house at least one day a week can really cut down on the impact employees have on overhead costs. If you are a small firm you are probably utilizing services (e.g. web conferencing, VPN, VoIP) that make everything virtual, so having people work remotely might not be a far stretch.

While many offices still need to have people in the office for meetings, smarter scheduling can still keep the “Water Cooler” environment that all business need in some way. A good way to start is to have it come from the top down as a mandate that Monday or Friday as work remotely day. Tell everyone that power and AC/Heating will be shut off that day so that they know if they come into the office it isn’t going to be a comfortable ice box with everyone around. As more people get into the routine you will be surprised how fast you could take this to two or three days a week and really keep energy costs low.

Offer mass transit voucher/reimbursement program

Living here in the DC area there is a pretty good mass transit system with the Metro. They have a program called SmartBenefits where you can actually load their Metro Cards with a certain dollar value. This can also be done as a pre-tax benefit and you could reimburse the employee because they have the incentive to use mass transit instead of their car.

Offer incentives to be eco-friendly even outside of their job

Now metro and buses are not everywhere and not everyone lives right near easy access mass transit, so people must use their car. In this case, many companies have begun to offer a subsidy for using a hyrid vehicle. For example, Livingston Communications CEO, Geoff Livingston offers his employees a $1000 subsidy toward buying a hybrid vehicle.

Recycle Office Equipment

If you have operated your business for any length of time you probably have office equipment that is collecting dust and if simply thrown away would hurt the environment. There is a great site, called UsedComputer.com, that has all the resources on where to take your electronics. Officefurniture.org has a list of resources on what to do with old printer toner and office furniture that can found here.

Buy Green

This is the way to support other businesses that are going green and in a way motivates others if it becomes a preference by many companies as part of their vendor selection process. SmallBizTrends.com refers to two studies done on the impact of whether people care to “Buy Green”. They found:

A recent survey by Landor Associates suggests that the majority (58%) of consumers do not care whether a business is green. According to the survey, that still leaves 42% who are interested to some degree in the environment.

Another set of market research — more extensive — was done by the Natural Marketing Institute for LOHAS. LOHAS stands for consumers with Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. The LOHAS research found that 23% of the U.S. adult population is “classified as a LOHAS consumer, meaning that they have a profound sense of environmental and social responsibility.” These are the people most likely to buy green products.

Twenty-three percent of the U.S. adult population is no shabby number — it exceeds 50 million people. So obviously a decent-sized market exists.

Good examples of this are buying biodegradable office supplies or looking for companies that incorporate green behavior as a part of their production/manufacturing process.

I’m not usually one to cover breaking news, but this demands it. Not so much because Boulder-based SocialThing is a great company or that they are a particularly good example of a great company acquired by an even greater company. Frankly, it’s neither. But it deserves a huge congratulations nonetheless.

TechStars, a YCombinator-style early incubation investment co-op(?), has a major exit by being acquired by AOL. Hats off to SocialThing and the young entrepreneurs behind it for making a very quick exit in a difficult market.

SocialThing is a lifestreaming service, much like the more popular FriendFeed. It was launched in March of this year making it all of four months old. It is so new it is still in private beta (we have an account) and doesn’t support Internet Explorer!

AOL, on the other hand, is a company desparate for relevancy. They continue to downsize announcing even more layoffs and consolidations of their business last month. Most of the business has been consolidated to Ad sales and retired to the hallowed halls of Madison Ave, though their former Dulles, VA HQ still boasts some performing products (AIM, Meebo, etc).

The feel good story here is that founders Matt Galligan and Ben Brightwell have just grown up very fast. They are no longer relegated to incubator company founders that might never make it. They have created a succcess story with an early stage exit that now makes them veterans in this space. Veterans being entrepreneurs with a successful exit (my definition, loose as it might be).

So congratulations to AOL and more importantly, the SocialThing team. Good to be grown up now.

Ask any startup. The most difficult decision leading up to a public release is when and what? Some might argue that getting funding is the most difficult but a good startup avoids funding until later, if at all. Others might argue that the difficult part is getting the right mix of people and hitting milestones. That also is important, but not as important as the when and how.

Usually, a good launch product is the result of a perceived need. Or maybe a need not yet realized - it’s hard to say for sure. There’s some black magic involved in all that.

FriendFeed launched not long ago because there was an empty hole in Twitter - that was aggregation and conversation. FriendFeed figured out that, to be successful, it was going to target that emptiness in the highly popular Twitter experience.

Disqus and Intense Debate figured that, in order to be successful, they needed to target the missing piece in blog comments - that was reputation and reputation management across blogs. The two fight it out, post-launch, over which is going to differentiate it over the other.

In these cases, the timing of the launches was critical to the uptake. Twitter started experiencing significant problems and influential early adopters began getting itchy to be somewhere that scratched their itch.

Putting aside timing, the most important part of a launch is what. It’s feature-sets. It’s determining the balance between a fully developed roadmap of features and what is needed to “hook” early adopters and get them to stay.

Take Identi.ca, the new Twitter clone that is completely open source and is timely in that Twitter faithful are really, really close to burying the hatchet and simply abandoning it altogether. The timing could not be more perfect. Folks have been talking about distributing Twitter and relieving the strain of a centralized service at one time. Open sourcing the product does this, to a degree.

However, Identi.ca gets a big “FAIL” for its launch for a few very important reasons.

1. There is no coherent way to deal with “replies”. Folks used to Twitter realize that when there is a river of content, and that’s what Twitter is, there must be a way to manage conversations. There must be a way to keep up with followers who are talking to you. In my working with Identi.ca, there is no way to do that and, while that might be coming, it wasn’t there at launch. Very conceivably, I’ve been lost forever and I generally have tons of followers as an early adopter. FAIL.
2. XMPP doesn’t work. The one reliable way to reply that folks on Identi.ca were talking about last night was with XMPP, the protocol used for various IM clients including Google Talk. I could deal with replies that way if it worked but at some point, XMPP stopped working. I could receive, but I could not send. A one way conversation is a monologue. FAIL.
3. OpenID integration must be seamless. I was pleased to see OpenID supported when I signed up. Unfortunately, today, I could not login with my OpenID account. If I can’t get in, I can’t use it. FAIL.

Some would say I’m being too hard on this startup. Screw that. Perform or get off the stage. There are very obvious and defined features that must be included in a microcontent site at launch. I’m not saying an entire roadmap needs to be worked out. No, get a working beta up and get testers in there. However, without replies, without reliable “offline” access (i.e. IM, SMS or client integration) I’m not going to stick around. Finally, direct messages would be a nice feature.

While I have high hopes for Identi.ca, I will remain there only to squat on the name “technosailor”. Bye, guys.

As you build your business the thing you need the most are those first customers. They are what provide you cash flow and a track record to win new customers. Getting the first few are the hardest because they are usually buying from you and believe in your ability to deliver. This is one of your greatest strengths, but over time, it can become one of your biggest liabilities. Let me explain…

Selling yourself is different from selling your business

As I mentioned, when starting a business there is probably just you and maybe a partner. Many people bring contracts and relationships from previous jobs that help jumpstart the business and gets the cash flow going. These customers are buying from you because they know you and your ability to deliver. This is great and is the way many companies start, but you are really just selling yourself and not selling your business. This is the habit you must break.

Within the first six months of your business you should be planning a major marketing and sales effort to expand your client base beyond your core relationships. This takes your business to the next level where people are looking at the business and not just buying from you. Still they are buying from you but you must have people that can manage the project and be ready to take the lead. This accomplishes two things:

1. You have more time to continue selling and growing the business
2. You do not become the “go to person” for every issue keeping the perception that they are buying from you

Whale customers are great to have in the beginning

As the business grows, you might be lucky enough to land some great big clients that provide a lot of revenue to help you expand. This is great and we should all be so blessed by winning these kinds of clients. However, what develops is the “90/10″ rule - 10% of the clients provide 90% of the revenue. This could mean that 1 or 2 clients are keeping the company running and losing one of them would be catastrophic to the business. So you must do one key thing quickly - diversify.

You must diversify or your put your success in jeopardy

Diversification is hard for some companies. Many people get lazy and confident that they will never lose them. Trust me, I speak from experience, you will. It could be a change in management, your champion leaves to take another job, budget control moves to a different department that doesn’t know you and doesn’t see your value, or the company goes out of business. What I am trying to say is that anything could happen and it could happen at any time.

So what do you do? After I learned my first hard lesson, I applied this rule - for every whale client, I worked over a six month period to find 5-10 customers that matched their revenues so that over a two year period those whales went from 90% to 10-20% of your overall revenues. This gave us a greater sense of comfort so when we would lose one of those two whales, which we eventually did, we only had a dip in revenues and used our sales campaigns to pick up the slack and pick up a few new smaller customers to fill in the revenue gaps.

Are you in the “Whale Boat” right now?

Are you dealing with the same dilemma? What have you done to diversify your client base? What advice to you have for your fellow entrepreneurs?