Sometimes all it takes is a clever little twist on a simple idea to bring publicity to your doorstep.

Take, for example, the typical networking event. You come to a luncheon with a pocketful of business cards, then spend time meeting other business people with whom you might strike up a relationship. If I were a reporter, I'd take a pass on covering that kind of event. Too boring.

But what if, instead of a restaurant, you can meet other business people on the ski slopes?

That's what happens each year during Peak Pitch, an event that gives entrepreneurs and investors a chance to network on the slopes. And it's been so successful that Borealis Ventures, which created it, is now partnering with four other venture funds and expanding Peak Pitch 2007 to five ski resort locations in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.

At Peak Pitch, a shared chair lift gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their business plans to a variety of venture capitalists, angel investors and other experienced startup advisors as they ride up a mountain on a high-speed chair lift.

The entrepreneurs wear blue. The venture capitalists wear green. Last year, Peak Pitch attracted over 200 entrepreneurs and investors to the series.

Recently I interviewed Flo Schell, Sales and Franchising Coach about the advantages and disadvantages of buying a franchise business.

After talking with Flo I got to thinking, if someone is interested in buying a franchise how do they find out what’s out there? So I phoned Flo to ask her about options for people interested in buying a franchise business.

As always, Flo was tremendously helpful. She explained that there are so many great franchising opportunities. Ones that came immediately to mind for her were Kabloom, which is a flower franchise, and Rocky Mountain Chocolate, which is a franchise chocolate shop. And of course, in Canada, Tim Horton’s coffee shop is a huge franchise.

Flo stressed that although there are many good food franchises (some of the biggies that you'll recognize are McDonalds, Wendy’s and Pizza Hut), franchise businesses are not limited to the food sector. Just about any service or product can be franchised if it’s something that the market wants.

And an important consideration is not to forget about local "home-grown" franchise businesses. I’m thinking of my favorite local coffee shop called Serious Coffee. This is a franchise that’s just on Vancouver Island where I live, so it’s in a fairly small geographic area. It’s not even province-wide or country-wide, never mind international.

But it started off about 10 years ago, one outlet down near Victoria and they have done things right. Because they ran that for about 7 or 8 years and got a really good reputation, and then they started franchising. Gradually you saw one open up in the next town and then the next town from that. And now, they’re up here in my town, and I love them.

Here's the transcript of my interview with Flo Schell, Sales and Franchising Coach about buying a franchise business:

Barbra: When someone is looking to start a small business, there’s lots of different options. They can start a business from scratch or they can buy an existing business or there’s buying into a franchise business. Could you explain exactly what a franchise business is and what makes it appealing?

Flo: Yes, I’m happy to. Franchising in my mind is one of the best models available for building a business. And, I say that because franchising creates a partnership between a parent company, or the franchisor, and that’s spelled f-r-a-n-c-h-i-s-o-r and individuals in different locations who are known as franchisees. So, you have the best of this big company resource with the smart location knowledge that a franchisees brings to the partnership.

Barbra: And so, the advantage of buying a franchise is that things are already in place?

Flo: Well, you are buying a proven model, yes. So, there is a model of the business that you’re buying that has already been in place and documented. And, in fact, the franchisor will have figured out systems that work for that business model, a marketing plan, accounting plan, financial programs for that business. All of that will have been completed and at least you know that that business is vital and operating somewhere and the franchisor believes it is replicable in other places in the country or abroad.

Barbra: I suppose from a marketing point of view one of the advantages is that there’s a recognizable name.

Flo: Absolutely. That is one of the biggest advantages, because when a customer is looking for a service provider they are more likely to approach a company that they’ve heard of before. They feel more comfortable doing that than approaching a company in the Yellow Pages that they know nothing about.

I'm hosting the Carnival of Home Business this week, which is something new for me. What it involves is reviewing all the submissions and then selecting the best ones to feature here. Since we are in the season of awards shows (what did you think of the Grammy's the other night?), I thought I'd have some fun here and make some Home Business blogging awards.

Most original content

Debra Moorhead has an impressive blog focussing on career development and empowerment for women. A quick browse through Debra's blog illustrates what's meant by "content is king". Debra knows how to write good solid content.

In her article on Determining Your Values Debra advises:

How do you determine which tasks get top priority? How do you not feel guilty when you say “No” to something or someone? How do you decide whether to take that new opportunity? The answers lie in your values. Once you establish and clearly identify what is most important to you, making decisions you feel good about becomes much easier.

Networking. Does the word strike fear into your heart, or does it excite you with its possibilities?

Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter if you have the world’s best widget at the lowest possible price. If nobody knows about it, your business won't be successful. That's why networking is so important.

And it doesn't have to be painful, as long as you know where to network. Here are five of the best networking organizations designed to benefit the small business owner.

1) Business Networks International (BNI)

If you're really serious about building your business, BNI is an excellent investment of time and money.

Primarily devoted to referral exchange, BNI provides members with the opportunity to share ideas, contacts and networking tools. A strong advocate of word-of-mouth advertising, BNI promotes marketing strategies for its members via networking opportunities.

BNI groups work like this: Each group is small, typically about 20 people. Only one person from each type of business is allowed in the group. For example, one web designer, one dentist, one heavy equipment operator.

BNI members get a binder which they fill with a stack of business cards from each of their group colleagues. As each member goes about their day, everytime they hear of an opportunity for a referral to one of their BNI colleagues they whip out their binder and make a recommendation for that person's service.

Belonging to BNI is like having 20 public relations people working for you.

A few weeks ago I read an article at The New York Times online titled "Help, I'm Surrounded by Jerks".

While the focus of the article was on the industry of books and seminars that has sprung up to help people get along with others, one sentence in particular stood out for me: "the lessons [of these books and seminars] include common sense (talk it out and put yourself in their shoes), character by character tactical road maps and something that the victims of the difficult don't want to hear: they might be the problem."

You know, there's an old adage that says "If you spot it, you got it". This means that we are often irritated by people who display the very qualities that we most fear in ourselves. For example, I am irritated by people who talk alot. Why do I find this behaviour irritating, whereas someone else doesn't? Obviously the talker isn't making me irritated, because if they were then everyone would react the same as me.

So what's going on? Well, I'll confess that I have a lot of emotional charge around the idea of talking too much, because I fear that I could also be a person who talks too much. And I have judgements about that in myself.

I love having a Virtual Assistant who is a computer wiz. No more frustrations. No more delays.

If I have a question I just shoot an email to Diana and the answer comes zooming back. Like today, I asked, "I’m drafting some new pages for the BeyondPaper site. When I make a new page, is it better to define the column widths in pixels or %?"

Here's her answer:

That’s a good question… Web designers actually debate about this quite a bit. It depends on the site and the designer. Pixels are absolute and will display as the same width no matter what the settings on the user’s computer are. Percentages are not absolute and will change with the settings of the user’s computer.

For instance, depending on the user’s settings, 75% (column one) of the screen and 25% (column 2) of the screen will vary for a person who has their screen resolution set to 800x600 than for someone with their screen set to 1024x768 and so on… With pixels 500px is always 500px no matter what the screen resolution is.

I usually use pixels instead of percentages. (I have been known to use %’s though…) Let me know this makes sense and if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Diana

Now isn't that better than trying to look up the answer in the Help menu? If you've ever wondered if it's time to get an assistant for your small business, let me tell you it's a wonderful thing. In my experience, most small business people wait too long before hiring help.

If you want to contact Diana, her website is OnlineOfficeSolutions.biz

(image from AtomicShops easy online website builder)

Looking for a graphic designer? My graphic designer is Lisa Perez, and she can be reached through her website at www.olijessadesigns.com.

Most recently Lisa designed an ebook cover for me, which you can see in the photo at left. Lisa is wonderful to work with and her rates are very reasonable for small business start-ups.

It's always good to talk with a few contractors before hiring someone. Here are additional recommendations for graphic designers from some of my colleagues:

Ericka from Multiple Streams recommends Tennille Hopper, owner of Pretty Little Pixels at thopper@prettylittlepixels.com Ericka says Tennille is incredibly reasonable, flexible and extremely easy to work with and most important, very creative.

David Herdlinger recommends Paul Fusch at http://www.macabooart.com

Cecile Adams recommends her son who is a graphic designer and designed her logo and web site. His name is Alan Beam and his email is Alan [at]BeamTeamDesign.net

Julianne M. Miranda recommends Steven Linville as "a great designer, good person and excellent web developer". You can see his work at http://www.mtna.org/it/aibtemplates.html and if you email him, he will send you more examples.

Rey Carr of Peer.ca recently reported that two Dutch psychologists have designed an online robot "life coach" they call MindMentor. The robot takes the user through a basic neurolinguistic programming (NLP) process to help "solve" their problem.

To date MindMentor has completed 1760 "coaching" sessions with people from several countries, and received a satisfaction rating of 47%. In other words, almost half the people who tried MindMentor said their problem was "solved" after just one session with the robot.

I'm impressed but not surprised by this statistic. After all, often we just need a structure to help us sort out a confusing problem. Other times just "talking it out" with someone (even a robot?) helps us identify some options for ourselves.

I don't know the specifics of how it works, but my guess is that the robot is designed with a pattern-matching algorithm that enables it to provide the most common solutions to different problem sets (sort of like an online search function).

Although the research is in its early days, I find it noteworthy that MindMentor's success rate is consistent with research about the efficacy of psychological counselling in general - that about half the time people get better "on their own".

Does the success of MindMentor undermine or diminish the value of human coaches? Not at all. I predict MindMentor will be a useful tool for certain types of clients (i.e. those that like technological approaches and are responsive to NLP techniques) to sort out thoughts and generate options. But I doubt it will be capable of the subtle communication necessary for masterful coaching. And as this research is new, there hasn't yet been follow-up to see how lasting the results were.

But think of the possibilities! What a great tool for people who can't afford to hire a life coach. Or as a tool for coaching clients to use between sessions. Or as a way to gather research on typical problems and responses.

I'm fascinated by this project, and look forward to reading the results of the researchers' analysis when available.