Web for Small Business » Inspiration

Quotable

Cat — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:01:19 +0000

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Don’t understimate knowledge, it’s one of the most important sources of power.

Quotable

Cat — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:13:56 +0000

The difference between try and triumph is a little umph!

~ Unknown

It’s very easy to dismiss something because we tried it and it have the result we wanted. This happens a lot in marketing. Say it’s letter dropping – isn’t it easy to letter drop 50 or 100 letters and when nothing comes of it, just write it off?

Often things don’t work not because the idea was bad but because the execution was poor and the effort was half hearted. And you’ll find in marketing, the main source of success comes from consistency.

I like this quote because it’s a reminder that often its just some extra committed work that can really make the difference between having a superb result or none at all.

Quotable

Cat — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:57:43 +0000

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I remember a famous film maker saying that everyone had ten bad films in them so that the best thing for a beginning film maker to do was to make as many films so as to get those bad films out and sooner start making good ones.

Don’t take “failures” too heart, even the most successful people have them – it’s the attitude they have to failures that make them great. They learn from them and move on.

Charity Spotlight: Kiva

Cat — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:15:51 +0000

Kiva is one of the few charities where donors often get their donations back. This is because Kiva is a non-profit organisation that facilitates micro loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

The process (as the diagram below shows) is that you look through listings of entrepreneurs who need financing, choose one, send $25 or more to Kiva and they pass that on to the relevant micro financing organisation in that developing country that lends it to the entrepreneur. When the entrepreneur pays the loan back to the micro financing organisation, it goes back through Kiva to you – you can then lend it to someone else if you want, donate it to Kiva to help with their operating costs or withdraw your funds.

And because Kiva partners with micro financing organisations on the ground in developing countries, you can be assured that the entrepreneurs’ stories listed are genuine.

Here’s a video that explains what Kiva is:

Here is an example of a Kiva loan request:

Micro finance (also known as micro credit and micro loans) goes beyond charity and empowers people in the developing world to create self sustaining businesses. It also means that one donation can have multiple lives as it able to be recycled to fund future projects.