Photo: Cave Canem

Can you open 10 new businesses in Detroit with just $50,000, some social media and great connections? Hatch founder Nick Gorga thinks so.

Last year attorney Gorga, a partner at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn, and Ted Balowski, a senior account executive at CareTech Solutions in the suburb of Troy, launched Hatch Detroit, a contest whereby the public votes on the best storefront-retail idea for the city with the winning applicant receiving $50,000 to launch a store. The other nine semifinalists also receive considerable advice and support toward launching their own retail spots.

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Courtesy of Dog-O-Band Anthony Accola with Dog-O-Band.

Many great ideas start with a bottle of wine, but most don’t amount to much. Generally, the inspiration ends when the evening does. For Anthony Accola and his brother-in-law Jimmy LaPlaca, however, a warm summer night of drinking and joking around in the backyard sent them on an entrepreneurial ride neither one had ever really imagined.

Accola, a hair stylist and salon owner from Warwick, N.Y., and LaPlaca, a personal trainer from Garfield, N.J., were feeling the pinch of the recession in the summer of 2008, when they got together at LaPlaca’s home for dinner. “We were talking about ideas, and how inventions happen,” Accola recalls. “You invent a stupid little gadget and it takes off and you become a millionaire.” They started throwing out ideas. Accola joked that LaPlaca should make exercise products for dogs: treadmills or workout clothes…something.

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Neurosurgeon Dr. Thomas Melin's been frustrated for about 25 years in practice — with expensive and inefficient bone grafting surgeries.

Source: Enventys Inc. Neurosurgeon Dr. Thomas Melin

Until recently, it has been a very messy business. It is not uncommon to fund surgical teams, who perform around 500,000 bone grafts each year in America, struggling to collect by hand or even through coffee filters, bits of valuable, real bone.

For one thing, synthetic bone costs about $900 for just 1 cubic centimeter, according to Hensler Surgical. Not to mention the patient's risk that the body can reject it.  » Read More

Source: nuts.com The Braverman family, from left: Sandy, David, Jeffrey and Kenny.

Ten years ago, Jeffrey Braverman was living the dream of many business school graduates. With a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in economics, he landed a job in 2002 at the Blackstone Group, a Wall Street firm specializing in private equity and investment banking.

Less than a year later, however, Mr. Braverman stepped away from Wall Street and returned to his family’s New Jersey nut business, the Newark Nut Company. It struck some as an odd choice: the family-owned company, which had been started by Mr. Braverman’s grandfather, Sol Braverman (known as Poppy), and had once employed 30 people, was down to two employees and two family members, Mr. Braverman’s father and his uncle.

Located in an indoor mall in a desolate part of Newark, the nut shop’s retail sales were fading and its wholesale business was, at best, stagnant. But Mr. Braverman harbored entrepreneurial ambitions.

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JGI | Getty Images

The chances are good that you, like many other small-business owners or managers, will be burning the midnight oil to meet the April 17 deadline for filing your taxes.

With the pain still fresh, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that the complexity of the tax code continues to pose significant challenges to small businesses. Unfortunately, that pain won’t go away anytime soon: the administrative and financial burden imposed on small businesses by federal taxes continues to grow, a new survey shows.

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One year ago, the International Franchise Association held a conference to discuss ways for franchisees to obtain the financing they needed to get their businesses up and running.

One outcome of that meeting between bankers and franchise owners will be announced today, at the second annual IFA Lending Summit, when the Consumer Bankers Association will announce a standardized lending “template” for working with franchisees that should speed up the lending process and strengthen the relationship between banks and franchise owners.

“This is something that needed to be done, and we got it done,” Mark Luppi, chairman of the small business committee of the CBA told CNBC.com.

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Bitpicture

Sole proprietors may be an efficient bunch. They jumped on filing their taxes almost as soon as tax season began, according to one accounting.

But they may not be as knowledgeable about their businesses as they could be. And that means money left on the table at tax time.

That's according to data compiled from online accounting solution Outright.com, which found that business owners are neglecting to report mileage and advertising expenses on their tax returns, which are due April 17 this year.

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A funny thing occurs when your business makes the Inc. 500 list a few years in a row — you become very popular as a potential target for venture capitalists. Although we at The Trademark Company are always flattered by the attention, we have traditionally steered away from outside investment in our company.

However, without exception every time a potential investor calls we graciously listened to what they have to say. To that end, over the years we have learned what venture capitalists are looking for in target investments, or at least those that we have spoken with. As such, if you run a start-up and are looking to attract venture capital here are four tips to peak their interests in your company:  » Read More