Hasta La Gadget!

At Nashville’s Belmont University, entrepreneurship majors are tasked with creating a promising business plan as their final project before graduation — which is how Jason Duncan devised the blueprint for his now-successful small business. Along with his wife, Jenni, Duncan opened Café Evoke, a coffee bar and mobile coffee company in Edmond, Oklahoma.

We’ve partnered with Intuit, makers of QuickBooks, to talk with small-business owners from a variety of different fields, bringing attention to entrepreneurs like Duncan and their emerging enterprises. During these conversations, they reveal what it takes to get started, overcome obstacles and face challenges along the road to success.

Duncan sat down for the sixth and final interview in our series (you can read the previous Q&A in our series here) to explain how he turned a university assignment into a thriving small business, and share what he’s learned along the way.

HP: Tell us a little about your business.

Café Evoke began as a coffee catering company that set up coffee stations at weddings and social events. Today, we [also] have a brick-and-mortar coffee bar and cafe, as well as a mobile coffee truck.

HP: Why did you decide to start your own business?

I started out as a music business major [at Belmont University] and really liked the management of music and the idea of having gallery space. My initial thought was that I wanted to open a business but incorporate my own interests, which were the arts … Basically, I had this idea of opening a social bar atmosphere that had art integration and great food and drinks. I wanted it to be a place where people could start their day. When I switched majors from business to entrepreneurship and began learning about coffee and opening a cafe, the planning definitely morphed. … The focus shifted to coffee and drinks over art. Once I got out of the music-business mindset and focused more on serving food and drinks, the business model followed.

HP: How has the business evolved?

Café Evoke launched as a catering company first. I learned how to serve coffee and do it well on a mobile level. In 2005, we opened our brick-and-mortar cafe [which] serves alcohol, beer, cocktails and all different types of coffee, as well as food, like sandwiches and waffles — however, the focus has remained primarily coffee.

HP: Any mistakes along the way that taught you important lessons about running the business?

Of course. I think anyone who says they haven’t made mistakes is lying! … I think we did a lot of things a little too early — we always thought we were ready for the next part of the business, and really, we weren’t. We’re still a tiny company, with 16 employees. While our growth has been steady and we like to think we have this thing figured out, we are still finding ourselves making decisions — like buying new equipment or hiring more people — when really we don’t have the resources to do so.

The mistakes I’ve made are more of “assumption”-type mistakes. … When we first opened the cafe, we had our doors open until midnight, thinking that’s what customers wanted. We found out quickly that nobody wants to come to a coffee shop after 7 p.m. For a full year, we opened until midnight until we finally changed our hours to close at 7 p.m. Staying open so late for so long was definitely a mistake. We’ve since learned that we need to listen to what our staff is saying and ask our customers what they want [in order] to make educated business decisions — and to be smarter with our money.

HP: What advice do you have for others looking to venture out on their own?

Take the time to plan as much as you can before you open because once your business is open, you’re not playing with Monopoly money anymore. It’s a lot more fun to make a business plan in spreadsheets and even make mistakes when you’re not dealing with real money. Plan your business out, and ask yourself what it looks like for you personally.

For example, I love riding my bike. I had to think about if I would be willing to sacrifice being able to go out on my bike or taking weekend trips for my business. Business owners need to know what success means to them, and then think about how it affects them personally. It’s way better to fail on paper than it is to fail in real life. There’s no reset button for that.

HP: What financial lessons have you learned?

You need to figure out what the bookkeeping plan is going to be. I try to do everything by myself, but it’s OK to pay someone else to do something you may not be very good at. It takes a lot of time to get bookkeeping right, and it takes me away from sales activities, which is my main job. Have a plan in place for doing your books and for what the operation is going to look like … whether you use a person that can steer you in the right direction, or a service like QuickBooks.

Make sure you know where your money is going and when it’s being spent — whether it’s on equipment, renovations or something else. Know that just because cash is coming in one month doesn’t mean you’ve made it. We’ve made the mistake before where we thought cash was coming in steadily and went overboard on spending. Cash is key — if you don’t have it, it’s really hard to operate.

HP: What are the most important qualities you think a small-business owner should possess?

You need to be willing to put the hours in, willing to figure out the business plan, willing to make things happen, and ultimately be willing to work really hard, because no one cares as much about your business as you do. If the owner isn’t willing to stand up and make things happen, it’s going to be extra hard when duties must be delegated to others.

HP: What is your favorite part of owning your own business?

The most rewarding part of my job is walking into the cafe when it’s busy to see people having a great time and the staff working hard. We have a huge chunk of regulars. I think that shows that we’re doing something right… We have people that have decided to invest in our cafe as the spot they come to drink their coffee every day. Knowing that all of the other guests are investing in what we’re doing, and what our staff is doing, feels incredible.

Intuit QuickBooks provides small business owners cloud-based tools to run and grow their business. From creating invoices and paying bills, to managing payroll and monitoring expenses, QuickBooks is the operating system that supports small business.

Following up on its first humidifier that used a UV light to kill germs in its water reservoir, Dyson has just announced an updated version of its Cool fan that now includes a built-in 360-degree glass filter to remove 99.95 percent of airborne invaders in a room. And not just any filter, but a high-efficiency particulate arrestance—or HEPA—filter as regulated by the U.S. government making it as effective as you can get in a consumer-grade appliance.

Read more…

The chatter surrounding high fidelity listening devices and services picked up over the last year or so (thanks, Neil Young), and Onkyo hopes its new 3-in-1 device will lure you to the land of high definition. The company’s aluminum-wrapped DAC-HA300…

Mouse Computer has also released their latest 15.6-inch gaming notebook, the NEXTGEAR-NOTE i5703BA1. As part of the G-Tune series, this high-performance gaming notebook is configured with a 15.6-inch 3840 x 2160 4K IGZO IPS LED-backlight display, a 2.60GHz Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor, an Intel HM87 Express Chipset, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3GB graphics card, an 8GB DDR3 RAM and a 500GB hard drive.

The system also sports a 2MP webcam, a multi-card reader, a built-in lithium-ion battery (up to 4.7 hours of operating time) and built-in stereo speakers with high definition audio system. Running on Windows 8.1 Update 64-bit OS, the NEXTGEAR-NOTE i5703BA1 provides WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 + LE for connectivity.

The Mouse Computer NEXTGEAR-NOTE i5703BA is available now for 169,800 Yen (about $1,412). [Product Page]

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) defended his state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal Monday evening, saying it’s “not a license to discriminate.”

Instead, Pence wrote in the op-ed, the law “simply mirrors” federal legislation signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1993 and similar measures in 30 other states.

“I want to make clear to Hoosiers and every American that despite what critics and many in the national media have asserted, the law is not a ‘license to discriminate,’ either in Indiana or elsewhere,” Pence wrote. “In fact, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act reflects federal law, as well as law in 30 states nationwide. Indiana’s legislation is about affording citizens full protection under Indiana law.”

In fact, the Indiana law is much different than federal or state laws that have been in place.

Those laws deal with disputes between the government and individual citizens. The Indiana law is the first to deal with potential lawsuits between individuals, according to ThinkProgress.

“The intent of the original RFRA was to ensure that religious minorities were protected from laws passed by the federal government that may not have been intended to discriminate against them, but had the effect of doing so,” said Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, in a call with reporters Monday.

“It is disingenuous to say that the Indiana RFRA is substantially similar to the federal RFRA, or laws in other states,” Warbelow added. “This bill allows all businesses, all corporations, to have religious beliefs and to assert those religious beliefs — regardless of whether or not they are actually religious organizations. These are for-profit corporations we are talking about.”

Last month, 30 legal scholars with expertise in religious freedom wrote a letter that the Indiana law would allow individuals to “take the law into their own hands.”

The Indiana law could result in “employers, landlords, small business owners, or corporations, taking the law into their own hands and acting in ways that violate generally applicable laws on the grounds that they have a religious justification for doing so,” reads the letter. “Members of the public will then be asked to bear the cost of their employer’s, their landlord’s, their local shopkeeper’s, or a police officer’s private religious beliefs.”

Pence also argued in his op-ed that the law doesn’t permit businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals. On Sunday, he dodged questions on whether business owners could deny service to gay individuals.

“I abhor discrimination. I believe in the Golden Rule that you should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’” Pence wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “If I saw a restaurant owner refuse to serve a gay couple, I wouldn’t eat there anymore. As governor of Indiana, if I were presented a bill that legalized discrimination against any person or group, I would veto it.”

Despite Pence’s assurances, he has said he has no intention of advocating specific discrimination protections for LGBT individuals.

Pence’s op-ed came after a flood of backlash over the law. The governors of Connecticut and Washington signed executive orders banning state-funded travel to Indiana on Monday and several businesses and Indiana corporate leaders have condemned the legislation.

Amanda Terkel contributed reporting.