In the Fast Company calendar, I came across an event called Teens in Tech Conference and, in it, was a small blurb about its founder, Daniel Brusilovsky (or Daniel Bru). Not only is he the founder, he’s a writer for TechCrunch (one of the hottest tech blogs out there) and a marketing manager for a mobile video startup called Qik. Oh. He’s 17.

I’m not really done, yet, with his list of activities. He’s the Executive Producer and Host of Apple Universe podcast, advisor to instant group messaging service Tatango (founded by 22 year old Derek Johnson), and to at least three other young companies as well. He’s a speaker at events like MacWorld too.

Right now Daniel is a high school senior in Silicon Valley (no big surprise there) who is struggling to decide whether to go to college or not. There’s no longer a  pat answer to that question especially for the young tech savvy kids. A lot of his success has come from being well-connected and asking for what he wants, getting involved in social media early and being a trend spotter. Here are his three tips for being an entrepreneur:

1. Don’t give up
2. Innovate
3. Persist

Here’s to youth and confidence!

A few of these brands are personal favorites and others are consistently recognized for their outstanding customer service. After years of automated phone hell, it does seem that customer service is beginning to improve slightly. Or maybe that’s just me. In this economy it is one way for big brands, and YOU, to stand out. Here are some fine choices

1. Southwest Airlines. WHO among us is not enjoying the whole “We Love Your Bags” campaign from SW Airlines? Brilliance. The marketing firm who put that one together should be very well rewarded. Definitely a fine example of pointing out a unique feature and selling it to death!

2. Panera Bread. I give Panera kudos because, unlike stingy Starbucks, they give their WiFi away for free and they did it early on. They know what Starbucks hasn’t figure out still: people almost always buy something when they go in to work or study at a place with free internet.

3. Verizon Wireless. Despite no iPhone yet, Verizon customers are very loyal. They provide great customer service which is a chief complaint about AT&T.

4. Virgin. Whether airlines or cell phones or music, Sir Richard and his brand have a strong following and fan base.

5. Nordstrom. This high-end department store consistently wins on the customer service

6. Zappos. Zappos has built its whole brand, from the beginning, on the premise of over-the-top customer service. From surprise shipping upgrades to unlimited talk time for customer service reps, they know what they are doing and their bottom line reflects this.

7. Ace Hardware. Proving bigger is not always better (is it ever?), Ace has beat out Lowe’s and Home Depot for customer service in reader polls.

8. Amazon.com. From free shipping on only $25 purchases, a wealth of choices and quick repairs when mistakes DO happen, Amazon has been a consistent performer in customer service.

9. Ford. By not taking bailout money or a salary, Ford built a strong reputation for caring for their shareholders, customers and country.

10. Apple. Notorious for giving people products that they are excited about, Apple wins for design, word of mouth and flat out appeal.

When you are a solopreneur or freelancer like myself, there comes a time when you have to meet with current or potential clients. Meeting at home can work for some business people IF you have the right set up, no rowdy kids or pets and the privacy and classy environment to make a good impression. For many people, that just isn’t the case. So where can you meet and what are the criteria for a good spot?

It is quite possible that you or your client will need to whip out a laptop and hook up to WiFi so that can be an easy way to eliminate potential meeting places. No WiFi? No meeting. Unless of course you have MiFi. Clearly you want some quiet and some privacy. One great suggestion from an article in Fast Company is to meet at a friend’s office. Maybe you know someone who still does corporate or who has office space that you can use for an hour or two.

One of the best choices are the community rooms at libraries and cafes like Panera Bread. These are usually free and you can reserve them in advance and they offer the quiet and privacy you need. They usually have free WiFi as well. If the meeting is more casual, you can simply do someplace like Starbucks, though I would avoid them during the immediate after-school hours.

Finally, there are meeting spaces for rent like Office Suites PLUS but they can be pricey. Best to save those for that really important client you are dying to snag and impress. They offer great amenities and services, though for each of these (like a projector if you are doing a PowerPoint presentation) there is an upcharge.

No office to meet in is one of the trade-offs of being self-employed, but it is increasingly common and more likely to become so as technology and the economy increase both the ease and likelihood of working for yourself.

Some are cheeky. Some are all business. One is off the charts (and not for the kids!). All are awesome, interesting women who have built a following for their businesses through great writing and building community. We’ve talked about a few a lot and some are probably brand new to our TVLAI readers. They are all great role models in the online business world. Enjoy!

1. Pam Slim. Pam has been highly touted here on TVLAI.com. She is an entrepreneur’s coach and a successful author. Here is one of my favorite posts about selling yourself.

2. Penelope Trunk. If you are a 30-something pursuing a career or entrepreneurial startup, it is hard to beat Penelope and her Brazen Careerist site. Here is a great sample of her advice and work.

3. Danielle LaPorte. Danielle and her “White Hot Truth” have become incredibly popular. She is also a business, entrepreneur coach and so popular that when she announced her “firestarter sessions” were going from $300/hr to $500/hr in 2010, she booked at the $300/hr rate for the rest of the year! Check out this awesome post.

4. Naomi Dunford. Naomi writes for all folks who run an “itty biz”, a really small niche business. With information on search engine optimization and general online marketing, she has superior content and e-courses available on her blog. She was also selected as one of the Top 30 Bloggers to Watch in 2010 by ProBlogger.

5. Carolyn Elefant (along with Susan Cartier Liebel) are the two cheerleaders for solo practicing lawyers. Carolyn writes killer content on her blog at MyShingle.com.

6. Lea Woodward. Lea, along with her husband, started Location Independent, a blog and site for virtual workers who travel the world. Highly motivating content if you want to break free and live a much more mobile, independent lifestyle.

7. Gina Trapini. Gina was the founding editor of the incredibly popular Lifehacker.com and wrote Upgrade Your Life . She has since spun out on her own and mostly writes about tech issues (impressions of the just announced iPad here).

8. Gwen Bell is really popular in the social media world, especially on Twitter. She writes on using this type of media in business effectively, is a yoga guru and excellent blogger. She is currently working on a media campaign for HP.

9. Arianna Huffington. Yes, this liberal powerhouse still writes for The Huffington Post which has grown huger than huge and is usually in the top 3-5 blogs most read blogs in Technorati’s Top 100. Interestingly enough, she’s been writing about sleep as well. You can read one of her posts about what she says should be the next feminist issue.  

10. The Bloggess. Oh ladies. She is handful but she says all of those things we wish we could. This one is for fun and to give you a laugh out loud break in your day. If you’ve ever ever been ready to kill at the movies, this post is for you. (It is NOT G-rated). She also writes a parenting column for a major paper.

Image by bitzcelt via Flickr

Full disclosure: I don’t get enough sleep and I do it erratically, sometimes working at 3 or 4 in the morning on a project. No one expects me to do this. I do it because I can and because it beats tossing and turning when I can’t sleep. Entrepreneurs have busy minds, thinking up ideas, scanning the horizons for new opportunities. It can be hard to shut down. But ample sleep is important for your own peace of mind and for your business.

How much sleep is constantly debated but generally 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is important for your average adult’s functioning. Continued lack of sleep can cause confusion, irritability (not good when working with clients!) and declining health.

Adequate sleep is the fuel of calm creativity, crucial to developing and growing your business relationships. There are some easy steps to increasing the quantity and improving the quality of your sleep:

1. TRY to keep a schedule. Your body knows when to wind down if you teach it to.

2. Establish rituals. If you’ve set 11pm as your “lights off” hour, start at 10pm with a warm bath, a novel and some soft music. No stimulants like TV or business books at bedtime!

3. Keep your bedroom as cool and clutter-free as possible. It’s better to have a cooler air temperature and more blankets than warm air and a messy bedroom does not engender sleep.

4. If you cannot sleep, do not get up. Give yourself 30 minutes and then turn on the lights and read in bed some more. Avoid getting up.

5. Many people are able to sleep better with a white noise machine (iPhone has apps for this!) or a fan to block out street and house noises. If there is too much light, get improved window coverings or try a sleep mask.

Let’s make a pact, you and I, to getting consistent and better sleep this year!

There are a variety of web readers but my favorite is Google Reader. Along with a zillion other online productivity tools, Google’s reader provides me with a “one-stop spot” for reading web content that I’ve subscribed to. If you are bookmarking blogs these days that you never get around to reading and you aren’t using a reader, here are a few reasons to try Google’s and how to get the most out of it.

Adding subscriptions to blogs/sites is a breeze. Simply type in the URL of most blogs into the “Add Subscription” field and you are set. You can organize your blogs by category just like you do documents in folders. If you are on a page with an RSS feed button, click on it and Google is one of your options.

What I like most is I get a main page that shows snippets of the 3 most current posts from my blogs. I can scan through quickly to see what is of interest or need to me. You can always return to it by selecting Home. And you can mark posts as “read” so they don’t show up again.

As a social add, you can share your Reader list with friends (or the general public) and you can also add notations and point things out to them. You can browse other users of Google Reader and see what they are reading. And you can *star* your favorite posts to refer back to.

If you’ve shared stories or posts with the public, you can create a public page that connects with your Google Profile (if you don’t have one yet, I recommend you set one up because it is fast and easy and another way to develop your brand). It looks like a snazzy Web site and you can create a designated URL for it. Finally, you can create a widget to embed on your existing web site/blog of your suggested stories.

Google Reader also has statistics that allows you to track what sites you read most, etc. I haven’t found that particularly useful. If you are a power reader, you might. Oh, by the way, the Google Reader app for smart phones is pretty sweet and user friendly.

I came across a great article on Entrepreneur.com about Suzy Prudden, whose face I recognized but whose name I did not. She’s had quite a life and offers many lessons for business people and entrepreneurs. Starting off as a fitness trainer out of her own, Suzy has seen serious financial ups and downs (which included being homeless and out of work), mostly based on youth and inexperience. She transformed herself into a motivational speaker, reaping praise from folks like Deepak Chopra and Oprah.

At 22, with a new baby on the way and a husband in school she needed an income and started doing fitness training from home. Soon she spun this into a full-fledged fitness company which she owned for 18 years before selling it in 1983. She started giving workshops, which she sold cheaply to gain a following and to brand herself as a speaker on mind-body connections. She’s now written 13 books, and is acknowledged as a leader in holistic mental/physical health.

What I particularly loved about the article and Prudden herself is her succinct advice for individuals interested in starting a business. This from Entrepreneur.com:

1. Have a business plan: “I actually for the first time ever have a business plan,” she says. “I’ve never had one before. I just had an idea and did it.”She’s now working with business coach Bobbie Leonard. “She looks at all the things I’ve done and she said she doesn’t understand why I’m not more successful in the world.”

   Prudden knows why: “It’s because I don’t plan, I just do.”
    

2. Find people to help you. “Getting a business coach is paramount,” she says. “A lot of us think we have to do it ourselves. We think we have to know everything. We don’t know everything. There are people who know much more than we do, and we need to get hold of them.”
    
3. Make sure you have money. “I suggest people keep their day job or make sure they have some kind of income. If you don’t have money, it’s too hard.”
    
4. Go for it. “Now is the best time to start a business because everybody’s a mess. The playing field is more even. And if you can make a business successful at a time like now, then you’ve got it made when things start turning around.”
    
5. Make sure you fill a need. “When you start a business, you have to look at what is needed, not necessarily what you want to do. People get a good idea, and they think everyone wants it. You’ve got to find out if they want it before you take it out there.”

For pulling herself up and following her own series of dreams, Suzy Prudden is our Saturday Success Story!

It is still January and I think many of us made the resolution to “be more organized” for 2010. Organizing your personal information is important, of course, but we’ll address your business documentation here. However, many of these services and tips will work for home!

Pixily is a service a friend of mine has signed up for. There are a variety of plans but I’ll tell you about the one she signed up for because she is a solopreneur without tons of paperwork to deal with. Pixily is a document scanning service that lets you send in your paperwork and they will scan and store it for you and then send the hard copies back. For $14.95 they will scan and store 50 pages which includes a prepaid mailer and return mail. Monthly storage for up to 1000 of these scanned pages is $4.95. So, she is having them scan ALL of her existing necessary paperwork and store it. If she needs more than the initial $14.95 she will request another envelope. Then she can access anything she needs from “the cloud”.

Some of you will have concerns about privacy and safety of the hard copies. She isn’t sending anything like a birth certificate or other crucial documents and isn’t worried about the other stuff. She wants that pile of paper GONE and doesn’t have the time to scan it on her flat-bed scanner.

Google’s new “Gdrive”. It isn’t really called this but a little advertised new Google feature that is rolling out over the next several weeks will allow you to store a ton of stuff on Google Docs. Not just documents but music, photos and more. You can read about it in detail here but if you are looking for an incredibly affordable offline storage site, this might be the spot for you. You get 1GB of storage free (if you convert documents into Google Docs formats it is unlimited) and then it is 25 CENTS per Gigabyte per year. This means 20GB for $5 per year(remember when computer hard drives were 1GB?)! Individual files need to be 250MB or less.

Finally for an ongoing resource for all things organization, head over to Unclutterer.com (prepared to spend awhile at first because there is a lot going on). There are great categories like Paper, Workspace of the Week and Cable Clutter to get you started. The site has a very active forum, as well, where you can connect with other people for suggestions and input on your particular organizational demon.

Photo courtesy of Unclutterer

You gotta give it to this guy. Jason Sadler developed a business idea that allows him to get paid for getting dressed. He’s been all over the media (literally: check this Press link) which he undoubtedly works harder at than his actual business model.

Businesses pay Jason to wear their t-shirt. He is a walking billboard. The model was brilliantly simple. On Day 1, his body costs the company $1 to advertise. Day 2, $2. Day 364? $364. So companies bid to get in early when his advertising (and the subsequent wealth of media exposure) is still low. He only wears the shirt for one day, but if he happens to be on CBS with Katie Couric, your “ad” could be seen by millions of viewers-for a buck. Even if he doesn’t get on a national show in your shirt, he still posts photos all over social media networks and on his site.

2009 sold out. So, he got a buddy to work Los Angeles while he continues to work his original spot of Jacksonville, Florida. 2 Guys to Wear Your Shirt. Guess what? Today is January 15, 2010. There are only 60 days in 2010 left to buy!

The income off of wearing the shirts comes to (in case you were trying to work out an Excel formula) $66,795. But there is more advertising on the site and you can be sure a book must be in the works. And they have a store that sells I Wear Your Shirt t-shirts. The guy is smart.

Jason, and now Evan, really understand self-promotion, relationship marketing and personal branding (sort of). So for picking a business model you gotta love, they are our Saturday Success Story!

Readers, we scoured the Internet for you, investigating what big wigs like Forbes and Inc.com consider the best business blogs (particularly small business) in cyberspace and tossing in one or two of our personal choices. Here is TVLAI.com’s definitive list!

1. Chris Brogan. Chris is one of the leading experts in social media so if you want to get the low-down on how to use it and how it’s changing, this is the blog to read.

2. UnMarketing. Scott Stratten is a leading proponent of relationship marketing, clearly following in the footsteps of Seth Godin. Learn how marketing is done these days through this entertaining and informative blog.

3. The Entrepreneurial Mind. Dr. Jeff Cornwall’s in-depth, ongoing study of all things “entrepreneur”.

4. AllBusiness Bloggers (owned by Dunn and Bradstreet) is a clearing house of nothing but business bloggers, breaking them down into sub-categories like human resources, home-based business and women in business bloggers. GREAT resource!

5. Mashable. Mashable bills itself as “The Social Media Guide” but it has really turned into a news repository for all things online, including small business, mobile apps, money and finance and more. Follow the whole Google versus China story here.

6. TechCrunch. For all things technology and technology news, this is your place.

7. CalculatedRISK. A fast mover on Technorati, CalculatedRISK covers finance, the economy and housing markets. 

8. Small Business Trends. Pretty much what it says!

9. Small Business Brief is a news aggregating service for all things “small business”. The site gathers news and categorizes under topics like entrepreneurship, finance and legal and marketing.

10. Tied for 10th place are some of our favorites: IttyBiz, Escape from Cubicle Nation, Career Renegade and Copyblogger.