Would you “bet your house” on your next business idea? Not so long ago, Kanya King had an idea that she thought was worth doing just that.

She is the founder of the MOBO Awards, today it reaches an audience of 250 million people each year. Amazingly she started it from scratch just 15 years ago.

In 1996, Kanya King had a vision to create a special way to recognise Music of Black Origin (MOBO). She dreamed of a special event that could inspire people all over the world.

Kanya risked it all to start her business. She took out a loan against her house and set to work on creating the first event.

She knew that if she wanted to grow the business as big as she imagined, she would need to attract some very big name partnerships. To do that she would need to present herself in the right way…

“We spent a great deal of time developing our brand policy, which ultimately allowed us to expand into our business. It’s a huge part of our prime goal and vision and has allowed us to partner with organisations including the BBC and HSBC. Hand in hand with this is the belief that the sky is the limit – we’ve always believed in the power of thinking big, there is no such thing as being too audacious with your dreams”.

Kanya’s story proves that cementing a powerful brand can be the difference between impacting thousands of people and impacting millions (upon-millions). It can be the difference between receiving a pat-on-the-back or receiving an MBE from the Queen.

Success has not dulled Kanya’s sense of social responsibility, she regularly participates in community and industry events, encouraging youth enterprise and vision wherever she can.

She will be 1 of 10 inspiring speakers at “Expand Your Brand” on March 20-21, delivering her personal story in the unique style which has inspired so many to embrace their wildest and most incredible dreams.

If you believe in creative thinking, in taking risks and making sacrifices and, above all, if you want to make 2010 the year when you turn your ambition into attainment then you cannot miss this. Book your tickets here >>>

Watch and read more on Kanya King
http://www.director.co.uk/MAGAZINE/2010/1_Jan/KanyaKing_63_05.html
http://www.femalefranchise.co.uk/Features/1296

Imagine you walk into an important meeting and the first words out of their mouth is:

“I got your book on Amazon.com and I loved it, you really know your stuff and we’re excited to be working with you”

There’s no question that you are in line to do the business and you’re not going to be arguing over price.

Having a published book is just one way to enhance your personal brand and it’s not as difficult as you think.

Just ask Mindy Gibbins-Klien. She is a best selling author who has also helped over 300 people to write, publish and distribute their book.

Mindy Gibbins-Klein knows that every single person has unique experiences and these unique experiences can form the basis of a great book. The truth is, you have a great book inside you waiting to be written.

Mindy has developed a method to get it written fast and she has the contacts to get it published easily … she even knows how to get it selling quickly.

Mindy knows that whether your book is a NY Times #1 Best-seller or not, it adds a massive premium to your value. Instantly you become the recognised expert in your field and a valuable person to have around.

Mindy Gibbins-Klien is just 1 of the 10 speakers you will experience at “Expand Your Brand” on March 20-21. Her story won’t just be inspirational, she will be sharing exactly what you should be doing to have your book up on Amazon before September 2010.

If building your personal brand is important to you, don’t miss out on tickets to this event:
ttp://www.triumphantevents.co.uk/?unlock=1348-f4vnzqd3gzuw85qh3dc9tpm8

Watch Mindy Gibbins-Klein on YouTube

Wouldn’t a nice long holiday be great? Especially if it turned out to be worth a whopping £20Million!

For Deirdre Bounds that is exactly what happened. After taking time out to do a gap year holiday she arrived back to England without a penny in the middle of winter.

Stuck in Leads, sharing a tiny bed-sit apartment, Deirdre couldn’t stop thinking about how wonderful it was to be free in the big wide world, and how terrible it was to be stuck freezing Midlands.

So she started i-to-i Travel, a business she hoped would encourage a few teenager to travel abroad on the best gap year holiday ever.

Deirdre was starting with nothing, but she imagined her brand would one day be the market leader in “ethical travel”.

Ten years later, Deirdre’s company had offices on 4 continents and was the biggest Gap Year Travel Business in the world… And her share was valued at £20Million!

i-to-i was sending tens of thousands of teenagers around the world teaching english, building schools, working in wildlife parks and supporting charities.

In just 10 years, Deirdre Bounds had started with nothing more than an idea and ended up setting thousands of teenagers free in the world.

Creating a powerful brand doesn’t just make you rich, it can also make the world richer and for that reason alone it’s worth getting right.

Dierdre Bounds is just 1 of the 10 speakers you will experience at “Expand Your Brand” on March 20-21. You won’t need to travel to Africa, it’s happening right here in London and tickets are half price through this link (note: only 8 tickets are left at £59 and they are due to increase tomorrow):
http://www.triumphantevents.co.uk/?unlock=1348-f4vnzqd3gzuw85qh3dc9tpm8

Deirdre Bound’s story isn’t just inspirational, she will be slowing it down and giving the exact things she did in the early days that enabled her to expand so rapidly. You simply won’t want to miss her presentation. Register today >>>

Find out more … Watch Deirdre Bounds on YouTube

Today’s sunny weather in London reminds me that no winter lasts forever. It’s always followed by the new blossoms of Spring.

No recession lasts forever either. Tough times are always followed by periods of growth where small businesses have big opportunities.

Take a look at Dan Wagner (see Wiki article), he founded his first company in 1984 when unemployment had hit 11.9%. The country had felt the effects of 4 years of a terrible economy.

In 1984, Dan’s company was little more than a good idea but by 1994 he had floated it on the London Stock Exchange for £120m (he was just 30 years old!).

Dan went on to do business with some of the biggest brands in the world – Microsoft, BT and IBM to name a few.

He also got a listing on The Times Rich List and recognised by the Prime Minister as one of the UK’s most innovative entrepreneurs.

Through all the fast growth Dan was known for his dynamic personal brand and his ability to attract the biggest companies in the world to do business with him.

Today he has ecommerce solutions provider, Venda Ltd, which is helping to expand some of the biggest businesses in the UK on the web (Tesco, De Beers, Jimmy Choo, JVC and more). Best of all, Dan is secretly more passionate about helping small businesses to expand their brands and his talk will share the very best strategies he’s developed.

Dan Wagner will share with you his very best experiences on doing business with big businesses and how to make your small business blossom this Spring.

Dan is just 1 of the 10 speakers you will experience at “Expand Your Brand” on March 20-21. Limited tickets available for £59 … book now before tickets increase:
http://www.triumphantevents.co.uk/?unlock=1348-f4vnzqd3gzuw85qh3dc9tpm8

Read more on Dan Wagner >>>

• Ecademy Profile
• Management Today
• Real Business
• Wiki Article
• Times Rich List

In 1998, Mike Harris had an idea for an “Internet Only Bank”. He figured that the internet could be a great place to do your banking without having to go into a branch and see a teller.

But it wasn’t received well, not even by his closest advisor. Mike’s wife Sue joined the opposition “The internet will never work for banking, it’s slow, unreliable and impersonal.” she said.

Rather than getting discouraged, Mike used her feedback to help construct the “Egg Brand Promise”.

Mike realised that Egg had to be known as fast, reliable, friendly and personal if it was going to make sense for customers.

It was the critics who actually helped Mike to build the worlds first internet bank and get it right. Egg grew from nothing to a valuation of £1.3Billion in just 3 years.

Mike Harris has built 3 multi-billion pound businesses in his career and each time he says that it was vital to get the brand right before the growth and success could occur.

When he takes the stage at “Expand Your Brand” he will be sharing the three key ideas that has led to billions of pounds in value that started as nothing more than an idea.

Mike is one of 10 speakers at “Expand Your Brand” who has achieved staggering success and who wants to share the key things he learned along the way.

At this event you will also be hearing from a man who has created over 150 “brand enhancing” products, a woman who’s brand goes out to 250M people a year now, a 19 year old who’s sold 50,000+ books and a woman who built a £20M business starting with nothing more than her frustrations. Click here to find out more >>>

A lot of my friends have recently been asking me “What is the point of Twitter?… Why all the fuss?”

So here’s my answer…

If Google owns all the important information in the world, Twitter owns all of our silly little thoughts. – Daniel Priestley

Do a Google search on the G20 Summit this week and the top hits are likely to be the official web site, the Wikipedia page and a major newspaper article.

Twitter search “G20” and you get minute by minute updates from people all over the world as they comment, debate and even get arrested at the gates!

It’s live and it’s bite sized chunks of info that could only be described as “Thoughts” (although twitter calls them “tweets”).

“Thoughts” are random, they occur in little chunks and they jump from topic to topic freely.

Thanks to Twitter, we are now gladly handing over our “Thoughts” to the internet to be searched and viewed freely, forevermore.

So what is more valuable, information or thoughts?

Clearly information is more valuable and Google will remain the biggest and most valuable internet company on the web but “Thoughts” are valuable too.

Humans love finding out what people “think” of something and in that context we want it to be live, streaming and up to the minute. Twitter can deliver this.

So the value of twitter (as a business) has more to do with “search”  than it does “followers”.

What about the Value to me as a user?

If you love sharing your thoughts with people (and you may even get paid to do it) then Twitter is an excellent tool. You can build up a loyal following and keep them updated with everything from your business decisions to the news you are reading to the breakfast cereal you just ate for breakfast.

Creators

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_disney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_jobs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JK_Rawling

Stars

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_smith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Beckham

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elle_mcphereson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Newman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_%22Diddy%22_Combs

Supporters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Katzenberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Eisner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer

Deal Makers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Katzenberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Geffen

Traders

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_soros

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lynch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Arnold

Accumulators

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_allen

Lords

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Albrecht

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi_Mittal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvar_Kamprad

Mechanics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_kroc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton

They say that no news is good news, but that was back in the days when just a few powerful people held the strings to the entire global media. That was then, this is now… today we live in a world where over 200Million people control the media that gets published daily – An army of Bloggers, Vlogger (Video Log), Twitter Posters and the like get to have more say these days than Rupert Murdoch.

So why does it need to be negative anymore. Social Media doesn’t require you to be sensationalist in order to sell papers or airtime. You can be truthful, authentic and if that means you share the good news as well as the bad then lets bring it on.

IN my recent video I decided to cover the stories of four business owners I know of who are doing things that inspire me. You can tell from my face that I was having a stressful day (which was compounded when I heard about another negative news story). When I made the video, I felt more balanced and was pleased to have focused my attention onto the people who really do deserve our attention … small scale entrepreneurs all over the world who ARE doing amazing things.

If you feel like sharing the stories of people who inspire you, I strongly recommend it.

By my rough calculations, to be the number one downloaded iPhone Application worldwide, would require you to sell about 250,000 versions per month (although I can’t find the exact number). At 99c per download the iFart Application would gross its creator (who could very well be a 14 year old) close to $250,000 per month!

Now considering that this App might have taken all of a few days to create and Apples cut is only 20%, that’s not a bad ROI!

iPhone applications are big business. Techcrunch projects that a BILLION downloads of iPhone Apps could happen in the first 12 months of the App Store being open. That would make it as big of a success as iTunes.

The difference is that iTunes music store has a library of 10Million songs however the App Store has just “10,000 Apps and Counting”. That’s a lot of cash to go around.

The californian gold rush of 2009 might just be finding silly little ways to entertain and delight the 15M+ iPhone users worldwide. So, if you hear your 14 year old making terrible sounds in their bedroom, fingers crossed they are recording it.

This month is the third solid month of mass layoffs since the house of corporate cards began to fall. Hundreds of thousands of highly skilled people find themselves looking for work, hoping for a fast break that will prevent them from defaulting on the loans that prop up the “good life”.

But as the shocking news spreads about these disastrous layoffs lets not forget that behind it all there is a whopping big secret…

…Hardly anyone really wants their corporate job to begin with!

Movies are made, books are written and songs are sung about people who break free from the office shackles to pursue a greater and more fulfilling purpose with their life.

They go on to start their own small businesses, run marathons through the Sahara, volunteer for charity, act in a musical, audition for a play or even sell widgets on ebay between play time with the kids.

Sometimes people need to be pushed from the nest in order to discover their brave spark and to see their value.

I can guarantee that there will be some green eyes peering at those “unfortunate folk” who are packing their desks and taking their first steps into the uncertain, bold new world that lies beyond the homogeneous days of meetings and reports in a corporate cubicle.