Robert Smith is a highly sought after publicity expert and author. Get a full scale and high profile PR campaign for $9997 for 6 month campaign. Call 800-776-5133.

-- "Imagine Being Handed $25,000 for Your Small Business!" --

"Nike does not accept unsolicited advertising or marketing proposals of any kind."

-- If you would like information on patenting your idea, we suggest you consult a patent attorney for assistance. If you already have a patent, please call Nike at (503) 671-5727 for further information or if you would like to request a copy of the guidelines and agreement, please send your name and mailing address to:
Nike, Inc.
Idea Submissions
One Bowerman Drive DF 4
Beaverton, OR 97005

-- -- Thought of the day:
-- "The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's determination."
Tommy Lasorda
Professional Baseball Manager

-- "European Court agrees to hear chimp's plea for human rights" --

-- -- Induction Dynamics -- Little devices that can be buried inside your walls to create home theater audio. - They come from a company named Induction Dynamics for their product SolidDrive.

-- Many people are turned-off by the idea of having to put 5, 6 or 7 surround-sound speakers in a room.  The SolidDrive is what the manufacturer calls a full-range vibrating transducer which goes inside your walls. That means it's supposed to be able to reproduce everything from low bass notes up through and including high treble musical notes. Each 1.2-pound unit is installed between your room's drywall support joists. - Sound quality was pretty good (on a very loud show floor environment). - Totally hidden speakers carry with them a very high WAF (Wife Acceptancy Factor) - always a problem whenever lots of ugly components are involved.

-- Thought of the day
-- "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." -- Thomas Edison 1847-1931, Inventor and Entrepreneur

-- -- “Selling On Commission” --

-- -- by Don Debelak

-- Selling On Commission:

-- Inventors often have more ideas than money. The result is that inventors have a tough time figuring out just how to proceed. One option most inventors don't often consider is selling on commission. An inventor gets orders for his or her product and then has a manufacturer make the product. But instead of a license agreement, the inventor just becomes the sales rep and takes a commission. The inventor may have to surrender control of the idea, especially if the development costs are high, but they often still have a great deal of input and they can usually negotiate a long term commission agreement. This is often an easier deal for the manufacturer to accept and in the end the inventor makes more money at a 10% commission rather than a three to five percent royalty. The whole secret of success is land a big order, then manufacturers will be interested in talking to you, provided the product fits within their manufacturing capability. The benefit to the inventor is that he or she is selling the product with the backing of an established company. That backing both enhances the inventor's credibility and provides the funding needed to launch the product.

-- The Basic Points for the Sales Pitch:

-- You are selling only two points when going for sales on commission. The first is that you have an order or commitment from a significant customer. The second is that the manufacturer has available capacity and will only need to make minimal changes to its manufacturing process. A bonus for the sale is if you can also show that there is an easy-to-penetrate distribution channel to sell to customers other than the one who will give you a commitment.

-- You won't always know which manufacturers have the right equipment in place and need to add production to fill up your plants. As a result you may need to call on quite a few manufacturers before you find one that has the right equipment and the available capacity for your product.

-- Key Benefits:

-- 1. Quick market entry. Having the product backed by an established company gives the product credibility and when you succeed, the manufacturer should provide the funding you need to expand sales.
-- 2. Offers an option for products with limited patent protection. Some product ideas can't get significant patent protection because of earlier patents. This problem typically kills a licensing agreement but it doesn't mean as much for selling on commission, where the company is just looking to add extra sales revenue.
-- 3. Inventors don't need financial backing. Inventors typically don't have to put up any money. The inventor's only expenses are defining the product, possibly making a model or prototype, and the cost of making his or her early market connections.

-- Key Move:

-- The key to lining up a selling-on-commission agreement is to know who the key players in the distribution network are, and preferably to have their support for your product idea before you approach a manufacturer. That's the only way the manufacturer will be convinced that you can actually sell your product. Use trade magazines and attend trade shows to find the distributors and manufacturers representatives in your area. (Click here to read about how to find distributors.) Then talk to those contacts to see if they believe your idea will sell. You should be able to get a selling-on-commission agreement if you get these contacts to endorse your product idea, or better yet, if they let you know they will buy the product if and when it becomes available.

-- Pros and Cons:

-- Pros:

-- 1. Requires very little investment by the inventor.
-- 2. Can be the quickest route to full market penetration.
-- 3. May produce reasonably quick income.
-- 4. The inventor continues to have input into his or her product's success.
-- 5. Provides instant credibility to customers.

-- Cons:

-- 1. Inventors don't always have control of their product.
-- 2. Doesn't establish an inventor's company or brand.
-- 3. Requires sales and marketing enthusiasm and expertise.
-- 4. Works best with products with large customers or a narrow distribution channel.

-- Items to Watch:

-- The manufacturer will expect quick results from you. Be sure to line up customers first before approaching the manufacturer to sell on commission. The manufacturer won't automatically print brochures, attend trade shows, or pay for a marketing program. Be sure to propose a marketing program and get the manufacturer's approval before signing a commission agreement.

-- You may go three to four months before sales are made. You can ask the manufacturer for an advance against commissions to cover those costs, but the manufacturer won't be obligated to offer an advance unless it is part of your agreement.

-- The manufacturer might offer you its standard sales representative agreement, which pays a commission only on the products you sell personally. Insist on a commission on all your products, including an override (or commission payment) of several percent on any of your products sold by other salespeople or independent representatives.

-- The manufacturer will want to produce the product as cheaply as possible and may compromise some of the product's features. You'll need to monitor closely the manufacturer's design to prevent this.

-- The manufacturer will be reluctant to make immediate changes in the product once it starts production. Be sure to show a model or prototype to potential customers and get their approval before the manufacturer finalizes tooling and the manufacturing process.

-- Success Tips:

-- Identify the market. Your job is to identify the key customer groups who will buy your product, the distribution channel that can be used to sell to that market, and the key players in that distribution channel. Then you need to uncover the industry's price structure, which includes discounts to wholesalers and retailers, packaging required, key buying periods, and important trade shows.

-- Own the market. The manufacturer or distributor who hires you on commission is really buying your ability to sell the product. You will improve your chances to land a deal with each additional person you know who is either in the distribution network or a major customer.

-- Other tactics you can use to generate support include call reports, which you write after you interview key buyers; letters of endorsements from those same buyers; and provisional orders, which are orders people give you with a provision that they can cancel if the product doesn't meet your promised specifications.

-- Produce results. The manufacturer or distributor will be watching your sales results to be sure you can back up your potential sales claims before investing significant amounts of money. You should have one or two customers presold before approaching a manufacturer. That way, you can produce immediate results.

-- Land the monster account: Nothing succeeds like having a big account in hand to land a selling-on-commission deal. If you pre-sell a customer like Home Depot, you will have offers rolling in.

-- Orders first, production second: You want the credibility of the manufacturer, and the manufacturer wants the extra business. But the manufacturer doesn't want to spend a ton of money on the product before it knows whether or not the product will sell. One solution to this concern is to have the manufacturer agree to let you represent it while obtaining orders. The manufacturer will go into production after you produce enough orders. This is a win-win situation for everyone. You will get the credibility of the manufacturer to help sell the product, and the manufacturer minimizes its risk.

-- Don Debelak has been working with inventors for over 25 year. He and a team of expert associates run the One Stop Invention Shop,
http://onestopinventionshop.net
==============================================

To: president@inventorsconnection.org
From: DONALD DEBELAK
Subject: Sales rep lists available
Date: Monday, August 8, 2011 1:09 PM 

New service from Don Debelak

Inventors with products to sell, or inventors trying to license their idea often need the help of independent sales reps to sell or license their product. But often they have trouble locating the reps to successfully launch their product.

Onestopinventionshop.net has put together a list of reps for many major important markets to help inventors get the product started. The rep list also included an article about how to sell to the market, which typically lists some of the major trade shows and magazines for those markets.

If you have inventors in your club that are looking for reps I‘d appreciate it if you could let them know about the lists that are now available as I believe it would help them. You can find the lists at
http://onestopinventionshop.net/books/sales-reps.

Sales Reps
Sales reps can be hard to find and coming up with a good list of potential reps can take hours. Why do all that hard work if you can buy lists from us for only $24.99? Select one of the lists below and then place your purchase order for it.

Baby and Children’s Products — a list of over 180 sales reps for children’s market

Convenience Stores — a list of over 90 sales reps and distributors

Promotional Products — a list of over 120 sales reps

Mass Merchants and Drug Stores — a list of 100 sales reps

Toy and Hobby Products — a list of over 120 sales reps

Outdoor Products — a list of over 400 sales reps

Kitchen Products — a list of over 150 sales reps and over 30 catalogs for the kitchen market

Gift Products – a list of over 150 sales reps for the gift market

Hardware Market — a list of over 170 sales reps and articles on selling to the hardware market

Interested in Licensing?

Read our sample article on how to use sales reps to land a licensing deal. No charge for this download.

Inventor Testimonial:

"I just wanted to tell you that the money I paid to have you create a list of possible sales reps and distributors was the best money I’ve ever spent on my product, the Pop-up Microlite. I just recently started contacting some of the reps and I hooked up with a great rep just last week. After only having samples for two days he has already sold the product to a huge hardware distributor that services 2000 stores and he has a private-label agreement in the works with another manufacturer interested in selling them as safety lighting. He said the response to the product was fantastic!"
-- John Teel, johnteel@microlitetech.com

About Don Debelak

Don Debelak has over two decades of experience providing assistance to over 70 new products as a consultant and marketing manager for small companies. In addition, he has interviewed over 80 entrepreneurs for his monthly columns for Business Start-Ups and Entrepreneur magazines between 1998 and 2006. Don has also started ventures based on new products including his current one that manufactures and sells particulate filters based on a Danish inventor’s new product concept.

Debelak has established himself as a leader in emerging business with columns in Entrepreneur magazine and published books and has been interviewed on national radio shows, Internet shows and has been featured in leading newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Debelak's website, onestopinventionshop.net, offers assistance to inventors, new businesses and people with ideas through a variety of services from coaching to business plans to evaluations of a company's business model. Debelak's books include:

* Bringing Your Product to Market: Fast Track Approaches for Cashing in on Your Great Idea in Less than A Year

* The Risk-free Entrepreneur: The Idea Person's Guide to Building a Business With Other People's Money

* Entrepreneur Magazine: Bringing Your Product to Market

* Think Big: Nine Ways to Make Millions from Your Ideas

* How to Bring a Product to Market for Less Than $5000

Contact information: Don Debelak, DSD Marketing, P.O. Box 120861 New Brighton, MN 55112, 612-414-4118, 651-773-5866 (fax), dondebelak34@msn.com.

Don Debelak DSD Marketing P.O. Box 120861 New Brighton, MN 55112 612-414-4118 651-773-5866 (fax) dondebelak34@msn.com
==============================================

-- "Patent cost information | How much does a patent cost?" --

-- After exchanging their stories, the woman said, "I'm going to slip into something more feminine and comfortable. Why don't you shave and take a shower? There's a razor upstairs in the bathroom cabinet." No longer questioning anything, he went up to the bathroom and found a razor fashioned from a bone with two shells honed to a hollow ground sharp edge, having a swival mechanism. "This woman is amazing !" he mused. "What next?"

Please take a few minutes to read this. It is a "lessons learned" document from the inventor of the SpinBrush Toothbrush, John Osher.
-- In an article in Entrepreneur magazine, he told how he decided to make a list of everything he had done wrong and wanted to see if he could come up with the perfect company. It went on to tell that John sold his company to Proctor and Gamble for $475 million. To learn about John's product development strategies read below.

If you are interested in learning about mistakes that are made by inventors/entrepreneurs read '17 Mistakes Start Ups Make.' --

Mistake 1: Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it's viable. "This is really the most important mistake of all. They say 9 [out] of 10 entrepreneurs fail because they're undercapitalized or have the wrong people. I say 9 [out] of 10 people fail because their original concept is not viable. They want to be in business so much that they often don't do the work they need to do ahead of time, so everything they do is doomed. They can be very talented, do everything else right, and fail because they have ideas that are flawed."

Mistake 2: Miscalculating market size, timing, ease of entry and potential market share. "Most new entrepreneurs get very excited over an idea and don't look for the truth about how many people will want to buy it. They put together financial projections as part of a presentation to pump up their investors. They say, 'The market size is 50 million people that could use this product, and if I could only sell to 2 percent of them, I'd be selling a million pieces.' But 2 percent of a market is a lot. Most products sell way less than 1 percent."

Mistake 3: Underestimating financial requirements and timing. "They set their financial requirements based on Mistake 1, and they go ahead and make a commitment to this much office space and this many computers, and hire a vice president of sales, and so on. Before they know it, based on sales projections that were wrong to start with, they have created costs that require those projections to be met. So they run out of money."

Mistake 4: Overprojecting sales volume and timing. "They have already miscalculated the size of the market. Now they overproject their portion of it. They often say 'There are 200 million homes, and I need to sell [to] x number of them.' When you break it down, though, a much smaller number of those are really sales prospects. That makes it impossible to make their sales projections."

Mistake 5: Making cost projections that are too low. "Their cost projections are always too low. Part of the reason is that they project much higher sales. There are also unknown reasons that always come out that usually make costs higher than planned. So on top of everything, their margins are now lower."

Mistake 6: Hiring too many people and spending too much on offices and facilities. "Now you have lower sales, higher costs and too much overhead. These are the things that you see every day in companies that fail. And they all grow out of that first mistake: failing to research the size and viability of the opportunity."

Mistake 7: Lacking a contingency plan for a shortfall in expectations. "Even if you're realistic in your estimates to start, there are things that happen when you start a new business. Your sales ideas may be no good; bank rates may go up; there may be a shipping strike. These aren't the result of poor planning, but they happen. More often than not, entrepreneurs just feel that something will come along when they need it. They don't have contingency plans for it not working out at the size and time they want."

Mistake 8: Bringing in unnecessary partners. "There are certain partners you need. For instance, you often need money, so you're going to need money partners. But too many times, the guy with the idea takes on all his friends as partners. Many people don't provide strategic advantages and don't warrant ownership. But they're all going to get 25 percent of the company. It's totally unnecessary, and it's a mistake. Before people are made partners, they have to earn it."

Mistake 9: Hiring for convenience rather than skill requirements. "In my first business or two, I hired relatives. It was easy to do, but in many cases, they were the wrong people [for the job]. And it's hard to fire people, especially if they're relatives or friends. More time needs to be spent handpicking people based on skill requirements. You really need super-skilled people who can wear more than one hat. It just bogs you down when you hire people who can't do the job."

Mistake 10: Neglecting to manage the entire company as a whole. "You see this happen all the time. They'll spend half their time doing something that represents 5 percent of their business. You have to have a view of your whole company. But too often, the person running it loses that view. They get involved in a part, and they don't manage the whole. Whether I do this product or that product, whether I hire somebody, [I consider] how they [will] fit long term and short term in the big picture. Constantly try to see your big picture."

Mistake 11: Accepting that it's "not possible" too easily rather than finding a way. "I had an engineer who was a very good engineer, but with every toy we developed, he would say, 'You can't do it that way.' I had to be careful not to accept this too easily. I had to look further. If you're an entrepreneur, you're going to break new ground. A lot of people are going to say it's not possible. You can't accept that too easily. A good entrepreneur is going to find a way."

Mistake 12: Focusing too much on sales volume and company size rather than profit. "Too much of your management is often based on volume and size. So many entrepreneurs want to say 'I have a company that's this big, with this many people, this many square feet of space, and this much sales.' It's too much [emphasis] on how fast and big you can build a business rather than how much profit it can make. Bankers and investors don't like this. Entrepreneurs are so into creating and building, but they also have to learn to become good [businesspeople]."

Mistake 13: Seeking confirmation of your actions rather than seeking the truth. "This often happens: You want to do something, so you talk about it with people who work for you. You talk to [your] family and friends. But you're only looking for confirmation; you're not looking for the truth. You're looking for somebody to tell you you're right. But the truth always comes out. So we [test] our products, and we listen to what [the testers] say. We give much more value to the truth than to people saying what we're doing is great."

Mistake 14: Lacking simplicity in your vision. "Many entrepreneurs go in too many directions at once and do not execute anything well. Rather than focusing on doing everything right to sell to their biggest markets, they divide the attention of their people and their time, trying to do too many things at [one time]. Then their main product isn't done properly because they're doing so many different things. They have an idea and say they're going to sell it to Wal-Mart. Then they say they're going to sell to [the] Home Shopping Network. And then the gift market looks good. And so on."

Mistake 15: Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose. "You should have an idea of what your long-term aim is. It doesn't mean that won't change, but when you aim an arrow, you have to be aiming at a target. This [concept will] often come up when people ask 'How do I pick a product?' The answer depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to [create] a billion-dollar company with this product, it may not have a chance. But if you're trying to make a $5 million company, it can work. Or if you're trying to create a company [in which] family members can be employed, it can work. Clarity of your business purpose is very important [but] is often not really part of the thought process."

Mistake 16: Lacking focus and identity. "This was written from the viewpoint of building the company as a valuable entity. The company itself is also a product. Too many companies try to go after too many targets at once and end up with a potpourri rather than a focused business entity with an identity. When you try to make a business, it's very important to maintain a focus and an identity. Don't let it become a potpourri, or it loses its power. For instance, you say, 'We're already selling to Kmart, so we might as well make a toy because Kmart buys toys.' If you do that, the company becomes weaker. A company needs to be focused on what it is. Then its power builds from that."

Mistake 17: Lacking an exit strategy. "Have an exit plan, and create your business to satisfy that plan. For instance, I am thinking I might run my new business for two years and then get out of it. I think it's an opportunity to make a tremendous amount of money for two years, but I'm not sure [whether] it's proprietary enough to stop the competition from getting in. So I'm in with an exit strategy of doing it for two years and then winding down. I won't commit to long-term leases, and after the first year, we'll start watching the marketplace very closely and start watching inventories.

Developed by John Osher, Inventor: SpinBrush Toothbrush.

Permission granted to the Minnesota Inventors Congress to forward this information to our database was received on Feb. 14, 2008.

-- "Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction." --
-- John F. Kennedy

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2011 when...

1. You accidentally enter your PIN on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Most commercials on television have a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't even have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go back and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. You keep thinking "I've read this list before, I think. Who can I send it new to who hasn't?"

14. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message to, thinking they already forgot it.

15. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

16. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list.