Other than adding up their own costs and adding a % margin on top of that, most businesses have little knowledge of how to price their products. We are going to look at a few of the best tricks and tips for developing your pricing model for your business. Whether you are trying to build a SAS subscription model or running a retail store and fighting prices on commodities, we’ll identify some of the key considerations to know when pricing your products.

Our presenter Christopher Hastings has studied at both the Acton School of Business and the London School of Economics, building expertise in both entrepreneurship and international development. He is the founder of two startups, one focused on providing CPAs with the tools they need to counsel entrepreneurs (including on topics of pricing) and the other focused on location analysis for economic development. Despite having written textbook chapters on entrepreneurship and run budgets of 150MM+ supply chain projects, he is never happier than when working one on one with entrepreneurs to improve their businesses.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cjhastings
Twitter: @HastingsCJ

Date: August 23, 7:00 p.m.

Location:
Business Success Center
Chase Bank Tower
7600 Burnet Rd.
Austin, TX 78757
933-1983

More info: http://www.meetup.com/BootstrapB2B/calendar/14292134/

The US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Services has a simple nine-point Export Questionnaire (not just for ag businesses) that addresses your international marketing plan, available resources, and your existing knowledge of export processes. The result rates your company on a scale of 1–100 and provides comments and next-steps for each question.

The California Centers for International Trade Development offer a more detailed Export Readiness Assessment that covers your present operations, attitudes, and products. Like the USDA’s tool, the assessment gives you a readiness score, point-by-point diagnosis and suggested actions.

Ready to take the next step? Have a look at the US Department of Commerce’s vast Helping U.S. Companies Export site, or give us a call — we’re here to help.

While the report doesn’t exactly toe the enviro line — it promotes expansion of nuclear power and R&D investments in “clean coal” technology — green-minded readers can only applaud its call for enhanced energy efficiency and modernization of the electric power grid to better accommodate renewable energy. Encouragingly, Roundtable President John Castellani explicitly acknowledged that a sustainable transition to a low-carbon economy must be a national priority.

Many small businesses fall into exporting “accidentally” when orders from overseas customers start to trickle in through their website. Maximize your company’s potential by managing it as a global business from day one. Your business is already global, whether you know it yet or not!

I won’t try to summarize the content on this blog; if you haven’t read it, the original Web “manifesto” and 95 (!) “theses” are here along with a link to the full text of the book, and the Wikipedia article gives a good overview.

Kalle Lasn of Adbusters magazine may have been the first to identify advertising as a form of pollution, back when the World Wide Web was still just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. But Lasn has little to say about alternatives to the conventional corporate model, and it took Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger to suggest that companies may be able to thrive by actively pursuing authentic “networked conversations” among and between their employees and customers.

It would be easy to dismiss Cluetrain as dot-com era hyperbole. After all, traditional top-down marketing, advertising and PR don’t show any signs of going away, and most of the big corporations that use them seem to be doing fine. Still, the insight that “there is no market for messages” remains valid, and the rise of blogging and “social media” have made the Internet more conversational than ever. Could these technologies really be opening a space where businesses based on genuine human-to-human communication have a chance to compete with the old mass-market monsters?

And is the effectiveness of marketing really all that’s at stake here? Even the original Cluetrain authors seem to have missed some of the deeper questions their work raises. The dirty little secret of, well, of modern capitalism is that, for generations now, the consumer goods industries have been churning out an ever-growing volume of products that no one really wants, along with increasingly intrusive advertising to generate demand for it all. Science fiction author Frederik Pohl satirized the situation in his 1983 novel Midas World, in which the masses of ordinary people are forced to live in extravagant luxury so that a tiny elite of super-rich can live simply. At some point we have to ask ourselves what it is we’re really trying to achieve.