Steve Farnsworth is a serial entrepreneur and a student at Fort Lewis College and at the age of 24, a Young Go Getter! Check out his site Burner Sports, where he serves as the President.

Anyone who has ever bought a car or a house from a dealer knows that sales people have MOTOR MOUTHS! It’s a fact, just call up any real estate agent, or car salesman, and you won’t be able to get off the phone until you commit to something. These two industry’s are an exception to what I am about to tell you. Real Estate Agents and Car Salesman are paid to talk, yet even they should know their limits.

I worked for an Environmental Chamber Manufacturer for about three years (I still do consulting for them), as a sales associate. It was primarily a position where I would make sales calls and receive sales calls. We were trained to do 2 things while on the phone with a prospect, or a current customer. The first thing we were trained to do was keep the conversation brief. I would time how long I was on the phone with each customer by using a stop watch that was always on my desk. I was trained to keep the conversation at about 3-5 minutes per sales call. This was a typical sales call, some situations required more time because more knowledge and information was communicated back and forth which is perfectly fine.

The second thing that I was trained to do was to ask questions. I would ask a lot of questions. This gets the customer talking; it gets them excited and engaged in the sale. I would just sit back, listen and take down as many notes as possible, which could be used for the next time we talked. This process of listening also allowed the buyer to sell themselves in many ways, I mostly just had to supply the information that they required. Sure I would talk about why our products are better than ‘the other guy’s’, but the real sale was made when I asked questions that allowed them to see the benefits in our products without me saying too much.

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Ryan is a twenty something attending graduate school in Texas. He fancies himself an entrepreneur and writes about relationship marketing, eCommerce, and other elements of business as it relates to Generation Y, on his blog, Ryan Stephens Marketing.

Most of the MBA students I know think they are absolutely brilliant. Because of the piece of paper they get when the graduate they will probably get to start out at about $100K a year. Evidently this notion, coupled with their narcissism, entitles them to think they are better than you and me. And that is okay with me because I am confident I can attain that status (provided I want to) in the amount of time they spent in the ‘real world’ and coming back to get their MBA.

The rest of this post outlines 3 reasons why you should skip obtaining your MBA or online MBA.

Reason #1: It’s about PEOPLE — not rules, theorems, and formulas.

Being a great business person, or a great marketer is about connecting with people; it’s about building and solidifying relationships, and it is about making your brand a Lovemark. Managerial Cost Accounting doesn’t help you do that. I do not want to spend my life tucked away in a cubicle (or an office), but out on the streets interacting with and learning from consumers. What do they really want? How can I facilitate our relationship by providing them with the solution they are looking for?

What theorem teaches me how to do that? When you start seeing your business as a business of margins you are in danger of becoming a commodity. You can learn all the strategies in the world to get attention for your business, but what do you do when you get it? Is it sustainable? Learning about the people, your consumers and what they want enables you to thrive and consistently answer these questions. A piece of paper that dictates how well you ran regressions does not.

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A Look at the Benefits

We can all remember the days as a kid where we wanted to be a cowboy or an astronaut when we grew up (I still think being a cowboy would be kind of cool). Then the year after that, maybe you’d have the desire to be a pro hockey player or an movie star. Eventually, we’d all grow up and some of us would go to college while others entered the work force. With that, our childhood dreams evolved as well. For some of us, they evolved into running their own company, the desire to work for yourself as opposed to working for someone else. Now, a lot of you here are already in the driver’s seat cruising down that path, you own your own business and somewhere along the line the thought of buying an existing business has strolled through your mind. If you’ve ever found yourself in that position, you’ve probably asked yourself questions like “Is it right for me? If so, where do I start?” There are a lot of things to think about and the choices you make can greatly impact the outcome. In a series of upcoming articles, I’m going to touch up on some details of buying a business.

You Don’t Exactly Need a DeLorean…

Alright, so you may not be able to tell the future (…yet. Great business idea here, folks.), but there are ways around that, which can prove equally as beneficial. When you’re looking to purchase an existing business that is up and running smoothly, you get the chance to know what you’re getting into before you actually get into it. The opportunity to look at all of a company’s bookwork allows you learn a lot about the company besides just the numbers. The more organized the bookwork is, the better the chance that the company itself is well organized and properly structured. Just like buying vegetables at the supermarket, you get to look for what you want without having to spend the time growing it and not knowing how it will turn out.

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Monica O’Brien is a guest writer from Twenty Set, a blog about personal and professional development for millennials.

One of my friends graduated in June 2007 and was headhunted for a startup after posting his resume on CareerBuilder. He was 20 years-old and had a choice: do the startup or take the other, much safer offer at a larger company. He chose the startup and joined a team of nine employees who built robots for large firms - in the CEO’s father’s basement.

What I failed to mention is how I met my friend - we’ve been coworkers for the past four months. The startup company was doing great business by building the top robots in the industry - but went bankrupt five months after my friend started due to lawsuits from the CEO’s old company.

But my friend survived his first affair with a startup, and you can too - because startups aren’t that risky. Here are three reasons why…

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A recent graduate of Harvard University, Lauren currently works full-time as a Marketing Associate in the Consumer Products Division at L’Oreal USA. Having spent 4 years as a Social Anthropology major (no, she didn’t study bones and fossils; it’s the study of people and cultures) and a lifetime as someone with entrepreneurial tendencies (at age 7, Lauren was selling her parents possessions, unbeknownst to them, for $1 a piece out in front of her driveway), Lauren decided it was time to put her knowledge of people, her ability to quickly build a rapport with others and her knack for business to good use.

We’ve all been there…
Maybe you forgot to set your clock. Maybe you set it, but you weren’t paying close enough attention and that wretched little dot was in the PM position. Maybe it actually went off… and in your sleepy stupor, desperate and wincing, all you could think about was clicking it back off.

Being late – particularly, being late AND looking like you’re late because you just woke up – is one of the worst impressions you can make with customers, clients, interviewers, and the like. If you’re armed with some quick tricks of the trade, oversleeping doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have to BE late or look like you just got out of bed…

Taking the following actions will get you out of the door in 15 minutes (or less) and, more importantly, could save you from personal and professional embarrassment.

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My son is currently eight months old, he is growing very quickly and he is very healthy little man. But I was sitting here tonight and I thought “Boy, I sure have learned a lot from him!” So, I decided to write down the four business qualities and lessons that he has reinforced in me over the past few months. They are very important lessons and his impression of these qualities are priceless to me.

Sharing them with you is very important to me. And yes that is a picture of my son up top, his name is Caden Andrew Nowak! I hope you enjoy; creating this article meant a lot to me!

1. Forget the bad things!
Have you ever noticed when babies hurt themselves, or get disciplined they are sad for a very short while? But not 2 minutes later they are happy and playing again. They have an uncanny knack for forgetting the bad thing that just happened and moving on to good things.

Us grownups seem to take failure very hard, dwelling on it for days and sometimes longer. Why don’t we just take it as a lesson learned, use the experience as a positive and move on or try and do it better next time?

2. Determination
My son is very determined when he wants something, he will spend hours sometime devising a plan to get where he wants (usually where he shouldn’t!) with a single focus. It rarely matters how long it takes or what’s in his way he will keep going.

Why do we quit when the going gets tough, or stop trying when it gets hard? Hardly anything is worth working for if it isn’t hard to achieve! So when the going gets tough, just think of what a baby would do, and get going!

3. Creativity
There is no imposed limits to babies, they haven’t had societies limits imposed on them yet. They believe and think anything is possible. They live day in and day out creating things and imagining the impossible. Look at home many things people have said were impossible, flight for example.

Maybe a little more creativity could help you in your professional life, I know it could help me in mine. Take those limits off your brain and set it loose for awhile, I think you will be amazed at what you come up with!

4. Loyalty
Babies are loyal to their parents while they are young, they completely believe in their parents as their sole provider and teacher. They look at their parents as hero’s and wouldn’t give them up for anything. They stick by their parents.

Being loyal to your customers, business associates, partners and family is a quality that seems to be disappearing today. Yet I believe it is one of the best traits you can have. I would not work with anyone that wasn’t loyal.

We can all understand how easy it is to get accustomed to the way things are and get into following a routine. Sometimes, it takes a change in that routine to begin seeing things through a different perspective. I recently took a position, similar to my previous position, but with a different company. This change was enough for me to step back and analyze exactly what customer loyalty means. I noticed many differences between the way the two companies were run and it got me to thinking how this effects the customer.

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