I've written before about the growing open innovation trend being pioneered by sites like Fellowforce and Spigit. Ideablob is another site supporting the open development of business ideas. And they're putting some money behind it too -- each month, the idea voted best by other Ideablob members wins $10,000 to pursue its development.

Past winners include:

• Penn State student & inventor Matt Allison for creating a portable touch screen device that syncs with a fitness-based social networking website. (more)
• No Sweat Apparel CFO John Studer for the company to continue producing their newest line of organic cotton knit t-shirts at a Palestinian-owned factory on Virgin Mary Street in Bethlehem. (more)
• Penn State student Aaron Fleishman won for Mashavu, a student project providing networked health solutions for children in third world countries. (more)

You can join for free and review and vote on the ideas, offer advice and build your reputation and submit your own idea for a shot at the $10,000 monthly prize.

Ever thought about buying a franchise as a way to own your own business? Franchises generally offer a proven business model, a reliable supply chain, brand recognition and national marketing support. Of course, all that comes at a price, but the success rate with established franchises is significantly higher than among entrepreneurs generally.

If you'd like to explore franchise ownership, you'll want to get to know Don Daszkowski, our new Franchising Guide. Don is President and CEO of Business Mart and the Franchise Buyers Network. He has owned and operated several businesses for the last 14 years.

Don's site is your source for everything you ever wanted to know about franchising, including:

• Franchise Basics
• Choosing a Franchise
• Buying a Franchise
• Franchise Reviews
• Popular Franchises
• Legal Issues
• Franchise Business Plans
• Financing

If franchising is new to you, or if you're just starting to explore it as an option, you may want to start with:

• Top 10 Reasons to Buy a Franchise
• The Process of Buying a Franchise
• How Much Does a Franchise Cost?

Don't franchising blog is also a great source of current news and issues in franchising, such as:

• Is McDonald's Recession Proof?
• Subway Franchise is Going Green
• The Franchisor Must Tell All (an analysis of the new Franchise Disclosure Document)
• Dunkin' Donuts Expansion Plan Will Hurt Some Existing Franchisees

Elsewhere on the Web:

• Blue MauMau
• Franchise Pick
• Franchise Law Blog
• The Franchise King Blog
• Franchise Pundit

Following up on my last post, 7 Signs It's Time to Drop a Client, the latest issue of Harvard Business Review has an in-depth report on the practice of "customer divestment", entitled The Right Way to Manage Unprofitable Customers. The full article requires an HBR subscription, but there's a summary at BNET.

While the authors recognize that there may be situations in which customer divestment is the best course of action, they see it as a last resort, and recommend a five-step process to try to salvage the relationship first, and to gracefully exist if it can't be saved:

1. Reassess the relationship. Why has the customer become a problem? And is there other value in the relationship besides just immediate profitability?
2. Educate customers. Can you retrain your customers to use lower-cost support options? Or perhaps they're unaware of your additional offerings that they might consider purchasing.
3. Renegotiate your value proposition. Can you create a pricing and service strategy that meets the client's needs while maintaining profitability? They may be willing to pay for that extra service they're demanding.
4. Migrate customers. Can you switch the client to a different distribution or support channel? A partner company? Perhaps a new payment plan?
5. Divest as a last resort. But do so in ways that minimize potential negative fallout. For example:
• With B2B clients, communicate your decision to divest months before a contract-renewal date comes up. Explain your reasoning in person, and help clients recognize that termination may be mutually beneficial.
  
• With B2C customers, provide advance notice in person or by a human voice rather than by an after-the-fact email message or letter. Also, focus your explanation on external factors (such as mounting competitive pressure to change your strategy) rather than simply a desire to increase profits.

Have you ever been fired by a client? It's painful, embarrassing and even a bit depressing when it happens. It can completely throw your confidence as an entrepreneur.

And yet, it may be the best thing in the world for both you and your client.

But why let it get to the point that they have to fire you? Don't you want to be the one in charge of the relationship? Don't you want to end it on your own terms, as much as possible?

While you may feel like you really have to hang on to the client, whether for your own cash flow or out of your sense of commitment, there are several signs that it may be time to terminate the client relationship.

In some cases, the problem really is with the client, and you should just fire them:

• The client is a jerk. Life's too short. Dealing with jerks is stressful, and if you're stressed, not only will it affect your mental and physical well-being -- it will also affect your ability to serve your other customers well. It will affect your relationships with employees and business partners. And if they're that difficult, odds are that they're not going to be a good referral source for you anyway -- they may even be a liability.
• The client drains all your time. You may have heard of the Pareto Principle, aka "The 80/20 rule". In this context, it's the idea that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers, while 20% of your profits come from 80% of your customers. Now I'm not suggesting you should drop your smallest clients, just the least profitable ones. Sometimes it's difficult clients, but sometimes it's the nicest ones -- the ones who can talk you into doing just a little bit more, then a little more, then more, and so on. Scope creep! Try to draw the line with your client, but if it continues, you may have to cut them off.
• The client doesn't do their part on time. In most projects, the client has deliverables as well as you. Just as the client relies on the project schedule to plan their business and cash flow, so do you. Their failure to meet deadlines is potentially just as detrimental to your business as your failure to do so might be to them.
• The client doesn't pay on time. Sure, they pay eventually, so you live with it. A few days once or twice may be forgivable, but if it's a pattern, or if it stretches out more than a few days, you probably need to drop them. Remember, the time you're spending on them is time you could be spending finding and working for a client who pays on time.

In other cases, though, it may be more about your own situation than about the client:

• You're spread too thin. If you're trying to manage too many clients and other projects, you clearly have to be less effective somewhere. If you don't take something off your plate, someone else will do it for you. Be proactive and make the decision as soon as possible so that you can be the one who decides what stays and what goes.
• You've lost all passion for the project. While I certainly think you shouldn't stay in a business you're not passionate about, I'm not suggesting you should drop every client or project for which you've lost enthusiasm. But at some point, that's the case. Imagine you're working as a campaign manager, and something happens that causes you to stop believing in your candidate. Do you really think you can continue to do the best job for them? Isn't it your responsibility to let them find someone else who can really put their heart into it?
• You've outrun your own capabilities. Maybe the project calls for expertise that you don't have. Or perhaps you can't deliver the quantity the client needs -- whether that's manpower or product. You may be able to find a partner to help you meet the requirements, but you also want to consider whether that's really the best option. Can you still operate at your best in that situation? If so, great, but if not, it may be best to just let it go.

These latter cases are especially difficult, because we feel a sense of responsibility to our client -- we've made a commitment and we want to keep it.

But isn't your real commitment to do right by your customer? If your client is happy with you, they may have a hard time accepting that you want to drop them, but in the long run, it's almost certainly in their best interest. Explain the situation and help them find your replacement. You may have to give up the current business in order to save the relationship, but in the long run, the relationship is more valuable.

The week of April 21-25 has been declared U.S. National Small Business Week 2008. Live events are taking place in Washington, D.C., and New York City, including several ceremonies honoring the 2008 NSBW Award Winners (and no, the Scott Allen that's receiving an award isn't me -- I wish!).

The web site for the event, NationalSmallBusinessWeek.com, will offer live webcasts of the award events, plus real-time blogs, photos and other information posted by award winners, speakers, sponsors and other attendees.

Everyone seems to be hopping on the professional blogging bandwagon these days. And why not? Blogs are hot right now, and blogging about a topic you're passionate about is a lot of fun.

But how much money can you really make blogging?

There are a couple of different approaches to professional blogging. The first is to write a blog for a blog network or other company -- basically a freelance writing gig. The second is to run your own blog and monetize it with advertising and affiliate programs.

Jennifer Chait at Network Blogging Tips offers some rare insight into the first model, with a look at typical blog wages, in which she exposes eight actual deals that either she or other bloggers have accepted recently. The deals range from $7-$12 a post or $120 a month at the low end to over $1,000 a month on the high end.

For independent bloggers, Problogger Darren Rowse provides a closer look at how much money a blog can earn. He shows examples ranging from about $135 a month to over $3,000 a month, and takes a look at seven factors that contribute to a blog's earnings.

The real question is... is it worth it?

Lucretia M. Pruitt, aka GeekMommy, offered up on Twitter perhaps the best definition of an entrepreneur I've ever heard:

I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm one of those relatively useless idea persons - good only for the concept. Entrepreneurs make things happen.

You might easily mistake them for another April Fool's joke, but the company is completely for real. StartupWear launched today, offering a collection of T-shirts that take a humorous look at the life of an entrepreneur. Here are a few samples, along with some links to related articles (images are linked directly to the corresponding shirts, in case you want to buy one):

Related: Good Ideas Do Not Need Angels

Related:
Ignore That Pie in the Sky: Understanding Your Real Market Potential
The "Defendable Swag" -- How to Realistically Estimate Your Market Potential

I loved the description on this one:

Work life balance is for sissies and Timothy Ferriss. Proudly display your caffeinated and unsustainable lifestyle.

Related: Tim Ferriss Interview

Related: Actually, I have nothing related - it was just my personal favorite and the one I'm going to order. :-)

For some additional fun, have a look at StartupWear's VC pitch (PDF).

Hat tip to Mashable

A while back, I did an audio interview with Tim Ferriss (Listen), author of the bestselling The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Compare Prices). I don't normally do transcripts of the audio interviews I do, but I've had so many requests for a transcript of this one that I decided to go ahead and get it done:

• Tim Ferriss Interview

It's five pages, covering a wide variety of topics, including Tim's personal entrepreneurial story, Richard Branson, creating a turnkey business, passive income, outsourcing, remembering to put a value on your time and what to do with all that extra time once you've created it.

By the way, if you're interested in getting transcriptions of podcasts done, let me tell you a little about my experience. Following the advice in his book, I had the transcript done very inexpensively by someone in India I hired off Guru.com. I still had to review it and correct it, but I've always had to do that with U.S.-based transcriptionists as well. I might have had to make a few more corrections, but those actually don't take that long -- the time-consuming part is just listening to the whole thing and reading it as you listen.

I probably spent an extra 10-15 minutes vs. using an American resource, and spent $8 instead of $25-$30. Let's call that $20 savings for, say, 12 minutes of my time. Multiply that by 5 and you get $100 per hour. Using the rough estimate technique Tim talks about in the interview, that works out to a rate of about $200K per year.

Is your time worth that? If so, then you'll probably save money by using a native speaker with a lower error rate, even if they're a bit more expensive. If not, then you'll more likely save money by using the cheaper offshore resource. If you're doing it on an ongoing basis, if you can get a resource that you can trust to produce error-free transcripts that you don't have to check yourself, then it's simple: do you make more or less per hour than they do? If you make more, then you definitely want a resource who can give it to you publication-ready.

The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award is one of the highest recognitions that entrepreneurs can receive for their achievement. Many people may not be aware that there is not just one winner. First of all, there are winners in multiple categories. Secondly, there are regional winners, as well. In 2007, some 260 entrepreneurs received recognition for their achievement. It's great publicity within your community and industry.

You can nominate yourself or someone else (what a great gift for the entrepreneur in your life!):

• Learn more about the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year program
• Entrepreneur of the Year Online Application Form