Most new businesses may be eager for new clients, but sometimes taking any job that comes your way can create some unwelcome hassles.
Rieva Lesonsky, CEO of GrowBiz Media, a media and custom content company focusing on small business and entrepreneurship, offered five tips to SCORE on obtaining worthwhile clients for small businesses.
A Silicon Valley technology company that makes software for analyzing customer buying patterns has picked Durham as its second U.S. office.
SugarCRM, based in Cupertino, opened the office on Emperor Boulevard about five weeks ago. It employs 12 in sales and engineering here, but it expects to double the staff in the coming months.
The company said in a statement it wanted to be closer to clients and resellers in the Eastern half of the United States, where it works with more than 60 "channel partners" to sell and support its products.
SugarCRM, founded in 2004, employs more than 200 people, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. Outside its two U.S. offices, the company has foreign offices in Munich, Paris, Cambridge, Sydney and Minsk.
The company's customers include Avis, Coca-Cola and General Motors. Its product, known as Customer Relationship Management, creates databases of customers, documenting their orders and preferences by location and other demographic categories.
If you ever think one consumer can't force change, here's a good example of a squeaky wheel.
Late Thursday, Costco Wholesale announced it had pulled a line of stuffed dolls after receiving a complaint from a member in North Carolina.
The "Cuddle with Me, Doll with Plush Monkey" line came in Caucasian, African-American and Hispanic representations. The customer complaint concerned the African-American version of the doll wearing a headband that said "Lil' Monkey" and cuddling with a stuffed monkey.
The Issaquah, Wash.-based retailer said the doll was carried only in its Northeast and Southeast regions and the company's Web site and was only for sale for a matter of days in July before it was pulled.
A number of reports and Web sites have criticized the retailer for carrying the product. Costco apologized, saying it didn't mean to carry "an item that demonstrated racial or ethnic insensitivity."
"We are sensitive to any complaint that a product we carry would cause discomfort to any segment of our membership," said CEO Jim Sinegal, in a prepared statement. "As soon as it became clear to us that this toy item was offensive to some of our members, we decided to remove it from our warehouses. We don't believe there is room for argument in matters of this type."
