How to Start a Business

When a business starts to slip, the owner usually feels it before they can measure it. Fewer calls. A quieter inbox. A bank balance that seems lower than it should be. That feeling is useful as an alarm, but it's a poor guide to what to do next. Some owners panic over...

In 1879, a St. Louis chemist named Joseph Lawrence created an alcohol-based antiseptic and named it Listerine, after Joseph Lister, the surgeon who championed sterile surgery. Lawrence first promoted it as a surgical antiseptic. Two years later he licensed the formula...

In 2003, three university students in Finland, Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen and Kim Dikert, won a game development competition and used the win to start a small studio called Relude. Two years later, after bringing in its first angel investor, the company renamed...

When sales slow down, owners tend to suspect the product. Maybe the service isn't good enough, the market moved, or the idea was wrong from the start. Sometimes that's true. But a surprising number of small businesses are selling something people would happily buy,...

During World War I, Kimberly-Clark made a material called Cellucotton, a creped wadding made from wood pulp that was far more absorbent than cotton and cheaper to produce. With cotton in short supply, the military bought it for surgical dressings, and the company...

In 1957, an engineer named Al Fielding and a Swiss inventor named Marc Chavannes ran two layers of plastic shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine. The sheet that came out was full of trapped air bubbles. They thought they had invented a new kind of textured...

Every business has an idea of who its customer is. The bookkeeper serves restaurants. The photographer shoots weddings. The web designer works with local retailers. That picture shapes the website, the pricing, the marketing and the way the owner describes the...