Inc.com

In America, bosses are only held captive in movies. In China, it's everyday business. As last week's episode with U.S. executive Chip Starnes proved, you can never be too prepared for a hostage crisis.

Last week, Chip Starnes, the owner Specialty Medical Supplies in Coral Gables, Florida, was held captive by employees of his medical supply plant on the outskirts of Beijing for six days until he agreed to pay them generous severance packages. He was released last Thursday.

Starnes has reportedly agreed to hire some of those workers back, this time under different contracts. In a shocking episode that won't be soon forgotten, the American executive, whom workers feared would shut down the plant entirely, was strong-armed into paying two months' salary and compensation totaling nearly $300,000 to 97 workers, according to USA Today.

These sorts of situations aren't uncommon when settling debt disputes in China, says Dan Harris, a lawyer at Harris & Moure and author of a blog at chinalawblog.com. "[Hostage taking] is just a tactic that's used to get paid," says Harris, who has helped numerous executives get out of hostage situations. "They use it when a relative gets killed in the factory. Injured workers do it."

If you're facing a dispute in China, here's how to protect yourself.

Establish relationships with authorities early on.

"As soon as you come to China, you should stop by the various government offices to introduce yourself and tell them what you'll be doing," says Harris. Explain how many people you plan to employ and how happy you are to be there. "It really matters," he says. If they don't know who you are, they won't jump to help when you call with an emergency.

Give everyone employment contracts.

"Often, Americans will go to China, hire three employees, not like two, and fire them," says Harris. "Then those people will come back asking for [an unreasonable amount of severance] and the American will be like, 'You only worked for two months and did a terrible job.' The American will ask us to fight it, but he'll lose for the following reason: He didn't have a written contract."

Having such documentation is the only way to ensure you have the law on your side and won't fall prey to what Harris calls "automatic mass severance," which must be paid when a worker is let go. In the document, clearly state what you consider to be grounds for termination and what may constitute a reasonable severance, given the circumstances. Chances are, you'll still need to negotiate the final payout, but it's far better to cut a $7,000 severance check than to pay $50,000 in legal fees, says Harris.

Do not meet face to face.

Resist the urge to meet in person when there's a dispute, says Harris. He advises against setting foot in China if you're facing a legal battle, owe money, or need to close down a facility. Especially if you're asked to meet in the factory or a backwater town, where the other party is likely to have the community's support.

If you must meet face-to-face, do so in a big city--ideally, in a five-star, locally-owned hotel. These hotels are more likely to have good security. Plus, says Harris, "a big, wealthy hotel controlled by powerful Chinese people won't want the publicity of something bad going down."

Get your weekly serving of what's new in tech. This week: The latest sign Apple is working on a watch, and phones to watch (skip).

Welcome to the debut of a brand new series: tech trends of the week. Starting now and on each Monday, I'll cover the tech trends, gadgets, business services, and apps of note. The goal is to highlight not just consumer flash-in-the-pan ideas, but actual developments that could impact your business. Post in comments if you know of any other trends from the week!

1. Apple trademarks iWatch
The big news of the week is the first real confirmation of an Apple smartwatch. Amid rumors and speculation about what Apple might be doing comes this news: Apple filed for a trademark for the name iWatch in Japan. As any entrepreneur knows, a trademark filing could be a strategic move or it could be the initial steps in product development. I'm hoping an iWatch doesn't just parlay what is on an iPhone to your wrist, but has some features for monitoring your environment and connecting you to other iWatch users. The iWatch could finally be the major innovation Apple needs.

2. Firefox phone debuts... in Spain
I first wrote about the coming Firefox phone in a very popular article about tech debuts for 2013. Well, now we know the operating system, which works a bit like Google's Android, is for real. We now know the ZTE One will launch in Spain. Another model, the Alcatel One Touch Fire, will launch in other foreign markets. One reason to keep an eye on the Firefox phones: The phone doesn't run traditional apps but relies on rich HTML5 content instead. That could mean innovative features outside of the traditional app model. (For example, a feature that links your current location to social networks and upcoming business meetings.)

3. Google Reader is dead
Google has diversified lately with services like Google Now (which shows you news and info about your day that's more personalized) and Google+, a Facebook clone that has more of a tech focus. If you're still using Google Reader to browse the Web, that service is going dark today. You can switch over to something like Prismatic or just follow the Google lead: rely on social networks, Twitter, and even Tumblr for your daily news fix. The posts from my Twitter friends are a much better source of news than Google Reader.

4. HP might return to smartphones
What is the ROI on $1.2 billion when it comes to smartphones? Not much, considering that's what HP spent to purchase Palm back in 2010. I covered the Pre phones in all of their incarnations back then and was never impressed. Well before that fiasco, the company made many Windows phone models and PDAs. Recently, HP hinted in an interview that it might return to the smartphone market. My guess: HP is waiting to see if Windows phones can make any headway, which would match up well with its Windows 8 strategy. Tech companies: If HP does return to the fold, I'd recommend watching it closely--especially if you have already jumped on the Windows 8 bandwagon.

5. BlackBerry is dead again
You may have missed this from late last week, but BlackBerry is in a slump... again. The company released actual sales numbers last week, revealing that the BlackBerry 10 phone like the Z10 failed to catch on. The company reported a major net loss that resulted in a shocking 26 percent decline in their stock price. I'm not quite ready to stick a fork in BlackBerry yet, though. I like the new OS and think it has potential. The main challenge has to do with perception. Businesses view the iPhone and Android phones as much more attractive. My advice: Wait and see if BlackBerry gets some momentum going.

George Zimmer wasn't the first founder to get axed by the company he'd built. Here are seven other founders who suffered the same fate.

Men's Wearhouse made headlines recently when it decided to can its TV spokesman and founder George Zimmer. This type of thing happens all the time, says Noam Wasserman, a professor at Harvard Business School. Sometimes their passion detracts from their management skills and they aren't suited to run the companies their start-ups grow into. Here are seven more founders who learned the hard way.

Tesla Motors might be synonymous with the name Elon Musk, but the company has two founders. In 2007, Tesla fired Martin Eberhard from his post as president, but apparently signing a"non-disparagement agreement" didn't stop him from sounding off on the company. In 2009, Eberhard sued Musk for libel and breach of contract, as well as taking credit for developing Tesla's Roadster. The suit also claimed Tesla had withheld his severance pay as a consequence of violating the non-disparagement clause.

Maker Studios' co-founder and recent CEO Daniel Zappin alleges the company breached his contract by pushing him out. According to Variety, which first broke the story, the lawsuit says "Maker Studios and other defendants 'conspired and agreed to use their power to line their pockets with Maker's assets, to deny Mr. Zappin, Maker's then chief executive officer ('CEO'), of all of his powers, and to gut the rights of common stock shareholders to control Maker and its corporate activities.'" Last December, Time Warner took a stake in Maker Studios, leading a $36 million investment.

Despite being fired, Andrew Mason still took the high road. Mason broke the news in a farewell letter to Groupon employees, in which he took responsibility for the company's failings, including its disappointing earnings since going public in 2011. "As CEO, I am accountable," he wrote. "You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I'm getting in the way of that." On July 2, Mason will release a seven-track record of "motivational business music" called Hardly Workin'.

The circumstances behind Jack Dorsey's departure as Twitter's first CEO remain unclear, though Chris Sacca, an early investor in the company, said they weren't fair. Regardless, Dorsey remains the company's chairman and has moved on to other ventures, including the well-received payment start-up, Square. Things may have worked out for the best, as Dorsey once told Inc., "There's a lot of emphasis on the initial moments of a company, but that ignores the reality that companies exist and evolve over time. A company has multiple founding moments."

Steve Jobs founded Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak in 1976, when he was just 21-years-old. In 1985, he was fired by the company's board and then-CEO John Sculley, whom he'd personally recruited from PepsiCo. The episode dealt a heavy blow, but Jobs moved on. He began a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc., then purchased an animation company from George Lucas that became Pixar Animation Studios. In 1997, the year Apple purchased NeXT, Inc. for $429 million, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.

"Jeffrey's firing is certainly a cautionary tale for me, and a reminder that there are no guarantees in business, even for founders," Seth Goldman, president and TeaEO of Honest Tea, wrote in Inc. after Jeffrey Hollender was fired from Seventh Generation. Hollender launched the company in 1988 and helped build it into a $150 million empire. He left his post as CEO post in 2009 to become a chairperson. But in October 2010, he was finally let go.

Getting fired once is bad enough, but Rob Kalin had to experience it twice. Kalin founded the online crafts marketplace in 2005 with Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik, and Jared Tarbell. In July 2008, Kalin was replaced as CEO by Maria Thomas, an executive from NPR. Less than a year after her departure, he returned to his previous post. But in July 2011, Kalin was replaced again, this time by the company's CTO, Chad Dickerson.

Don't be so quick to turn to VC money. Here's why I recommend angels, instead.

I recently closed a $1 million seed-funding round for Likeable Local, my new social media software company. But it wasn't through venture capitalists. My seed round is a convertible note raised entirely through angels.

While venture capital dollars are shrinking, angels, a new class of investors, are growing in number each quarter. And though this influx of angel money may make it harder to raise later-stage funding because of the so-called series A "crunch" it creates, I'd recommend it to you, too.

Here's three reasons why:

1. Money (Of Course)

The most obvious way angel investors can help you grow your business is through the dollars they invest. I raised $910,000 exclusively through angels. Whether you need $25,000 or $1 million to get your company off the ground, you can turn to angels for money. I suggest you use AngelList or Gust to find the angels and angel networks that make the most sense for you to pitch.

2. Networking and Mentorship

Beyond dollars, angels help you meet other smart people who can help you grow your business, mentor you, and teach you. Every angel, whether or not he or she funds you, has an extensive network of people who can help you in one way or another.

I've pitched several angels who chose not to invest in Likeable Local for a wide variety of reasons, but ended up introducing me to others, who did in turn invest or help me. Also, even though I don't actively angel invest except through my affiliation with Gen Y Capital, I've helped several entrepreneurs who angels introduced me to.

3. Business Strategy and Recruiting

Many angel investors were once entrepreneurs so they often have extensive experience building, growing, and selling scalable businesses. Because they've been through the process, angels can provide invaluable advice, no matter what stage of the business you're in. Angels can also refer you to people with proven experience growing start-ups--people they've hired or worked with before, whether in development, sales, marketing, finance, or any leadership role.

What has your experience been talking to and fundraising from angel investors?

For boat designer Rodger Martin, it's the key to his company's success.

In the sailing world, shorthanded races (those with just one or two crew members per boat) have a reputation for being especially grueling.

In May, seven two-person crews competed in the Atlantic Cup, a 16-day Class 40 race between Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, with a stopover in New York City. Pictured here in New York Harbor is Icarus Racing, a Class 40 boat designed by Rodger Martin Design of Newport and skippered by teammates Tim Fetsch (on the stern) and Ben Poucher (below deck).

The 40-foot monohull, which is on loan from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Sailing Foundation, has eight sails. Since South African native Rodger Martin founded the company in 1984, he and partner Ross Weene have designed about 60 boats for international clients, averaging about $200,000 in annual sales.

Despite being one of the oldest boats in the race--it was built in 2007--Icarus placed third. "Rodger was really ahead of his time when he designed her," Poucher says.

New York Harbor 05.14.13 7:51 P.M. / Photograph by Nathaniel Welch

Jack Dangermond, co-founder of mapping software maker Esri, talks about how his company maintains steady, stellar growth.

My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills. There's no substitute for growing up around people who actually like doing business.

I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape. After school, my wife and I moved back home to Redlands, California, and started working in our own very modest way. Redlands is not a high-tech capital like Silicon Valley. But it allowed us to live cheaply in a $400-a-month apartment. We had $1,100 total when we incorporated Esri.

Today, about 350,000 organizations use our tools. We have 9,000 employees worldwide and $912 million in revenue. In our 43 years, we have never missed a quarter. We've never had any layoffs; we've never had any downsizing. It's just been very conservative, systematic growth.

One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want--not what the stockholders or the VCs want. That's a strategic advantage. Customers notice that we are actually here to support them. And their needs help us innovate. We spend about a quarter of our annual revenue on innovation--about twice what a normal public company spends.

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.

Sure, I have the demands of my customers. But I don't have that investment world breathing down my back constantly. In Redlands, we're out of the Silicon Valley fray, where you can get a better job if you move across the street and venture capitalists are always searching you out.

Being in this so-called backwater, we are not well known, so we don't have investors wanting to get rich out of the good work we are doing. By not, as they say, "monetizing" the company, we can concentrate on the work that needs to get done.

When Gail and Stacey need to spread the love, they turn to their neighbors at The UPS Store.

Gail and Stacey, co-owners of Toys with Love, Inc., share a passion for making kids happy. So when they need to spread the love, be it shipping a gift nationally or printing event mailers for the whole town, they turn to their neighbors at The UPS Store®. Because while play is their business, The UPS Store experts don’t play around when it comes to providing the right packing, shipping and printing solutions. Learn more about The UPS Store small business solutions.

Good news: Distractions help you think, researchers say. But the type of distraction also has an impact on your performance.

Distractions help you make better decisions, researchers say.

According to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, you may be better able to make a complex decision after a period of distraction than a period of conscious focus.

In the study, led by Marlene Abadie of the University of Toulouse, researchers presented participants with a complex problem-solving question. Then the participants were given either a simple matching game to distract them, a complex distraction, or a quiet period in which to focus and reflect on the problem.

Researchers found that participants who came back to the problem after a simple distraction--like number matching--had a 75 percent chance of giving the right answer. Participants who experienced no distractions whatsoever had a 40 percent chance of answering correctly.

However, the unconscious-thought effect (UTE), which allows people to make better decisions after a period of distraction seems only to apply to simple distractions, the researchers say. Participants given a more complex distraction also had a 40 percent chance of answering correctly.

So the next time you're facing a tough decision, perhaps you should eschew the multitasking and opt for a game of Solitaire to clear your head.

Uber, the car service that is not a car service, knows that any time it moves into a new city, it will face a fight. That's fine. Fighting is good, winning is better, and explosive growth is best of all.

"Travis? He's out by the pool." An Uber employee who smells like sunblock greets me as I enter the front door to the Miami beach bungalow the company is renting. She bounds upstairs as I meander toward the back of the house, poking my head into various rooms. There are signs of the dozen recent college grads stationed here: a bedding pile crumpled on a couch; a jumble of high heels in the foyer.

Three Cadillac Escalades are parked out front. Out back are parked four Uber employees and their MacBooks, on benches and chaises around the pool. It's T-minus two hours to the first Miami supersecret cocktail hour, a recruiting party for which planning began 48 hours earlier, and Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, is calm.

He has been in meetings all morning, but now he's in a T-shirt and sandals, just catching up on email and joking around. He asks me if I'm familiar with the words jamazing and ledonk and treats me to the UrbanDictionary.com definitions of each--the latter of which he boasts of having coined.

When an employee whispers to Kalanick that an email promoting the party may have been sent out to the company's "all-Miami" list, the mood suddenly tenses.

"No, no, no, no, no," Kalanick says. "What part of 'this is not public' do you not understand?"

I excuse myself and duck back inside the house. Two lanky managers in Uber-logoed sleeveless T-shirts are hunched over the dining-room table, where they are instructing two brawny older men in black suits.

Uber is the extremely fast-growing company behind an app that lets city dwellers hail taxis, sedans, and SUVs--like the ones parked out front. The company, which was co-founded by Kalanick just four years ago, is doubling its revenue every four months, has hired 225 people in the past year, and now operates in 35 cities.

This group of Uber employees flew into Miami for 10 days in part for a work retreat, and in part to act as a kind of advance squad, whose duties include networking with hospitality workers, scouting venues, and recruiting Miami Uber drivers.

Keith Radford, who in a normal week is the general manager for Uber's operations in Atlanta, is explaining to a potential driver that touching a button on the driver's iPhone labeled Arriving Now will alert his passenger, who has hailed him through the Uber app on her phone.Three minutes later, if the passenger hasn't hopped in, the driver should phone her. After 17 more minutes, he's to call again if she hasn't shown--and then cancel the ride.

"Wow," says the driver, Baldwin Clarke, a longtime private driver in Miami and owner of one of the shiny vehicles out front. "Sometimes, I sit for hours. One time, I sat for 15 hours, no kidding. You guys don't mess around."

Radford, Kalanick, and I climb into the Escalade of another potential driver and head toward downtown for the party. "If we were operating, this could be considered the first Uber ride in Miami history," Kalanick says, squinting out over the Atlantic Ocean.

That's if Uber were operating in Miami. But we are just taking a test drive on this January night, and all the drivers shuttling passengers to the Uber party this evening are being paid hourly by Uber to try out the app. Using it to find fares, and accepting payment for a ride through it, would be illegal. Kalanick is here to change that.

In most major U.S. cities, and many around the world, there's an alternative to standing on a street corner flailing an arm for a taxi. Typically, this is phoning a local car service--or, within the past couple of years, opening an app on your phone. Open the Uber app, which was the first car-service app available in most U.S. cities, and you'll see a map of your location, replete with nearby vehicles for hire and their estimated times of arrival.

One can usually reach you in five minutes, and the ride will carry a minimum cost of about $7. But you can't do this in South Florida. Regulations in Miami-Dade County dictate that a car-service or limo ride must be booked at least 60 minutes before the ride begins and cost at least $80. Unless the Miami-Dade County Commission changes the law, Uber is locked out of a multihundred-million-dollar market.

As it expands, Uber often meets legal complications--cease-and-desist orders, court injunctions, the impounding of cars. Uber is no stranger to complaints from public utilities commissions, from city councils, and from taxi and limousine commissions, all of which have constituents clamoring for protection from the likes of Uber.

It used to be if a scrappy company tried to take on a local government, it might not have the heft to win. Uber, with $50 million in venture capital backing and a growth rate that rivals those of Google and Amazon in their early years, definitely has heft.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is so headstrong, so enthusiastic, and so combative that he is at risk of seeming like a parody of today's tech entrepreneur.

It also has an aggressive culture and growth strategy set by a CEO who is so headstrong, so enthusiastic, and so combative in defense of his big idea that he is at risk of seeming like a parody of today's tech entrepreneur--up to and including having a thing for Ayn Rand. You hear a lot about tech companies shaking up staid industries, pushing past slow, complacent competitors. This is the next phase. This is Silicon Valley's cult of disruption taking on city hall.

Recently, some of the world's fastest-growing tech companies have been pushing ahead with their ideas without pausing to ask for permission. As a result, they're behaving in ways lawmakers aren't quite comfortable with. Consider that on your phone, you can purchase luggage (say, on Amazon), find someone to carry said luggage (TaskRabbit), rent an apartment for a couple of days (Airbnb), and hail a luxury sedan (you get the picture). But when the luggage retailer doesn't pay state sales tax, the employment provider doesn't pay minimum wage, the renter doesn't hold the lease, and the sedan driver doesn't charge a fixed rate? The government is pissed.

Uber started operations in its hometown of San Francisco, then opened for business in four more cities before rolling into the nation's capital--its sixth city launch--in December 2011. Kalanick had assigned a launch team to explore potential regulatory hurdles in the district, and the team found what seemed to be clear skies.

Kalanick hired a Washington, D.C., manager named Rachel Holt, who followed a launch strategy that had proved successful in other cities and is still the basic model. She managed a team that recruited drivers, in part through cold calling car services and limo companies.

A separate team for community management started social-media outreach, and a post on Uber's blog announced that an Uber vehicle had been spotted in the district. Uber hosted a launch party for VIPs. The whole process took about six weeks, at the end of which Uber was fully operational.

All was going as planned in Washington. "Until I got a call at 6 a.m. from Rachel a month later," Kalanick says. The city's taxi commissioner, Ron Linton, had an Uber car impounded and its driver ticketed. He said Uber was violating regulations by charging fares based on time and distance--a privilege that, according to his reading of the regulations, was limited in D.C. to taxicabs. Uber was suddenly making national news. It did not, however, stop operating.

Then, last summer, councilwoman Mary Cheh proposed a transportation bill that included what were literally called Uber Amendments, one of which would have put a price floor under car-service rides, effectively making Uber five times as expensive as a taxi for short trips.

Uber came out swinging. It reached out to users asking for support. That drove 50,000 original emails and 37,000 tweets with the hash tag #UberDCLove. Cheh reversed, omitting the amendments Uber disliked. Then, she did more than that: She sponsored a nearly inverse piece of legislation that establishes a legal framework for "digital dispatch" in the district. It passed last winter.

These moves--the launch party, the hash tag--are straight from what everyone at Uber calls the playbook, a now-extensive collection of strategies for overcoming obstacles on the local level. After Uber launched in Chicago, the city's consumer protection board proposed regulations that would limit sedan drivers' use of metering devices--which in Uber's case is a smartphone. That would have essentially shut down Uber's black-car service there.

So the company launched a social-media campaign. "What we did in Chicago, what we do in all these cities, is reach out to all of our users and say, take action--email your councilperson; email the mayor," Kalanick says. "Uber riders are the most affluent, influential people in their cities. When we get to a critical mass, it becomes impossible to shut us down."

Denver is a more recent test of the playbook. In January, Colorado's Public Utilities Commission proposed rules under which the company could be classified as a motor carrier--meaning it would be treated like a taxi company. This issue is at the core of many of Uber's regulatory challenges. That's because, city by city and state by state, transportation companies of all sorts--cab, sedan, limo--are heavily regulated in terms of the insurance they carry, the structure of their fares, the background screening of their drivers, and the condition of their vehicles.

Uber neither owns vehicles nor employs drivers; it makes the technology that connects a user to a driver, one who is ostensibly already abiding by all these local regulations. As Kalanick often says, "They need to decide whether we are Orbitz or American Airlines."

To be classified as a transportation company would amputate from Uber the exact things that make it an exceptionally good business: its ability to scale fast, control how a rider pays, and not be bogged down by owning vehicles.

For a court hearing in March on the PUC's proposed rules, Kal­anick flew to Colorado, where Uber's team on the ground had already launched an online campaign (#UberDenverLove). After the daylong hearing, Kalanick hosted a nighttime rally, with drinks, for supporters at a local start-up education space called Galvanize. Uber is still doing battle in Denver. The Federal Trade Commission has weighed in against the PUC's proposed rules. Add a rally of ardent fans to the playbook.

In its political struggles, Uber's most potent weapon is its ability to present itself as a force for modernization and freedom and against bureaucrats and politically connected interests--and in broad strokes, that is an accurate picture. But it's not a complete picture, because Uber's competitors are in many cases other entrepreneurial businesses.

One major Uber opposition force is the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association, a global trade group of more than 1,000 livery fleets and taxi companies. The group scoffs at Uber's assertion that it can't be regulated like a taxicab or limo company because it doesn't own any cars or directly employ any drivers. The TLPA isn't against ride-hailing apps in general--it endorses one called Taxi Magic--but it characterizes Uber's product and others as "rogue apps," and published a white paper by that name.

Central to the complaint is Uber's surge-pricing system, whereby the price for rides rises as demand increases. So a ride home on New Year's Eve might cost you five times as much as a ride home on December 30.

Mike Fogarty, the CEO of limousine company Tristar Worldwide Chauffeur Service, which runs fleets in New York City, Boston, London, and Hong Kong, says the playing field is uneven. "Uber portrays the industry operators as companies that are entrenched and in bed with local officials," he says. "We are small businesses. We don't have the money or the social-media clout that Uber does. We are the ones being bullied here."

Kalanick grew up in Los Angeles's Northridge neighborhood, learned to code in sixth grade, and continued on a technical track through college at UCLA until dropping out to work on his first company, called Scour. Scour was a sort of proto-Napster: a pioneer in file sharing. Media companies didn't exactly support that aim, and in 2000, Scour was sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars.

The company declared Chapter 11. Next, Kalanick worked for years on a new company, Red Swoosh. He didn't pay himself a regular salary, and he lived at home with his mother. His lead investor, Mark Cuban, lost interest and asked for his money back. Eventually, however, Kalanick sold that company for $19 million.

At 36, he still has a chip on his shoulder, and conversing with him is an entertaining--if challenging--exercise. Despite his sturdy self-confidence, he distrusts journalists and seems to be skeptical of strangers in general. He once told me by instant message that he had "1000 things more important to work on" than an interview with Inc.

He has developed a reputation for being aggressive, a tough negotiator, blunt, someone you really don't want to cross. In March, he got into a Twitter throwdown with John Zimmer, the co-founder of the ride-sharing service Lyft. Kalanick got the last word with, "you've got a lot of catching up to do...#clone."

When quiet negotiations with city officials don't seem to be getting him anywhere, he has a tendency to lash out, often by implying that the people standing in his way are corrupt. Lawmakers, understandably, have bristled. The Washington City Paper wrote: "To see the way some D.C. councilmembers treated Travis Kalanick at a hearing last month, you would have thought they had cornered a master criminal."

Uber's growth, by the numbers:
Employees: 300
Employees one year ago: 75
Cities globally: 35
Cities a year ago: 12
Month-over-month revenue growth the past year: 18%

Kalanick does his part to bait his critics. He can be at times comically grandiose and un-self-aware. When I ask him why he left angel investing (which he was doing after selling Red Swoosh) to run Uber, his rambling, five-minute answer includes two hyperbolic claims, a mixed metaphor ("It's so complex all you can do is swim in uncertainty"), childish whimsy ("that is my happy place"), and, believe it or not, an unironic Braveheart reference.

"That's part of me, that freedom fighter in me," he says. "It's like Brave­heart. Like, 'freeeeeduuuuuuuuum.'"

Kalanick has clearly devoted a lot of thought to his own mix of skills, which he refers to--often--variably as "creative pragmatism" and "pragmatic creativity."What that means in short is that he understands the back-end workings of the business well enough that he could rebuild them himself (well, almost), and he also cold calls customers and says things to journalists aimed to warm consumers' hearts, such as: "On Valentine's Day in Chicago, we had every driver give every woman who got in the car a rose. That is scaling romance." He's something of a technical co-founder and a biz-dev whiz rolled into one. In this sense, he's an investor's dream CEO.

"He can present a high-level pitch and do so in an entertaining fashion," says Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who as an individual contributed to two of Uber's venture-funding rounds. "He can drill down to the crux of the problem and be very detail oriented, whether it's on the service side or on the math side."

Kalanick has hired in his image. He looks for general managers who can think both analytically and creatively--creative pragmatists. A city's GM oversees two branches of employees in that city, the driver-operations side (very adept at math, technical, left-brained; Uber is full of former investment bankers) and the community-management side (creative, social-media savvy, right-brained).

When hiring--or just in meeting new people--Kalanick automatically sizes up an individual's skills and temperament. If he likes the person, he starts placing him or her in one of two buckets: d-ops or CM. I stopped by a dinner the Uber team held at Prime One Twelve, an expensive South Beach restaurant, and the waiter had the charisma and smile of a talk-show host. He was eloquent and game for jokes. Kalanick whispered, "Definite community-manager material" before introducing himself to the waiter, who said his name was Kevin Baynes. "Kevin," Kalanick said, "have you ever worked at a technology company?"

The playbook has worked all over the country, but in Miami, most of the plays have yet to be called, and the fact that Uber Miami has been a year in the making is a significant frustration. Radford, the GM for Atlanta, flew in to investigate Miami laws last summer, and when he reported back, Kalanick found them too tough to work around.

A year later, Kalanick has met with Miami officials a couple of times, including in January, when Uber threw that more-secret-than-usual prelaunch recruitment party. He is hopeful a bill will be introduced soon that allows Uber to operate. "Everything I've gotten from any political leader there is very positive," he says.

Meanwhile, the company is venturing beyond cars. It launched a motor­cycle-pickup service in Paris, a mariachi-band delivery service in San Francisco, and an ice-cream-truck-delivery service in seven cities. Yes, dessert trucks are cute, if complicated, publicity stunts. They can also be considered grand experiments in the future of Uber.

The idea: Uber doesn't just set passengers up with drivers. It's a company starting to dream of becoming a logistical nervous system for cities.

If you ask Kalanick about competitors--of which there are many, especially in the taxi-hailing space--he is dismissive: They're just clones; they aren't worth talking about. But once, I asked about Square and whether Uber might function most profitably as something of a payments company. He lit up. He said he could see applying the Uber model--taking a 10 percent to 20 percent cut of a customer's payment while providing superior service--to anything.

Is it much of a stretch that Uber, which is on its way to becoming a verb, could soon mean "ordering food delivery" or "hiring a cleaning service"? It's already standing for "reserving private planes": Garrett Camp, who co-founded Uber with Kalanick (though he doesn't have an operational role), last year launched BlackJet, an air-travel business modeled on Uber's technology.

Kalanick's closest mentor, with whom he's on the phone or side by side nearly daily, is Shervin Pishevar, formerly a managing director at Menlo Ventures, an investor in Uber. Pishevar says he believed so much that the company's original model could scale globally that he helped enlist other investors, and a few celebrities, including Olivia Munn and Ashton Kutcher, to his round.

That's because he likes Kalanick's reflexes, even when--as in Washington--they push him to fight. "His instincts are singular and unique," Pishevar says. "He's changed how city politics work." Now that cities have changed their laws to accommodate this Silicon Valley approach to transportation, other logistics industries might want to brace themselves.

"Uber is building a digital mesh--a grid that goes over the cities," Pishevar says. "Once you have that grid running, in everyone's pockets, there is a lot of potential for what you can build as a platform. Uber is in the empire-building phase."

A handful of experts interviewed by The Fiscal Times outlined the following seven tactics for dodging health care reform, including the pros and cons.

That's because under the law, businesses with at least 50 "full-time equivalent" employees have to provide health care to their workers or pay a penalty. Recent surveys indicate that many small-and medium-sized businesses are restricting hiring and cutting hours to get under that threshold. And according to Kenneth Laks, a certified public accountant at AVZ & Company, many businesses simply aren't prepared.

"I'm seeing a lot of people not paying attention, and even after warning them they’re still not paying attention," Laks told The Fiscal Times last week. "A lot of people are not aware of the simplest thing."

The 2010 Affordable Care, designed to extend health care insurance to millions of uninsured Americans, penalizes firms employing 50 or more people that don’t offer health insurance - or that offer coverage below minimum standards. Regardless of whether companies abide by the new rules or seek a way around them, the stakes are high.

According to the Obama administration, 96 percent of all firms in the United States or 5.8 million out of 6 million total firms have fewer than 50 full time employees and therefore are exempt from the Affordable Care Act. These 5.8 million firms employ nearly 34 million workers. Moreover, more than 96 percent of firms with 50 or more employees already offer health insurance to their workers. Less than 0.2 percent of all firms -- or about 10,000 out of 6 million -- may face employer responsibility requirements. The administration contends that many firms that do not currently offer coverage will be more likely to do so because of lower premiums and wider choices in the exchanges.

Related:

Why Millenials Are Obamacare's Last Hope

Obamacare Will Miss Rollout Deadline

Confused IRS Tax Rules Threaten Obamacare Rollout

The new law takes full effect Oct. 1, when the federal government and state officials launch new on-line insurance exchanges in all 50 states and the District of Columbia where uninsured Americans can apply for affordable or government-subsidized policies.

For many companies, the decision to provide new coverage and fully abide by the law could cost them hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Others that choose not to offer insurance could be hit with substantial federal penalties -- although in some cases it would be far less expensive for them to pay the penalties than provide the insurance.

Now small and medium-sized businesses are being forced to make a decision that has both moral and fiscal aspects.

From a moral standpoint, companies must decide if it's right to provide health care to employees. It's cheaper to pay the penalty, but is it good business? Is it the right thing to do? According to Denis Collins, an American business ethicist and professor of business at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, the answer is no.

"It's understandable why a company would do that -- it's understandable to want to minimize your costs. So in the short term, it’s understandable. In the long term, that's bad business," he said. "In terms of ethics, that's egoism. You do what's in your self-interests. And [businesses] have the legal right to do that. But in the long term … it's not for the greater good of their employees and it's not for the greater good of the company, because it's going to damage morale," Collins continued.

Kenneth Laks sees it differently: "There are a lot of companies who are saying, 'who cares? If we have 80 people and we don’t offer insurance, it's heck of a lot cheaper than providing insurance.'"

The advent of the Affordable Care Act has spawned a surge in business for lawyers, CPAs and industry consultants on ways for businesses to navigate the new law and minimize their financial exposure.

A handful of experts interviewed by The Fiscal Times outlined the following seven tactics for dodging health care reform, including the pros and cons. They are:

1. PULL UP YOUR SOCKS AND PROVIDE HEALTH CARE INSURANCE

Pros: It will make current employees happy, while attracting new ones. As numerous studies have shown, happy workers are more productive.

Cons: It's expensive. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average health care cost per employee this year was $10,522, compared to $10,034 the previous year. That number is expected to rise to $11,188 next year.

2. CUT HOURS FOR WORKERS

Pros: Cutting the hours of workers below 30 hours per week to get under the 50 worker threshold would free the employer from having to provide health care, while also avoiding the federal penalty.

Cons: Technically, it's illegal. Under Obamacare, employers can't just cut hours or jobs to avoid providing health care or paying the penalty; there has to be a business reason for the staff reductions. "Benefit plan attorneys are waiting for that to occur so they can bring lawsuits," said Laks.

3. CUT JOBS

Pros: Firing employees to get under the 50-worker threshold would also free the employer from Obamacare obligations.

Cons: As in the case with cutting hours, it's illegal. But according to Howard Rosen, an accountant at Conner Ash in St. Louis, employers are preparing to do it anyway.

"People are cutting hours and jobs now because of the 50 full-time equivalent count. They're cutting down to 27 to 29 hours per week so they don't have to pay," he said. When asked if any of his clients were concerned about litigation, he replied, "None that we've talked with. Maybe it's because we're in the Midwest and we're not as litigious or as aggressive. That has not come up and we had multiple discussions about this."

4. PAY THE PENALTY

Pros: It's cheaper than paying for health care. In the worst case, the penalty is just $2,000 per employee, and the first 30 don't count. This means a company with 50 or more workers would pay an additional $40,000 in taxes each year.

Compare that to what it would cost to provide health care. Using the Society for Human Resource Management's numbers, insuring all 50 workers would cost the company $526,100. So paying the $40,000 penalty saves the company $486,100.

Cons: Workers aren't likely to be too happy about this decision, and it would be hard to recruit new ones.

5. OFFER BAD INSURANCE

Pros: Under Obamacare, employers can provide what's termed "minimal essential coverage," a fancy name for a health plan that's so bad it doesn't meet Obamacare requirements. The employee has the option to turn down this plan and buy insurance from an exchange. If this happens, the employer is penalized $3,000 for each worker that purchased insurance on his or her own.

The upside for employers is that this penalty is still cheaper than paying for health insurance. As mentioned in the previous example, providing insurance for a workforce of 50 would cost $526,100. Paying the penalties for pushing these workers to an exchange would only cost a maximum of $150,000, although it's highly unlikely that every employee would chose to buy from an exchange. But even paying the maximum penalty would save the company $376,100.

Cons: Workers probably aren't going to appreciate the offer of a bad health care plan, especially one that puts them through the trouble of purchasing insurance at an exchange.

6. DOWNGRADE 'CADILLAC PLANS'

Pros: Those with high-end health care plans -- known as Cadillac plans -- are going to experience big changes to the way the get medical care. For many, large deductibles and cheap visits to the doctor's office will become a thing of the past.

That's because of Obamacare's tax on expensive plans. Here's how it works: For plans that cost more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family, the employer will have to pay a 40 percent tax on the cost of the program above those levels.

Take the cost of the average plan: $10,522. Employers will be forced to pay a 40 percent tax on $322, or about $129. That might seem like a small number, but for an employer with 10,000 employees, it adds up quickly. Such a company would be paying an additional $12.9 million each year.

The tax doesn't take effect until 2018, but employers are already rolling back heath care plans to get below the threshold. If they're able to get the cost of their policies below $10,200 each, it will save them a lot of money down the line.

Cons: The obvious losers in this scenario are those workers who are having their health care downgraded.

7. HIRE A PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYER ORGANIZATION

Pros: Many small businesses are outsourcing human resources, employee benefit and payroll work to companies known as professional employer organizations (PEO). These companies exist simply to provide companies with additional employees -- but strictly on a contract basis that doesn't impact the size of their overall full-time workforce.

Workers hired under this system operate much like federal government contract workers: They are recruited by an outside firm and are paid by them, but they report to and work for another company.

Here's how it works. Let's create a fictional biotech firm: we'll call it TFT Biotech, a small Silicon Valley shop with fewer than 50 workers. TFT Biotech identifies a potential employee, a hotshot Stanford grad with a degree in organic chemistry. They bring her in for an interview and decide they want her. They would then go to a PEO -- says Ambrose, one of the biggest in the country -- and retain them to hire her. She'll work at TFT Biotech, but technically Ambrose will employ her.

This saves TFT Biotech money in a number of ways. It removes human resource and payroll cost. It also removes health care cost. If TFT Biotech were to hire the young woman directly, it might breach the firm’s 50-full time worker threshold, forcing it to choose between paying the penalty and providing health insurance.

Ambrose removes that burden. It provides health insurance to the young Stanford grad, as well as to thousands of other workers in the biotech, financial services and professional services industry. This large work force also gives them leverage in negotiations with insurance companies, keeping health care costs down.

Cons: There actually is little downside to this strategy for small companies. The most challenging part of working with a PEO would be managing the relationship between the employee and Ambrose. A small business going this route is counting on Ambrose to keep the employee happy with regard to health care, pay and other human resources considerations.

This article was originally published on The Fiscal Times.

Even the most amazing product won't sell itself. Getting someone to fight for your company is necessary - but not just anyone can be the knight in shining armor.

This is part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too.

This post is about finding your “champion.”

We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA - the overall methodology is described here.

The “P” stands for Pain or the reason your customer needs to implement a new product.

The “U” or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or the unique attributes of your solution to solve their problems better than anybody else they could use..

The first “C” stands for Compelling Event.

This post is about the second “C” or Champion.

No product sells itself no matter what startup companies like to think.

In order for an organization to buy product it takes an individual who has a budget and is willing spent it on you or they have access to a group budget and are willing to fight for the resources to implement your solution.

This is especially true for products that involve more than an individual user.

Every company is inundated with products and technology so inertia takes over. It’s far easier to do nothing than to do something new.

Not everybody who is nice or helpful to you is your “champion.”

In order for somebody to be a champion they need to have both influence (in order to persuade others to take action) and “authority” to either make the decision or to get somebody who holds budget to make the decision.

I shorthand these two things - Influence and Authority - as IA.

I do this to contrast the opposite, which is NINA - no influence, no authority. Otherwise known as a time wasters.

In order for somebody with IA to be your champion he has to be actively helping you through the sales process. If he’s not then he may simply be an IA but he may not be a champion. Or worse - he may be somebody else’s champion.

Of course you have to develop and nurture champions. Obviously they need to be bought into your solution and feel compelled that it will solve a problem in their organization (the PUC).

He or she also need to trust you, personally. In order to spend money or access budgets and especially if other people need to use this product she is going to have to stick her neck out to implement you.

Understanding why an individual would buy something or why she should champion you deserves reflection. Is she managing a P&L and wants to reduce costs or improve sales? Is she a mid-level in an exec and wants to be seen as an innovator by embracing new, exciting technologies?

Most people never try to understand the psychology of the buyer but I think it’s tremendously important.

You need to find your champion and nurture the relationship.

Big deals that involve multiple people deciding seldom go your way without a champion so you need to be in search of yours to win the account and you need to constantly test whether somebody is your champion or not. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

The best kind of champions are what I call “egg breakers” and this again forms part of our sales teams shorthand nomenclature to figure out whether our process is going well as in, “OK, you said Susan is your champion, but is she an egg breaker?”

Egg breakers don’t mind making tough decisions. They’re willing to stick their necks out when others keep silent.

Imagine a room full of people who have convened a meeting to discuss whether to go ahead with your project (or maybe to select a vendor amongst many).

There might be somebody in the room who is most knowledgeable and/or most passionate about which solution to pick. But that person is irrelevant if he’s not willing to defend his position strongly when others advocate harder for a different answer.

Other people are “consensus driven” even if they’re willing to assert their point-of-view in a meeting. They want to wait until everybody is bought in and until every bit of information is considered.

With this kind of person advocating on your behalf you run the risk of your decisions being over-turned and or the decision process to be elongated.

You want IA Egg Breakers as champions.

A champion is somebody rooting for you. They typically are willing to be transparent about the most important factors you need to know in a sales campaign

• Who else is involved in the decision?
• Who makes the ultimate decision or is it made by group vote?
• Who is for you and who is against?
• Who are you competing against?
• Who holds the budget for this project?
• When is a decision likely?

You can often test whether somebody is a champion or not by asking some of these questions and finding out whether they’re willing to be open with you about the process.

Not open = not a champion. Period.

If a person is holding back on you need to go in search of a champion in order to win the campaign. Just because this person isn’t your champion doesn’t mean he’s against you, just that you can’t count on him to push hard for you at the moment of truth.

You need that champion in the decision-making process and in the room when the topic is debated.

And remember that just because a person is friendly with you and shares the information above doesn’t make him a champion. It makes him really useful (for sure!) but not necessarily a champion.

Because a champion has influence and authority.

Even if you’ve identified your champion your work isn’t done.

There are often many players involved in a decision for or against you and you need to meet or speak with all of them to understand the purchasing landscape.

And that is the subject of my next post, “Key Players.”

This story originally appeared on the blog Both Sides of the Table.

Sasser Family Holdings has been around for 85 years and has passed some of the toughest tests a business can face. These are the rules it lives by.

This year, the Chicago-based Sasser Family Holdings is celebrating its 85th year in existence. In a world where 14-month old companies can sell for a billion dollars, you might overlook a company like Sasser--but you shouldn't. It's a rare example of a company that has passed some of the toughest tests a business can face and founder who has worked hard to build a successful legacy.

What's not to admire?

In the midst of the Great Depression--when other entrepreneurs were shutting down and record numbers of people were out of work--Fred H. Sasser started up a refrigerated rail car leasing company. It was a great idea--but after the stock market crashed no one had the funds to lease his innovative products. So Sasser was left with a stockyard full of parts and abandoned projects.

What would have been the demise of most companies was just the beginning for Sasser Family Holdings, as Sasser realized he could reinvent his company by repairing existing cars for companies that could no longer invest in new ones.

Four generations of Sassers have faced what could be seen as insurmountable challenges in the Great Depression, World War II, the Staggers Railroad Deregulation Act, and the ongoing demand for innovative technological advances. Yet they have forged ahead to continually evolve and innovate, making this family somewhat of a legend in the railroad industry. These are the rules they live by.

Allow your core values to guide you.

Anything that causes the company to compromise its values is a non-starter for the Sasser team. Established many decades ago, those values are

• We will never compromise our integrity.
• Our only product is superior customer service.
• We succeed or fail as a team.
• We relentlessly seek ways to add value.

They believe that if a company bases every move on values, making sure that every employee, vendor, partner, and customer is a good cultural fit to the organization, it will enjoy a solid foundation.

Example: The Sasser values extend to the community as well. The company supports a number of local charities and when two of their subsidiary businesses' employees were affected by multiple sclerosis within 18 months of one another, the company became involved in The National MS Society. Employees are also given time off to contribute their manpower to local charities as well.

Embrace change.

After returning safely from serving in World War II, Sasser's only son, Robert, knew that the U.S. government had an overabundance of rail cars. He took the opportunity to purchase them and repurposed them into shipping cars, thus bringing his father's initial idea current with the times and demand and really making it boom.

Today, the company's fourth generation company president, Shad Peterson is focusing on new technology that will eliminate the delays and increase the efficiency of rail inspection. Legacy companies don't sit back; they're always looking to the future and what it will mean for the business.

Recognize those who support your team.

As a family-owned organization, Sasser recognizes that success comes from a long line of contributors. They believe that the support generated by employees' extended family contributes to their success. To honor and celebrate this, the company holds a family picnic every summer where both immediate and extended family members are all invited to attend. In this way the Sasser family demonstrates the importance of family, not only theirs, but that of their employees, vendors, and partners.

Choose partnerships that fit.

"Every relationship has to be mutually beneficial so partner for good times and the bad," says Kelly Brannon, director of corporate communications and marketing. If something about that relationship compromises your company values, dissolve it--before it dissolves you.

The same rule applies to projects. If a project is at odds with your long term purpose or vision, stop working on it.

Example: When Sasser created a Web-based interface for customers, the company considered automating the process entirely. But they knew that complete automation would not fit in with their culture of superior customer service. Where many companies are cutting corners, Sasser maintains a personal touch by having customer service reps readily available to their client base.

Inc.'s Editor in Chief Eric Schurenberg reveals why the longtime series is always compelling and dramatic read.

I had coffee on a recent morning with an entrepreneur, as I often do. What struck me about this founder, an enthusiastic Ohioan named Austin Allison, was how unremarkable his remarkable story was. He is CEO of dotloop, a maker of cloud-based software that streamlines the maddeningly slow dance of documentation that accompanies any home sale.

Agents, real estate brokerages, and homeowners seem to find real value in dotloop's service: According to Allison, in four years the payroll has gone from two to 120, the footprint from five cities to 700, and revenue from zero to $15 million. Along the way, Allison went through a year without salary, maxed out his home equity line of credit, nearly bottomed out on cash, and gambled what little money he could scrounge on a booth at a real estate conference.

By any standard--economic, business, or human--it's a remarkable, dramatic story. But here's the thing: It's not that unusual. Facing the odds and swallowing risks to create jobs and wealth out of nothing are what entrepreneurs do. It happens all the time.

The "How We Did It" cover story in this issue is our annual attempt to pay tribute to the endlessly remarkable and mostly untold stories of entrepreneurs unfolding all around us every day. You'll find some practical tips here, but, speaking for myself, the main takeaway is inspiration--and a little awe.

It's hard to feel otherwise when you read about David Tran, who arrived here from his native Vietnam without any money or English and one month later launched what would become the wildly popular Huy Fong Foods brand of sriracha sauce. Or when you read Bert Jacobs's story of how his Life Is Good team rallied to support an employee (and other victims) who had been wounded in the Boston Marathon bombings.And then there's a whole different kind of inspiration to be gained from the story of our cover subjects, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram, whose $1 billion sale to Facebook just 18 months after launch set a new high-water mark for the rewards of entrepreneurship.

We've been around long enough at Inc., however, to know that small business is not all upside, to put it mildly. Feature subject Mark Suster has been on a crusade against hype in the start-up scene; Jessica Bruder's story captures a (typically vulgar) piece of his mind. And you'll find features by Christine Lagorio on Uber and Burt Helm on CrossFit, respectively, two controversial businesses that illustrate how much entrepreneurs sometimes have to challenge the rules to make their vision stick.

Over coffee, Allison told me he wants dotloop to be a 100-year company. Statistically, founders are lucky to make it to five. And human nature suggests that if Century 21 or Keller Williams were to show up with a sufficiently generous offer, Allison's horizon might get much shorter. Still, we at Inc. have always preferred the builders to the flippers. They have better stories, and it's our job--and privilege--to tell them.

A nice week on the beach? Not for these guys. Here's why they prefer to risk their lives in their free time.

You might have seen Channing Tatum gush recently about his newborn daughter on The Late Show With David Letterman but a year ago he was thinking about how to stay alive, not about changing diapers.

Tatum and fellow actor Adam Rodriguez, along with a pack of Harvard alumni, had set off for Guyana on the northern coast of South America for a 12-day survival course rife with so many hazards they each had to take out special insurance to cover the cost of a helicopter evacuation if they were badly injured.

The only thing is the jungle was so thick "you'd actually have to dynamite [it] to be able to get out because there's nowhere a helicopter could land," says Patrick Salyer, CEO of Mountain View, California-based Gigya, a sart-up that provides the tech infrastructure for social logins, plugins, and gamification for half of comScore's top 100 U.S. websites.

Not only did the eight-person group have to get themselves and their gear across a raging river home to piranhas and anacondas using only a rope and help from each other, they also repelled down a 200-foot cliff, made their own shelter every night by chopping plant materials down with a machete, and caught, harvested or hunted their own food.

Mostly it was fish since, as Salyer says, "We were pretty bad with the bow and arrow so let's just say we didn't have huge opportunity [to kill animals]." Though they also ate maggot-like bugs they found in seeds.

Getting lost was a big peril. "If you wander off and it's the middle of the night, you can get lost forever because everything looks the same. That was something that you had to be pretty cautious of," Salyer says.

But why go through the trouble? These guys aren't hurting for money and could easily vacation nearly anywhere they want.

According to Salyer, solving problems is what entrepreneurs like himself do all the time, but surviving in the jungle means doing it at a more intense level.

Here's how he says surviving in the jungle relates to succeeding in business.

The cliché is true: It really is good for teamwork.

About crossing that infested river (which was 150 feet across), Salyer says they did it with a 60-lb. packs and no boat or wading.

"There's a technique for it which is extremely scary, which involves basically streaming a rope across the river, tying off that rope, filling your pack with air, strapping your pack on the rope and trying to figure out how to get across without being swept away or pulled underwater," he says. "You have to do that with your partner or there's no way you get across."

In business it's the same thing, he says.

"If you think about how we service clients... [there's an] engineer, a project manager, a designer--all these different aspects--and unless these people work together we're not going to give the client a good experience.

Success is about the journey.

Surviving in the jungle comes with unceasing challenges--not unlike the life of starting up a company.

Salyer says Gigya's ambition is "to be a huge public technology brand that everyone remembers." No big deal, right?

While getting your first 100 customers or launching your first product are great accomplishments, the work doesn't stop there. Soon your sights are set on getting your next 500, 1,000, or 2,000 customers and launching your seventh product, he says.

"So you really have to be focused on the day to day and just enjoying the challenges," he says.

Humility is a virtue.

Salyer says his jungle experience humbled him because he realized how much he needed to rely on other who knew more than him.

"I think in business you should always be humbled as well because there are always people you can learn from, there are always going to be new experiences," he says.

The group is planning its next adventure, which will take place within the next six months. Possible destinations include a desert trip to the Middle East, a winter survival expedition in the Arctic, or something that may include scuba diving in Southeast Asia.

Stretching yourself can change your outlook.

"I think it gives you perspective. It shows that you can accomplish a lot, things that you wouldn't normally accomplish from day to day. There are different types of challenges in life and I think that showing yourself that you can take on these different challenges and actually accomplish them is pretty meaningful," Salyer says.

Surviving can lead to a blissful denouement.

Near the end of the trip the group was hanging out with some locals who surprised them by knowing who Channing Tatum was. Even though the village was remote and barely had a road leading to it, they had seen his Step Up movie thanks to satellite Internet and were thrilled to not only meet him but breakdance with him in the flesh.

"That was a pretty good moment," Salyer says.

The happiest--and most productive--people focus more on what they do, not on what they have. Here's how it works in practice.

Many people think happiness, both professional and personal, is based on having a bigger house, nicer car, larger income. It's all about better, faster, higher, more.

Yet the happiest people I know focus a lot more on what they do, not on what they have. They see a great outcome as a wonderful by-product of a personal journey and not a primary goal. In short, their perspectives and beliefs are different.

To live a more joyful life, try adopting a few of those beliefs:

1. The best success is shared success.

Solo success is rewarding.

Achieving something with another person or a team is awesome. Not only do you feel good about yourself, you feel great about other people--and you create a connection that can last a lifetime.

And if you do fail, you fail together, which makes that failure a lot easier to take and provides the support to help you try again.

2. Comparisons kill.

No matter how successful you are there will always be someone who is more successful. No matter how big your business gets, there will always be a bigger business. Unless you're Serena Williams or Stephen Hawking or Bill Gates, there will always someone better or smarter or richer.

To be happy, only compare yourself to the person you were yesterday--and to the person you hope someday to become. You may never be the best, but you will gain incredible satisfaction from being the best you that you can possibly be.

That's all you can control--and all that really matters.

3. A body is a terrible thing to waste.

When you were a kid you sometimes ran simply for the joy of running. You jumped and rolled and skipped because it felt good. Without thinking, you used your body as a way to celebrate being alive.

Now you don't.

Try something for me. Go ride a bike. Or jump on a trampoline. Sure, it's a little awkward now, but it's still really fun. Or swim, or play a game, or take a hike or a long walk.

You might get a little bummed because you'll realize you're no longer young but you'll also find out you're not as old as you think.

And you'll realize there's still a kid inside you. That realization alone will make you happier and, in time, will help you see the world and your place in it in a different and better way.

4. Luck is the worst thing to wish for.

Why? The things you earn are infinitely more gratifying.

If you saved up to buy your first car you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you worked and hustled and saved and finally had enough to buy your car, you appreciated it. You took care of it. It was yours, both practically and emotionally.

If you were given a car, that was pretty cool--but you didn't really feel anything. (Except possibly gratitude.)

If you want to wish for something, wish for the strength and perseverance to earn the things you want. Don't wait for luck to bring you that enabling client; work your butt off to land that enabling client.

That way you'll not only enjoy the destination, you'll appreciate and be fulfilled by the journey.

5. Fear is a sure sign of life.

Nothing beats how you feel immediately after you put a fear aside and take a plunge. And that feeling lingers for a long time. Think about the speech you dreaded giving; immediately after, even if you bombed, you felt a sense of relief and even exhilaration. You did it!

Facing a fear makes you feel alive. The more alive you feel, the happier you will be.

Pick a small fear and stare it down. I promise you'll feel awesome afterward. Keep doing it and in time you'll open yourself up to new experiences, new sensations, new friends--and a richer, more fulfilling life.

6. Silly and irrelevant makes the life go round.

You're incredibly focused, consistently on point, and relentlessly efficient. Your life is dialed in.

Your life is also really, really boring.

Remember when you were young and followed a stupid idea to an illogical conclusion? Road trips to nowhere, trying to eat six saltine crackers in one minute without water, staying up all night just to see who fell asleep first. You dined out on those stories for years.

Going on a mission was super pointless and super fun. In fact the more pointless the mission, the more fun you had because missions were all about the ride, not the destination.

So do something, just once, that you no longer do. Drive eight hours to see a show. Get up really early and buy your seafood at the dock. Ride along with a policeman on a Friday night (easily the king of eye-opening experiences).

Do something no one else thinks to do. Or pick something that doesn't make sense to do a certain way and do it that way. You'll remember the experience forever.

The joy of possession comes and goes. The joy of experience, especially an unusual experience, lasts forever.

7. Good people deserve their just reward.

Don't wish someone else had gotten the recognition they deserved. Don't someday regret not having let people know how you felt, how you cared, or how much you appreciated them.

The act of recognition is just as fulfilling as the receipt. Make someone else feel good and you instantly feel good, too.

Best of all, you can do something good for someone else and the joy you feel will never, ever diminish.

8. Values create the springboard for actions.

Few things create greater trauma and stress than when what we do doesn't match what we value.

Pick three things you value most. You might value pride, or sincerity, or faith, or family, or cooperation, or adventure, or camaraderie, or humility, or independence--the list is endless. Pick three.

Then determine how much of your time--and how much of your money--is spent on those values. The more time you spend fostering and honoring your values, the happier you will be.

Live your values and you can't help but be happy and more joyful-- because in those moments, you are exactly who you truly wish to be.

9. Subtraction creates addition.

Everyone wears armor: armor that protects but in time also destroys.

The armor we wear is primarily forged by success. Every accomplishment adds an additional layer of protection from vulnerability. In fact, when we feel particularly insecure we unconsciously strap on more armor so we feel less vulnerable.

Armor is the guy who joins a pick-up basketball game with younger, better players and feels compelled to say, "Hi, I'm Joe--I'm the CEO of ACME Industries." Armor is driving your Mercedes to a reunion even though taking your other car would be much more practical. Armor is saying, at the start of a presentation, "Look, I'm not very good at speaking to groups... I spend all day running my huge factory."

Armor protects us when we're unsure, tentative, or at a perceived disadvantage. Armor says, "That's okay. I may not be good at this but I'm really good at that. (So there.)"

Over time armor also encourages us to narrow our focus to our strengths so we can stay safe. The more armor we build up the more we can hide our weaknesses and failings--from others and from ourselves.

Take off your armor. Sure, it's scary. But it's also liberating because then you get to be the person you really are and, in time, start to really like the person you really are.

Which is the surest road to happiness.

Want a great culture? Start planning before your first employee walks through the door.

In many ways when my partner and I left the big ad agency world to start our own shop it was a typical start-up story: Five-year business plans were developed, spreadsheets were created, and it all was revised hundreds of times.

There was another element of our initial planning efforts that I believe has been equally important in our success: We spent just as much time focusing on our culture and discussing what it would be like to work at Launchpad five years down the road as we did talking about the present.

In the ad agency world, egos and attitudes seem to dominate day-to-day life. If you’ve ever worked at an agency, big or small, you know what I’m referring to. While most people I’ve worked with at agencies are great, there are always a few that bring their own brand of "I am awesome and you are not." That attitude can set the tone for an entire office. They make things miserable for everyone. We wanted to create something different--an agency that people actually wanted to work at--and started that effort on day one. Long before we had employees, we envisioned a day in the life at the Launchpad of the future. What would the culture be like? How would people feel about working at this agency? What would they say to their friends about the agency?

We created an objective that goes something like this:

"Like any job, there are good days and not so good days. But we want to create an agency where each and every person who works there can come to work every day believing that today can be a great day."

From this strategic objective was born what has become our primary rule: the Launchpad No Jerks Policy. It’s born of the belief that there are talented people out there who are also nice people, so there’s no reason to hire someone with a negative attitude, huge ego or destructive personality.

It was a year later we hired our first employee, and we’ve since staffed up to become a 50-plus person shop. From day one our No Jerks Policy has driven every hiring decision we’ve ever made. Even contractors and freelancers are held to this standard. The result is an agency that delivers a great creative product and is great to work at. There’s more collaboration, ideas really can come from anyone and the environment is more "drama free" than any company I’ve ever worked at before. We’re an agency where the owners hold themselves to the same standards as everyone else.

Too often a company’s culture happens by accident rather than design. The next time you are working on business plans, step back from the spreadsheets and product design for a while and think about what it will be like to work there in five years. What you can do to ensure the culture you envision becomes a reality? This is true whether you are starting a business, running a business or even running a department at a large company.

These nine steps to make certain the next quarter bring increased revenue and profit.

Here's a list of must-do activities that every company (and salesperson) should take at the beginning of every year (and every quarter) adapted from Bill Stinnett's top-notch book, Selling Results!

1. Requalify each opportunity.

Determine what you know and don't know about each account to prompt you to consider your customer's current state, desired future state, and vision of the ideal solution.

2. Resize each opportunity.

Determine your client's appetite for investment from the people who are responsible for earning a return on whatever capital they decide to invest.

3. Reforecast each opportunity.

Determine when they need to arrive at their desired future state and what will happen if they don't arrive. Then estimate when this customer will buy based on their urgency.

4. Revise your revenue projection.

Revise your sales forecasts based upon the information above so that your ability to influence next quarter's revenue results lies in the actions you take today!

5. Reevaluate what it will take to achieve your goals.

Plan what you need to do in terms of monthly and weekly business development activity goals that will ensure you achieve your revenue objective.

6. Prepare to broaden your relationship footprint.

Identify who you currently know within each account and then decide who else you need to meet as the opportunity changes and grows.

7. Develop a plan to move each opportunity forward.

Create brief project plans (with dates) for each event that identifies the people who to be involved from your company and each client's company.

8. Resolve to better plan your customer meetings.

Each interaction with your customer should move the sales opportunity forward. Commit yourself to doing pre-call planning and research.

9. Retune your marketing message.

Better align your marketing with your sales by revising sales tools and marketing collateral so that they speak from the customer's viewpoint.

Like this post? If so, sign up for the free Sales Source newsletter.

Lazy days ahead? Not this summer. Here's what you should be doing to stay productive in the dog days of summer.

During the dog days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, most of us become accustomed to the inevitable summer slow-down. Key people aren't available (holidays); projects stall, waiting for Fall to roll around, and a general sense of lassitude begins to creep in.

Summer doesn't need to be a write-off however. Here are 10 ways you can use those months to get ahead of the game:

1. Conduct your personal annual review.
There's something seemingly magical about the calendar year end that has us all trapped in its spell. We see the turn of the year as a time for reflection and a time to plan the year ahead. But the reality is, the calendar year-end is an entirely mechanistic construction.

An annual review (looking back at what you learned, what you achieved, what you missed out on, and rearranging priorities for the incoming year) is an incredibly useful exercise, but there's absolutely no reason your need to conduct it in the middle of a much-needed holiday, and during what is a busy time for all of us.

Do what I do. Move your personal annual review to the summer. You still get to review the entire previous year, but you also get to do it in a much less frenzied state, and with much more likelihood that you will actually implement the lessons you learn (remember all those never-happened new years' resolutions?).

2. Read.
Most of us read less than we ought to. Time constraints notwithstanding, there's something about cracking open the spine of a book (or double-clicking on an ebook file) that sparks low-level guilt pangs in many leaders. The sense that there must be something more important, or urgent, to do robs us of the opportunity to learn from others.

Grab just two books from the pile you've been meaning to get to, and build a daily reading time into your summer schedule. Read consciously, deliberately, and read to learn. If you've been too busy to even set aside some books, there are many fine lists out there, and at a pinch this book and this book are as good a place to start as any.

3. Review your project list.
You should know by now which of your current-year projects are bearing fruit, which are dead in the water, and which are still teetering between the two.

Use the summer dead-time to review your project list (if you don't have a master list of every project you're involved in, start by making a brain dump of them all. This exercise in itself will prove invaluable) and use the principles I outlined in this article to re-prioritize them.

4. Get to and learn to maintain inbox zero.
If there was ever a time to finally get on top of your email overload, it's the summer, when both email volume and (perhaps) demands on your time goes down.

I'm a big proponent of David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) methodology. It just plain works, but at the cost of an initial time investment. Get the book, set aside two or three days, and get started. Most importantly, use the dog days of summer to stay on the inbox zero horse, and groove the GTD principles.

5. Do your annual budget.
If your responsibilities include the construction and oversight of an annual budget, you may well be able to do a large percentage of the underlying prior-year analysis and budget construction during the summer months.

Why wait until the fall, when everyone is once more up to their eyes? Unless there are unavoidable reasons otherwise (the need for seasonal information, for example), get started now.

6. Take a break.
A real break. Not one of those "I'm away but I'll be checking my email and voicemail" martyr deals.

Whats that? You can't? Then I suspect you have deeper problems. Unless you're managing a start-up that's still in Early Struggle, you're either a lousy leader who can't hire or delegate well, or you have an inflated need to be needed. Maybe you should spend your summer working on that.

7. Reset your single pre-eminent goal.
Leaders who achieve great things almost always have a Single Pre-Eminent Goal (SPG)--a clear, unambiguous deliverable that sits below their 50,000-ft objectives, and which dictates and prioritizes their activities on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

SPG's should be reviewed about twice a year, so why not use this article to do just that over the summer?

8. Do something "it's never the right time for".
Go paperless. Change accountant. Take up yoga. What projects are on your "someday/maybe" list that you wanted to start, but felt "this isn't the right time to start".

Well, now's the time. Pull up that list of deferred projects (or spend 10 minutes recollecting and listing them), pick one, and get started.

9. Rebuild your working environment.
Look around you. Chances are your working environment is less than ideal for high-quality, highly creative work. The summer months are a perfect opportunity to fix that.

Over time, we let crud accumulate in our working environment. Files for since-aborted projects; books, papers and other reading materials we'll never get around to; Old, unused tech; Souvenirs, gizmos and tchotchkes that once seemed cute, but which now just get in the way. Grab a trash bag and flush the lot. Stick it all in storage if you're queasy about throwing it away. Now take another look around. What else can you do to refresh your working pace for great productivity?

10. Give back.
Many leaders I know are generous of heart and spirit, but are so consumed with daily responsibilities that their ability to give back to the wider community shrinks, often to the point of becoming inactive.

If the last occasion you can recall doing something altruistic and substantial is over a year ago, why not make this summer the time to change that? Don't make the giving back (necessarily) about money. Instead, gift what is most valuable to you: your time. Volunteer, mentor, coach, encourage. I guarantee that you - and therefore your business - will be the better for it.

Download a free chapter from the author's book, "The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success" which provides a comprehensive model for developing yourself or others as an exceptional, world class leader.

A resort in Mexico sets the standard for stellar service. What lessons can we learn to apply to our own businesses on how to keep our employees happy and delivering awesome service?

Recently, I was lucky enough to steal away on a mega-long weekend, five whole days in Mexico. It's a quick trip for us west coasters. We stay at our favorite resort, which in our opinion has the best service of any place we've ever been.

My husband and I started talking about why the service is so incredibly good and our conversation kept ending up with the same conclusion: the employees love what they do and feel lucky to work at such a top-notch place. Over and over we heard, "This place is one of the top three places you can work in this area." And the smiles on their faces and the way they adoringly talked about their employer said it all.

The staff sports some smart uniforms, cool linen since they work in the heat so much, but something really stands out as part of their look, each employee wears a rectangular pin with either diamonds or placeholders for future diamonds. As it turns out, for each year of service the staff gets a new diamond they place in the pin and wear with the utmost pride. A few of them (15) have actually filled out an entire pin and are working on their second, and what's really cool? Everyone on the staff knew exactly who the 15 people were and looked up to them as a source of inspiration. If they leave, even for a short time, they have to start all over.

It was so great to see such a sense of pride and a real family of people who work together for a long period of time.

So how do you keep employees around and make them happy so they do the best job for your customers?

1. Treat your team well--And I don't just mean by paying them a ton. Recognition goes a long way and this pin idea is great. The resort staff wears it with pride and it's their badge of honor!

Also enabling employees to make decisions on how to interact and treat customers goes a long way toward giving them a feeling of satisfaction. Zappos does a great job of empowering their service reps to be themselves and go above and beyond.

2. Understand who you serve and be passionate--This resort in Mexico understands that people are paying good money for service, so they go above and beyond. One small example? They take note of our clothing and provide a sewing kit with thread that matches most of our items in case we need a quick repair.

Once at my online marketing company VerticalResponse, an engineer was trying to help a customer. The engineer recognized that this customer was only about 20 minutes away and offered to drive over and help. The customer was thrilled and no one even asked him to go the extra mile-- he just really wanted to help.

3. Award Your Team--If you apply for awards, and you win, it's another way to get your team behind what they do day in and day out. Even if you're a finalist and don't win, it's still a win because you are receiving recognition.

We apply for the American Business Awards in a number of categories like customer service, marketing, management and product awards. We feel that if we tell our stories to a third party and our peers give us a thumbs up, it's an amazing recognition of all our efforts.

So make sure your passion for what you do spreads to your team, because if that happens, you're customers are going to be very happy.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, sign up for the free VR Buzz weekly newsletter and check out the VerticalResponse Marketing Blog.

Did you create your budget in gloomier days? Be aware there's new reason for optimism -- and for making mid-year tweaks to your budget.

A few phantom green shoots a couple of years back aside, it’s been a long time since entrepreneurs had much in the way of positive economic news to celebrate. But while it’s still not exactly boom times, author and business expert Ram Charan may have finally located a reason to feel cheery.

What is it? Turns out many businesses’ budgets for this year are too pessimistic, he writes on the HBR Blog Network.

"There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the economic outlook for the next five years. The shifting energy equation, for example, sets the stage for growth. Shale gas will allow the US to be energy independent, create an export industry, and reduce energy costs. Lower costs are already making some industrial sectors more competitive," he argues, noting with near heroic levels of positive thinking that "even gridlock in Washington has not stopped the economy from progressing."

Which isn’t to say everything is 100 percent hunky dorey. Europe outside of Germany is still obviously a mess and certain industries (sorry Australian commodity producers) aren’t sharing in the cheer. But unless you’re a copper exporter located Down Under, Charan encourages you to let yourself crack a smile and take a fresh look at your 2013 projections in a more optimistic mood.

"If your budget was created for economic headwinds, then now is the time to revisit your assumptions," he writes. So what might you change in your budget halfway through the year if things are looking up? The post lays out eight possibilities to consider, including:

Reset your goals and KPIs. You may have to make some upward revisions as the economic picture changes. Lack of ambition allows mediocre performance.

Set funds aside for growth. Even as you loosen the purse strings, keep some money on hand to invest in marketing or advertising as the market turns. You don't have to spend it ahead of time but be ready to pounce and outspend competitors segment by segment as consumption rebounds.

Rethink outsourcing. Market growth has shifted to the US, and change happens faster than ever requiring smooth coordination. It may be wise now to source domestically or to bring some functions back in-house. Being close to the market, you'll be able to move faster and also protect your intellectual property.

If you’re convinced that Charan isn’t premature in his slightly sunnier projections then check out the post for the rest of his points to reconsider.

Are you more optimistic about the business climate than you were in 2012?