Robert Jordan, author of How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America, collected advice for entrepreneurs from founders of successful businesses. Here is a sample of Jordan's collection:

1. Too little funding forces discipline. The upside of having too little funding is that your business can grow organically, and you'll stay very focused on making a profit and positive cash flow. (Viresh Bhatia, InstallShield)
2. Always have a standby investor. No matter how much you like each other, and how much time and effort you've invested in negotiating and paperwork, large financial partnerships can - and often do - fall apart last minute. (Jim Dolan, The Dolan Company) Read more...

t's the nightmare of every small business: one unfair online review on Yelp!, Citysearch, TripAdvisor or some other site that tarnishes your reputation. The scariest part? You will never know how much business you may have lost as a result of people reading that bad review.

Consumers don't buy so much as a toothbrush anymore without Googling the brand online. Therefore, it's become essential for businesses of all types to manage their online reputations. Michael Fertik, president and founder of ReputationDefender, an online reputation management company, offers these tips to help keep your business's online search presence as positive as possible.  Read more...

Mike Michalowicz, a.k.a. The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur has a new video up on his site about an age-old topic: how to have more productive meetings. His solution - remove the chairs. Hardly a new idea but still worth discussing. Standing meetings make everyone sharper and more to the point...right?

Can I take the other side of this never-to-be-decided, chairs-or-no-chairs topic for a sec?

I'm standing in a meeting, and the subject is one where I actually have to think. And so do you. It's going to take some time. Maybe it'll take an hour until we hash it all out, argue it, negotiate it, compromise and resolve next steps. My feet hurt from standing, so does my back. I'm getting angry at having to stand here without chairs. I haven't really been listening to you, I'm that uncomfortable. Are we supposed to just make a decision -- right or wrong -- so we can go back to what we were doing and sit? Fine! You decide so I can sit down.

Some other suggestions for more productive meetings:

1. Have an agenda and stick to it: If it's not on the agenda, it doesn't get discussed (but it does go into a "parking lot" so it can be discussed at the right time).

2. Go ahead, make my day: First one to have his BlackBerry or iPhone ring/vibrate or otherwise disturb the meeting puts $100 (not $1, not $5, not $20) into the pot for future office parties or charity. The fee idea also applies to people who are a minute or more late. And if the latecomer is the boss of supervisor, the fee is doubled.

3. Don't turn what should be a four- or six-legged meeting into a centipede. Have only as many people in the meeting as it minimally takes to make a decision or get to next steps.

What are your suggestions for ways to make the most productive meetings? Let's hear something new.

I am a small business owner/entrepreneur like many of you reading this.  Sometimes I bet you wonder whether it's all worth it -- the uncertainty of business, working "in" vs. working "on" your business, whether your business will continue to grow (FYI, sales for my business were up 41% in 2011, our best year ever, and we've been growing 20%+ a year for the past four years), and a bevy of other worries and concerns. And then something happens and you say to yourself, "It's all worth it." In my business, I still sometimes (though not most of the time) am on-site working a  job with my employees. If our staff is stretched, or if the client requires my personal attention, I suit up.

My 22-year-old son is working his way through college and is one of my key "go-to" guys. The other day  we had a job in Manhattan and we both were on the job. He asked me about my dad, who ran his own business, and for whom I worked when I was my son's age. "What kind of boss was Pop Pop?," he asked me. "I responded without hesitation. "He was the best." And a flood of memories came to my mind about working at the store on Lexington Ave. for my dad, from when I was 13 until a little bit after college. My dad taught me everything I know about dealing with people, about service, about quality.

After I'd talked about my dad for a bit, my son said to me, "Not to be too mushy, but I really like this time we get to spend  together." This is part of the dividend of working in your own business -- having your child by your side, taking responsibility and learning to be a business person himself.

What's your "special dividend" from owning your business?