From a database of nearly 21 million companies reviewed by Entrepreneur magazine and research provider CentrisPoint, Simply Self Storage was distinguished as one of the nation’s “Hot 100, The Fastest Growing Businesses in America” for 2008. The company ranked No. 1 on the list for its rapid sales and job growth, among other select criteria. The Hot 100 ranking appears in the magazine’s May 2008 issue. 
 
Of the millions of companies on the preliminary list, only 0.3 percent made the first cut, and just a fraction of those made it to the Hot 100. Entrepreneur’s 14th consecutive ranking of America’s top fast-growth companies revealed businesses with total combined revenue of $4.6 billion in 2007. The Hot 100 are expected to collectively employ more than 15,000 individuals by 2009, an increase from a total of 517 employees on their first day of business. And of the companies ranked, 91 offer employees health insurance, 73 provide retirement funds, 42 offer tuition reimbursement and 40 offer flextime.

 
“This year’s Hot 100 listing reveals the shining stars continuing to drive the nation’s economy forward,” says Karen Axelton, executive editor of Entrepreneur. “These companies, and the entrepreneurs who built them, are making a major impact on the economy with their revenue and the new jobs they create as a result of their growth. The innovation, persistence and passion they demonstrate in industries across the board are vital to the nation’s success as a whole.”
 
For the complete story and Hot 100 listing, as well as a profile of Simply Self Storage, visit www.entrepreneur.com/hot100.

Based in Orlando, Fla., Simply Self Storage has offices, developments and facilities in 20 states as well as Puerto Rico. The company has more than 15.6 million square feet of storage space in operation. For more information, visit www.simplyss.com.

Bilha Maina could not have ignored the chance to invest Sh500,000 of her savings on a Jatropha plantation in Matuu where her family owns 40 acres of land.

Ms Maina is the CEO of Adopt a Village an enterprise that grows Jatropha trees and trades them to farmers, and industries that are seeking alternative energy sources.

Lately, Jatropha has become a popular subject in the Kenyan market.

“My focus is to develop extensive Jatropha nursery beds and to trade the seedlings to interested farmers such as the incoming Japanese who have shown interest in the markets, but primarily to create a base for generation of seeds that currently is a major challenge in the market”, she said in an interview at her farm in Matuu.

The tree produces oil seeds that when crushed produce oil that can be converted into Bio-diesel.

“Our business is to commercialise the production of Jatropha based bio-fuels, through the development of a small-scale farmer outgrower’s scheme”, Ms Maina says, explaining that the enterprise will help the neighbouring community to be self sufficient with bio-oils for domestic cooking and lighting.

“We aim to create a model village for “Adoption” by industries that may be interested in substituting fossil fuel with bio-fuels that are cleaner for their production processes, but whose primary business not being in agriculture, would create a challenge in developing and growing the oil crop”, says the Adopt a Village CEO.

Ms Maina works as a business development specialist and has over 10 years experience gained both in private and public sector organisations.

“This project will help alleviate poverty by creating employment especially for women and increasing food security”, she said.

In spite of the rural electrification schemes, lighting in rural Kenya is still a challenge and more so, families are still dependent on biomass for cooking. Jatropha oil could in the future provide a safer and cheaper substitute once the technologies have been identified and made available.

Jatropha contains glycerine which makes it difficult to burn in a normal hurricane lamp or stove but research is currently underway to convert these implements to be able to burn crude oil without trans-etherification.

Many countries around the world have started venturing into production of bio-fuels in order to combat environment degradation as well as have alternative fuel sources thereby becoming independent of fossil fuels.

The 35 year-old CEO believes that offering entrenched business development services to groups of farmers and creating tangible linkages with other private sector players will empower the rural dwellers.

Ms Maina is growing the plant in large scale to sell out to the farmers at a subsidized price. The business developer argues that there is a need for the development of seeds for use in the Kenyan market as what is available locally and from the region tends to be of very poor quality. She urges the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) to come in to ensure that farmers get the best seedlings.

Inspired by the fact that rural populace are abandoning agricultural activities in search of white collar jobs, she reckons that if cottage industries using bio-diesel could be introduced upcountry, then rural to urban migration will reduce significantly.

Ms Maina holds an MBA in marketing and strategic management from USIU. The sale of seedlings could help an average farmer earn some good revenue. A kilo of seeds for planting costs not more than Sh1,000. A truck load of saw dust costs Sh1,000, while soil goes for Sh3,000 and compost can be made from foliage and cow dung collected on the farm.

These purchased materials could plant up to 10 kilogrammes of seeds. A kilo of seeds requires 4 workers to prepare and plant at an average daily wage rate of Sh100 each. A seedling will be sold at Sh20. Harvested seeds retail between Sh6 to Sh15 per kilo. With just four employees, she projects an annual turnover of not less than Sh700,000.

“Am ready to make Jatropha, a cash crop for the dry lands”, she said

Back then, the child showed a budding chutzpah, said Mel Kornbluh, the father of one of Davis’ childhood friends.

“He was never afraid of a challenge, never afraid to try anything,” Kornbluh said recently.

That same entrepreneurial spirit has carried over to Davis’ adult career.

As the founder and owner of Urban Sign & Crane Inc., Davis, 28, has managed to break into the regional sign design, fabrication and installation market, with his company reaching gross sales of about $2 million last year.

Three months ago, the 25-employee company relocated into a 28,000-square-foot warehouse on Chestnut Avenue, its third move since Davis opened for business in 2003. Again, Urban Sign & Crane had outgrown its space. These increasing profits and expansions are because of the high-profile clients the company has landed, Davis said, such as the city of Philadelphia, Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, and clothing retailers H&M and Aeropostale.“It’s been like a blur,” Davis said of how quickly he’s seen his business grow.

Davis, a graduate of Vineland High School, earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from Philadelphia University in 2003.

His first job in the industry was as a draftsman for the Philadelphia Sign Co. in Palmyra, Burlington County. The company, which has done work for Subaru, Commerce Bank and Home Depot, helped Davis understand what goes into designing a sign, building it and getting it installed.

But Davis wanted more.

“Ever since I was young, I always wanted to have my own business,” he said.

He turned to Kornbluh, a mentor and a former boss who once employed Davis to fix bicycles.

Kornbluh agreed to co-sign the loan that allowed Davis to buy his first crane for installing signs. Urban Sign & Crane was on its way up.

Davis’ big break came courtesy of hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, who was planning on opening a second location of his 40/40 Club in Atlantic City in 2005.

Davis had heard about the project and decided to track down the developer. Maybe they needed some help? So he made a cold call - a childhood tactic he had no qualms about using.

The call paid off, but Davis only had a five-week timeframe to work on the sign. It needed dozens of lightbulbs flashing in an ongoing loop.

“We got a lot of work after that sign,” Davis said.

The sign cost about $28,000. In his first year in business, Davis said, his company’s gross sales were about $250,000. This year he expects to reach about $2.5 million.

“He took that business from a very primitive start to a very quick success,” Kornbluh said.

Urban Sign & Crane’s signs run from $3,500 to $100,000.

In Atlantic City, Davis’ company has done work at The Walk and The Pier Shops at Caesars, and it is currently reviewing plans to create the awnings and signs for the upgrade to the 2600 block of the Boardwalk commissioned by the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority.

Urban Sign & Crane’s touch also can be found in Philadelphia. Last year, the company installed directional and interpretive signs around the city to guide pedestrians.

Davis also has work planned in his hometown of Vineland, where his company has been charged with creating the new sign for the Landis Theater, which is undergoing a $6.5 million makeover.

The original sign - blue and pink and rusted over - has been kept in the parking lot of Urban Sign & Crane. It will be replaced by a new marquee, Davis said.

The projects seem endless.

In a tour of the warehouse, Davis pointed out a circular sign for a shopping center in Pennsylvania. Then he showed off pieces of black aluminum that will spell out the name of the Borgata’s forthcoming hotel - The Water Club.

Davis said he can’t help but appreciate the finished products when they’re up for the world to see.

“It’s nice to see where you start and where you finish,” said warehouse foreman Tom McTighe, supervising another project.

 

If the men are doing it so are the women. From opening restaurants to starting hotels, actresses are also blurring the lines between the worlds of Bollywood and business.

While actors like Mithun Chakraborty, Shah Rukh Khan and Suniel Shetty are thriving in the business world, their counterparts Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai and Preity Zinta are also giving them tough competition.

Sushmita was probably the first to turn entrepreneur when she set up her company Sensazione in 2006. Through her company, she plans to open a chain of hotels, lounges and spas. Besides, she has acquired 12,000 sq ft of space in Kolkata for a ‘lifestyle zone’, which apart from a huge open space will house a nightclub, a restaurant and a cigar lounge.

She says frankly that she was tired of being an actor and business had always been a second career option.

“Had I not been an actor, I would have been an entrepreneur. The lounge bar in Kolkata and my dream project, the spa, are all part of my effort to touch people’s lives,” the actress has been quoted as saying.

Sushmita has other plans too.

Ron Sim is an entrepreneur at heart. As a child, he sold noodles on the streets of Singapore for pocket money. In the early 1980s he set up a trading company selling household goods and appliances. Over time, that evolved into Osim, which today generates most of its 380 million dollar annual revenues from high-end massage chairs, as well as a host of other healthy-lifestyle products. UKpreneur caught up with Ron Sim at his Singapore headquarters.

UKpreneur: You’ve been quoted as saying that entrepreneurs do it for hunger or despair or desire. Which one were you?

Sim: When I first started the business at 20, it was all pure hunger. You know, and then I hit some bad crisis in the ’80s and, you know, you go into some bad despair and that taught me a lesson too. You know you’ve got to find you’re own niches and when you go through that hunger and despair process… Right now it’s all about desire.

UKpreneur: In the 1980s, Singapore went through quite a significant recession. It was tough for you, and you took a decision to branch out into selling high-end, luxury products, i.e. these chairs, these massage chairs in the middle of a recession. What was the logic behind that?

Sim: The recession in Singapore was really bad, it taught me two things. You know, first you know you cannot be a trader. You have to shift from a trader model to a builder, you know, and I also realized that Singapore was too small, you need to build an external economy.

Osim first headed to Hong Kong… and today has more than 1100 shops in 31 countries.

UKpreneur: What would your advice be to someone starting out now?

Sim: I always tell the young entrepreneurs that are coming up, if you want to win, be prepared to lose. And every loss is an opportunity, you learn something from your loss. We lose many times.

With that said, these days Sim and his team are constantly reinventing their signature product.

UKpreneur: So, who did you learn from, how did you learn to get the models right?

Sim: The market of society is a teacher because you’re trying to survive, you’re learning everything all by yourself all the time, as trial and error.

As for this father of three, and his product…

UKpreneur: How may hours a day are you literally sitting on your product?

Sim: I’m always on a chair, always on a chair. (Gives a big smile)

Company: OpenDNS

Funding: $2 million from Cnet (CNET) Founder Halsey Minor

Ulevich wants to change the way you call up Web sites. So his company, OpenDNS, has come up with what it considers a faster, smarter, and more secure method for translating requested URLs into corresponding sites. It helps companies guard against phishing schemes and bar employees from calling up adult sites. In less than two years OpenDNS has amassed more than 4 million customers, including 10,000 schools. The company is profitable and generates sales by displaying ads with search results.

Advice: “There are always people who do well even in a slump,” says CEO Ulevich. “Focus on building great products for your customers and be flexible, because their needs may change. And free is certainly the right price.”

Company: FriendFeed

Funding: $5 million in February 2008 from the two co-founders and Benchmark Capital

Taylor and Norris left Google (GOOG) last July to start FriendFeed, a startup that’s tackling the thorny issue of helping people organize the growing array of social networks and services they use. FriendFeed lets subscribers pull together on a single Web site everything their friends are doing on more than 30 sites. The duo, who met at Stanford, were part of the original team that developed Google Maps. Next up: Adding more filters to prevent information overload.

Advice: Says Taylor: “Getting things done is often more important than getting things right. When you are creating an entirely new product, getting things right without direct feedback from users is virtually impossible. The company that wins is the company that receives and responds to feedback the fastest. The best decision I have made so far is surrounding myself with smart people who think differently than I do.”

In a “complex” and sophisticated fraud, Pakistan-born Raja told “endless lies” to inspectors and “despicably” targeted his own community, Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, said.

To escape detection he used various methods to distance himself from many of his phoenix-like firms that appeared, disappeared, and then rose again with a new name.

The jury heard that Raja, who mainly supplied labour to clean planes and prepare onboard meals at Gatwick and Heathrow, not only conned workers into thinking their deductions were being made properly but created fictitious employees to pocket even more.

He then tried to conceal as much of his ill-gotten gains as possible by channelling large chunks into accounts controlled by his wife, children and other relatives.

When revenue investigators moved in they found millions in tax and national insurance contributions missing.

The judge told Raja: “Umpteen sums of money in terms of PAYE contributions in respect of goodness knows how many workers were not paid as they should have been.

“In respect to some of the off-the-record companies, no tax was paid at all. You made not just a handsome profit yourself and your family but a veritable fortune.”

Raja, of Hanworth, Middlesex, was sentenced to six years’ jail to run concurrently on each of nine counts of cheating Inland Revenue between February 1998 and April 2001.

He got an 18-month and a three-year sentence, also to run concurrently, for being found guilty on two charges of false accounting.

The 11-week trial heard Raja’s companies had acted as labour agencies providing a large number of workers to other businesses.

Prosecutors put the amount of money stolen at in excess of £4m. Raja’s accountant puts it to at least £2m. The judge said the amount owed to the Inland Revenue is “in the very least the sum of £2.75m” and a confiscation hearing will take place at a later date.

Why do people who obviously have some business acumen, ruin it all!

Company: RockYou

Funding: About $15 million from Sequoia Capital, Partech International, and Lightspeed Venture Partners

RockYou co-founder Shen likes to boast about his company’s speed. RockYou makes software that helps Internet users add pizzazz to social network profile pages. Last year the company introduced Superwall, a feature that lets users post video and other content to friends’ pages, three days after dreaming it up, says Shen, Rock-You’s CTO. Now he’ll need to make sure that a hiring binge—which has doubled headcount, to 40, since November—won’t inhibit RockYou from keeping up with its better-funded rival, Slide. “You don’t want to lose that edge,” he says. Meantime, RockYou is lining up a new round of funding to stay sharp.

Advice: “We’ve never been extravagant in the way we spend money,” Shen says. “Every person we hire is for a specific use. When we bring a person in, we know we can bring in more unique users and more page views.”

A true domestic goddess who swept away the competition has been named as a finalist in the British Franchiser of the Year awards.

Businesswomen Pam Bader, of Vicarage Road, Maidenhead, has gained recognition from the British Franchise Association (BFA) after succesfully franchising Molly Maid Ltd in the UK 22 years ago.

Pam’s career began as a nursery nurse and boutique owner before she and her husband gambled on a franchise opportunity from Molly Maid to start up a small scale cleaning business in Farnham Road, Slough.
Fighting hard to carve a niche cleaning domestic homes the business has prospered under Pam’s leadership and she is now UK chief executive.

From a minor operation in Slough, to 68 franchises across the UK, the company currently reels in an annual turnover of more than £12 million. 

“The awards from the British Franchise Association are very important to Molly Maid,” said the entrepreneur who lives in Maidenhead.
“Years ago myself and my husband made the very frightening step of starting our own business and through franchising we have turned Molly Maid UK into a great success.”

In 1995, Pam was awarded an OBE in recognition of her services to training and also became the first woman to be elected chair of the British Franchise Association.

The awards at London’s Sheraton Park Hotel will showcase Britain’s best performing franchisers. Pam will attend the ceremony on May 22 with marketing and communications manager Kirsten Ware, and franchise development manager Andrew Parsons.

They hope to be named Express Newspapers brand builder of the year after gaining 7,000 new customers in 2007.