Every year, Small Business BC hosts The Successful You Awards to support and recognize entrepreneurs from all over British Columbia for their efforts to grow successful small businesses.

They also recognize companies that foster entrepreneurial spirit and this year, we were extremely honored to win Company of the Year!

The event was held at the Birks flagship store in downtown Vancouver, and we met such a great assortment of entrepreneurs – including Chris and Larry, the Clodhoppers Candy Kings! Their inspiring story showed us just how much of a roller coaster (and how rewarding) the entrepreneurial life can be.

Below you’ll find a few shots from the event – enjoy!

Huge congrats go out to our fellow winners, Growing City (Business Start-Up Award), My Tech Guys (Business Growth Award), and SEEDS Development Centre (Small Business Champion Award).

March 8 is International Women’s Day: a day to celebrate and recognize women all around the world. The number of women in professional occupations in business has risen by 50% over the past decade (more than double the rate seen among men). To celebrate, we’re profiling a handful of the incredible women on the CityMax.com team. Thank you - we couldn’t do it without your help!

Name: Ani
Dream Business: An R&D house creating user interfaces based on new technological concepts, such as the Semantic Web and Augmented Reality. ‘Web 3.0’
How long I’ve been with CityMax.com: Since November 2004
Role at CityMax.com: Product Manager – I am responsible for the technology: network infrastructure, product development & quality.
My female role model: Helen Greiner – Co-founder of iRobot Corp. and inventor of the Roomba. She is not only an entrepreneur, but also a strong leader and innovator in a predominantly male industry. Her unique approach to robotics aims to make them a more versatile and integral part of our daily lives.

Name: Yasmin
Dream Business: SEO consultant (realistic) or a Disney Imagineer (well, it is the happiest place on earth)
How long I’ve been with CityMax.com: Since March 2005
Role at CityMax.com: Business Manager – I am responsible running the day-to-day business, as well as everything to do with people (human resources). You might call me the Chief People Officer!
My female role model: Besides my mom, I would have to say Jane Austen. I admire her strength as a woman, considering the era she was born in. Not only is she a strong role model for women, but all of her characters are strong women by any era’s standards.

Name: Corinne
Dream Business: A Geeky Gadget Design company. I can’t wait till the day I see someone walking down the street with my designs!
How long I’ve been with CityMax.com: Since January 2009
Role at CityMax.com: Support Manager – I am responsible for keeping all our customers happy! I help resolve any issues our customers have, and also teach them technical skills for their websites.
My female role model: Randice-Lisa Altschul - the inventor of disposable cell phones.  She is also a successful toy designer and patent holder.  To be able to invent simple toys/games, then make the leap to create several high-tech, ground-breaking technologies inspires me to do the same.

Name: Mara
Dream Business: A vacation resort in Mexico
How long I’ve been with CityMax.com: Since October 2006
Role at CityMax.com: Editor in Chief – I am responsible for all things “text”,  including internal and external communications, social media, and application design.
My female role model: Ann Handley - an extremely talented and successful writer/marketer. She co-founded ClickZ.com, manages personal and corporate blogs, and is also the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, an invaluable resource for any marketer.

Name: Bea
Dream Business: Exotic Food Restaurant
How long I’ve been with CityMax.com: Since March 2007
Role at CityMax.com: Quality Control – I handle all quality control and testing, making sure that our software products meet the qualified requirements for customers in terms of  performance, usability and functionality.
My female role model: U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. She has endured and triumphed over several life obstacles while in the public eye. It takes tremendous determination and hard work to achieve what she has. Her courage and assertiveness are very inspiring to young women. I admire her wit, edginess, and accomplishments in the political sphere.

For more on International Women’s Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Day

To show you how grateful we are for every customer you refer, we’re improving how our referral program works!

With the old program, you got your site for free whether you referred 3 or 300 people. With the new program, the more people you refer, the bigger the reward!

Here’s how it works:

1. You get a link that you can distribute a number of ways (Twitter, email, website footer, etc.)
2. For every person that signs up through your link, you get 5 credits for every month their site is active.
3. Each credit is worth $1 and can be redeemed by phone to pay for your website subscription.

You’ll find the new “Get a Free Website” program under “Free Website” below your profile picture on your Dashboard.

It’s not often that you get to meet someone like Ken Lyotier – a man who rose above his own personal challenges to create a well-respected, non-profit business by uniting a community more known for sad stories of homelessness and addiction rather than those of success.

Lyotier is the founder and former Executive Director of United We Can, a non-profit bottle depot that operates out of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. This week, we were lucky enough to have Lyotier come in and tell his inspirational story to us first hand during our weekly team learning session.

Like many entrepreneurs, Lyotier started off by identifying a problem that he was experiencing himself. While trying to earn a living by collecting recyclable cans and bottles, he found that the stores that were supposed to honor the refunds were often unwilling to accommodate the bottle returns.

With the help of a local minister, he and a friend decided to organize an event where people could bring in non-recyclable items for cash – he was overwhelmed with the response and energy it generated from the community.

“The buzz you get from people being excited about what you’re doing is better than any high you’ll ever get from drugs or alcohol,” says Lyotier.

After searching for answers to local recycling issues and working with the government and VanCity, United We Can was founded in 1995 and has grown into an impressive source of inspiration, empowerment, and employment to people living in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. Over the past few years, the organization has grown beyond the bottle depot to include other services that work well within the community, including a bicycle repair shop and computer recycling.

Along with being a well-respected member of his community, Lyotier’s positive impact on the community has also recently earned him an invitation to light the cauldron at the 2010 Vancouver Games celebration site after being handed the Olympic torch by Canadian singer Michael Buble.

Ken Lyotier is an inspiration to any entrepreneur and he also provides some food for thought. What business opportunities surround you in your own life? What’s holding you back? Use personal challenges to take a step forward and write your own success story.

If you’re familiar with CityMax.com, you already know we’ve got entrepreneur fever. Our website builder is the heart of thousands of successful businesses (just take a look at our amazing Homepreneur finalists), and we’ve been around for over 10 years. But so what, you might ask?

Well, two weeks ago we decided to put our money where our collective mouth is. We decided to start an online venture.

Why?  To show that anyone can do it, and hopefully learn a few things along the way.

Every CityMax.com team member will help run our new small business. Each week, the entire company (all 34 of us) will meet as a board and vote to determine our next course of action – from our operational name, to the look of our website, to marketing. And you’ll get to follow along right here!

Week 1: We drafted and approved our company bylaws. Boring but essential, and very democratic.

Last week: We began talking about what kind of business we should start. To figure out the “right product”, the team started floating ideas against a boatload of questions that any new business owner should ask:

• Is it easily shipped? (The best products are those that can be packaged or shipped affordably and safely)
• Is it scalable? How are you going to manage increased shipping/sales if you go from 1 sale daily to 400?
• Does it encourage repeat customers?
• Do you have a secure product supply? A long-term relationship with key suppliers?
• Can product delivery/production be outsourced?
• Is it easy to access/local?
• Does it have high margins per item (actual dollars, not percentage)? What is the likelihood of making money on every sale, factoring order size, shipping costs, etc.
• Is the product line brandable?
• Are people searching for what you are selling?
• Do you believe in what you are selling?

Now that we’ve got a few guiding factors to help us decide our business model, it’s time to brainstorm and see what we come up with. Next week – we choose our product and begin competitive market research. Stay tuned!

The judges made their final tallies and have declared Marco Barberini of OvernightPetTags.com our Homepreneur of the Year!

Marco’s vision, story, and growing success stood out from an impressive group of finalists. The 24-year old former gas station employee from a tiny Michigan town began his CityMax.com site in 2006 with no HTML experience. In 2007, he ended up quitting his job to focus on his business and has now tagged over 32,000 pets!

In an interview, Marco said: “A few years ago, my wife Heather and I realized we were tired of working paycheck to paycheck and started focusing on Overnight Pet Tags. We built out our site with CityMax.com and eventually started ranking in the search engines. Our online sales have increased by 100% each year and our dream is to tag every pet in the United States.”

OvernightPetTags.com is currently generating $6,000 - $8,000 in monthly online revenue and, according to Marco, requires only 7 to 10 hours of his time each week.

As Homepreneur of the Year, Marco is the winner of a $10,000 prize package, including a round-trip flight to Vancouver, Canada, three days in a beautiful luxury hotel, the Red Carpet treatment, a day of 1-on-1 expert consultation at CityMax.com HQ, and a complete redesign of his website. He’ll also receive a life-time subscription to CityMax.com for himself and five small businesses of his choosing.

Our two runner-up winners are:
Meredith Patterson (MeredithPatterson.com), an enterprising musical theatre and TV actress who has appeared on All My Children.

Michael and Mary Ferrari (UnusualThreads.com), a retired couple who are generating millions of dollars annually with their online celebrity fashions business.

Our runner-ups will each receive a custom redesign and website makeover ($1,000 value), plus a lifetime subscription to CityMax.com for themselves and three small businesses of their choosing.

Congratulations again to all of our inspiring winners!

If you know someone you’d like to nominate for Homepreneur of the Year (online home-based business, please email homepreneur@citymax.com.

On Wednesday, we were lucky to talk to best-selling author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell. Courtesy of Lindsay Smith and the F5 Expo team, Gladwell telecommuted into a posh Vancouver lounge. There, local tech heads and entrepreneurs gathered to pepper him with questions in anticipation of his April appearance in Vancouver.

Here is some of the CityMax.com team at F5 Expo’s launch party!

As an expert of social sciences, Gladwell has brought us such gems as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. His stories inspire and compel, while allowing us to draw parallels to our own everyday lives.

We highly recommend reading his articles in the New Yorker - here are a few of our favorites:

• In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?
• Priced to Sell: Is free the future?
• The Coolhunt

Whew!

Last week was a very busy one with members of our website builder team heading both to Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West 2010 and Miami for Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Summit. We met hundreds of great affiliates, networks, resellers and marketers and returned home charged and ready to go.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at ASW 2010. To the old friends and new faces it was good to see/meet you all: Brandon Delgrosso and Jared Sidwell (DOBA), Mindy Brown and Carol-Lyn Jardine (LinkTrust), Gillian Muessig (SEOMoz.org), John Chow (JohnChow.com), Deborah Carney and Liz Ababon (TeamLoxly.com), and Alison Stewart (plus the rest of the RevenueWire crew) - just to drop a few names. Both conferences were packed and we picked up more than few marketing tips to share with you entrepreneurs out there.

Highlights!
A favorite ASW booth of ours was MarketLeverage. They gave away free hamburgers in exchange for business cards – see the pic! To wrap up ASW, our own Patrick Schrodt even won an awesome remote controlled car from the nice folks at LinkTrust.

Here are a few photos of the Las Vegas fun – and yes that’s 90s rapping legend Flava Flav…

It’s just nine days until we launch our website builder affiliate program at Affiliate Summit West 2010 in Las Vegas! From January 17-19, our team will be at the CityMax.com booth (#404) at the Rio All Suite Hotel & Casino in Vegas, giving our affiliates the gold treatment and offering a chance to win a grand prize worth $100,000.

Our new program will allow the very best affiliates to promote a ‘White-hat” product offering for both the money-making online crowd and the mass market home business owner. Our one promise for Affiliates is this: We will treat you like gold!

To learn more about our affiliate program and our Affiliate Summit West 2010 promotion, visit our CityMax.com at Affiliate Summit West website, or get in touch with our Affiliate Ambassador, Kyle Murphy, at 1.866.310.9327 ext.146.

The polls are closed and the votes are in! Time to tally them up and find out our Homepreneur of the Year…

Thank you everyone for sending in your emails, Tweets and even snail mail! We received hundreds of votes and messages of support for our intrepid finalists.

Later this month, we will announce the grand prize winner, who will be flown to Vancouver, Canada for the full red carpet treatment and a complete website redesign package!

The judging panel has a challenging decision ahead of them to determine the winner. They will be taking each of the following criteria into account:

• innovation and originality
• entrepreneurial ‘spirit’
• revenues generated through home-based business
• prior experience and success
• business sustainability and scope
• electronic votes via Twitter/email

Stay tuned to find out who the winner is, and congratulations again to all of our truly inspiring finalists!