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Popular YouTuber ProfessorBlackOps joins The Savvy Entrepreneur to share his top cysecurity tips for startups and small businesses.

He talks about passwords, routers, and printers, and how to avoid the increasingly-sophisticated phishing and vishing schemes. He also shares tips for what you should do WHEN you get hacked. Because as he stresses, it's a question of WHEN, not IF.

Finally, he shares his predications for future cybersecurity risks, as well as some of the job & business opportunities arising from cybersecurity.

Listen in — the interview is full of lots of practical tips that will help individuals as well as small businesses stay safer.  Or go here if you'd prefer to read a transcript of our interview.  

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Kavnia Coffee Company was established by Olivia vonNieda as part of her quest for perfect cup of cold drip coffee.  For non-coffee afficionados, cold-drip coffee is the next evolution beyond cold brew coffee.  Cold brew is made by soaking the coffee grounds in cold water.  Cold drip passes a mist of water over the beans, creating coffee one drop at a time, creating a more intense flavor and picking up more of the subtle flavors of the coffee.

Cold drip coffee is beloved by coffee buffs, but to date, it's difficult and expensive to produce at home.  It's really only available at high-end coffee houses.  vonNieda set out to find a way to make it more accessible, applying her formidable engineering and business skills.

Along the way, she needed to find money and resources to help her.  She found resources at mHub and The Hatchery, both incubators based in Chicago.  And she was eventually successful at pitching for funding, although it required a major pivot in Kavnia Coffee's business model.

vonNieda shares the story of Kavnia Coffee with The Savvy Entrepreneur, along with plenty of advice and tips on pitching for funding and how and when to successfully pivot.  Not to mention it will whet your appetite for cold drip coffee!

Click on the arrow to listen, or go here if you'd prefer to read a transcript of our chat.

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Rieke Office Interiors, owned & managed by Melissa Kehl, is no startup business.  It's been in business for 27 years.  But Melissa explains why small businesses today need to think and act like startups, and why you need plenty of entrepreneurial skills to meet customer needs, keep ahead of the competition, and stay in business.

She explains to The Savvy Entrepreneur some of those entrepreneurial skills.  She stressed the need to delegate early on, even when cash is tight, and offers some creative ways to do that.  Doing that, she says, allows you to work ON your business, not necessarily IN it.  She also articulates why it's so important to take time to step back from the urgent, day-to-day crises, and always stay focused on the strategic.

Both startups and established small businesses today also need leaders who are willing and able to take big risks, she says.  If you're not comfortable with that, you're probably in the wrong spot.

The interview is full of candid, no-nonsense advice from a CEO that has regularly pivoted her company in a market space full of competition and highly susceptible to economic downtowns.  And yet, under Melissa's guidance, the company continues to grow.  Her advice is relevant to both startups and small businesses.

Click on the arrow to listen, or go here to read a transcript of the interview.

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America's nursing shortage and lack of healthcare access for many people are well-documented.  Bre Loughlin and her company, Nurse Disrupted, are actually doing something about it.  She recently joined The Savvy Entrepreneur show to share her story.

Nurse Disrupted provides a turnkey system where healthcare access is limited, and staffs it with online nurses who screen patients and either assist them or get them to the next step in healthcare treatment.  The company started with homeless shelters during the pandemic in Dane County, Wisconsin (the home of Madison).  It has since expanded to locations in Milwaukee and elsewhere in Wisconsin, and the calls for help are starting to come in from all over the country.

The system is anonymous and super-easy to use.  Payment for the systems comes from public health grants as well as large health systems who are desperate to reach rural, inner city, and other poorly-served populations.  The company is now funded through outside investors, and is growing rapidly.

But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns.  Bre shares some of the challenges she faced and how she overcame them.  She also offers her thoughts on lessons learned that may make the journey easier for others.

Nurse Disrupted is the inspirational story of a startup company that does well by doing good.  It's a clever product and service, and helps meet a desperate need.

Click on the arrow to listen and be inspired!  Or read a transcript of the interview here.

 

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Annette Gilchrist started out as a cancer researcher before starting MyGenomeRx, on online platform that identifies potential gene-drug interactions.

She joined The Savvy Entrepreneur to share the story of shy she founded MyGenomeRx, and how she's built & grown the company.

Annette's medical research background led her to teach pharmacists, and as part of one of her courses, she had pharmacy students use their DNA to identify potential gene-drug interactions.  She quickly realized that there were a lot of potential interactions, but no good websites to easily access this information.

She partnered with a coding whiz and they developed MyGenomeRx, a site where you can enter your DNA from ancestry.com, 23and me, or other source.  For a small fee, the platform then identifies gene markers that may cause your body to uptake a drug faster than normal, slower than normal, or have no response to at all.

Researchers are constantly finding indications of these, all of which help both patients & physicians determine which drug and dosage to use.

Annette shares some of the challenges of creating such a huge matching platform and of generating a report that is easily understandable.  It's also a story of how to find the right co-founder, and the challenges of  creating a company as a side hustle for both of them, not to mention the challenges of marketing and pricing.  It helps that this is not Annette's first “rodeo” as a founding entrepreneur, and she talks about how some of the learnings with her first company have helped as she's built and grown MyGenomeRx.

It's an interesting story, and Annette openly shares some of the challenges she's faced along the way.  And she candidly shares some of the lessons she's learned and advice for other budding entrepreneurs.

Click on the arrow to listen to the fascinating story of MyGenomeRx — and you might even decide it's a good idea to find out your own drug-gene interactions.   Or go here to read a transcript of the interview!

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