where's waldo? he's with small businesses using him to get customers to shop local, and it's back to the future with a 19th century flavored elevator pitch. all of that and more coming up next on "your business." ♪ small businesses are revitalizing the economy, and american express open is here to help. that's why we're help to present "your business" on msnbc.

♪ hi there, everyone. i'm jj ramberg, and welcome to "your business." we came across a great shop local event while one our producers was vacationing with her family this summer, and when we dug in a little deeper, we discovered that it was happening nationwide. the observer of a book store in falmouth, massachusetts, launched a find waldo local scavenger hunt to get people to visit her neighborhood stores, and today if you've ever wondered where's waldo you might actually find him shopping in a local downtown near you. now you see him. now you don't. for the past three summers, waldo, that intrepid and usually elusive children's book character in the red and white

shirt and black-rimmed glasses has been spotted shopping locally in stores all across america. >> we've had major cities use find waldo local. we've had small towns. they have been on main streets. they have been in shopping malls from asheville to austin, from yakima, washington, to zimmerman, minnesota. >> in just three years this special july campaign anchored bay local independent book store has had more than 10,000 local businesses participate, and the whole thing started here in falmouth, massachusetts, in 2011 with this woman, the owner of a small book store called eight cousins. >> like many ideas this measure came from desperation. every summer we tried to do programming because it's our busy season and we, of course, to encourage people to be involved with the store, and then i thought, well, everybody knows waldo. maybe we can do something with waldo, and then i thought a

scavenger hunt, that could be fun. >> she got in touch with candlewick press, the publisher of "where's waldo" and asked them what they thought of the idea and loved it and said if it was a success in falmouth they would create a find waldo shop local campaign nationally. >> they formed a book partnership with national and went next year with 250 stores in 250 different towns in every state, so i was so, so pleased about that. >> the idea was simple. get 25 local businesses to gather in your area to participate in a scavenger hut by hiding a cardboard cutout of waldo somewhere in the retail store >> you never know where he's going to find him. today he's hiding in the shark's mouth and kids thought that was hysterical. >> waldo searchers are giving a passport for each store they find waldo. the most stamps they have on

passport the better chance they have of winning a prize at the enof the campaign. >> now let's get that stamp. >> stores participated because it was a great way to get new potential customers through their door. >> they liked the idea that it would bring more people through their door, more walk-in traffic. that appeal. they liked the idea that they wouldn't have to do a whole lot, and then pretty soon it took on a life of its own because they could see that it was really working for them. >> there. >> not only does it drive traffic into the store, it just creates a fun environment within the store. our employees love it. they love when the kids come in, and we'll play hot and cold with the kids to help them find waldo. >> for 7-year-old agnes buell, the actual task of finding waldo was a big undertaking. >> so i go into this store, and i'm always like looking like this, and i'm looking up and down and all around and it's

very hard work, but at the end of the day it pays off. >> and for her mom, it was an excuse to do a little shopping. >> i enjoyed it because i got in to some different stores that maybe i wouldn't have stopped in if there hadn't been a waldo hiding there somewhere. out of the 20 stores we visit the, i purchased something at 11 of them, and there's one store that she found waldo right away and i said i have to go back, i loved everything in there so i'm planning on returning the next rainy day. >> in other parts of the country like new orleans, the timing of this event in july is perfect since it's typically one of the slower times of the years. >> july in new orleans is very slow, and it's also the first month of hurricane season, so a lot of people tend to vacate the city. since we've been playing waldo for the last three years, the stores that have participated have actually seen a rise in the

business. >> judith of octavia books has been the organizer of the local event there. she's approached shops in her area that might be a little off the beaten path. >> i wanted to get attention to shops and stores that maybe didn't get a whole lot of attention during the month of july, and they have great things to offer, and, you know, why not check them out. >> philip and evan have been searching for waldo all month long and came by octavia books for the end of the month i found waldo party. >> i won a gift card. >> i think it's a great thing. i think anything that makes children participate with reading and writing and experiencing things with their imagine helps them to be better and having the parents being able to relate to the children, and then all of us as retailers relating to people coming in as

customers and what we can do to make it more fun and interesting to them. it's just a big circle that actually works well for everybody. >> you know, people can buy merchandise anywhere, including nowhere, and yet people can only have genuine experiences doing real things. >> the where's waldo campaign is just one of the ways small businesses are getting customers to shop local as the holiday shopping season approaches. here are five ideas to help prepare your online business for the hustle and bustle of the fourth quarter courtesy of entrepreneur.com. one, anticipate your bestsellers. build an inventory of product now. analyze your past sales results and keep a surplus of your top items in stock. two, plan promotions. come up with campaigns you're going to offer and map out sales early on. three, test your online shop.

the holidays often bring increased web traffic and transaction proses issing, so make sure your website can handle it. four, add flair to packaging. stand out from the competition by infusing a bit of seasonal spirit. you can use customized wrapping paper or include a festive image or message on your shipping label. and, five, take a look at your shipping tactics. you'll be sending out a lot more packages as we get closer to the holidays so make sure your current mailing process is the most efficient and affordable option for your business. >> there is a reason big companies have hr departments. it's because it takes a lot of time to deal with benefits and payroll and all sorts of other things that are piling up on your desk right now. our website of the week will help you with these tesks. zenefitss.com is a free cloud-based software system that

eliminates all of your business's paperwork. it allows you to manage payroll, health insurance, time off and more all in one dashboard. also, you can quickly on board new team members by having them sign all of the necessary documents through the online portal, and they will be directly processed into your payroll and benefits system. there comes a time for many of us when we're done running our businesses. maybe you want to retire. maybe you want to move. maybe some life event is making it necessary that you change things, and when that time comes and you are looking to sell your company, our next guest says that you better have all your ducks in a row, so best to start planning for it long before that day arrives. michael is the managing director at chapman associates, a firm that specializes in middle market mergers and acquisitions. so great to see you, michael. >> hi, jj. thanks for having me. >> you talk in general about investing in people and processes. don't run your business willy-nilly. you won't be able to sell that.

>> right, right, absolutely. what we find is that in many cases business owners tend to wear a lot of hats. a lot of business owners like to run the company, keep the financial house, be the keeper of all the customer relationships. that makes it very difficult to sell. a company owner should really bring into the company a good competent management team and bring in the cfo and bring the manager of sales. similarly on the process side a lot of companies tend to run by the seat of their pants because that's what entrepreneurs are able to do, but as the company gets larger, in order to really bring the value for that business owner, they really need to put practices in place that allow the company to be sustainable and create a lot of value for the buyer as well. >> okay. so that moves into the next thing that you talk about which is just do what you do best and outsource everything else. >> right, right, and that goes for transactions as well. i mean, most business owners that we work with, it's really the only transaction they will

ever do in their lifetime, so every minute that a business owner spends working on a transaction, they are really not spending time doing thing that creates value for them, so i really recommend early in the process, i mean, even years in advance, talking to a good n & a adviser to help you understand where the values are in your business and how to make it more valuable. bring in a competent merger and acquisition lawyer and someone with a transitsal background, similarly brick in a trust planner, estate planner and tax-planning help all of those things really allow you to create a lot of value early in the process that you probably aren't going to be able to do when the transaction is imminent. >> and then you talk about recurring revenue streams because a buyer is going to be much more interested in your company if they know money is absolutely going to be coming in. >> yeah. i think the big issue for us is in dealing with our clients,

we've learned that buyers hate risk, so anything you can do to manage risk inside your company is going to be worthwhile. tying down long-term relationships, putting recurring revenue plans in place, making sure your customers are sticky, even down to, you know, making sure you have a long-term lease in place, your vendor's relationships are long-term, anything you can do to reduce risk is going to make your company more valuable. >> and finally, getting your house in order because a buyer is going to come in. no matter how great your company looks like from the outside, they are going to lift the curtain or if things look a mess and you don't have recurring revenue streams and there's a risk, suddenly you're much less valuable. >> yeah, that's right, jj. what tends to happen is i've heard from many, many clients, well, these financials are good enough for me. they have enabled me to run the business, and i understand that approach, and that's complete will you a valid approach when you're running your business, but when you're dealing with a transaction most of the to

imyou're dealing with professional investors. you're dealing with lenders, banks that are going to be interested in very keen business practices and financial practices that you need to make sure you have that financial house in order. adopt a financial practices that you can live with over the long term, you know, adopt good accounting practices and lastly in the last year or two before you're ready to sell think about getting an outside accountant involved an getting your financial reviews or maybe even audited. >> michael, great talking to you. thanks very much. >> thank you very much, jj. >> when we come back, a look at whether you should be sharing information about your company's financials. lynn tilton, ceo of patriarch partners which owns companies ranging from stilla to rand mcnally on making great products beautiful, even helicopters, and an old-fashioned elevator pitch for ketchup like the one your great great grandmother might

have made. if i can impart one lesson to a new business owner, it would be one thing i've learned is my philosophy is real simple american express open forum is an on-line community, that helps our members connect and share ideas to make smart business decisions. if you mess up, fess up. be your partners best partner. we built it for our members, but it's open for everyone. there's not one way to do something. no details too small. american express open forum. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. you don't want to sell somebody something they can't afford. we don't want to sell somebody something they don't need in their home, so if we can really learn and think about what they they'd in their home to make things better for them, we'll get a repeat customer. i have a simple saying. your success is our success.

if we have a customer that successfully shops our store, it's our success. they will be back with more and will tell their friends. >> do you remember how great ketchup tasted in the 1880s? neither do i, but today's elevator pitcher does, and he thinks there's a market for a retro condiment. two of our favorite panelists take the taste test. >> hello. i'm daniel hooper, owner and chef and food historian for 1876 ketchup. since 1876 ketchup has been branded as one flavor, tomato. in 176 ketchup will bring back some of the victorian flavors popular back then, starting with our first four offerings, cranberry, cranberry habanero and tomato and ginger. made in small batches with whole fruits and all-natural ingredients. >> daniel, i've got to say artisanal food is big where i come from or where i'm looking

right now. how much money are you looking to raise? $$60,000. >> what are you going to do with that money? >> i'm going to work with the co-factor and be able to increase my production while we're being able to have reserve capital. >> got it. i'll ask one more question before i let these guys have at you. have you seen any success so far? >> at farmer's market and different farm table restaurants that i work with, they are enjoying ketchup very well. >> okay, great. i'm going to give you guys this. i didn't even let you taste it yet. >> we have to taste. what's the use of coming on here with the food without having this? >> okay. while you are eating that. >> there's one that's ginger, which one is that? >> in the middle. >> and i'm having cranberry habanero which has a little bit of spice to it, little kick to it. >> give 1 to 10 on pitch and some suggestions for working it better. when did you start the company? >> i started it in may this year. >> you definitely get a 10 for

best costume here on the elevator. okay. jeffrey, how did he do in. >> i'm going to have to give you a 5. the reason i gave you a 5, you've got the stuff and know the stuff, have to get over being able to give me all the facts and figures. a one-time deal, only one chance to be on elevator pitch. >> i gave you a 5 because i upgraded to 5.1 but it was too rehearsed, right. you weren't going in, honest truth, you were going through your sequence of words and that's what threw you off. the product is phenomenal. i love what you're doing but the pitch got me. >> if your pitch is as good as the real sauce you'll get a lot more than $60,000 for that kind of product. >> all right. great advice. good product. work on the pitch, practice, practice and then people will pay attention to the product more. good luck with everything. thanks so much for coming on program. you guys stick around. >> thanks for the hats. >> all right. now if any of you out there have a product or a service and you

want feedback from our elevator pitch panel on your chances of getting interested investors, just send us an e-mail. the address is yourbusiness@msnbc.com. please include a short summary of what your company does, how much money you intend to raise and what you intend to do with that money. we look forward to hearing your pitches and look forward to seeing some of you here in the elevator. it's time now to answer some of your business questions. i've got jeffrey and mike out of elevator to help us out. the first one is about getting help with your tech needs. >> that's one thing we've struggled with is finding the correct tech talent and who can really marry our skills and our services with that right person or that right firm. so how do you know when you've found that right person? >> you know what's so tricky about this, mike, is that we don't speak the same language, right? >> right. >> and you're so reliant on your tech team. you have to trust them, trust that they are doing the right thing because you can't look at their work and say that's right

or that's wrong. >> no, but you can measure the end result. >> sure. >> how you find the best person is look at their past history. we're all human pattern kind of people, if that makes even any sense. what we did in the past is what we're likely to do in the future so the best way to gauge the performance of the company is look at their past work. okay to give them a test. when you bring them on board, put them on a probation period, even if only a few weeks and measure the end result. >> the other big thing is we don't spend enough time taking to know these people. i don't like to hang around most of them and getting to know them a little bit more, take them to dinner and put them in social situations because you'll need conversations with this and they deal with things differently. think about outsourcing. go to places where they do this all the time, especially for small businesses. >> i would also say go read some books and understand the language, do you know what waterfall needs versus agile? you cannot talk to a tech person

if you can't speak the language. >> you don't know how they are doing it or what they are doing it to you. >> jeffrey has a great point, cultural fit, extraordinary person and talent does not maybe mean fit. >> let's move on to another idea and that's sharing your financials with others. >> how much of the financials, the p & l should i share with those people so they can make decisions and understanding the impact of those decisions in the context of the profitability of the business? >> it's a really interesting question. we did a story on open book management a few years ago and what i learn from that is you can't just share the information. you have to make sure that people understand what they are looking at. >> yeah. because once they see oh, we're making money, where's mine and that's a big, big, big problem for a lot of business owners and for people that work for them. at the same time you don't want to share everything, but they also know when you're starting to pay for goods out of the

backdoor with cash, things aren't going very well and when you're taking a vacation and you're going or bought a brand new car they know things are going well. you want to share that decision because i've had bad things happen to me because i didn't share things with my manager who went out and bought a truckload of business and almost put me under. >> do you believe in open book management? >> i'm a convert. i used to keep it all secret. when i shared our first million in revenues and one of my employees came up afterwards and said you're making a million here, and i'm like i haven't paid the salary and that's when we switched. we did keep the salaries kind of bucketed together so we didn't know individual salaries but people became aware your top line is not your bottom line and started to help improve bottom line. >> bottom line, they know what each one is making. they all get around and talk about it. as much as we want to put a lid on that, they know. the biggest thing is to educate

saying here's why we're doing this, not getting a bonus this year. here's why we're getting a bonus this year and if we do these things you can impact the bottom line which is better for you. >> for people who really practice open book management, some, here's revenue, shades of gray there, but if you really practice it it's a lot of work and employees like it and don't like it to certain degrees because it's more work on them because you have to go to classes and understand this. >> it's a major educational component. if you don't tell them the numbers they can still assume the numbers so that's can be very dangerous. >> probably some degree to which people should be doing this. >> communicate, the big thing. >> moving on to a question of finding right mentor for your business. >> what would be a good way to find a mentor to help take your business to the next level?

>> you can point out who are the real people that really do great miss and who i respect and adore and add mire and say, man, if my business could be like that or even here in new york city, i have those kind of things with the big guys on wall street, so you want to go out and reach out to them. so i tell you if you ask them and say would you help me? would you partake some of that and give that knowledge back? i've always found that most people want to do that. >> but i think you wan to be specific about the ask, the sort of big would you help me is sort of too scary? >> jeff probably gets ten times volley do but i get a lot of people saying mike, would you do this for me? love for you to be my mentor. no. i'm not going to do this for you, but the ones that compare, i admire what you are doing, here's what i'm going to extract and here's what i commit to doing to make it easier on you, mike, those are the people that i'll team up with. >> a lot of people say let's do

coffee. i don't drink coffee. what do you want? tell me and then i have an objective and can i kill it and crush it. i like that. >> we won't be asking either of you for coffee any time soon. freight to see you. if any of you out there have a question for our experts go to our website. we answer them every week here on the show. the address is openforum.com/yourbusiness and once you get there hit the show link to submit a question to the panel, or if it's easier to you send us an email. the e-mail is yo yourbusiness@msnbc.com. we've had a lot of good advice interest jeffrey and mike on how to improve your miss and now it's your turn. great ideas from small business owners just like you. >> when i first started the company, we had very little money but i invested in having a photographer take a very beautiful picture of our first product and had postcards made very cheaply an sent them to all

the pest retailers and that's how we made our first sales. >> i've always been surprised at how powerful instagram is as a sales tool. we use instagram to build our brand, but we frequently get contacted by customers seeking to purchase our products and wholesale accounts seeking to purchase because they have seen us on instagram. >> i have i'll be back cards, so whenever a customer leaves me shop and they say great, i'll be back, and i said magic words and i hand them a business card and i've printed $5 coupons for sales over $25, so now what this does, it gives me business card value so they hold on to the card and that way they will know to come back and see me again. >> for the past 14 years, lynn tilton founder and ceo of patriarch partners has had ownership in and restructured more than 240 companies. with combined revenue of $200 billion. from cosmetics to rand mcneal, her company's investments spans

1 business sectors. she's all about saving american jobs. she took some time out to share with us what everyone can do to build an empire of their own in this learning from the pros. 243 companies, more than 100 billion of revenues and 700,000 jobs gives me an incredible advantage to be able to create new product in industries that have never seen that technology before. everything begins with product. there's only two things people want. they want design and they want disruption. they want to be enveloped in elegance and they want to be excited by innovation and technology. if you don't understand where the world is going, if you don't understand the drivers of technology that are changing the world, you can't create the right product. i'm constantly trying to create

beauty in everything i do, because if it's beautiful, it's really made well. even with my helicopters, i don't think we should ever manufacture a part that i wouldn't put on my shelf, whether you see it or you don't see it. helicopters have historically been black interiors so we're doing a lot in midnight blue. i think streamlined elegance is essential in everything we do. you have to work from the customer backward. at the same time, you have to be able to intuit what the customer wants because if you spend a lot of time in market research, by the time you get started, it's going to be obsolete or someone else is going to have that product. never before do we have such instant reaction. we showed someone a new stila product at miami swimwear

fashion shows. and instagram was so quick with people in likes and how they felt about it, it was wonderful, and it was such a relief that people were so excited about it. you really need to have that right brain owe left brain of being able to do it all. businesses are qualitative and quantitative and people who run businesses with no creativity now, how do you dream in product? in the end, you have to be able to do what others do and lead by example. you really have to develop that side of you that's weakest. if you want to be a leader, if you want to own your own business, if you want to make sure it's successful. >> to learn more about today's show, just head on over to our website. it is openforum.com/yourbusiness. you'll find all of today eats segments, plus web exclusive content with a lot more information to help your

business grow. you can also follow us on twitter. it's@msnbcyourbis and we ear on facebook and instagram, too. next week, a small business cannot succeed without knowing who its real customers are. find out how this children's party place became profitable when the owner realized it was the parents, not the kids, who he should be catering to. until then, i'm jj ramberg, and, remember, we make your business our business. if i can impart one lesson to a new business owner, it would be one thing i've learned is my philosophy is real simple american express open forum is an on-line community, that helps our members connect and share ideas to make smart business decisions. if you mess up, fess up. be your partners best partner. we built it for our members, but it's open for everyone.

there's not one way to do something. no details too small. american express open forum. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. an experienced journalist just printed something about what is not supposed to happen between congress and the military. on tuesday this week, this man was speaking at a campaign forum held in the basement of a bar if colorado springs, colorado. we have tape of it. we wanted to make sure it really happened. we did not want to go without