good morning. coming up on msnbc's "your business," when his grocery store started struggling, he went niche and now he's known as the soda man. pole fitness and dancing studios are positiving up everywhere. those stories, plus how to win in a competitive market, coming up next on "your business." will your business be ready when growth presents itself? american express open cards can help you take on a new job. orful a big order. or expand your office and take

on whatever comes next. for those who find new ways to expand their business, american express proudly presents "your business" on msnbc. hi, everyone, i'm jj ramberg and welcome to "your business," the show dedicated to helping your small business grow. john nies is a sommelier for so soda. it's transformed his grocery business into a shangri-la for soda lovers. with flavors ranging from cucumber to huckleberry, this highly specialized niche store stocks more than 750 varieties of the unusual hard to find, high quality soda from around the world.

♪ >> when you walk into galco's old world grocery store in the highland park section of los angeles, you are immediately transported back in time. ♪ and if the nostalgia doesn't put a smile on your face, the infectious sound of john nies's laughter which echos through the aisles certainly will. [ laughter ] and then you spot the motto that john has lived and breathed by since he took over management of the family business in 1995. it says just about everything you need to know about galco's. >> if you look up on the beam, it says freedom of choice. it's your choice, whatever you want. you mac the decision. >> then it hits you.

even though remnants of the past remain, this isn't a grocery store anymore. it's a store completely reinvented. a wonderland of soda with more than 750 varieties of the bubbly stuff, all in glass bottles, all made with real sugar, filling aisle after aisle of shelf space in every color of the rain dough. >> you can buy one bottle of anything in here. i am not trying to sell you a 24-pack and spend your money for you. especially if you only need six or one. try it. see if you like it. >> the old world grocery wasn't always in the soda pop business. john remembers what used to be here in aisle three. >> this was the vegetables, canned corn, beans, peas and all that other kind of stuff. fruit was on the other side of the aisle. that's with then. >> the business founded in 1887

was an institution. they made huge italian sandwiches, including the blockbust blockbuster, named by rocky marciano. >> the sandwich was too big for his mouth. he said this is a real blockbuster and it's been a blockbuster ever since. >> the store was virtually unchanged. when john took over the business in 1995, he could see the future was bleak for independent grocery stores. he knew galco's wasn't likely to survive if they continued to do the same thing. >> i mean, it was just a matter of time. we were in a controlled collapse. >> john's motivation for re-inventing the store came after he had a heated exchange with the local pepsi sales person. >> he says i'm going to give you the best buy you'll ever get on a pallet of pepsi cola cans. i'll charge you $5.59 a case. >> i'm going to send my customers to the ralph's down

the street. they're on sale for $1.99 a 12-pack. they're selling them cheaper than i can buy them for. pepsi cola is a demand item and your customers will demand you carry pepsi cola. >> my customers will be happy that i was honest with them. >> john courageously yanked the big soda brands from his shelf. >> then the lightbulb clicked on. you know? you should thank pepsi cola for reminding you that you own your shelf space and they don't. you can sell anything you want. >> he then set out on a mission supporting the small soda company, making great products that needed his shelf space. >> i went out and found 25 brands of independent bottlers. they were on glass bottles and put them on myself. >> not surprisingly, john's father was baffle by his son's plan. >> i said we're going to do sodas. my mother shook his head and never said a word. he told gale who works here, he

says, he's crazy. he is absolutely crazy. i am absolutely positive of it. [ laughter ] but it turned out. it turned out. that's what people were looking for but nobody asked. it's really easy to make the decisions when you're going broke. there's no bad decision. they're all good. you're going to go broke anyway, you can try things. >> for john, the gloves were off and he was in a battle to save the family business. having a myriad of interesting choices was his way of differentiating himself from every other store in los angeles. >> a little army can defeat a big army any day of the week. all you have to do is concentrate on a single part out of the line, create a breakthrough, get behind the lines and destroy them. and that's what little business has to do in this country. i'll flank them with more variety, do everything exactly opposite from what they say is good business practices. fewer suppliers, less choice.

no, no, more choice. just overload them, continually overload them. and you win. simple. >> the strategy worked and slowly galco's transformed from a grocery store to a soda pop shop with nies becoming the only purveyor of unique sodas like mr. cucumber which he carried exclusively for five years before it got selected soda of the year. >> it's so rare to find these sodas that you can't find all over the place, you know? i thought it was fantastic. >> even though some people miss the groceries, more people are walking through the door of galco's to buy craft soda than ever before and hopefully the repositioning of the store will help the business last another 100 years. >> let's be happy with what we're doing and that's what we did. became very happy with selling sodas. and people come in today and they look and say, you know, you have the happiest customers i've

ever seen. everybody's happy. chances are when you think of pole dancing you think of exotic dancers. but currently it's one of the hottest fitness regimens in the nation. thousands of enthusiasts are expected to participate in the fifth annual pole expo in los angeles this fall and studios are opening quickly both here in the u.s. and overseas. while some people say they'd like to see it in the olympics, advocates and owners say they still have to deal with the reputation surrounding the sport. >> i'm an elementary school teacher. >> i'm a technician. i work in a doctor's office. >> i'm a librarian. >> if you're not already familiar with pole fitness, these may not be the kinds of women you'd expect to see learning the latest moves but this is pole dancing of today.

it's more than just a performance. it's a growing trend in fitness. >> when i transferred to austin for work at the time, i was looking for a different sort of classes. i was used to doing yoga, belly dancing and pole. i couldn't find that one stop shop here. when i got downsized from my job, i'm like, that's a great opportunity. that was my vision. i said this is where i'm going to start. >> soon after opening the doors of inner diva, sherri knew she had a hit. her classes were full with people looking for a new fun way to get in shape. that said, she still had to contend with old notions of what pole dancing is. >> as a business owner, the hurdles are the conception of pole. it's not necessarily stripping. that's what a lot of people think when you hear pole dancing but it's not. >> the classes have helped some students shed the pounds.

>> i've lost 27 pounds since i started in january and a bunch of inches. i feel so much stronger. it's hard. you're usually drenched in sweat sometimes. >> others gain confidence. >> i think anyone who believes that pole fitness pole is a club type thing is way behind the eight ball. it's evolved. it's a fitness phenomena right now. it's way beyond that. >> while the inner circle understands the change, the riske outfits and the pole itself are making pole fitness a hard sell. >> we have to wear less for the reason and sticking and holding to the pole. it's not like we're trying to be half naked. we have reason for doing that. >> this isn't just a problem at inner diva. it's a problem for pole knitness studios across the country. which is why they found strength in numbers. >> our sport is really quite new. when i co-founded the pole

fitness association, we had a need and we had a need to establish consistent training standards, to establish a way we can all communicate with each other. >> that communication is not only pushing the sport forward but also helping individual exudio owners succeed. >> we had the opportunity to share business ideas. we talk about how to train staff, maintain them, promote them. we talk about overcoming the kind of dated opinion of what pole is. and how we do that, how we negate that. i've used it substantially as a business reference. just like i would in corporate america. >> we caught up with some of the people setting the tone of pole fitness as we know it at the international pole convention in los angeles. the top competitors and studio owners from across the globe came together to share resources on the latest techniques and to discuss a topic that's been making headline news, getting

pole fitness into the olympics. >> there's a lot of debate whether pole dance fitness belongs in the olympics or not. in some sense, that movement is a beautiful grass roots movement to enable people to understand that pole fitness is mainstream worthy and that it has athletic credentials, right? that what we do requires training to be good at it. it's a rigorous sport. >> so far, the associations have done a lot to help educate the public that pole dancing can be for everyone. and as they get more people comfortable with the idea, no doubt, the numbers of participants and studios will grow. >> some of my co-workers do know about it and they also have a lot of different questions but once you kind of explain what it is you're doing and they can actually see the difference and i show them my guns every once in a while. i have to admit. many of your customers are using their phones to get to your website.

but is your mobile look holding you back? inc.com has five design trends that will help you create a user interface that works on a smaller screen. >> one, less is more. a simple design improves conversion. so keep your website's features clean and straightforward. two, bigger is better. mobile screen sizes can be very small. so stick with large, bold fonts that are easy to read. three, subtle colors are the way to go. bright hues can appear bright and distracting. stay with understated tones. four, wearables are the next mobile. design your site to look professional on devices like the apple watch. your user interface should be easy to navigate, even on tinier screens. and five, pop-ups are gone. this form of marketing doesn't translate well on mobile. designers have been looking for alternative ways to reach people.

the market for most of us in business is competitive and if for some reason it's not for you right now, mark my words, other people are going to enter your space once they see your success. how can you win against your competition? michael determiner is the author of "the lonely entrepreneur." it shares ideas for helping entrepreneurs with growing their business. it's so good to see you. so true, the lonely entrepreneur. >> thanks for having me. >> it's great to see you. let's talk about it. because it can be scary when you get out there and then you see big guys entering your space or startups or people with a lot of money. let's talk about how you deal with that. >> well, the struggle is real. this is big boys and girls stuff. it's hard to really take all that in. part of it is realizing when you are under pressure you develop some flawed perspectives, right? some of those perspectives are like, i have to do everything. those naturally cause you to struggle. even things in your basic life.

when i was building my business, people would say you have to sleep more. you would say who has time to sleep. i fell asleep on my couch for a half hour one day and felt so much better. the first thing to realize is it's natural. we call it being under the influence of the four ps, passion, pleasure and pain. when you're under that influence you get a distorted view of the world. >> you talk about focusing on your path. your business path, your personal path? >> when you think about standing out from the crowd as a entrepreneur, what you don't have is big marketing budgets or a brand. let's say, for example, you were going to create that dress. think about going to bloomingdale's and saks and retailers and trying to go on a playground where people are already playing. >> they'll laugh at me. >> where do i find a playground where only i'm playing. let's say it's join investment bankers in new york city. you'll give them a personal

shopping experience to buy the same dress. you've created your own playground. what you do have, which a lot of people don't have is creativity. think about wear the red dress would do better. >> the more traditional paths. partnering with big corporate companies. that's great because you get their marketing dollars, their distribution. how do you get in with them? >> most entrepreneurs think you have to build a company from the ground up. you build it, raise money, build a company. but what entrepreneurs don't have is they don't have capital and resources and distribution. corporate america has that in spades. what they lack is great entrepreneurial ideas. my original business was in health care. i wouldn't go build a health care company today. i would come up with an idea and a concept and a business plan and go to united health care that has 40 million members. right? if i can become part of their infrastructure, the way to do that, instead of focusing on

necessarily building your business, you're taking that effort and focusing on the partner where your business solves a problem with them. fy help united beat cigna -- >> right. that's valuable to them. >> that's valuable to them. when i wake up every day, i spend my effort on what problem do i solve, how do i find the partner, investment bankers, the people that play in that space as opposed to asking mom for $10,000. >> that's your short cut to customers, too. >> absolutely. >> then focus on specific customers. this is almost like phoning your path. find your person. >> we would go to saturn if we could find ref view there. that's poort of tart of the pro. you have to say, i'm going to sell that dress to women whose name starts with the letter "b." i'm going to find out where they

eat, sleep, spend their money. >> it'd, right? >> absolutely. started in specific schools and got big. >> amazon. >> tinder. >> books first. >> all of these companies. create your own rules. what do you mean by that? >> again, if there's a market that wins on price and you compete on price you're not going to have the capital and resources that other people have. for example, i was doing work for a company that does dna testing for pregnant moms. the normal way that market competed was about here's how we're going to walk you through the testing, follow up with you. same thing everybody else is doing. what we helped them do is say it's an emotional sell. en is it really about, is there anything you wouldn't do for your unborn baby? >> right. >> you're changing the rules. you don't have the resources. you can't compete on their terms, just like going to your own playground. to stand out from the crowd you have to create the rules. >> here comes your marketing background. >> taking something and looking

at it in a different way. good luck with the book and really appreciate you stopping by. >> thanks for having me. if you're a business traveler, you know how hard it can be to schlepp your luggage along with everything else you're trying to hold. today's elevator pitcher has come up with carry-ones that will make things easier. brian cohen is ceo of launch it and serial entrepreneur sonya is co-founder of little global chefs. >> hi. my name is tom nelling. i'm ceo and founder of visionary luggage. it's a complete line of hard-side luggage. i created it four years ago after 20 years of experience. did you know there's 1 million business travelers each day and for them i created two of the most exciting useful carry-on pieces of luggage ever seen

before. first i have a pod pal. there's a place for your ipad, check your e-mail, watch a video. next is the beverage pal. which is a cup holder on a piece of luggage which is patent pending. i've sold some of the most exciting retailers in the country, ru la la. skymall.com. i sold $250,000 worth of this item. i'm looking for $500,000 for a 20% investment in my business. the money to be used basically for inventory and product development. >> thank you so much. nice job. >> thanks. >> let me give you two these. >> thank you. >> two numbers from 1 to 10, 1, what do you think of the product? 2, what do you think of the pitch? >> not only for business travelers but parent who is schlepping around with their kids to have a place for your coffee, this could help me a

lot, many times. brian, you're up. >> first, you really got it down perfectly. you gave me your background, history. you have a brand identity that fulfills the wonderful opportunity to have multiple product lines. you explained where you've already sold the product. you created credibility. wonderful. good job. on the financing side, you're right in the sweet spot -- >> what's your number? >> my numbers are 8 and 8. >> what did he miss? you didn't give him two 10s. >> i have to say i never give two 10s. that's perfection. i think you're pretty close to the opportunity that gets you on that wavelength. my interest is to know how i can make money and how you can execute. if you gave a little bit more, put how you'll build your business to execute, i would have probably given you a 9. >> sonya. >> tom, thank you so much. i gave me a 6 and a 6. the reason i gave this number,

first i saw a lot of passion from you and you clearly have a lot of experience in the industry. i wanted more information from you on why there's knew need and demand for this type of product. we've all about there trying to pull our luggage and drink our coffee but i would love to hear from you on consumer research or validation to show this is something that consumers really need. the other thing i thought you were missing is price point versus competitors. how is this priced versus the rest of your competitors? one thing i would suggest if you pitch again, think through how to convince us what the opportunity is. you describe how big the market was in terms of the number of travelers out there. how big do you think this business can get to in terms of sales and how will you get there? >> fantastic. thank you for your feedback. good luck with everything. i'm jealous of this. the next i'm i'm in the airport, i think this is really great. thanks for coming on the program. we appreciate it.

any of you have a product or service and you want feedback on your chances of getting interested investors, please send us an e-mail, the address is yourbusiness@msnbc.com. include a short summary of what your company does, how much money you're trying to raise and what you intend to do with it. still to come, communicating with employees, both remotely and in the office. and why it's imperative you demonstrate growth to investors and customers. will your business be ready when growth presents itself? our new cocktail bitters were doing well, but after one tradeshow, we took off. all i could think about was our deadlines racing towards us. a loan would take too long. we needed money, now. my amex card helped me buy the ingredients to fill the orders.

opportunities don't wait around, so you have to be ready for them. find out how american express cards and services can help prepare you for growth at open.com. it's growing quickly and we're doing it in multiple cities at the same time. the indication becomes super complicated when we're talking to each other from eight different cities. how do you solve that problem as the company grows? >> i think you want to be purposeful in your communication. so first i would have a weekly e-mail that goes out talking about procedures that have changed or sales figures or anything that, you know, you want to have in writing they can see and read and remember. secondly, you probably want to have a weekly phone call with each manager to talk about what's going on and share ideas and follow-up and get a feel for

how things are going. lastly, you probably want some kind of group skype or something where everybody can get together and bounce things off each other, here's what's great, here's what's not great. i think each one of those has a different purpose and is very important. i don't know that i would want to go without any one of those three things. >> we now have the top two tips you need to know to help your small business grow. brian and sonya are back with us again. brian, yours is also about communication. >> it is. >> like we just heard from jay. let's start with you. >> it's a big tip. having looked at perhaps a thousand or so companies, there's one cultural element that constantly comes back to haunt them. they don't communicate internally with their employees, they don't listen well enough. great companies are smart and fast at the same time. to be smart and fast you have to have a culture that encourages everybody to be critique driven. egos get in the way, unfortunately. in a small business where everybody is a touch point and everybody overlaps with each

other, they've got to learn to be able to offer each other an analysis of what they're doing and input to do it better. everybody is everybody's coach. it works beautifully when you find a cohesion among employees in your company. >> all right. son sonya, you're up. >> my top tip is as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to demonstrate growth and progress at every point of the road. whether you're talking to a customer, investor, a partner, a distributor, whatever it may be, you need to be able to demonstrate that your business is moving forward. and then -- >> what happens if your businessened is moving forward. >> you're in trouble. no, just kidding. say you haven't launched your business. you can communicate in how you're making business in so many ways. you'll need to do customer testing before a product launches, you may need to have a beta test or a prototype made. you may need to understand the competitive market. >> if you go through a tough time, you can also progress

would be what you are doing to counter the tough times. >> exactly. what you're learning. how you're going to mediate against the circumstances that you're experiencing. but without demonstrating growth or demonstrating progress, partners may start to lose confidence or question the value your product actually has. >> i feel like you're chomping at the bit to get in here, brian. >> progress is good but what's more important is celebrating every opportunity when you've achieved something. >> show how you've gotten to where you are today. demonstrate the path you've gone through. they've done x, y, z. they're not coming up with an idea and say, give me $100,000 before doing work. >> and celebrating it. you're talking about external. internally, right, that's what gets people motivated and excited to keep people working with you. >> it's a culture you build.

thank you so much. >> pleasure. this week's your biz selfie comes from kyvan foods. he's a former nfl players with the bengals and falcons who combines southern roots with his love of cooking. thank you so much for sending that, reggie. he took his family recipe and made a product that's now available in a lot of major supermarkets. now, why don't you follow reggie's example and pick up your cell phone, take a selfie of you and your business and send it to us here at yourbusiness@msnbc.com or tweet it to @msnbc your biz. please use #your biz selfie. we'd love to hear from you. if you have questions or comments, send us an e-mail at yourbusiness@msnbc.com. also, please go to openforum.com/"your business." we've posted the segments from

today's show plus a whole lot more. you can also connect with us on our digital and sobel media platforms as well. we look forward to seeing you next week but before we go, we have one special congratulations because our long-term stage manager, joe, just got married to his lovely now wife jeannine. so we wanted to tell you that we are so excited for you and wish you the best of luck in your new life together. thank you again, all of you, for joining us and remember, we make your business our business. brought to you burn american express open. visit openforum.com for ideas to help you grow your business. or fill a big order

or expand your office and take on whatever comes next. find out how american express cards and services can help prepare you for growth at open.com. rachel will be back in this seat on monday night. if you are like me, then god help you. if you're like me, you live for election nights. there is something exhilarating, something fun, enjoyable about sitting down and watching returns from states and cities and counties and precincts all across the country. you see patterns that emerge. one candidate is strong over here, the other is cleaning up over there