stream some stuff! somewhere! sometimes! you totally nailed that buddy. simple. don't let directv now limit your entertainment. only xfinity gives you more to stream to any screen. coming up on "your business," think your product is hard to market? this guy made the accordion cool. tv and movie star monica potter starts a small business selling local products to help her ohio town's economy. those stories, plus what you need to do to prevent sexual harassment in your workplace. that's all coming up next on "your business."

hi, there, every everyone. i'm j.j. ramberg, and welcome to "your business," the show dedicated to helping your small business grow. move aside, weird al. there's a whole new generation playing the accordion. a lot of it has to do with one small business owner and the videos he puts on youtube. he's doing all he can to make this instrument hip again. they have people from all over the world flocking to his three-story accordion sp in

philadelphia. it's a packed house at open mike night in a restaurant in nearby philadelphia. but instead of tuning a guitar or running through vocal scales, these performers are making sure their accordions are ready for their moment in the spotlight. the accordion? it's an old-school sound that's finding a modern audience thanks to michael, founder of liberty bellows. >> i decided i was going to take a 19th century craft and try to bring it to the new millennium. >> in high school, michael discovered his dad's old accordion in the attic and fell in love. >> nothing really interested me until i picked up the accordion. >> as you might imagine, finding support for his new love wasn't easy. >> really hard to get any information. i realized early on, there's not

a lot of accordion players out there, but there probably would be if they were easier to find and there was more resources out there. >> that thought stuck with him. when he returned to philadelphia to go to business school, he launched a small side business from his apartment. >> i started just earning a little money on the side by teaching and doing very basic repairs and then starting a small inventory and next thing you know, i had a business. there was a big demand, and if anything, less supply of people doing it, a lot of people who know about accordion are retiring. >> so much demand, he was able to open a store in 2009 when he grew out of three years later. today, they have three stories of old accordions, new accordions, repairs, lessons. basically, if you care about the accordion, liberty bellows is your happy place. this is especially true for accordion aficionados who

previously had no wr to send their instruments for repair. >> unl till you have worked on 100 instruments, you don't have the basic skills to tune one up. over time, we found that as we built up a reputation, that we were good at repairing things. >> that word of mouth got celebrities coming on by. >> bruce springsteen's accordion player. jenny conied and the folks from flogging molly. >> not only did michael want to create a place for accordion lovers like him, he wanted to o show the unainitiated what it was all about. >> they might never have thought about the accordions, but when they see it, they think, maybe i should play it. >> i would always walk by it. i was always interested in learning how to play. one day, i was like, i'm going to walk in and see what it's about. >> michael has his sights set high. it's what they're doing online that's getting international

attention. they post videos of all of their instruments on youtube. >> instead of one big viral video, we said let's have a lot of viral videos and push as much content out. since then, we have had about 3,000 videos and millions of hits on our website and youtube. i think that was the hardest thing for people when they buy a used instrument, is there's a lot of things that can go wrong. seeing a video and what it sounds like is really key in developing a trust with the customer that could be very far away, maybe in a different country. >> the videos bring peace of mind for purchasers of used instrument, but they also give customers access to brand-new accordions, ones they would have never been able to access otherwise. >> italy and germany do a great job building instruments and have a lot of great craftsman, but it's hard to find information about the models. they might have pictures, very few have videos. for that reason, a lot of times if you search for a certain

brand, often, their website comes up first and ours second. >> beyond the commerce, michael knows the core of his business growth comes from nurturing a vibrant community of active players. >> we're getting people to learn how to play, that can get to a point where they're comfortable, enjong it, and our thought is that, you know, if they keep making progress, they're going to keep buying accordions and accessories. >> that means providing lessons, which he does both online and in the store. >> you want to fill in the gaps and have an artist in residence now that is available to teach here or via skype or facetime. >> want to try that? >> and hosting event where students can show off their skills. >> ultimately, michael hopes that by infusing new energy into this old instrument, the accordion experiences a renaissance. >> our whole goal of having the

community and having these open mikes and having an artist in residence for lessons all ties into the fact that we want people to see that accordion is still out there. it's alive and well. that there's people who use it in every kind of nre, every type of music. i don't think it's going anywhere. it's something that it is an old craft, but i think it will always have a place. we just want to continue to make the accordion great again. >> hollywood is actress monica potter's stomping ground, but her heart is in ohio. her love for her hometown is so much a part of who she is, she decided to start a business that celebrated shopping local and tried to bring jobs back to the community she grew up in. she's acted alongside some of hollywood's biggest names like nicolas cage and morgan freeman, and received widespread love as

christina braverman in the tv show "parenthood." >> you just listen to the music. okay? >> but what you probably don't know about monica potter is that she's also a successful entreprene. >> i always had this business plan that i wanted to do something like paul newman. i love him so much. he's just one of my biggest inspirations aside from my dad. and he's from ohio, too. i met him, actually, once when we were downtown, a long, long time ago, and he just said to me, keep up the good work, kid. i'm like, how does he know who i am? >> in 2012, she started monica pa potter home, an e-commerce site that features home goods and beauty essentials all made by local cleveland artisans and craftspeople, just like monica herself. >> growing up in cleveland, i saw how hard people work and how much they care aboutheir city and their community. my dad was an inventor. and my mom's a homemaker.

i grew up learning how he thought, how he created, how he, you know, wanted to not only make great products but help people by giving jobs back. >> completely self-funded, for monica, this isn't just a side gig. it's a true passion project. >> i'm lucky and i'm grateful because i get to act, and then i get to use that cash, saying it bluntly, use the cash to put into this and create a business. i learned everything. i really did. i learned how to do it because no one is going to care about your business as much as you do. so i eat, i breathe, live, sleep, sometimes to a fault. >> with her name front and center on all thelabels, monica makes sure each and every item is something that she wants to sell to her customers. >> i never wanted to attach a name to something that i didn't put my blood, sweat, and tears

into along with my team. people work hard for their money. i'm not going toel them junk. i'm not going to make junk. if there's a bad batch of something, we throw it out. my standard is like would i give this to my mom or my kids? if the answer is no, then it goes out. >> thinking of her fans as family led her to find new ways to interact with them, face-to-face. >> we were online and people love the stuff, and then i love to connect with people. so i thought, this could be a great opportunity to have a destination location in garrettsville, ohio. where we have a store front. we have our production room. we have our shipping, our handling, our distribution. the store is an extension of my home, and my home is an extension of my store. there's no barrier, you know? >> with all the decisions she makes that are rooted in business savvy or trial and error, sometimes it's just been about listening to her gut. that's what ultimately led to

monica's latest venture, opening up a second location in the arcade, a popular shopping destination in the center of downtown cleveland. >> being an actor has helped me tune in to, if i think too much, i make the wrong decisions, so it's a feeling. opening the arcade, it was sort of like everyone is like, how are we going to do it? we can't do it, nobody wants to do it, then i went to sleep and woke up the next morning and i sat and i just took a deep breath, and i said, no, we're going to do it. it's a completely different energy. this is our country store. and then we have a city store. and then we have an online store. so we're able to reach many people. >> as the brand expands and reaches new customers, monica measures success in more than just the bottom line. it's equally about sharing monica's first love, h love for her hometown, cleveland. >> all of the products that we make, the candles, it' all

here. it's sourced here, made here. sometimes i have to be careful because you can get so caught up in the business part of it that i have been lately, you know, losing sight as to why we arted this to begin with. and that was to bring jobs back home and hopefully expand and help other communities and cities. there's a real need for this. i feel like people want to do this kind of thing and feel gratified and know that they're contributing somehow, and being prout of what they make. you are probably aware of the stories surrounding sexual harassment cases at major corporations like fox and apple, t a sll business can also be brought down by not enforcing a stringent zero taolerance polic. david lewis the founder, president, and ceo of operations

incorporated, a human resources outsourcing and consulting firm. you think about big corporations who have these very developed hr departments, and still things are going wrong. thenhink about the small businesses where everything is kind of catch as catch can and you're just trying to make sales. forget about the other stuff. what can you do as a small bez person to make sure you don't end up in that situation? >> it starts with awareness and training. you need to understand that the laws in place cover every business, regardless of size. then you look and see, do i have a policy out there? do i explain to people what exactly harassment is and what's supposed to happen if it occurs in the office. >> what happens a lot in small companies is it's so collegiate, right? it's a small company. you all know each other. people cross the line, they don't, maybe you want to be the kind of company where it's okay to cross the line. how do you reconcile that with having a zero tolerance policy? >> you can't. it's impossible.

so you have to go ahead and be sure that the moment that somebody in an environment where you have let it go comes forward and says, i'm not comfortable with this kind of behavior, that the company immediately takes that opportunity to say, okay, the days of us being more casual about this are over. now we need to go into mode where we investigate the issue, come down t some conclusions, take some type of acti, and then adjust our culture accordly because letting something like that go is going to translate into huge issues both culturally and financially for any company. >> you need to address it before it ever happens. just don't. don't allow it in your company. >> a zero tolerance policy is helpful, but a lot of organizations worry what's going to happen to their culture. they have a certain dnand th done want to bring big bad hr in. so aot of companies will ease into this and try to find a middle ground. there is no middle ground with this issue. i think where companies really make a change to their practices

only is when people comes back and says the line has been crossed, maybe for that person, maybe collectively, and then you move into the mode where you increase training, awareness, and follow the steps in your policy. that's one of the big issues. >> because you could have a policy. it's easy to grab a policy and not follow it, and then it's meaningless. >> that is the killer, the one where you don't do as you say in terms of what your policies are. so when you put something out there that says this is what's going to happen, this is how we're going to handle it, and then you don't, that's great fauder for the lawyer for that employee who's now suing you. >> you need to take this seriously. the minute somebody brings it up, you have to deal with it. >> there's no middle ground, there's no don't take it too seriously or don't be too concerned. statements like that are what we read about in the newspaper about major lawsuits. >> you have to have a culture of openness. if something makes you feel uncomfortable, come say

something. you're not going to be punished. no one is going to look down on. you have to say something, especially if you're in this small environment where maybe you don't want to bring down the hammer ahead of time. >> putour money where your mouth is. make sure that your employees see that what you're describing as an open culture is an open culture. >> thank you so much. >> my pleasure. strong visuals are important for your small business's branding and marketing needs. but what if you don't have the design skills or the budget to hire someone full-time to create what you need? inc.com gives us a couple tools to get the job done. >> piktochart is a graphic creator. choose from a range of templates or start from scratch. two, for the times you need great photos, head to pexels. they're free for commercial use. three, flaticons offers more

than 2500 free icons to jazz up infographics and reports. if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, you can make your own. four, create an entire range of visuals using canva, offering templates for everything from an instagram post to your next poster. and five, when you really need a pro, check out 99designs. post a brief of what you need on the site and how much you're willing to pay for it. designers then submit entries and you pick your favorite. the artist gets your prize money and you get full ownership of the winning design. today's elevator pitcher understands that we don't all have the time we need to get to the gym. sometimes we need to fit in that exercise whenever we can, and so she created a piece of equipment to help all of us. let's see if our panel of investors give her any resistance. alisha suretis the founder and ceo, and monica is the manager

principle of seventh capital. >> hi, my name is michelle and this is exy. a high-quality portable and very durable cross trainer. it weighs just ten pounds, but it packs a mighty punch. it's got 30 pounds of bidirectional resistance. that allows you to do serious cardio and strength training. our patent pending approach allows you to do over 100 different workouts wherever and whenever you want. we're having great success with people who refuse to let a shoulder or knee injury or pain set back their health. we're seeking our first round of financing of $500,000, and that is to extend our opportunities into channels with physical therapists and also personal trainers. we believe that exercise is medicine. by connecting with them, all integrated with our mobile coaching application, we believe we can help more people connect

to quality exercise to their everyday life at home, work, or on the go. for more information, visit exy.com. >> thank you very much. all right, here you go. two numbers, the first one is what do you think of the product, and second, what do you think of the pitch? and i actually have a piece of advice for you. traction. you and i were talking ahead of time. i know that you had a kickstarter campaign that was incredibly successful. you forgot to mention it here. i think investors always want to know what success you have seen before. now i have biased you. let's hear what you've got. >> okay, so i gave you a five on the product. you gave a lot of information, but i don't know who you're targeting. i don't know where to buy it, and i don't know how much it costs. these are really critical details. on the pitch, i loved your delivery. i loved hearing it was patent pendin but i didn't get a sense foth milestones in the business as a whole. i liked hearing about the ask, but i just felt like it was a

bit lacking. so overall, really good delivery, but i needed a bit more information. >> you have the information, i know from our previous conversation. >> i gave you a gave you a 9 an. i am your target audience. i see this and this fits into my life. i can't make it to the gym. i have a child, i have a husband, i have a redemanding business. i also think that there are a lot of people who could understand, you know, how this would function into a very busy life. i agree that it would be helpful to know the price point because that would help us understand how accessible this product would be. and also what would you use the money for. is it inventory or are you -- do you have a specific target marketing in mind. >> i think the price point is interesting because it is relatively high, 500 something. >> $557. >> that separates you from some of the as seen on tv cheap things. this is very high quality. all right, good luck with everything.

thank you so much. >> thanks for having me. >> absolutely. thank you, both, for your feedback. and if any of you out there have a product or a service and want feedback like you saw from our elevator pitch panel on your chances of getting interested investors, send us an e-mail, yourbusiness@msnbc.com. please include a short summary of what your company does, how much money you're trying to raise, and then what you're going to do with the money. we look forward to reading all of your pitches and seeing some of you here on the show. when we come back, how to convince a client your business will help, not hurt them. and why you should always be monitoring and updating your online profile. will your business be ready when growth presents itself? american express open cards can help you take on a new job,

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 r growth at openom. when i'm pitching a large customer that has business functions that do similar work tomine, how do i show my business is additive instead of competitive? >> that's such a excellent question. especially as a new business. you often find there is some overlap between your business and a larger business that you're pitching to. the best way is to identify those differences between your business and the business that you're pitching to and accentuate those areas that are

not overlapped, that add value to the larger business. so many of the larger businesses could use your expertise, you just need to highlight those and pitch and present and work on those areas that they're not experts at. >> we now have the top two tips you need to know to help your small business grow. alicia and monica are back with us once again. so good to see you both. i didn't get to see that earlier on but i love hearing all of your advice. alicia, let's start with you. >> my top tip is mind your online profile. all too often when i'm considering in investing on an entrepreneur, i'm going online, looking at social media to get a better sense of them. you won't believe how many times i find people writing really negative things, maybe something about an ex, or incendiary political commentary. whatever the case may be, that becomes a huge red flag because the thing is, as an investor or potential customer, you have tons of options out there. and while you're free to post whatever you want, that may be turning people off and you may be losing business without even

knowing it. >> the same way we think about our kids, right, and how they might be interviewing for a job or getting into college. >> all fair game. >> right. everything is out there. once you put it, it is public. >> my top tip, listen to music all the time, to boost productivity. you know, it -- there is something visceral about music. there is a response within the brain that goes back to cave man days and different types of music can help you be more productive in different types of tasks. when i need to focus, when i'm working on spreadsheets, i listen to classical music and it gives me the focus of a laser. when i am not feeling motivated, when i need to get a boost, it is something with a faster tempo, pop music, something with more than 120 beats per minute lifts the mood and gets you moving. so put a soundtrack to your life, it will actually make you more productive. >> what song do you listen to when you have to present something? >> bombs over baghdad. outkast, that's my get in the

zone music. >> that sounds good. i'll take that. >> do you have one? >> i listen to classical music all the time. >> if you have to present something -- >> i don't even hear it, it just keeps me going and i feel productive and the time passes and all of a sudden i'm done with a project. >> got it. i -- this was so many years ago, but i was applying for some job, something i was very nervous about, and the song that i kept listening to on the way, you know the song from "working girl" when she's going past the statue of liberty. >> carly simon. >> yeah. what is the song. ♪ let the river that was my song when i needed it. thank you, both. thanks so much. juggling a small business, your personal life and everything else that life throws at you can be exhausting. but you just may be able to get some help thanks to the small business tools, suggestions from our viewers.

>> one app we use here is sugarsync, a traveling file system that allows you to sync across users. we share documents back and forth with each other, upload documents. you can send those documents via e-mail to third parties or you can send links. it just makes for a really efficient storage of any document you might have. >> the tool i use on a daily basis, many times a day, is called smartnews. it is basically a news aggregation site. i'm able to read about breaking news and entrepreneur magazine, forbes inc. and just get the highlighted stories. >> one website i frequently resource is daily worth. it has great tools from financial resources to better

organizational tips when you're thinking about being a better professional. i love daily worth. >> one website i use is called coatables. it is a website you can hire developers to do small projects for you, such as develop an app, making updates to your website or any type of technical platform you're looking to do. >> this week's your biz selfie comes from kenya brantley who owns greenhouse mercantile in noonan, georgia. she a major supporter of locallmade products and her