Brenda Dronkers: Finding Success with Inflatable Party Spaces

Sometimes the best business ideas are just around us -- if you know where to look.

Brenda Dronkers, founder of the inflatable party place Pump It Up http://www.pumpitupparty.com/index.htm, got the inspiration for her business in her church's fall festival in 1999. She was then a California mother of three who struggled to make ends meet with no college degree and no money.

In that festival, she saw her kids' excitement as they rushed to the inflatable trampoline. And the idea hit her -- since kids love inflatables and inflatable slides and trampolines are always a hit during parties, why not create a place full of inflatables where parties can be safely held?

Brenda moved fast with her business idea. With a friend giving her some capital, she leased a cheap warehouse and commissioned much-sturdier inflatables. She opened her first Pump It Up in Pleasanton, California that year.

And her business worked! She booked 90 parties in her first month. Last year, revenues of Pump It Up reached $55 million. She has franchised her idea, and now has about 160 franchises in 38 states.

Check out Brenda's successful venture at PumpItUpParty.com

ADDED:
You can read about Brenda's new venture and the lessons she learned from Pump It Up in the article "Brenda Dronkers: Moving from One Successful Business to Another"

Debbie Weiner: Interior Design for Budget Conscious Families

As a small business, you can't offer everything to everyone. Hence, niche targeting has been an effective a strategy used by many small businesses to succeed. With more limited resources, you can offer better products or service if you concentrate on a smaller (but profitable) market that the giants of your industry has overlooked.

This is the strategy that interior decorator Debbie Weiner of Designing Solutions LLC in Silver Springs, Maryland has successfully used for her business. Instead of competing with other interior designers for high-end designs in the Washington DC area, Debbie's interior design firm specializes in creating real-life family-friendly designs for busy homes. Not the immaculately perfect interior designs fit only for magazines, but designs for budget-conscious families for the way they really live.

With kids, it takes a yeoman's job to make sure that everything is in order -- and Debbie understands this need. Instead of creating fancy designs, she says that her

"elegant decorating style is influenced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in that it is carefully thought out to survive whatever life throws at it, including incontinent pets, food fights between siblings, vomiting babies and extremely sloppy spouses"

Debbie's fresh approach to decorating has earned for her rave reviews from publications such as Washington Post, New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and other publications.

Ashley Qualls: 17-Year Old Success Story

One of the most interesting success stories of 2007 is Ashley Qualls, only 17 years of age but has already built a million dollar website.

Her site, WhateverLife.com offers free MySpace page layouts giving her main target audience -- young girls -- the ability to change their MySpace pages using Ashley's flowers, hearts, celebrities that they can put into your own MySpace layouts.

With the term "MySpace" layouts one of the most searched term in Google, Ashley stumbled on a market with huge demand. No wonder her site attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month.

Ashley is able to leverage her site's gargantuan traffic into a huge moneymaking machine through online ads, such as Google Adsense and Valueclick's banners. She has dropped out of high school to focus on her growing empire and even bought a house. Not many 17 year olds can boast of these accomplishments!

Her site is not much to look at; in fact it looks cluttered and will not win any web design prizes anytime. But it is a solid proof that even small businesses can thrive on the Internet -- if you are able to speak the language of your target audience and relate to them.

Fast Company has a very interesting article on Ashley that you can read http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html