We’re hosting FREE events for small business owners across the US in February and March. Find your nearest city and register via the links below.

Denver, CO: February 11, 2013

Tucson, AZ: February 13, 2013

Las Vegas, NV: February 19, 2013

Oakland, CA: February 21, 2013

Philadelphia, PA: March 4, 2013

Dallas, TX: March 6, 2013

Located in or near one of these cities? Here’s why you should consider attending:

-Free event with free stuff (and who doesn’t like free stuff?)

-Get words of encouragement and tips from successful entrepreneurs

-Learn the best way to evaluate your business model

-Set achievable financial goals

-Build out an action plan to hit your goals

-Opportunity to network with local and national small business owners

Plan to attend? Leave us a comment below and we’ll be sure to connect you with other Citrix users. 

Integration with Citrix ShareFile makes it possible for ShareFile users to access files stored in the cloud, edit PDF files, sign contracts and agreements, or fill out PDF forms in PDF Expert on the iPad and save documents back to storage.

“PDF Expert is a perfect tool for ShareFile users, who aim to get work done right away having only iPad on hand,” says Igor Zhadanov, Readdle CEO. “Integration between Citrix ShareFile and PDF Expert is focused on increasing people’s productivity by providing a complete solution for editing corporate PDF documents on the iPad anytime, anywhere.”

We are excited about this integration and look forward to hearing your feedback on it soon!

It has now been made public that ShareFile really is one of the best places to work. Yesterday, the Triangle Business Journal unveiled its list of the 2011 Best Places to Work in the Triangle area. ShareFile was named among the Best Places to Work within the medium-sized companies in the Triangle.

“These awards are a testimony to the good work done by businesses in the Triangle that recognize employees are the company’s most valuable assets,” say Triangle Business Journal publisher Bryan Hamilton.

Interested in joining our team? Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and drop us a line!

Our 3-year sales growth rate is 1322% and our employee growth is 41. Last year at this time, we had 29 employees, so there are a lot of new faces here in the office! As a result of our growth, we have expanded our office facilities to accommodate new employees. We’ve been doing a lot of growing over the past year!

The Inc. 500 list is an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.

The 2011 list is available in Inc’s September issue- get yours from newsstands today through November 15- and also available on Inc.com.

Here is a link to our Inc. profile for more information: http://www.inc.com/inc5000/profile/sharefile.

According to Forbes, Raleigh ranked number two in the “Next Big Boom Towns” list in the U.S. Raleigh has experienced the second-highest overall population increase and the third-highest job growth rate over the past two decades. Raleigh is a “magnet for technology companies fleeing the more expensive, congested and highly regulated northeastern corridor.”

It’s no surprise that Raleigh tops Forbes’ Best Places for Business and Careers in 2011, considering business costs in the Raleigh area are 18% below the national average and the 42% of the labor force holds a college degree. Raleigh and Durham (ranked No. 31) are surrounded by three universities- North Carolina State University (Go Wolfpack!), University of North Carolina and Duke University. With three elite schools within close distance, the educated population has a reason to stay in the Triangle to start a career.

Our CEO, Jesse Lipson, is a graduate of Duke University. Just a few short years after graduating from Duke, he started ShareFile, which has grown from zero to over 16,000 business customers, over 2.5 million users, used by 99% of the Fortune 500, and over 70 employees in just a short time. Due to the recent growth, we have expanded our office space in order to accommodate new employees. Graduates from the three surrounding universities (NCSU, UNC, & Duke) represent a large amount of ShareFile employees.

We are excited about our growth and expansion and are pleased that Forbes has named Raleigh as the Best Place for Business and Careers- after all, we agree!

The majority of the presenting companies at the Venture conference are seeking funding from VCs. Instead, our unique pitch will present a quick company overview and invite attendees to visit our booth and check out a product demonstration. We want to uphold our core value of being customer centric and we will remain committed to our customers by not seeking any funding. In fact, we have adopted a corporate slogan, “Funded By Our Customers,” which has resulted in a tremendous customer adoption rate, with a recent cross over 15,000 corporate customers and two million users.

We look forward to the opportunity to meet with attendees and help them find an easy and secure solution to exchange large and/or confidential business files.
If you’re attending the CED Venture Conference next week, be sure to keep a look out for the ShareFile booth, although it may be hard to find it since I recently got word via Twitter that this year’s event is almost sold out! Make sure you’re in attendance for the Lightening Rounds to hear ShareFile’s unique story. We hope to see you there!

CED YouTube Channel

Paul Barth with Generate Design in Raleigh, North Carolina has been a ShareFile client since November 4, 2005 (the first day ShareFile released to the public). I recently had the pleasure of discussing ShareFile with Paul and how the product has helped his business over the past five-plus years.

Generate Design is a Raleigh-based interactive and graphic design firm that brings clarity out of a world of chaos. Design makes things look, feel, and function better. Since 1998, Generate Design has been recognized for its excellence in branding, logo and identity development, print design, interactive web design, and display works. After using FedEx for years, Paul was looking for a way to save some money and send files more efficiently to clients and partners alike.

“We’ve been with ShareFile for over 5 years. ShareFile has saved us thousands of dollars in courier and overnight shipping fees while adding speed to our services and processes. Additionally we have a simple way for customers and vendors to upload and download large files with no FTP software or complex knowledge of transferring large file sizes. Everyone loves the features and many of our own customers have adapted the systems into their websites and workflow functions.”

In addition to the money saved, Paul said he values the ability to request files from clients on the fly and be notified once the files have uploaded completely. He likes all of the new features we have released but still relies on some of the original features that put ShareFile on the map.

It is exciting to have two million users worldwide using the service. However, it is equally as exciting to look back and appreciate those who help you get started. Whether you have been with ShareFile for 5 years or 5 days, we are thankful for the chance to serve you. So to two million users and counting, thanks again for choosing ShareFile!

Our core goal, to raise the bar for service in the technology sector, guides all decisions made at the company, and we hope to show our clients how much we appreciate their choice to work with ShareFile by offering outstanding support to each account. While millions of people use the ShareFile service, dedicated account managers reach out to each new account to ensure that accounts are able to get started and use the service immediately and effectively. We also began 2011 by increasing our telephone support hours to 8am-7pm EST to better accommodate our client’s diverse schedules. We hope that these policies will help make us a great software solution for more businesses. Moreover, it should also to make getting help and setting up an account even easier and more convenient for all of our current users.

With 2 million users worldwide and counting, ShareFile looks forward to increasing our ability to facilitate file transfer for businesses of all sizes and types by offering more tools that allow us to integrate with the processes and software that our clients are using. With the recent release of our ShareFile Sync tool and mobile application, we hope to expand integration with mobile devices for business and also to offer more quality integration tools for desktop users, including Mac users. We plan to soon fine-tune even the newest features that we offer to increase their relevance to our users, by introducing native apps for iPhone and Android devices and an Enterprise Sync tool that will allow synchronization to be set up network-wide for an entire company.

We would like to thank all of our users for helping us reach this milestone in our growth as a service company, and, with your support, we hope to someday help millions more!

“I think that the concept of uniqueness is highly overrated when it comes to business ideas. Many aspiring entrepreneurs, especially students, feel they need to come up with a totally unique idea and if they later find someone already doing it, they give up. There is no need to be afraid of competitors as long as you have a clear path for acquiring customers and generating revenue. What you should really be afraid of is coming up with a totally new idea that no one actually wants to buy/use.”

He also believes that the time to start a business is when you are young and do not have some of the constraints that come with getting older.

“I would say that the least risky time to start a business is while you’re in school. As a student you can work on a business without needing to make a big salary, so the downside to starting a business in college is very small. In the worst case your business will fail, but you’ll still have some great experience that will help you get a job after graduation.”

Read the full interview with Jesse here.

Coming off our recognition in the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies list, we’d love to be nominated for the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” award.

See the full list of categories here.

You can vote for ShareFile every day up until the 24th of December!

Indeed, this cowboy mentality is glorified by many venture capitalists, blogs and publications that cover entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this article is to present a dissenting opinion. While others are encouraging you to drop out of school and try to become the entrepreneurial equivalent of the next big rock star, I am the practical voice who tells you that “Most musicians barely make minimum wage, spend your time studying instead.”

At first this advice may sound kind of depressing (maybe that explains why I have not yet been invited to speak at any graduations). The good news is that it’s also liberating. Most aspiring entrepreneurs make things much harder on themselves than they need to. They rack their brains hoping to come up with the next Facebook, a totally new blockbuster idea with a special competitive advantage to keep [insert name of billion dollar tech company here] from duplicating it.

My advice is to do the exact opposite. Pick a business that has established demand and entrenched competitors. Choose something simple that you are passionate about and can do well. Then, focus on execution. Finally, select a business idea that can succeed on a small scale even if it doesn’t hit it big. Before I lay out these rules more formally, I would like to begin with an example of exactly the type of idea I’m talking about: Pizza.

While in college at Ball State, John Schnatter worked at Greek’s Pizzeria delivering pizzas in Muncie, Indiana. Shortly after graduating in 1983, Schnatter decided to start his own pizza delivery business. There were no shortage of pizza joints in Indiana (or just about anywhere in the world for that matter), but John felt that the quality of pizza was generally pretty low and figured he could make better tasting pizza by using fresh ingredients. He purchased $1,600 worth of used restaurant equipment and opened a pizza delivery business out of an old broom closet in his father’s tavern. His pizza was well liked by customers and a year later he opened his first full restaurant, called Papa John’s Pizza.

Today Papa John’s has over 3,100 locations. Its stock is publicly traded on NASDAQ (PZZA) with a market capitalization of over 650 million dollars. Schnatter owns 30% of the company, making his share of Papa John’s worth over $215 million.

Papa John’s is one of many great examples of companies that grew successfully by following the two simple rules (and three corollaries to those rules) outlined below.

Rule #1: Pick a business idea that can succeed on a small scale

Statistically, we know that very few businesses will reach a valuation above 100 million dollars. You may be the exception, but most likely you’re not. To hedge your bets, try to tweak your business idea so that it can succeed on a small scale even if it never reaches its full potential. If you have to pull the safety parachute on your business and you only end up with a ten million dollar or million dollar business, you’ll walk away with some great experience. Plus, you’ll have a nice financial cushion to allow you to swing for the fences on your next venture if you want to.

Papa John’s definitely followed rule #1. John Schnatter’s business could have been as small as a single location and still could’ve run profitably and successfully, yet it had the scalability to grow to hundreds or thousands of locations or anywhere in between.

Corollary to Rule #1: Choose a business idea that can launch with minimal funding

If your business idea requires a lot of outside funding to get started, it will be extremely difficult to succeed on a small scale and therefore violates Rule #1. Investors (rightfully) want a healthy return on their money, and if you raise a lot of money, you’re pretty much taking the possibility of a small exit off the table. Because of the size of their funds, venture capitalists typically need to invest millions of dollars in each deal otherwise they would have hundreds or thousands of companies in their portfolio. This is too cumbersome to manage, so small exits don’t really make sense for them.

John Schnatter’s first pizza oven only cost him $1,600 and he was able to open his first store by selling his Chevy Camaro, pictured below (after becoming a multi-millionaire he was able to track down and buy back the exact same Camaro he sold in the early 80s).

This corollary does not imply that a business should never take on outside investment. The key phrase is “can launch with minimal funding”. Once your business has launched and succeeded on a small scale, it may become clear that it has the potential for large scale success and needs outside funding to get to the next level. I’m sure at some point (maybe around 10 or 20 stores) it became clear to John Schnatter that his business had the potential to go national or even global.

Rule #2: Enter an Established Market

Starting a business is hard enough without having to worry about whether there is even a market for your idea. Every once in a while, a truly new idea hits the market and succeeds. More often than not, though, successful businesses are incremental improvements on existing businesses.

When Papa John’s launched, one element of the business plan that they did not need to scrutinize was whether people were willing to pay money for pizza. If Schnatter instead had an idea for being the first provider of pizza-flavored milkshakes delivered right to your door, he could have executed the idea perfectly and still (probably) would have failed. Instead, he just needed to worry about making pizza that tasted really good and was delivered reliably for a good price.

Corollary to Rule #2: Your business should have existing competitors

This corollary is pretty simple. If you enter an established market, by definition there will be at least one direct competitor. It’s OK to have your own twist on your product or service offering, but when you launch a business there should be at least one other company doing pretty much what you are doing.

Second corollary to Rule #2: Focus on execution

If you are entering an established market, your competitive advantage is not going to come from a big new idea. Instead, it mostly comes from doing the boring things really well. Papa John’s decided to focus on making a great tasting pizza while competitors were focusing on low price and fast delivery instead. To make better tasting pizza, he had to charge a bit more and could not deliver quite as fast. He also needed to offer fewer menu options so that his fresh ingredients could be both affordable and profitable.

Focusing on execution is important for a couple of reasons. First, most competitions in established markets are dogfights where every small advantage is crucial. And even if you violate Rule #2 and enter a new market, if it’s a good market soon enough you’ll have plenty of competitors.

Great execution is much more difficult for competitors to copy than changes in products, prices, or features. In the above example about pizza-flavored milkshakes, if it turned out that people really enjoyed pizza in liquid form, Domino’s could add pizza shakes to their menu fairly easily. It’s much more difficult for entrenched competitors to quickly change things like company culture, customer service quality, management techniques, and logistics.

The Papa John’s story serves a great example of how you can build a $650 million business simply by executing better than the competition.

To conclude, the next time you are brainstorming potential business ideas, think about pizza and the importance of entering an established market and choosing an idea that can succeed on a small scale with little outside funding. Resist the temptation to try to become the next entrepreneurial rock star. You may not be the subject of the next Aaron Sorkin movie, but if you follow my two rules, the recipe for your entrepreneurial success might be a lot simpler than you originally thought. And graduation speech requests may be directed to keynotes@sharefile.com.

Jesse Lipson is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ShareFile