Indian & Balinese communities targeted for mentoring trip now in progress

Note: Shel Horowitz's book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, contains a great deal of other information about the interplay of marketing and social change, and ways to move a business toward both environmental and economic sustainablity.

SAN FRANCISCO (August 27, 2003)-Over 20 million Indian youth enter a workforce with fewer and fewer jobs, leaving 2 out of 5 young Indians unemployed. And given the fickle nature of tourism, people on the hard-hit island of Bali need to learn alternatives to a tourism-based economy. Steven Van Yoder, San Francisco-based small business guru and author of the new book Get Slightly Famous (Bay Tree Publishing, July 2003), is a man with a mission-to bring the message of entrepreneurship to the developing world, beginning with India and Bali.

"This project is my book brought to life," says Yoder. "As a long-time journalist, I've traveled and seen the human costs of poverty and economic hardships brought on by a rapidly changing global economy, especially to people in the developing world.

Yoder is establishing a global network of marketing experts who volunteer their knowledge and resources to teach entrepreneurship and small business marketing skills to emerging entrepreneurs in the developing world. The project is powered by the support of marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson, the National Federation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE ), Indian-based I Create, Inc. (in partnership with NFTE), the Center for International Trade Development and legendary catalog entrepreneur Lillian Vernon, among others..

In his first in a series of trips, Yoder will send daily dispatches to an online community at his web site, allowing visitors to track his progress and get involved in real-time. [www.getslightlyfamous.com/journal.html]

Several copies of Yoder's book will be donated to local business organizations. He'll also be meeting with business leaders to arrange partnerships for mentoring small businesses.

Yoder stresses the need for developing countries to learn basic entrepreneurial skills to create wealth and jobs. He will work on building an export operation for Balinese artwork with a contact he met on a previous trip. He'll also go to Delhi, India to develop a partnership with a virtual administrative assistant, to help him grow his one-person business to a small outsource firm for global companies.

"I hope this project inspires others," notes Yoder. "If I can convince enough people to mentor potential entrepreneurs through this program, we could experience an economic renaissance of impressive proportions--and possibly fix a few of the world's problems at the same time."

Note: Shel Horowitz's book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, contains a great deal of other information about the interplay of marketing and social change, and ways to move a business toward both environmental and economic sustainablity.

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