Hi, welcome to the show. This is Anita Campbell, and you're listening to Small Business Trends radio. And I'm so glad you could be with us today. We have an absolutely wonderful guest we'll be talking with in just a few moments, Ron McDaniel, who is CEO of word-of-mouth marketing agency, Bazoodle, is going to be talking bout this whole revolution in marketing today, including this trend towards word-of-moth marketing and buzz marketing and why they're so important.

But before we get to Ron, we're going to do our traditional Today's Trend segment. And today's trend is the trend of the alterpreneur. The alterpreneur is an entrepreneur who is looking for an alternative lifestyle to the grind of a nine-to-five job. These alterpreneurs tend to run very small businesses, meaning businesses that typically employ fewer than five employees. Many alterpreneurs are sole proprietors and have no employees. That's the way they want it. That's the way they hope to keep it. They're motivated to start their businesses not by the desire to get rich or grow a big business, rather they're motivated by lifestyle factors-such as being their own boss and wanting to spend more time with family. They want control. Control over their work lives and over their time.

Now the term alterpreneur is a combination coined from alter, which comes from alternative lifestyle, which comes from preneur from the word entrepreneur, of course. The term came out of the United Kingdom from a study of micro business owners about their motivation for starting their businesses. But regardless of where the term came from, alterpreneurs can be found all over the developed world. In the United States, Canada, Australia, you name it. While their intentions are to develop lifestyle businesses, they have to guard against their businesses gradually taking more and more of their time. The danger is that these entrepreneurs who start a business in order to have a less stressful and less demanding work life can end up with just the opposite. Perhaps the business takes off and begins to be more in demand than expected. Or perhaps the business requires more hours than the business owner anticipated. In this 24/7 world, instead of being able to preserve their personal time, the line blurs further and further between work and personal...
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