You’re rocking the sales funnel, bringing in new business and delivering to your clients like a super star. So why aren’t your profits growing too?

You may be an unwitting victim of common pricing mistakes. These drive-by villains can kill your bottom line. Read on to learn if your profit margin is a target.

Small Business Pricing Mistake #1 – Everybody’s Doing It

You’re almost ready to launch a new product, but still haven’t set the price. To save time, and let’s be frank (or Betty or Joe… ) , to avoid the number crunching, you set your price based on your competitors’ prices. Although the lowest is $99, and the highest is $875, most are in a tight range between $425 and $475. Hmm… how about $462? $462.15? Perfect!

Like huge cows, the mighty sauropods would have generated enormous quantities of methane.

Sauropods, recognisable by their long necks and tails, were widespread around 150 million years ago.

They included some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, such as Diplodocus, which measured 150 feet and weighed up to 45 tonnes.

Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning.

Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Question­naire (those who scored in the neutral range—about half of initial respondents—were excluded). Wieth instructed them to solve three analytic problems and three insight-oriented ones. No time-of-day effect was found for analytic problem solving, but subjects’ performance on tasks requiring creative insight was consistently better during their nonoptimal times of day.

The pipes, sewers and basements that lie beneath the coastal city of New Haven, Conn., could be flooded by rising groundwater by the end of the century, according to a preliminary study from Yale University and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Much of the city's downtown is less than 30 feet above sea level, and advancing waters in the Atlantic could raise groundwater levels as much as 3 feet near the shoreline, the report said. This has the potential to "inundate underground infrastructure," flooding basements and submerging sewer pipes and utility lines that deliver water and electricity.

Collaboration. It’s a $1 billion industry, according to an ABI Research study on worker mobility and enterprise social collaboration. And it's projected to grow to $3.5 billion by 2016.

No wonder lots of ink has been spilled on this business buzzword on everything from how to start (hint: build trust) to doing it better with social platforms, to using it as a way to achieve that holy grail of business: innovation.

Two years ago, the Harvard Business Review even touted the need for another C-suite executive: the CCO. A chief collaboration officer would be charged with integrating the enterprise as companies scramble to innovate from within. Authors Morten T. Hansen and Scott Tapp argued that with a little flexibility, existing execs such as the head of HR or the CIO could take on that task.

Job growth in Portland comes from local, small businesses.

As demonstrated in the last installment of Thinking Local, a discussion of “Job Creation Not Relocation,” resident companies are growing considerably while nonresidents are losing jobs—that’s negative job creation.

In a 10 year period from 1999 to 2009, existing Portland companies grew by 63.6 percent while nonresidents (headquartered outside of Portland) declined by 8.9 percent, according to the National Establishment Time Series database. During this time, Portland-based small businesses with less than 10 employees were the only net job creators, adding 113,630 jobs.

Educate your lawmakers on the importance of innovation in job creation and building the economy. Join the Innovation Coalition, a national network of technology and entrepreneurial associations, for the 2012 Fly-In Day. Members of the Innovation Coalition and innovation leaders from around the country will:

• meet with policy makers to discuss initiatives in key research and technology sectors
• emphasize the role innovation plays in creating a thriving economy
• brief lawmakers and their staffs about the innovation process and the important role that innovation can play in job creation and economic growth  

Creating and building a business is not a one-man show. It requires a team effort, or at least the ability to build trust and confidence among key players, and effectively communicate with partners, team members, investors, vendors, and customers. These actions are the hallmark of an effective leader.

Behind the actions are a set of principles and characteristics that entrepreneurial leaders, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, seem to have in common. Look for these and nurture them in your own context to improve the odds of success for your own startup:

A few weeks before Christmas 2009, the world was in the grip of a flu pandemic. More than 10,000 people had died, and roughly half a million people had been hospitalized worldwide; tens of millions had been infected. In the United States, millions of doses of Tamiflu, an antiviral medication, had been released from national stockpiles. “December 2009 was a point in the H1N1 outbreak where there was a lot of talk about a second or third wave of this virus coming back and being more deadly,” says Peter Doshi, now a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a member of an independent team of researchers tasked with analyzing Tamiflu clinical trials. “Anxiety and concern were really peaking.”

Last Friday, Forbes health care editor Matt Herper and I sat down to talk about my proposal, which I detailed in a paper for the Manhattan Institute, to encourage the FDA to approve more drugs after mid-stage phase II testing, using a process called “conditional approval.” (You can read my proposal, in three parts, here.) Matt put forth some very perceptive critiques of the idea, which I respond to in today’s dispatch.

As a refresher, my proposal builds on an existing FDA procedure called accelerated approval in which the FDA approves drugs that show great promise in phase II, with the caveat that the drug sponsor must still perform confirmatory phase III studies. If the phase III studies ultimately show that the drug doesn’t work as advertised, or has previously unknown safety issues, the FDA can revoke its approval. This is exactly what happened when the FDA revoked the approval of Avastin in breast cancer, after phase III tests did not reproduce the early signal of benefit that the drug had shown in phase II studies.

As a startup, “if you cannot nail a presentation, you’re done.” That is what Katie Rae, managing director of TechStars Boston, said after the accelerator’s Demo Day yesterday. 13 TechStars companies went on stage to pitch their products to investors, and every single pitch passed with flying colors.

Getting the pitch right is one of the most important parts of a startup's life cycle. It is vital to nail the Demo Day pitch, of course, but learning how to give a thoughtful, dynamic presentation is a skill that pays benefits far beyond the stage.

The name of Peoria's bioscience incubator has changed, but its mission remains unchanged on the verge of its launch.

BioInspire, previously Peoria Incucelerator, is expected to open early next month at 13660 N. 94th Drive in Plaza Del Rio near Loop 101 and Thunderbird Road.

The incubator is a partnership among the city and BioAccel, a Phoenix-based non-profit that works to commercialize life-science technologies, and Plaza Companies, a Valley-based real-estate firm that specializes in medical office, technology and bioscience facilities.

On global and local scales, there is a large shift in how novel ideas and discoveries can quickly establish market relevance and commercial significance. The acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for US$ 1B may seem aberrant, but it clearly marks recent trend boundaries. As a co-founder of a small biotech, informatics based, academic startup company, this has led us to wonder how a young company like Instagram could have achieved such stunning success so quickly.  

I love my three young children immensely. So it's hard for me to be fully rational about them. Of course they are the smartest, the best looking, and the most athletic. I'm not alone — all parents are irrational. We lose sleep worrying about things we can't control and take pride in ridiculously small achievements we had nothing to do with.

A similar type of irrationality affects innovators. Talk to an entrepreneur or a scientist about the idea they are working on — it's just like talking to a parent of young children. They feel unduly proud when their team does something without needing their help. They endlessly worry about things that are well beyond their control.

If you can’t solve problems and enjoy it, you won’t make it as an entrepreneur. By definition, an entrepreneur is the first to undertake a given business, and firsts never happen without problems and people frustrations. The toughest problems are people problems, like personnel issues, but there are tough operational problems as well, such as vendor delays.

The real entrepreneurs I know are good at overcoming both people problems and business obstacles, and get satisfaction from the challenge. Some people think this is a talent that you must be born with, but experts disagree. You can definitely train yourself to be a problem solver, if you haven’t already. It’s a key skill for success in every business role, from accountant to customer support. Here are some basics rules:

Asking budding entrepreneurs where they’d like to build their next startup often elicits the same three-word response: New York City.

Over the past four years, there’s been a 40% spike in startup financing in “Silicon Alley” — a bigger increase than anywhere else in the U.S.

Cities around the world are increasingly looking at New York, rather than San Francisco or Silicon Valley, as a model for nurturing startup growth through policymaking and urban planning.

The lifeblood of any small business enterprise is money. But like with any commodity, such as oil or gold, access to money has a price tag on it. There are investors who may well provide capital for your business. However, it's not your interest they have in mind but their own.

More specifically, business investors have one question they want you to answer: What's in it for me?

To better answer that question, business owners seeking funding have to figure out what type of capital investment they should pursue. Usually that means venture capital (VC) versus angel funding.

Early on in my career I worked with an engineer named Max who always said, “You get what you measure.” The Accomplishment Journal for Women Entrepreneurs: From Goals to Results: A Simple System To Build Your Business & Be More Effective does just that.

The authors created not just one book, but a series of accomplishment journals to help women stay focused on what is important to them personally and for their business. This journal was designed to counteract the all too common feeling women have that despite how many emails they answer or meetings they attend that women still feel like a failure.

In the recent years, we have heard in the news some pretty creative “Take This Job and Shove It” stories. Joey quit his job with the support of a marching band and posted the event on YouTube. A Jetblue flight attendant quit his job, grabbed a beer and then slid down the emergency chute of the plane he was on. But, in probably the most significant public resignation of 2012 thus far, Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, wrote a personal manifesto of the company’s faults. It landed in the New York Times, garnering national attention and even online parodies.

Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to get a foot in an employer’s door.

While unpaid postcollege internships have long existed in the film and nonprofit worlds, they have recently spread to fashion houses, book and magazine publishers, marketing companies, public relations firms, art galleries, talent agencies — even to some law firms.