Business

The One Mistake Is Putting Your Brand Reputation at Risk — and Most Startups Still Make It

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Most entrepreneurs and business owners understand they need a comprehensive communications strategy to reach their target customers. However, all too many think that only means branding, marketing and advertising and forget to include public relations (PR). In particular, many small businesses and startups neglect this part of the communications equation.

This has always been a mistake, but that’s even more true today. Here, I explain how PR impacts brand credibility and customer trust, as well as how those seemingly ineffable factors connect to your hard revenue numbers.

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The problem with investing solely in marketing

Investing only in marketing and ignoring PR is a problem because marketing drives awareness, but PR builds trust — and without trust, awareness doesn’t convert.

One study has put the number of consumers who believe advertisers have integrity at 4%. Customers’ trust in conventional advertising is also plummeting, especially for members of the younger generations. As Wharton Magazine reports, 84% of millennials not only dislike traditional ads but also distrust them.

Research also shows people don’t pay attention to ads and actively avoid them. According to consumer research firm Bulbshare, 63% of Gen Zers use ad blockers, meaning they don’t even see ads online. If they do come across one, 99% say they hit “skip” when given the choice.

In short, today’s consumers are savvy. They know how to follow the money trail and identify conflicts of interest. Indeed, the Content Marketing Institute has found that 80% of corporate decision-makers prefer to glean information from articles that are more objective rather than ads, which are recognized as biased and self-interested.

Meanwhile, today’s consumers increasingly prioritize ethics. B2B services company BusinessDasher explains that 84% of customers weigh companies’ ethics and values when considering a purchase, and 63% say they would like companies to adopt more ethical practices.

For companies that would like to expand their market reach, these statistics send a clear signal. Investing only in advertising and marketing is unlikely to move the needle. To develop a good reputation for your brand, you need to do PR.

PR: Ethical strategic communications

PR differs from other communication strategies like branding and marketing because it specifically focuses on developing your organization’s positive reputation and earning consumers’ trust. While ads and marketing campaigns may attempt to tell people about the business’s great reputation, good PR shows them. It enables the business and its spokespeople to demonstrate ethical conduct rather than just making claims to this effect.

For instance, while a top PR team will draft and release press releases and media advisories on a company’s behalf, they will also seek out opportunities for the company’s leadership to serve as expert sources in the media. When the public needs help understanding current events and a journalist turns to a company’s spokesperson for expert analysis, the viewers understand that this person and their company are trustworthy. In addition, they come to rely on and appreciate the spokesperson’s valuable advice.

In the course of such an interview, the company’s representative may never even mention their product or service. By demonstrating their willingness to share important information, however, they signal their care for the greater good, their own sterling character and that of their company. This forms positive connotations in viewers’ minds. People come to associate the spokesperson and company with credibility and garner their trust.

Behaving in an ethical manner and showing goodwill tends to be more convincing than merely claiming to be good. This is how strong connections with customers can still be forged despite today’s cynical environment.

How PR contributes to revenue growth

To be clear, PR is not a direct method of boosting sales or generating leads. Instead, it works in the background, burnishing your brand’s reputation and predisposing people to think highly of your company. This can pay off in the end, however.

Take Sears, Roebuck and Co. as an example. When the brand partnered with The Oprah Winfrey Show to provide Christmas gifts for 100 foster children, the results were staggering. After the episode aired, customer surveys showed an 11% jump in positive sentiment toward the brand — and people said they planned to spend 39% more at Sears.

The final impact? That single PR moment helped generate $13 million in new revenue.

In addition, father-daughter co-authors Al and Laura Ries studied 91 launches of new products in their book “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” Those campaigns that incorporated PR were more successful than those that only deployed marketing approaches. Indeed, they conclude that PR is a better investment than advertising for most businesses.

In my own experience leading a PR firm, I can attest that campaigns sometimes generate so much new business that clients can’t scale fast enough and have to pause our services while they catch up with demand.

Enter the limelight with PR

Hiring a PR firm, especially one that can show a track record of success in your particular industry, is indispensable to make your brand image shine. This strategic communications approach avoids the common missteps of advertising and marketing while aligning with today’s customers’ preferences for ethical business practices.

For these reasons, more businesses should consider taking PR firms up on their offers of a free consultation call. There’s nothing to lose and the limelight to gain.

Intellectual Insider

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Business

5 Data Backup Mistakes that Could Bankrupt Your Startup

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In the current information age, data disasters have become the biggest threat to businesses. Based on a 2024 data loss statistics report, 51% of businesses that suffer data loss shut down within two years, and 43% never reopen their doors. Although most startups take the precaution of backing up their data, many of them do not do that properly. In this article, I will list five of the most common data backup mistakes that could derail your startup and how to fix them fast.

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Mistake 1: Taking cloud storage as backup

One of the biggest misconceptions is taking data sync on cloud storage as an auto backup mechanism. Actually, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox are storage solutions, not backup solutions. Data sync helps when your local device is damaged or lost. But if you delete an important file on the local device by mistake, or your file is encrypted by ransomware, the copy on the cloud drive will also be deleted or encrypted.

I’ve encountered many such cases. For example, a design company enables sync between the local drive and Google Drive. One day, the hacker attacks their local systems and encrypts all the drawing files. When they detect the attack, they resort to Google Drive, but only find that all the copies on the cloud are also encrypted!

Solution: Find or implement a true backup solution that will create a separate and isolated copy of your data. The solution can be based on cloud storage. However, recent trends show ransomware will not only attack the original data, but also infect the backups. Therefore, to protect your backups from ransomware, it is better to make a backup that is completely physically isolated from your device and the internet.

Mistake 2: Backup via copy

Startups normally ask their employees to back up via copying files to an external hard drive, to save the cost of purchasing a professional backup solution. But this method has the following disadvantages:

Over time, it will become more and more complex to manage multiple backup versions.
Backing up duplicates files and data repeatedly in different backup versions, wasting a lot of time and unnecessary disk space.

Solution: It is more cost-effective to choose a professional backup solution because it can:

Manage the backup versions on different time points easily.
Most of the solutions support incremental or differential backups, which will only back up the difference since the last backup or last full backup, saving a lot of disk space and time.

Mistake 3: Manual backup

Similar to mistake two, startups normally choose to backup manually instead of automating the process. But there are many problems with this method:

Employees may forget to back up even if there is a regular backup policy.
Due to human inertia, employees who initially follow the backup rules may gradually begin to slack off.
The backup process will consume a lot of time and system resources, affecting the normal workflow of the employees.

Solution: It is always recommended to automate the backup process, because:

Data will always be backed up on the scheduled time, not affected by human factors.
By scheduling backup time on off-business or off-peak hours, the backup process will not affect the normal workflow or the computer performance greatly.

Even if you cannot automate the backup process completely, you should choose a solution that allows you to perform the backup via one-click or one-press instead of a lot of operations, which will make employees more willing to perform the backup regularly.

Mistake 4: Backup without encryption

Many startups will use various mechanisms to protect their sensitive data, such as privileged access management, multifactor authentication, etc., but neglect the protection of their backup data. Whenever the backup devices are lost, stolen, or the cloud data center for the backup is invaded by hackers, a data breach occurs.

IBM report shows that the global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is 4.9 million USD.
Other than financial losses, data breaches can also lead to compliance issues and may even result in business closure.

Solution: Find a backup solution with encryption support. Make sure you:

Use high-strength encryption algorithms. It is recommended to use AES-256 to encrypt and decrypt the backup data since it is fast and secure.
Do NOT use obsoleted or insecure algorithms, such as DES and 3DES.

Mistake 5: Backup without validation

Completing a backup is not the end of your data protection journey — it’s just the beginning. The next step is to validate the integrity of the backup data to make sure it can be restored successfully when needed. Validation is very important because:

Backup is time-consuming and typically involves a huge volume of data, so any error in the process can corrupt the entire backup.
With the elapse of time, the physical devices storing the backup data will deteriorate, causing data corruption.

Solution: Find a backup solution that supports validation. And make sure you:

Validate the backup immediately after a backup process completes.
Validate the old backups regularly. If possible, automate the validation periodically.

The startups that last longer are those taking data backup as the core part of their businesses instead of an afterthought. By checking and preventing the five mistakes in this article, you are planning for the worst and turning data vulnerability into resilience.

Mistake 1: Taking cloud storage as backup

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Business

Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Meta Superintelligence Labs

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, is reshaping the company’s AI efforts to focus on superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence.

In a memo to employees on Monday, released in full by CNBC, Zuckerberg announced that a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, will house Meta’s AI initiatives going forward. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old former CEO of AI training data startup Scale AI, will lead the group and assume the newly created role of Meta’s Chief AI Officer (Meta has a separate Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun).

In the memo, Zuckerberg called Wang the “most impressive founder of his generation” and said that former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman would “partner” with Wang to lead the MSL team. The new unit will encompass Meta’s existing teams that focus on developing AI models and AI products. It will also include Meta’s fundamental AI research (FAIR) team.

“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.”

Meta previously announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier this month in exchange for a 49% stake and fresh talent from the startup, including Wang.

^{Alexandr Wang. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Zuckerberg also wrote that Meta would bring on 11 new hires for MSL, including researchers from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The new team includes former Google DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, OpenAI researchers Trapit Bansal and Hongyu Ren, and Anthropic software engineer Joel Pobar.

In the memo, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s vision for AI was “personal superintelligence for everyone” and that the company was going to start working on its next generation of AI models to debut “in the next year or so.”

^{Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Meta has a broad reach: Zuckerberg disclosed in May that the company’s AI is used by more than one billion monthly active users across its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The company is also investing heavily in AI, with plans to spend $60 billion to $65 billion this year alone on AI infrastructure.

Meta also isn’t afraid to spend heavily on AI talent. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated earlier this month that Meta was offering “$100 million signing bonuses” and “more than that” in compensation to many OpenAI researchers in an effort to poach talent.

Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, refuted the claims last week in a leaked all-hands meeting, saying that Altman was “being dishonest” about the signing bonuses and compensation.

“Look, you guys, the market’s hot,” Bosworth said at the meeting. “It’s not that hot.”

Meta is the sixth most valuable company in the world, at press time, with a market cap of over $1.8 trillion.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, is reshaping the company’s AI efforts to focus on superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence.

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Business

En Suite Bathrooms: The Secret to The Perfect Guest-Ready Home

We’re staying with our parents for five weeks in Honolulu, and I wanted to share a little revelation I’ve learned about making a home guest-ready. If you dream of owning a home where friends and family regularly visit—because you genuinely enjoy their company, this post is for you.

Not all of us can afford mega-mansions with separate wings or homes on sprawling lots with multiple structures. If you’re like most people and can only afford one structure on a modest plot of land, then there’s one key feature you absolutely need to prioritize.

En suite bathrooms. That’s right. The key to harmonious, low-friction cohabitation is ensuring everyone has their own bathroom. The more en suites, the better. The term “en suite” comes from French and means “in sequence” or “attached.”

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En Suite Bathrooms: The Unsung Hero of Guest Harmony

During our first week in Honolulu, I found myself waking up between 2 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. every morning—normal hours for me given the three-hour time difference from San Francisco. Unfortunately, nobody else was awake… except for my dad, who’s up by 3:30 a.m. to check the stock market. Cool beans, I didn’t know.

I had my own room, and my mom had hers across the hall. The shared bathroom sits between us—close enough to wake a light sleeper with even the gentlest faucet twist. Not wanting to disturb her, I found a workaround: I quietly crept upstairs and used my dad’s bathroom since he was already awake. Slightly inconvenient, but a solid solution.

Still, I couldn’t help but think: If only I had an en suite bathroom.

To be a courteous guest, I kept 85% of my toiletries in my room and left only my toothbrush, floss, and toothpaste on the bathroom counter. I even tucked them neatly to the right, so I took up minimal space.

A few days later, my mom asked me to move them. Apparently, I’d placed everything too close to the light switch, and she’d knocked over my electric toothbrush multiple times. My bad.

From then on, I moved those few items to another shared bathroom upstairs, the one my wife and kids use. But given it was already cramped, my stuff was regulated to a shelf in a closet.

Once again, I thought: If only my mom and I each had en suite bathrooms.

The Bathroom Ballet Continues

One afternoon, after a full morning of school drop-off, pickleball, the beach, and lunch, I took a well-earned nap. While I was sleeping, my wife walked to the local library to pick up books for the kids. When I woke up, I decided to use her upstairs bathroom instead of the downstairs one—just in case my mom, who’s always home, needed it.

Mid-grunt, my dad came to the back of the house to ask me a question. Two minutes later, my wife knocked on the bathroom door. She was back and needed to use it too. What was supposed to be a peaceful five-minute solo session turned into a series of interruptions.

Then, on another morning, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to publish my post, Sleep In, Stay Broke: Wake Up Earlier for Financial Success. With a title like that, I had no excuse not to rise early. After writing and editing until 6:40 a.m., I went to the bathroom. Fifteen seconds in—like clockwork—my wife woke up and came straight to the door.

Finally, while staying at my aunt and uncle’s beach house, I slept on the futon in the living room. At 6:15 a.m., I got up to use the bathroom, which sits between the living room and my son’s room. Within seconds, he flung the door open with a big smile and shouted, “Good morning!”

Ah, more en suite bathrooms would be nice.

More Bathrooms = More Peace And Harmony

When you gotta go, you gotta go! Any type of delay or hinderance can be incredibly annoying, especially if you’re digestive system is plugged and you need to focus. The more bathrooms, the better.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that when people live together, their bathroom cycles somehow sync up. Even if I wake up at 4 a.m. and my wife gets up at 6:30 a.m., there’s still a high chance we’ll both need the bathroom at the same time at some point in the morning. Same goes for me and my parents.

In the past, I used to look down on large homes with as many bathrooms as bedrooms, or even more. It seemed excessive. But now I get it. It’s not about indulgence—it’s about comfort, privacy, and avoiding frustrating sighs in the hallway.

My parents’ house has three full bathrooms, which is more than enough for just the two of them. But with six of us under one roof, friction is inevitable. My aunt and uncle’s house has two bathrooms and two bedrooms over maybe 1,000 soft, which is tight for the four of us. But the freedom to be by the ocean is wonderful.

Buy Or Build The Bathrooms

If you enjoy hosting guests, do yourself a favor: rent or buy a home with at least two en suite bathrooms and an additional full or half bath. Ideally, you have an en suite bathroom for every person who lives in the house plus a guest bathroom. Both your sanity and your digestive system will be eternally grateful. In fact, I’m now including this bathroom requirement for anyone searching for the ideal home to raise a family.

When I hosted my parents at our new house for 10 days, I felt 80% less stressed and so did they. Why? Because they each had their own bathrooms—and so did we and the kids. That kind of peace is worth every dollar and then some.

Basic full bathrooms are just fine. However, when designing a luxury master bathroom, consider including dual rain shower heads with a handheld option, a private toilet stall, double vanities, and a deep soaking tub with jets. Make sure you also have an electrical outlet behind the toilet so you can plug in your Toto Washlet. Once you go Washlet, you can’t go back.

Take a look around your home and see if you can convert unused space—like part of a closet or part of your garage—into a bathroom. Even better, if you’re able to expand your home’s footprint, it adds valuable livable square footage, which can boost your resale value.

Final Reason For More En Suite Bathrooms: Your Children And Friends May Visit You More Often

As I think in two timelines, I hope that 20 years from now, my children will still come visit their mom and me. I’ve heard too many sad stories of adult kids going years without seeing their parents. Once they’ve gotten what they needed financially and emotionally, they’re gone!

But with two en suite bathrooms ready for my daughter and son, they’ll have no excuse not to stop by and give their old man a hug and a kiss. And if we really start to get on their nerves, there’s even a separate mini-kitchen and entryway they can use to escape us in peace.

The more inviting your home, the more likely your children, friends, and loved ones will want to visit. This is especially true when you have to convince your spouse to stay at their in-laws.

Since strong, supportive relationships are the number one factor in living a long, happy, and healthy life, adding more en suite bathrooms could quite literally be a key to a life well lived.

Readers, what do you think the secret is to having a guest-ready home where both host and guests are comfortable for an extended period of time? How many en suite bathrooms do you have in your home? What is the ideal number of bathrooms a home should have?

Suggestions To Build More Wealth

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