Archives

Customer Profiling: How do you work out who your customers are? Are the important defining characteristics geography, lifestyle, demographics–or what? Take the time to answer your own questions. [...]

Customer Lifetime Model: Here is a graphic way that will help you relate the cost of customer acquisition and support to the value of a customer’s business over the lifetime of doing [...]

Critical Success Factors: You want to succeed, obviously, but as I remember it, the determination of what things are the most critical to that success is far from easy. Among critical success [...]

Team Behavior Building:  Of course you know that your attitude affects your behavior. But what may surprise you is to know just how much your behavior affect the behavior of others. The image on [...]

Critical Path Analysis is an algorithm for scheduling a set of project activities. You will not find the Critical Path Analysis methodology here (!), since there are so many ways to tackle the [...]

Conscious Competence Matrix: It is really interesting—and useful—to think about competence. Founders of new ventures do well to think about themselves in terms of competence, in order to be clear [...]

Startup B-Words: Here is my list of Startup B-Words for business building. Have productive fun thinking about how these startup b-words can contribute to your success. Treat them almost as though [...]

Business Plan Mistakes: If you have never attempted to write a business plan before, beware! The territory is full of traps and you want to do your best to avoid them. If you are reading this [...]

Fishbone diagrams: Popularized in the 1960s by Kaoru Ishikawa, who pioneered quality management processes in the Kawasaki shipyards, and in the process became one of the founding fathers of [...]

Business Plan Outline: This is a business plan outline of a business plan that is less than 20 pages, plus appendices. Naturally you are going to make it specific to your situation. You will [...]

Business Model Planner: Here is a tool to help you create an effective business model (the way in which revenue will be produced), covering all the critical bases. As you think critically about [...]

The Business Model Canvas is now perhaps the most widely used tool to help entrepreneurs and managers both in the commercial and nonprofit world—to describe, design, challenge, and pivot business [...]

Business Entity Types: The main types of business registration are shown in the table, but there are a few variants, such as the Social Purpose Corp in CA, or the Public Benefit Corporation in [...]

Brainstorming: Brainstorming originated in the world of advertising in the 1940s. Brainstorming is a creativity tool that is very effective when an individual or team is ‘stuck’. [...]

Blue Ocean Matrix: the matrix is a graphic way of expressing Blue Ocean Strategy, which is a marketing theory from a book published in 2005 which was written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of [...]

Startup Mentor Checklist: Mentors can be invaluable to a founder to act as a sounding board for ideas and planned action. They can also play the role of devil’s advocate, challenging your [...]

I have spent a fair amount of time over my career searching for the right sources of help or detailed information about the services I needed. So, as a shortcut, I have developed some [...]