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 [...]

Bootstrap Finance is a craft that is very widely used in the creation of new ventures. In tough economic times it can be a matter of survival, once the business has started. For many [...]

Entrepreneurial challenges are not just for you alone. Almost every founder has some, if not all of these 15 challenges, each of which has to be confronted and overcome. Loneliness: It can be [...]

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 [...]

Customer Respect: How many times have you heard this recorded voice message when trying to contact a customer support line? I am almost certain that you will answer something like, “Too many.” [...]

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 [...]

Business Incubator and Accelerator Directory—USA: According to Carl Schramm, there were 1,600 business incubators and accelerators in the US in 2016. The Business Incubator and Accelerator [...]

Corporate Venture Capital Directory—USA: Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) involves large firms taking an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist private ventures including startups [...]

Equity Crowdfunding Directory—USA: Equity-based crowdfunding allows people to invest in an early-stage, private company (a company that is not listed on any stock exchange) in exchange for equity [...]

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 [...]

Beneficial Values: Greed, hatred and delusion are characteristics inimical to successful startup. And no, this reflection is neither a polemic on business, nor about foolish entrepreneurs. It not [...]

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 [...]

Dangers of Startup Mentors: I am a startup mentor. So, why would I warn entrepreneurs about the dangers of using mentors? My warnings are based on my understanding of how such relationships can [...]

Being an entrepreneur: is becoming one; is accepting impermanence, hence expecting possibilities; involves both listening attentively and acting impulsively; is likely to expand vision through [...]

Mission Driven Capital: There are more and more sources of seed and venture capital which have a bias in favor of sustainable business. They add criteria beyond the purely financial to make their [...]

Maker and Hacker Spaces vary enormously, as do the facilities and equipment they have. Hacker spaces, as the name implies have an IT and/or IoT (Internet of Things) focus. Both may have equipment [...]

Grassroots Startup: My recent researches into community supported business and running rural development workshops have reinforced my observation of what may be getting in the way of grassroots [...]

Affinity Diagram: Messy thinking? Scrappy data? Can’t see the wood for the trees? Oh, yes, that’s me. But, there’s help. It has a big name, but is a deceptively simple process. [...]

Sources of Startup Finance: creating a new venture is going to require money. The sources of money are almost endless. The successful entrepreneur will be financially ingenious about finding ways [...]

Small Profits and Quick Returns: Think as big as a Roman Emperor and start with small steps towards building your own empire. The reason for a big vision is to have clarity of purpose. The reason [...]

Buddhist Economics: is giving people a chance to use and develop their skills; enabling them to overcome their self-centeredness, joining with others in a common task; creating the goods and [...]

Breakeven analysis is used to determine when your business will be able to cover all its expenses and begin to make a profit. Breakeven Analysis is important to identify your startup costs, which [...]

Co-opetition: Traditionally, when big companies cooperate it is called derogatory and anti-competitive things like, price fixing, or antitrust. However, coopetition is an increasing behavior [...]

PEST Analysis: involves the analysis of four external factors that may impact your business: Political, Economic, Social and Technological. It should not be confused with a SWOT Analysis, that [...]

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 [...]

Founder Perception: Clearly successful entrepreneurs see things that others do not. Not surprisingly we tend to have differing perceptions of things, but the key to a winning new venture is being [...]