Benefit Venture Blog

Company and Community: The business and community surrounding it are in a symbiotic relationship, whether desired or ignored. At the negative end of the spectrum, the inter-relation is easily [...]

Say the Customer’s Name: “Hello My Keyser, said Pricilla. Nothing very extraordinary about that, but Matt greets me that way, too. Both are Pharmacy Technicians at my local Walgreens, [...]

Opportunities for Purposeful Startups: there are many areas of opportunity for new ventures to address critical social issues, either directly or indirectly. Startups cannot ignore injustice [...]

Small Entrepreneurs Have Global Impact: If you are Don Miguel, of Fincas Familia Castro, a small family coffee plantation and roasters, in San Pedro de Poàs, about an hour north of San José, the [...]

Side Business to Startup: About 57 million Americans have a side business, in addition to their regular paid employment. That amounts to nearly half of American full time workers who have a side [...]

Founders Can Learn From Corporate Deceit*: Founders can learn more from corporate mistakes than the the things they appear to be doing successfully. The big boys often say one thing and do [...]

Blooming Beauty Business: The cosmetics and toiletries sector is about improving the appearance and health of the body and is in a period of significant growth in sales and new products, [...]

Mailbox Storyboard Startup: a new personal service has been born in Houston, Texas to give stories to friends, relatives and colleagues to delight them by receiving hand drawn greetings through [...]

Startups Build a Better World: New ventures started with an international dimension are likely to prosper, because they will be sensitive to a wide variety of options. Those who start a business [...]

Early Stage Funding: Most startups are not highly capitalized. Of course it varies by sector. You are unlikely to find airline startups with hundreds of thousands dollars in startup funds. On the [...]

Startup Strategy is a subject much written about. Many business school professors and strategy consultants like Bain, BCG and McKinsey have built their reputations based on their own models of [...]

Smart Technology: How dumb can smart technology be? Many products are described as smart, without fully explaining in what way they can be smarter than the people who use them. The recent Boeing [...]

Inequality Immorality: Greed is seldom a motivation for starting a new enterprise. Of course, founders can be selfish, but in the sense that they are seeking self-actualization, [...]

Re-Startup: Startups are new ventures that seek to meet a need through a viable business model for a product, service, process or channel. Chances of success or scalability are increased through [...]

Startups and Sockpuppets: Founders are crazily busy and may gloss over certain risks, especially when they involve issues with which they are not familiar. The internet is a vital tool for new [...]

Founder Compassion: You will have heard that having a focussed passion for delivering benefit is a paramount quality for successful entrepreneurs, but not about doing so compassionately. [...]

Rewriting the Rules of Business: Most governments support the existing unreasonable and unfair way we organize our community social and economic affairs. On the other hand many new [...]

Opportunity Gap: The Opportunity Gap concerns the arbitrary circumstances in which people are born—such as their race, gender, ethnicity, ZIP code, and socioeconomic status—that determine their [...]

Founder Team Balance: I am a male entrepreneur, who values female founders. I had a female co-founder of my main business back in 1982 and my learning from her was probably greater than anything [...]

“Entrepreneurship is the ability to create and build something from practically nothing,” says my hero, the late Jeffry Timmons. He says that, both in the best founders’ reference book, New [...]

Hemp entrepreneurs are mostly known in the commercialization of marijuana in those States that have legalized commercial sales. But though marijuana and hemp come from the same cannabis strain, [...]

Entrepreneur Types: This list of entrepreneur types is partly for real and partly for fun. There is a huge raft of research about what makes a successful entrepreneur, and types of entrepreneur. [...]

New Venture Creation—the Timmons Model: My own conclusion about what drives startups above all else is strongly influenced by the ideas of an amazing thinker, researcher and teacher, the late [...]

Behaviors of Successful Founders: You’ll find endless ideas about what it takes to be a successful founder—and none is perfect. Internet searches will reveal all kinds of answers. The one [...]

Non-entrepreneurial Mind: So much is written about the entrepreneurial mind, including by me. Much less is written on the non-entrepreneurial mind, which can be catastrophic for a new venture. My [...]

Spin Out Startup: the experience of three women who created their startup from the ashes of their former employer’s business seemed courageous back in 2014, when it was launched. [...]

Movement for Business Purpose: entrepreneurs who create new ventures with both a declared sense of purpose and who live it through their strategy and policies have a significant impact on [...]

Five Whys Technique: Young kids are often dissatisfied with the first answer you give to their questions, and bug you with a few more, whys? They may have a good reason! The first answer may not [...]

Exit Strategy by ESOP or Co-op: An Employee Stock Ownership Plan or Co-operative Ownership are both increasingly popular options as exit strategies for entrepreneurs and small business owners. My [...]

Founders—Pause for Breath! Founders often forget they’re breathing, because they are so busy making things happen. This is true for other high pressure occupations, too. That is one of the [...]

Effective Startup Learning: new ventures need to learn, and they need to learn fast, or they will fail fast. The trouble is that you are already run off your feet. To take time out to [...]

Self-Aware Startup Teams: The creation and development of a winning team depends on the founder’s leadership. The Johari Window is a marvelous tool to help founders to develop greater [...]

Staffing a Startup: What staff does a startup need? The data does not show that solo founders do any worse than those with two or more. However, my advice is that the second member of the team [...]

Entrepreneurial Empathy: The word ‘reveal’ sounds either like showing off, or showing private stuff. Good entrepreneurs who habitually reveal themselves by the way they behave—to show [...]

Startup statements of intent have a critical role to play if your new venture has a strong social purpose and the startup seeks to change the world for the better, with benefits for all. There is [...]

Systemic Social Enterprise: Social enterprise is a term in common use for many types of venture that “address a basic unmet need or solve a social problem through a market-driven approach”. That [...]

Entrepreneur Personality: Everyone who starts a new venture wants the keys to startup success. Many people think there’s a special ‘entrepreneur character’ you should have for [...]

Creeping Disruption: Market disruption is presented as if it is a big bang like digital photography ending film photography. But it’s much more like a gradual change—creeping disruption, [...]

Startup Workshops: The best startup workshop that I ever attended was one designed to enable a venture capital company to decide on potential startup investments. Lead entrepreneurs from about a [...]

Logo for Startups: Choosing a startup’s logo is hard and subjective. Sometimes it can be obvious and flows from the name itself, the place of business, or the product sold. So it was with [...]

First-Class Noticers: What are first-class noticers and where does the word ‘noticer’ even come from? The Nobel prizewinning novelist, Saul Bellow, coined the term in a novella [...]

Vision Statement: My former home city, Georgetown in Texas, is one of the first US cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants with 100% renewable energy supply—provided by its own power municipal [...]

Sweat Equity: You have heard the term ‘sweat equity’. It is the opposite of ‘financial equity’. Many entrepreneurs pride themselves on their sweat equity. Frequently they [...]

Purpose of the Venture:  David Hieatt, co-founder six years ago of Hiut Denim Company, the UK fashion jeans manufacturer with his wife, Clare, suggests that the question a new entrepreneur must [...]

Founders and Abundance: The definition of “to found” is to ‘set up or establish on a firm basis or for enduring existence’. Abundance means ‘an amount that is more [...]

Public Contracts: It is amazing how few startups think about going after business from Federal Government, States, Cities and other public entities. All kinds of bodies put out RFPs (Request For [...]

Startup Storyboarding—what is that? Why would a startup want to use the storyboard technique? And for what? Surely that is just for film producers. Telling stories is one of the most persuasive [...]

Expansion or Extension: Management ‘specialists’ talk about Stretch Goals, or even Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals, or BHAGs. Venture capitalists, with whom you you are probably not [...]

Reducing Risk to Startup Safely: Strategy is tough for entrepreneurs when they love their product so. They just want to get on with it, producing and selling what they’ve got. Let’s [...]

Funding the Benefit Sector: The Benefit Sector is emerging to fill a gap in the ability of the three traditional sectors to produce balanced benefits for society as a whole1. Social (nonprofit) [...]

Loans from Family and Friends: The first port of call for borrowing money for startups is family and friends. Historically, promissory notes have acted as a form of privately issued currency. [...]

Burn the Business Plan: The title is arresting and has a lot of truth. I am a retired MBA teacher of new venture creation and many of my students produced business plans. For me though a business [...]

Connection, Trust, and Love in the New Economy1: The generally accepted aim of a business venture is to maximize financial gain for its owners. On the other hand, the aim of a nonprofit [...]

Variance Analysis: The monthly activity of comparing either/both of forecast/budget numbers with actual out-turn proved for me to be a really critical management task. It’s all about data [...]

Value Proposition summarizes the reason to buy a product/service, convincing a prospective customer that it will add more value or better solve a problem than the competition. Defining your value [...]

SWOT Analysis: the initials stand for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and provides a simple, but effective means of considering potential decisions before you implement them. [...]

Strategy Map: This is one of the more complex tools I offer, but nonetheless effective. If well done, it can be a good means of communication with your colleagues inside the company, as well as [...]

Startup Staffing Grid: How to work out what skills and experience are needed to run your business may seem pretty obvious. However, it’s worth taking time to figure out what they are and [...]

SOAR Analysis much resembles a SWOT Analysis. A SOAR Analysis is a tool to improve the strategic planning process and is best done in a group setting. I have a pet theme in the strategic thinking [...]

Sales Funnel: simply a way to think about all the steps in the sales process and to be able to log them so that you can avoid a sudden dip in sales. If the sales funnel is not topped up at every [...]

Risk Mitigation Tools: Entrepreneurs that survive tend to be very good at risk mitigation, or considering the downside risks of their actions. Ignorant people tend to describe entrepreneurs as [...]

Startup Milestones and Accountabilities: Don’t be fooled by the simplistic appearance of the Milestones and Accountabilities Chart below. Setting plans is not enough. It may seem to be [...]

Mind Mapping: A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, [...]

McKinsey 7-S Framework was the outcome of much earlier work, but was crystalized by Bob Waterman and Tom Peters in the 1980s, when they were both McKinsey consultants. An enduringly useful tool [...]

Marketing Strategy Grid: A marketing strategy integrates an organization’s marketing goals, policies, and action sequences (tactics) into a cohesive whole. I developed this Marketing [...]

Make Meaning Grid: “The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning,” says Guy Kawasaki (in The Art of the Start). It could be to right a wrong, or save a life. Equally [...]

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that will measure outcomes against strategies set at the level of the whole venture, a function of it, and even an individual department. You can [...]

Goal Tracking Tool: Here is a very simple goal tracking tool I devised. You can copy or adapt it for your own use. You can print it or, better, keep an electronic version on your desktop so you [...]

Force Field Analysis: Kurt Lewin created a powerful strategic tool used to understand what’s needed for change in both business and personal environments. I have used it many times in both [...]

Eisenhower Method: the method enables you to organize tasks in order to figure out priorities. General Eisenhower is quoted as saying, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is [...]

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 [...]

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.” [...]

Mindful Work: A growing number of leading businesspeople open meditate. They may have been meditators for a long time, but now they are not shy about saying that they meditate. The late Steve [...]

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 [...]

Coworking Directory—USA: New startups are finding shared work spaces are a huge improvement over working from home, an internet café, or committing too early to their own office lease. The [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]