Benefit Venture Blog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 crystallized 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]