Idea & Opportunity

Critical Success Factors (CSFs): 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 [...]

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, I [...]

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

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

“Entrepreneurship is the ability to create and build something nothing,” says my hero, the late Jeffry Timmons. He was very good guide on how to create and build something from nothing. He says [...]