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8 Pieces of Advice Every Entrepreneur Needs
I don’t like listening to smart people when they pretend they developed the wisdom they impart all on their own—like a Stephen Hawking fairy flew down and touched them on the head with a Wand of Wisdom. It doesn’t work that way for most of us. Everything I know I was told by people who are smarter than me. Like the following advice, some of which has stuck with me for years: "Go ahead and be an 'individual.' Just do it on your own time." For a long time—longer than I care to admit—I let ...
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Comment Mentions: Stanford Jeff Haden
Why Entrepreneurs Do What They Do
If you ever wondered whether starting a business is worth the hell you put yourself through, read this. By Jon Burgstone and Bill Murphy, Jr. | @jburgstone | Getty Tweet Every time a new founder/billionaire is minted—and there have been plenty lately—people who aren't entrepreneurs tend to lose sight of what this calling is really about. Entrepreneurship isn't simply about launching new ventures or making money. Instead, it's about solving problems and creating social progress; building great ne
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Lower Your Start-up Legal Costs: 3 Tips
You’ve got a killer idea, a well-researched business plan, and enough capital (you think) to at least get it off the ground. Before you get too far, however, have you factored in legal expenses? It's a cost that optimistic entrepreneurs sometimes forget about or downplay.
Consider this: The average legal bill prior to Series A financing is $23,000, and the average legal bill for Series A is around $52,000. That’s according to Richard Komaiko, cofounder of AttorneyFee, a website that compares the prices charged by more than 25,000 lawyers. The company, which gleans its ...
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6 Secrets to a Successful Start-up
How do you know if your company will succeed? Venture capitalists give their perspectives on traits that define the best start-ups. It's every entrepreneur's most pressing question: Is this company going to make it? All companies need to have the basics: a solid business model, a viable market, and a brilliant product or service. But the most important-- and unpredictable-- indicator of success is the entrepreneur. Do you have what it takes? Despite the popularity of 25-year-old Internet entrepr
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Comment Mentions: Chile Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
7 Office Space Traps to Avoid
You just closed a small financing round, hired some new team members and are looking to move into a new office space. Here are seven things to avoid when signing up for your new digs. You just closed a small financing round, hired some new team members, and are looking to move into a new office space. After finding the perfect spot and locking down a two-page letter of intent, the landlord sends over the lease agreement—and it's 70 pages long. How do you get through this massive document without
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Find Your Company's Native Cannibals
How (and why) to disrupt your own business before your competitors or upstarts have a chance to. Many years ago, I was lucky enough to work on a project with one of the original Apollo 13 mission-control engineers. One day, while he was patiently answering questions from his wide-eyed colleagues about how NASA got the astronauts safely home via their Lunar Escape Module, he paused, looked down at a gadget in his hands and cracked a wry smile. "You know, this little device has more computing capa
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Comment Mentions: Nasa Intuit Mastercard
Don't Be a Burnout Boss: How to Support Employee Work-Life Balance
Don’t Be a Burnout Boss Helping your employees set work-life boundaries is easy and prevents burnout. So why aren't you doing it? By Jessica Stillman | @EntryLevelRebel | Tweet Are you an after-hours Blackberry addict? Do you expect your employees to be e-mail addict, too? How much to keep in contact with office calls and e-mail in the evenings and over weekends may be a matter of personal choice (or business necessity) for founders, but for employees when they can switch off can be a nerve-wrac (Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Jessica Stillman
The 9 Most Common Start-up Mistakes
Making mistakes is a great way to learn. Making mistakes is also not particularly fun. It's a lot more fun to avoid them entirely. Here are some of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs—and businesspeople in general—tend to make.
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Comment Mentions: Jeff Haden
3 Numbers All Entrepreneurs Should Know
In the early days of a startup, it can be tough to find good data to help with decision-making. Put a priority on these three numbers, and you'll be fine. To make good decisions, you need good data. That’s a given, right? But in a start-up, what data should you be looking at? In the early days of a startup, sometimes there isn’t much to measure. A comparison of this year’s sales compared to last year’s isn’t all that helpful if you’ve only been around for eight months. But that doesn’t mean ...
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Comment Mentions: Don Rainey
How Old is Too Old to Start a Great Company?
(Left to right) Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook; Steve Jobs, Apple; Sergey Brin, Google; Larry Page, Google Tweet Sometimes it seems like there's a sign hanging over the doors of some top venture capital firms reading, "No Old People Need Apply." It's not hard to understand why. Investors are looking for the next big thing, and the truth is that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all were in their late teens or 20s when they launched their
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Comment Mentions: Larry Ellison Apple Bill Gates
11 Tips to Become a Better Negotiator
I admit it. I hate negotiating. (Hate negotiating.) To me, a negotiation always feels at least a little confrontational, and I’m a confrontation-averse kinda guy. Unfortunately, negotiating is a fact of business life. So if you’re like me—a negotiating sissy—here are a few ways to make negotiating a little less stressful, a little more fun, and a lot more successful: 1. Make the first bid. People hate to go first if only because going first might mean missing out on an opportunity: "If I quote a
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4 Tips for Protecting Your Trademark
Little icons have big implications. Trademarks, those little ™ and ® symbols hanging over the end of a name, are a result of time, effort, and investment in a product, aimed to provide an extra edge over competitors. Trademarks reflect a company's overall identity and reputation—yet businesses around the world lose millions of dollars every year from easily preventable trademark infringements. By not actively policing trademarks for unauthorized use, companies risk confusing customers and diluti (Read Full Article)
Comment Mentions: Washington New York Mexico
22 Ways to Manage Work-Life Balance at a Start-up
Launching a start-up is demanding and takes huge amounts of time, energy, and attention. Is it possible to have a life outside of work? It’s not easy, say the founders I talked to, but they do have tips to help you launch and maintain some vestige of work-life balance. 1. Start dancing. It's physical, it's fun, it's social, and you can't check your phone or be working on your laptop while you're out dancing. Find the coolest place wherever you live, and go out dancing once a week. You'll feel co
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Make Your Employees Motivated Missionaries
As your company grows, you can't plan for revenue growth alone. You need to plan for leadership and culture growth as well. Here's how Stella & Dot does it. At Stella & Dot, we are in the midst of rolling out our annual strategy for our new fiscal year to our employees. As a management team, before rolling out our 2012 company goals, we did what every management book would tell you to do. We worked backwards from a three-year plan, we focused in on 2012, we broke it down by function and provided
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Start a Company; It's Your Only Hope of Living the Life You Want
Quitting your job may not be as risky as it seems. You should have done what you wanted a long time ago! You've done what you were supposed to do. You graduated high school. You may have gone to a great college and even graduated with decent grades. You landed your first job and were then promoted. Maybe even multiple times! You now are making decent money—more money than you ever thought you'd make. You're married and now have responsibilities – kids, a mortgage, parents who may outlive their s
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How to Be Happy at Work
Let me start off with a little story. I once knew a saleswoman–young, divorced–who got a diagnosis of breast cancer. She had to work and raise two kids while fighting the cancer. Even so, she managed to be happy at work, noticeably happier than her co-workers. In fact, she not only won her battle with cancer but subsequently became one of the top salespeople at Bristol Myers. She was not, as it happens, naturally cheerful. Quite the contrary. When she started full-time work, she was frequently d
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Comment Mentions: Geoffrey James
Has Your Business Failed (and You Just Won't Admit It)?
Every small business struggles. Struggle is what you signed up for when you became an entrepreneur. (I'd say we're still struggling at Sageworks, and we've made the Inc. 500 twice.) Even the most successful business builders have all gone through moments when they wondered whether they should call it quits and try something differe
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Business Essential You Might Be Missing
A Silicon Valley CEO tells how he learned that company values aren't a nice add-on. They're mandatory to holding your business together. By Jessica Stillman | @EntryLevelRebel | shutterstock images Tweet You've got the idea for a company and posess the necessary skills. Maybe you even have money, co-founders and a solid business plan, but one Silicon Valley CEO says there’s one additional, essential ingredient your new company might be missing: values. You may think of things like mission, value
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Comment Mentions: Jessica Stillman
4 Essential Steps to Managing Growth
A funny little thing happens on the road to success. Often the prosperity of the business can outpace the ability of the business to maintain that success. At this point most of you are probably wondering what am I talking about. Rapid success can lead to failure? Get real. But it can. And I have seen it repeatedly in all scales of businesses over the past few years. How does it happen? Let’s say you bring a product to market. It is received well by the public. They begin to buy. You begin to ma
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The Power of First Impressions Online
Customer relationships are job No. 1 for any business, but building them with customers who experience your product primarily online and over the phone requires a unique blend of intentions, knowledge, and process (all aligned with clear expectation-setting). The goal is to quickly forge trust in the ability, reliability, and strength of your service and its team. These overall truths of your product and team are vital to delivering a customer experience that bonds the customer to your brand and
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How to Succeed Against the Odds
As a coach, I help entrepreneurs through the issues that keep them from their dreams. For the most part I see these individuals as driven, passionate, unstoppable human beings. But after my recent discussion with one entrepreneur, the bar has definitely been raised. Monte Lee-Wen entered the United States from Canada with few resources and little money. But he had a dream, and that was enough to keep him going. It wasn’t long after coming to the United States that Monte built his commercial real
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5 Things They Didn't Teach You in Business School
At the end of our first year in business I got on my knees and prayed to God for a sign: whether we should continue our business. Even though sales were coming in, we had zero profit to show for it. A week later, we closed a deal with a large airline to have our wines served on their international flights. Although we got the sign, there are certain other things I wish I would have known back then. I wish I would have known the real skills required to be an entrepreneur. I've learned a lot in
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How to Squeeze Creativity From Your Employees
Moonbot Studios, a digital animation and development company based in Shreveport, Louisiana, describes itself as "an interplanetary creative expedition of story and art." If that sounds vague—even a bit nebulous—that's because its founders like to keep thing fluid. They're artists first, and businessmen second—they're filmmakers, painters, drawers, and writers—and they've come to embrace the iPad as the vehicle to to tell their stories. Founded by William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg, and Lampton En
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Signs You're Ready to Be an Entrepreneur
Is it time to take the leap? Here are founders' words of wisdom on whether you're truly ready to make it on your own. By Riley Gibson | @RileyGibson | green light means go shutterstock images Tweet I'll never forget pressing the "send" button on the e-mail to my boss letting him know that I was leaving to start a company. It was a terrifying and thrilling moment best summed up by my father when I told him the news: "Well, you just jumped of a cliff,
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Comment Mentions: Prasad Thammineni Jake Nickell Trada
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Pawan Deshpande » A Startup Partner Needs More Than a Good Resume
This is very true!
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This is a must read.
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