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Rules for Entrepreneurs: Pay yourself first
Over the last 9 years and two startups I have learned many things and screwed up royally in some cases. This ongoing series is about providing you best practices of lessons learned and avoiding the mistakes I have already made. In the past, I have had good years and bad years. When you have employees,…
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New Series: Writing a Marketing Plan
Since the Business Plan series came to a close I thought of the next logical step in what you have to do in your business to support the business plan and its operations. This next step is the marketing plan. Logically, your CMO or VP of Marketing would be in charge of this effort but…
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New Series Introduction: Rules for Entrepreneurs
As you all know I just wrapped up my Business Plan Series and will be starting a Marketing Plan Series next week. So I started thinking about what smaller bits of advice I could organize in a great ongoing series of posts. This is where I came up with “Rules for Entrepreneurs”. These rules will…
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Apparently, Running a High Profile Business Makes You Stupid
It’s simply fascinating that we look up to certain people who begin successful companies. Not to knock them, or anything. They obviously have something working for them. However, you’d never know it from their blogs. In fact, their blogs tell us that they are complete idiots. Examples. Biz Stone, founder of Twitter keeps a blog…
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Do you really want to work in Venture Capital?
I have heard this from many people I have met “I really want to be a VC”. First, why are you asking me when I am not one and don’t have a desire to be one? Let me direct you to some people in the industry and a few who left it to get a…
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Rules for Entrepreneurs: Business Card FAIL
I have been to a lot of networking events in my life and I am sure you have as well. The one common element of going to these things is swapping business cards and collecting them for entry into the address book and then the trash…maybe you just skip to throwing them into the trash…
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Business Plan Series: Part 10 – Appendicies
We have reached the end of our Business Plan series with this final entry on “Appendicies”. Our next series will dive into the marketing plan for your business so be on the lookout for that next week. So what exactly is in the appendix section of the business plan? In short, it is the kitchen…
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Business Plan Series: Part 9 – Financials
As we come toward the close of our business plan series we reach probably the most important section of the plan next to the Executive Summary, the Financials section. Despite the work you put into creating a stellar business plan most investors will read your executive summary first and then dive right into your financials.…
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If You Want Sex, You Need to Make a Sexual Move
First of all, thanks for proving a side point that posts with sex in the title will almost always get clickthroughs. :-) Besides that, I actually have a point with that title, and trust me… it’s completely non-sexual. But it is true. One thing I’ve noticed growing up and being around people in general, is…