From the category archives:
We all forget too easily: the best startup funding is sales. Sure, angel investment, friends and family, SBA loans, all of those options are necessary for most startups. But sales is better.
If you can, find the early customers. Give them a deal, make them important, work with them to optimize their needs; but make a [...]
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Imagine yourself as judging a business plan competition. You read the plan, watch and listen to the pitch, ask questions, and consider the answers. What do you do, in that situation, with a team whose opportunity is in your opinion bigger than it realizes? What about a team whose opportunity is different from what it [...]
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Did I miss something critical here? The chart at right is from my Choose your own world view post on here Tuesday. I was trying to relate choices to results and highlight tradeoffs; but I wasn’t sure whether these three factors pulled away from each other, or did they in fact work together if you [...]
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Business stories aren’t just stories. They’re the underpinnings of company culture and policy; powerful, and possibly dangerous.
Consider this: If customer service representatives get together for morning coffee and swap stories about annoying customers, the level of customer service will go down. It’s unavoidable. If the people behind the counter at the coffee shop share annoying [...]
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Sometime around the middle of last week I published the following quote from Walt Disney:
A man should never neglect his family for business
Somebody who read that quote followed up by asking me:
Yes, it’s possible, but you need to apply common sense too, no?
That comment started me thinking. And I ended up drawing the diagram [...]
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Seems like negotiation week for me. I published this post about Seth Godin’s take on business development, and then another on how win-win is the only win in business negotiations. That leaves me thinking about negotiations I’ve been involved in, things that have worked, and things that haven’t worked. And I end up wanting to post the [...]
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I really like this video (8 minutes), not just for what it says, but also for what it doesn’t say.
As Jeff Bezos stands comfortably in front of the YouTube camera, in a garden, with a flip chart, I’m reminded of the “it’s good to be king” refrain in Mel Brooks’ classic History of the World [...]
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I posted here yesterday about what makes a good manager. I asked whether you are a good manager, and how you would know if you aren’t.
One thing I’ve thought of since is one way to tell you aren’t a good manager. Sometimes the negatives are easier. And although I can’t imagine all the different ways [...]
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On the bad days, in off moments, it seems like my two years in business school were mostly about learning the definitions of a few key buzz words to use in meetings.
1. ROI
Stands for return on investment, as in profits divided by total investment. For fun in boring meetings, think of it as “run out [...]
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The most important-but-forgotten salary negotiation tip is: finish well. In sports they call it the follow-through. When it’s over, be happy.
So you wanted more, and you pushed for it, which made you nervous when you did it, but they gave you more than they originally offered, although it was also less than what you’d [...]
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