Business Financing

Why The Bank Won’t Finance Your Business Plan

July 27, 2011

Over the years I’ve received hundreds of emails from entrepreneurs complaining about banks not lending them money on their business plans. I just got another one this morning, and when I searched this blog I couldn’t find a post to cite as an answer. So here it is, today: Banks can’t lend you money on [...]

Read the full article →

5 Non-Traditional Ways to Get Startup Money

July 26, 2011

So you want to start that company but you don’t have enough of your own money to do it. Most people think you either borrow the money or find investors, but neither of these are always possible.  You won’t get investment if your company isn’t investible.  And banks can’t lend you money on faith, you [...]

Read the full article →

Angels vs. VCs on Business Pitches

June 20, 2011

Over the weekend I caught Business Insider’s Five VCs Explain What They REALLY Think About Your Pitches. It’s a great post, gathering points together from discussions with several high-end VCs. If you’re looking at venture capital, read it. Part of what they said reminded me that angel investors and VCs have a lot in common. [...]

Read the full article →

Entrepreneurs: Profits are Overrated

June 15, 2011

Real entrepreneurs don’t make profits, and for good reasons. Huge oil companies make excess profits, sure. Smart entrepreneurs don’t. And I don’t mean just the land-grab web companies like Facebook and Twitter don’t make profits. Growing companies don’t make profits. Can you be more successful than amazon.com and Jeff Bezos? Amazon didn’t make profits until [...]

Read the full article →

Planning vs. Accounting: 2 Different Dimensions. And Why You Care.

June 13, 2011

Just as the stargate in the picture was a gate between two different dimensions (from the 1994 movie), today is also the stargate between planning and accounting. Accounting starts today and goes backwards in time in ever-increasing detail. Planning, on the other hand, starts today and goes forward in time in ever increasing summary and [...]

Read the full article →

7 Financial Terms Every Entrepreneur Should Know

May 26, 2011

This is a rewrite of an older post, but it seems like a good one to repeat. You don’t have to be an accountant or an MBA to do a business plan, but you will be better off with a basic understanding of these six essential financial terms. Otherwise, you’re doomed to either having somebody [...]

Read the full article →

5 Steps to Better Financial Projections

May 18, 2011

(Note: this is reposted from my post Monday on Amex OPEN forum. It had a different illustration there, and I’ve changed it to the hockey stick here in honor of so many sales forecast charts that looked like hockey sticks) Every spring, I read and review dozens of business plans as a member of an [...]

Read the full article →

5 Ways to Make Your Projected Profits Realistic

April 15, 2011

I’m well into my business plan marathon again this year, in Houston today looking forward to judging the Rice Business Plan Competition, one of my favorites. Regarding business plans, instead of just complaining (again) about unrealistically high profitability projections, today I have some specific suggestions. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with the six [...]

Read the full article →

Charting the Lesson of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Appeal

November 30, 2010

Yesterday I posted here David McCandless’ fascinating 18-minute talk on data visualization, in which he puts up charts and graphs as a window into patterns and relationships in numbers. Watching that talk led me to discover his Information is Beautiful blog, which is a great source of ideas and insights. For example, the chart shown [...]

Read the full article →

Federally Funded Small Business Financial Port in a Storm

June 10, 2009

Bridge financing? A few thousand dollars just to tide us over? I’ve been there, and, in fact, I’ve been there to the tune of $65,000 in credit card debt, which is definitely not the best way to do it. So I’m noticing today that the US Small Business Administration (SBA) is making good on a promise [...]

Read the full article →