Business Stories

Sticky Questions on Startup Ownership and Buy-Sell

November 27, 2012

I received this interesting detailed question from the ask me form on my website. I’ve decided to answer it here. I think my answer might be useful for others with similar questions. I’m putting the question in quotes, paragraph by paragraph, and adding my response directly where it comes in the question.  It starts like [...]

Read the full article →

The Best Business Success Factor is Value

October 1, 2012

Keys to entrepreneurial success? We talk about passion, persistence, ideas, funding, planning, sales, product-market fit, and all of that. Do what you love, we say. My opinion changes according to recent events, experience, even mood. Which is fine, because it’s a reaction to events, and we don’t want to get static. But on the long [...]

Read the full article →

Marketing Messages? Simplify and Repeat

July 27, 2012

Watch this video. It’s just 90 seconds, and it’s a great reminder. It needs no further introduction. In case you don’t see it, click here for the source at Stanford’s scorner video collection for entrepreneurs.

Read the full article →

7 Steps to Practical Business Stories

July 13, 2012

Remember, stories aren’t just stories. They’re truth and promise and relationships established. They’re vital to business. There’s more truth in stories than in all the statistics ever published.  Geoffrey James posted How to Tell a Great Story on Inc.com last month, quoting Mike Bosworth of Solution Selling, and Ben Zoldan, one of his top trainers. So this [...]

Read the full article →

The Myth of Persistence Can Ruin Your Life

July 9, 2012

Kudos to Barbara Taylor for Reaching Your Limit as a Business Owner on the NYTimes blog, a thoughtful reminder about a huge problem: The myth of persistence in business ownership. Given the wrong circumstances, running yourself into a brick wall, over and over, is simply not useful. Her point, put simply: Many owners reach a point in [...]

Read the full article →

Key to the Pitch: Make Me Care

June 27, 2012

Never underestimate the business value of the good story. Business planning is telling stories and making them happen. Startups make stories come true. In this delightful TED talk storyteller (filmmaker) Andrew Stanton boils it down to this: Make me care. If you want to sell a business idea, tell it as a story. The best [...]

Read the full article →

Pricing is Magic. Stranger Every Day

April 25, 2012

Pricing is magic. There are no good algorithms. No best practices. Grab a theory — competitive pricing, value-based pricing, scientific wild-assed guess pricing, you name it — and stick with it. If it works, stick longer. If it doesn’t change it.  Some reflections on pricing:  Yesterday I bought a short story,  off of Amazon.com for [...]

Read the full article →

True Story: Begin With a Job at a Startup, Then Start Your Own

March 8, 2012

The title of this post is taken from Martin Zwilling’s Begin With a Job at a Startup, Then Start Your Own on the Gust blog. In that post, Martin starts with this: For those of you who want to get in on the ground floor of a new venture, but haven’t yet worked up the nerve [...]

Read the full article →

The Joy of Startups, Revisited

March 2, 2012

Getting really into a new startup, when it goes well, is exciting like a clear mountain morning, like a warm spring rain, like falling in love. Cheesy? Sure. But I’m doing it again, and loving it. I’m not just saying what people always say; I’ve been there, and I’m there again right now. If you’re [...]

Read the full article →

How Contagion Can Help You Forecast Sales

February 6, 2012

Can we talk about beauty in numbers? Amidst all the nervousness about forecasting new products, does it not make sense, and add elegance too, to talk about the classic s-curve we see in nature? So many natural phenomena show an increase along a natural S-curve and bell curve  like the two shown here on the [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries