Some Suggestions for Family Business
By Tim Berry
I’ve done business with my wife, daughter, son-in-law, and various mixtures of those. Of course the classic advice on this is not to mix business with family. But people do. I read somewhere that 62 percent of the gross national product of the Western world is produced by family businesses. Furthermore, I don’t believe (much) in... Read More »
The Paradox of Profits
By Tim Berry
We take it for granted. One of the main goals of a business is making a profit. Right? Maybe not. Answer this question: What makes a business more valuable? Is it profits, or growth? Or future prospects? And then this question: Don’t you have a straight trade-off between profits and growth? Assume you have money... Read More »
The New JOBS Act, Crowdfunding, and Shoes Waiting to Drop
By Tim Berry
It’s less than three weeks since the new JOBS act opened the door to exciting new crowdfunding initiatives. This could be a sweeping change, an end to antiquated laws requiring startups to get investment mainly from so-called accredited investors. And it could be another deregulation causing a lot more problems than it solves. For the... Read More »
Truth, Magic, Stories, and the Digital Campfire
By Tim Berry
Do yourself a favor and watch Marco Tempest on this brilliant six-minute TED video. If you don’t see it here, use this link to go to the TED site to watch it. After you’re done, I’d like to tell two true stories that seem somehow related. And before the video, I want to highlight some... Read More »
Q&A: Valuing a SaaS Business
By Tim Berry
This question was posted on my “ask me” page on my timberry.com site. I can’t promise to answer all the questions I get, but I try, and I’m particularly happy when I get one whose answer might be useful to other people. So here’s a question: Do you have any idea how to value a SaaS... Read More »
What Would You Do About This Facebook Post?
By Tim Berry
Hats off to Inc Magazine for this great treatment of a problem a lot of business owners face. In this case it’s a man named Mark, who discovers: Recently an employee put a photo of the cover of the book Your Company Sucks on their own Facebook wall, titling the entry “Succinct.” To his great... Read More »
User Interface Dark Side: When Deception Works
By Tim Berry
No ambiguity with this one: the site is named darkpatterns.org… a pattern library with the specific goal of naming and shaming deceptive user interfaces (aka “dark patterns”) and the companies that use them. … and author Harry Brignull, in his List Apart post Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design, calls them “evil web... Read More »
9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month
By Tim Berry
I’ve been meaning to post about Mark Suster’s 9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month for a couple of months now. What a great reminder, and useful in a lot of contexts. Mark makes his point about the dangers of overfunding a startup with too much outside investment. He says: Over funding often produces bad... Read More »
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