Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 9, 2023

“The devil in the details” is a quote that we have all heard, and clearly applies to startups, where success in the long run is all about execution. But for you as an entrepreneur trying to get started, the devil is really in your mind, where you must prevent drifting, and maintain that confidence, commitment, and passion, to achieve your business dream.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 21, 2023

Commonly, I find that business owners and entrepreneurs look first at solutions which solve painful problems, or have high profit margins, regardless of their own commitment to a higher purpose, such as saving the environment or helping the underserved. For your own happiness and satisfaction, I recommend you start instead working from that higher purpose and passion.

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Community Social Media Metrics Programming 286

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 24, 2023

One of the things I’ve learned in working with aspiring entrepreneurs is that managing and leading a team is a scary venture into the unknown for many people, even if they have worked as a business professional for years. Having worked in my own career on both sides of the fence at various times, I recommend that everyone practice thinking like the boss in every role to prepare.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 30, 2023

It may not be as sexy, but starting a new business which builds on an existing technology or business model is usually less risky than introducing that ultimate new disruptive technology. There are many levels of innovation that go beyond copying someone else’s idea, but stop short of pushing the leading edge (bleeding edge). Many of the major business successes started this way.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 16, 2023

Contrary to popular opinion, viral marketing has not eliminated the need for old-fashioned lead generation to bring customers to a startup. Indeed, while the rules and technologies for lead generation have changed, Forrester and other experts still see it as the most effective way for businesses with limited budgets to maximize their return on marketing investment (ROI).

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 15, 2023

The reigning theory in business has long been that “alpha” leaders make the best entrepreneurs. These are aggressive, results-driven achievers who assert control, and insist on a hierarchical organizational model. Yet I am seeing more and more success from “beta” startup cultures, like Zappos and Amazon, where the emphasis is on collaboration, curation, and communication.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 18, 2023

Every startup founder loves to prompt for questions from investors and potential key team members about their vision, and the huge opportunity that can be had with their disruptive technology. Yet if you are on the other side of the table, there are some other key questions that you need to ask, which will tell you more about the real success prospects for this business.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 30, 2023

Over my many years of mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs and business professionals, I often hear a desire to start a new business, with a big hesitation while waiting for that perfect idea and perfect alignment of the stars. From my own experience and from the best entrepreneurs I know, I always offer some basic business realities, and assure you that conditions will never be perfect.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 12, 2022

As a business advisor, I have too often seen technical entrepreneurs get a product or service off the ground with ease, but then struggle mightily when their business reaches a couple of million in annual sales, or the employee count grows beyond a handful. It’s at this stage that the job changes from creative and tactical to managerial and strategic.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

A common complaint I hear in my business consulting is that your boss is the problem , and you could fix the business if you only had the opportunity. When I ask what you are doing to prepare for that role , I usually only hear frustration and a lack of specifics or an action plan. Having spent my career on both sides of the fence, I have found some important things that worked for me.

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Leadership Restful Management Entrepreneur 307

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 25, 2022

Most entrepreneurs assume that success is dependent on their product expertise, coupled with some knowledge of how to run a business. In fact, I have found from personal experience and mentoring that both of these are necessary, but not sufficient, for building a business. Successful entrepreneurs today must practice human-centered leadership to compete and win.

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Leadership Due Diligence Acquisition Demand 357

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 25, 2022

Relationships are the key to survival and success for entrepreneurs, and first impressions usually turn into lasting impressions. As an advisor to many early-stage entrepreneurs, I caution them to always be prepared for that chance meeting with a famous investor, a potential partner or an industry guru. It’s not smart to believe that your passion and gift of gab will impress anyone.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

Despite the rush in every academic institution to offer more courses on entrepreneurship, I still haven’t found it to be something you can learn in school. Of course, you can pick up the basic principles this way, but the problem is that the practical rules for success are changing so fast that no academic can keep up. The best thing you can learn in school is how to learn.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 31, 2022

The largest and most successful businesses of the past have been traditionally driven by autocratic and powerful leaders who managed a highly structured organization of subordinates. I see that model changing today to one of team collaboration and decision making, per companies such as Amazon, Google, and Zoom. Where do you see your fit in this leadership transformation ?

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 8, 2022

Success in any business these days requires a constant flow of new and innovative solutions, to keep up with changes in the market, competition, and to attract new customers. Yet in my role as a small business advisor, I still see a singular focus on achieving repeatable processes and “cookie-cutter” manufacturing. I don’t believe these two objectives have to be mutually exclusive.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 7, 2022

You will be pivoting your business in your lifetime, whether you are a new startup, or a mature company like Motorola or IBM. You can count on it and plan for it, or you wait for the next survival crisis brought your way by this rapidly changing world. You can even give it a more elegant name, like “market-focused reinvention,” but it won’t be graceful if you don’t take the lead.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 16, 2022

We are living in a new generation of business, where customers drive the experience, and highly engaged employees are required to keep up with customer expectations. Traditional business leadership practices, including autocratic, reactive, and narcissistic, aren’t good enough. Over 16 percent of workers are still actively disengaged , and half have left at least one job because they hated their boss.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2022

You have to be extra tough mentally to start a new business venture. While thinking about it, I realized that it’s really not that different from the toughness required and trained into America’s elite military force of Navy SEALs, who are known to be cool under fire, able to sense danger before it’s too late, and never give up on achieving their objective.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 1, 2022

You may be surviving in the marketplace, but is your business really thriving and winning? In my role as a mentor, I challenge every business leader to be more open-minded as they face the challenges of change and new competitors entering their space. Most are reluctant to tip that balance between hard-won experience versus new thinking that can take them to the next level.

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Technical Review Social Media Metrics Hosting 302

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2022

Most business mentors tell me that the single biggest problem they have to deal with in small companies is the lack of open, honest, and effective communication, both from the top down and from the bottom up. Some entrepreneurs forget that talking is not communicating. Fortunately these skills can be learned, and the barriers to communication can be overcome one by one.

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Semantic Technical Review Retention Distribution 342

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 10, 2022

Most of the entrepreneurs I have met are smart, but many are not always wise. That means they may show great insights into a new technology that has marginal business value, their passion may motivate team members more than customers, or they may allow themselves to be pulled over the ethical line in their success drive. Wise leaders are authentic, timeless, and enduring.

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Leadership Early Stage Entrepreneur Community 292

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 9, 2022

Starting and running a company is a team effort. Yes, it takes a leader (entrepreneur), but you can’t do it alone, without a team. Maybe only you and a co-founder comprise the team at first, to provide key skills, back you up, and test your ideas. As the startup grows, the team has to be able to really push you in making growth decisions, rather than you pulling them along.

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Cofounder Leadership Design Naming 330

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 16, 2022

If your startup is looking for an angel investor, it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up. Or does it? Actually numbers and locations are just the beginning. The challenge is to find the right angel for you, and for your situation. Here are some basic principles: Angels invest in people, more often than they invest in ideas.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 5, 2022

It’s a whole new world out there in the workplace. Millennials want work that matters, and don’t care for hierarchies. Boomers are coming back to work, but because of their experience, they may be insulted by constant feedback. All prefer more flexible hours, the chance to work from home, and the traditions of lifetime loyalty to one company no longer apply.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 4, 2022

What sparks paradigm-shifting and disruptive innovation in any business? It’s a special mix of entrepreneur and company, regular in every respect except for having the courage and foresight to make an idea happen that was supposed to be impossible. As an entrepreneur in a startup, how do you know if you have this potential, and what are the steps to get from an innovation to a revolution?

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 10, 2022

As a long-time mentor and advisor to new business owners, I can attest to both the need for mentoring, and the satisfaction that comes from watching an aspiring but tentative entrepreneur grow into someone capable of changing the world. Business is not rocket science, and one-on-one guidance face-to-face, with a real project, trumps the classroom and mistakes every time.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

Many of the startup investors I know are disappointed that so few of the startup ideas they see are really innovative or disruptive. Most of us are incremental or linear thinkers , and we miss the really big opportunities, like the next smartphone or space travel. That ability to “ see around the next corner ” seems to be limited to a very few entrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

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Artificial Inteligence Matching Leadership Entrepreneur 344

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 3, 2021

Starting and building a company is all about leadership – formulating an idea, building a unique plan based on vision and experience, and forging a path over and through all obstacles. Yet the image of leadership in business is at an all-time low, according to national leadership experts, considering the political debacles, recent business scandals, and executive fraud cases.

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Leadership Entrepreneur Developer 394

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 13, 2021

As a long-time business consultant and investor, especially to entrepreneurs, I recognize your sparkle of vision , to build the ultimate world-changing product. Every one of you sees yourself as the next Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or maybe even Steve Jobs. Yet most of us succumb after a time to the short-term pressures of growing a business, and the long-term vision gets pushed aside.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

In my role as a business advisor, I find that most still resist change , especially change they can’t control and did not choose, rather than accept it as the norm, and seek to capitalize on it. I believe that that by adopting a more positive change mindset , you can actually make surfing the waves of change much more manageable, and even make your business and career fun again.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 3, 2021

Not so long ago, business leaders operated behind the scenes, and even long-time employees rarely heard from them or saw them in the news. Today, with the Internet and social media, if you aren’t visible in a positive way to everyone, including customers, your leadership efforts will be lost. To be a leader, you have to be willing to be a public figure , and display the right attributes.

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Stealth Leadership Viral Social Media 362

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 14, 2021

With the advent of the Internet, social media, and instant communication via texting, customer expectations for service, as part of their entire customer experience, have changed. They expect you to be there, to know their history as a customer, and to treat them with priority and respect. They tell their friends and the world everything, and a bad experience can kill your business.

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Customer Social Media Public Relations Internet 427

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 25, 2021

Every entrepreneur with a new technology tells me that his innovation will be industry-disrupting, meaning that it will render the existing technology obsolete, and create a new market. Yet truly disruptive innovations, like the smartphone from Apple and the rise of the Internet, are very rare, and are generally unpredicted. So why would any investor ever believe any of these claims?

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 9, 2021

Many budding entrepreneurs struggle mightily with that first step – out of their comfort zone and into the unknown. They keep asking people like me whether the time is right, and the truth is that there’s never an ideal time to start your own business. It’s like starting a personal relationship, if you wait for exactly the right time, you’ll never do it.

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Salary Global Cost Naming 422

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 21, 2021

During all my years in business, I’ve noticed that some people seem to make their job look effortless , while others are always in a struggle, no matter how simple you thought the task should be. I’ve always wondered if some people are just that much smarter, or what some do that the rest of us can emulate, in order that we too get the best results without working so hard.

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Technical Review Restful Internet Small Business 309

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 2, 2021

I’m always looking for evidence of early startup characteristics that might be predictors of long-term success. Every investor has his own list, usually based on his own very small sample, or simply his gut feeling. Of course, we would all like to have a magic list based on more definitive tracking of many real startups over time. In that context, I came across an old study of 27 startups featured in Inc’s annual “Anatomies of a Start-up,” done for “The Journal of Business Venturing,” and publis

Non-Compete 425

Non-Compete Channel .Net Distribution 425

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 12, 2021

As I’m sure you are aware, surviving that first couple of years as a new business is a huge challenge, waiting for cash flow to turn positive. In my experience as a business advisor and occasional investor, many of you won’t make it that far, succumbing to the high costs of getting those first customers, funding an initial inventory, and building an operational support process.

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