December, 2012

Startup Professionals Musings

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The New Breed of Startups Master These 5 Processes

Startup Professionals Musings

I see more and more entrepreneurs who seem to have everything going for them – vision, motivation, passion, even a good business plan, product, and money, and yet they can’t close customers. Maybe it’s time to look harder at the mantra of a new breed of gurus and successful entrepreneurs, including Steve Blank and Eric Ries , called “nail it then scale it” (NISI).

Startup 296
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Privacy is a Startup Challenge and an Opportunity

Startup Professionals Musings

With another list of the Top 10 Internet Scams and more identity theft , there seems to be a growing population out there worried about all the people intent on hurting them. Why is everyone so paranoid these days? My plea to entrepreneurs is to recognize these concerns as an opportunity, and go the extra mile to make people’s life better, rather than stoke the fires.

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6 Approaches to Maximizing Good Business Habits

Startup Professionals Musings

Most of the entrepreneurs I know realize they have some bad habits, like maybe procrastination or not listening well, so they focus on dropping these. New studies indicate that a more productive approach would be adopting new good habits and behaviors that clearly move your business forward, like good time management and implementing customer recommendations.

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10 Entrepreneur Qualities That Tag You as Fabulous

Startup Professionals Musings

To be successful as an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be a fabulous person, but it helps. Some people, and some entrepreneurs, have that something extra, like Simon Cowell is searching for on the X-Factor , that you can’t quite put your finger on. But the entrepreneurs that have “it” seem to be able to effortlessly get team members, investors, and customers to follow them anywhere.

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10 Key Entrepreneur Success Drivers May Surprise You

Startup Professionals Musings

We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. From recent survey feedback, it seems evident that the urban legends leading to success are wrong. The average entrepreneur is not the one who dumped a promising career, sketched his idea on the back of a napkin, and accepted millions from an investor to make billions of his own. I was just perusing an older but still very relevant report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, titled “ Making of a Succes

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Entrepreneurs Learn New Rules for Real Influence

Startup Professionals Musings

Successful entrepreneurs, like Tony Hsieh of Zappos and Casey Sheahan of Patagonia , have long since realized that influence is no longer something that you do to someone to get what you want, but requires listening and relationship building to do what they want, with a win-win outcome. We now live in a world where even subtle persuasion efforts are suspect.

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10 Keys to Successful Entrepreneur Relationships

Startup Professionals Musings

Just because you are an entrepreneur, or work in a startup, you can’t ignore the rules of building and maintaining relationships. Many despise these experiences in corporate environments, and leave for a startup, only to find that they have to be able to navigate a similar minefield there of workplace and business relationships to be successful. Jan Yager, Ph.D., an author and speaker on this and related subjects, outlines in her recent book “ Productive Relationships: 57 Strategies for Building