Most startups fail for one of the following reasons:
Poor Management Acumen
Many entrepreneurs start relatively early and consequently do not have a lot of management experience under their belt. Often they are technical experts and lack business acumen, and either cannot or will not bring in the resources necessary for success. This one is key, because [...]
Delegate or dump? Sometimes its hard to distinguish the two. Often managers delegate the work they like the least as opposed to strategically assigning it. In doing so, they’ve dumped the problems on others and walked away – its human nature after all, to avoid doing things we dislike. But risks exist with simply passing [...]
How many of you start the day with over 300 new emails in your inbox and know more will follow? How many find this method of communication productive? If you do, I am not one of you – I’d much rather be getting my hands dirty tackling the issues. For the bulk of those [...]
Many managers I’ve worked with reside at either end of the spectrum: They are either hands-off or the micromanager. The best managers I know understand that they cannot be locked into a single position, and rather move up and down the scale as the situation requires. They know for example, that when a team is [...]
When preparing for outside financing, its important to understand that investors are investing as much in the team as the product. So it behoves the team to understand where they stand in that dynamic. Too often the focus is on the product.
I prepared this model, that I use with the companies I work with as [...]
I found this post by Reid Carr on FastCompany’s website and thought it had some great ideas for maintaining and improving company morale. The link takes you to the original content. I did not alter what he said, as I really liked the approach, but the website might offer you some other good ideas as [...]
With the economy starting to grow once again, companies that want to position themselves for success need to have an edge on the competition. To do so, they need be plan for growth.
Some ideas to consider:
Invest in New Technology – Have the new technology in place to streamline process and add customers with little incremental [...]
Feedback is essential to our development as professionals. Yet for both the givers and receivers it can be painful. For the receiver hearing their performance is less than stellar can be hard to take, and frankly is at odds with most companies rating systems of a bell curve, which by definition means that the majority [...]
I recently purchased a new computer, making the switch from PC to Mac based on everything I had heard coupled with the fact that when I factored software into the equation the price was compariable to what I would pay for a new PC. I was looking forward to this utopia that people who had [...]
The Small Business Administration (SBA) just released their report to the President on the state of the small business economy -
Topics include, in no specific order:
employer firms and employment by firm size and industry
business turnover by State and select territories
macroeconomic indicators
common stock IPO offerings
link between internal finance and small firm growth
disbursement of capital pool in [...]
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