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Successful entrepreneurs often start with a “random” idea, but they quickly focus their efforts and follow a “system” to organize their startup and maximize the clout of their activities. Too many entrepreneur “wannabes” never get past the idea stage, or strike out randomly in many directions, hopi Read More

You can’t make any business work if your customers can’t find you, or don’t even know what you offer. Thus I was surprised to read recently that 30 percent of small businesses don’t even have a web site. As an advisor to new entrepreneurs, I’m also surprised at how many potential business owners te Read More

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who think the most creatively, not only in their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth from startup to maturity. But even the best of them can easily slip into some bad decision habits that limit or hurt their busines Read More

Even in this age of videos and text messages, the quickest way to kill your startup dream with investors, business partners, or even customers, is embarrassingly poor writing. Being very visible in the startup community, I still get an amazing number of badly written emails, rambling executive summ Read More

We all have blind spots – things you don’t see despite your best intentions to observe the world changing around you. In business, these can quickly take you off the growth track, even as you work harder and harder. In my role as startup and small business advisor, it’s my job to help you see more Read More

Many passionate entrepreneurs fight to add more features into their new products and services, assuming that more function will make the solution more appealing to more customers. In reality, more features will more likely make the product confusing and less usable to all. Focus is the art of limit Read More

Nothing happens in business until someone makes a decision. These days, with the market moving at warp speeds, the timeliness of decision making is also critical. What might have been the right decision yesterday, may be the wrong decision tomorrow. Yet one of the most common complaints I hear as a Read More

The world of marketing is changing faster than technology these days. Winning entrepreneurs have long since supplemented conventional print and video “push” marketing with digital online interactive “pull” marketing, and more recently added social-local-mobile (SoLoMo) to the mix. Mobile and global Read More

No company or entrepreneur gets it right every time. As an angel investor, I have found that people claiming a perfect record are either lying to themselves, or they are not taking enough risk to enable a big payback. In the long run, your ability to thrive in business today is more about how you p Read More

Based on my many years as an executive in large and small businesses, and time mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners, I find that most people enjoy being CEO critics for a day, but are hesitant to consider themselves as a long-term candidate for that position. They often rationalize Read More