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Even when your new product or solution fills a real customer need, and has a positive value proposition, many new venture founders are surprised and frustrated to find that excited customers are hard to find and growth is slow. Thus, as an advisor to many startups, without being negative, I often s Read More

Does your business have a visible positive strategy, or do your customers and employees still see your primary focus as closing more sales and killing competitors? Certainly that has been the strategy of many companies, and has worked in the past, but today’s customers and workers are looking for m Read More

I applaud the resurgence of a focus by new ventures on saving the environment and having a positive social impact. Yet, when you are pitching to investors, this has to be balanced by generating enough profit to keep the venture thriving, growing, and providing a healthy return-on-investment (ROI) t Read More

Maybe it’s just me, but I sometimes feel that accountability is a rare talent in business today. In big businesses, people are quick to defer with “that’s not my department,” and even startup founders too often blame failures on the economy or the lack of investors. As an investor and advisor to en Read More

As a long-time advisor to small businesses and startups, I still find many who think marketing is still primarily broadcasting your message to as many customers as possible, hitting them again and again, until it sticks. They don’t realize that customers today are looking for relationships, meaning Read More

New technology markets and paradigm shifts have traditionally been bad bets when seeking investors, since these were known to take decades to develop, and cost lots of money. For example, consider how many years it took for the market to move from radio to television, or fully accept personal compu Read More

As a long-time advisor to aspiring entrepreneurs, and a technology fan myself, I still meet dozens of techies with great solutions who assume they don’t need marketing to change the world. They subscribe to the myth that “if we build it, they will come.” In fact, with today’s information overload, Read More

One of the most important skills for every entrepreneur is timely and effective decision making. In a startup, any decision is better than no decision. One of the primary roles of every founder is to solve problems, make a decision, and manage the decision to results. The best entrepreneurs relish Read More

n my experience in large businesses as well as years of advising startups, I see far too much focus on product skills, and too little on people and process skills. In my view, this focus on the wrong skill set is the primary reason why over half of new businesses fail in the first five years, and o Read More

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 Read More