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As a business owner in this age of rapid technological change, with the surge of worldwide competitors, setbacks and adversity are virtually guaranteed. Based on my years of experience mentoring and advising entrepreneurs, you need to attack problems and challenges with a mindset of success, or it Read More

Entrepreneurs who require funding for their startup have long counted on self-accredited high net worth individuals (“angels”) to fill their needs, after friends and family, and before they qualify for institutional investments (“VCs”). The many crowd funding platforms on the Internet, led still by Read More

Have you ever noticed that some of your business owner friends get all the bad customers, and yours all seem fairly reasonable? Or is it the other way around? I’m always amazed that, in my role as a business advisor, bad customers somehow seem to gang up on certain businesses. I long ago learned th Read More

Getting things done effectively in a startup requires total individual and team accountability. You can’t afford excuses and multiple people doing the same job. In my view, “taking responsibility” is the core element behind accountability. Many people hear responsibility as an obligation, but I hea Read More

As an angel investor and business advisor on new ventures, I expect to see five-year financial projections from every entrepreneur. Yet I get more pushback on this request than almost any other issue. Founders point to the great number of financial unknowns in any new business, and are reluctant to Read More

Even after many years mentoring entrepreneurs and advising businesses, I continue to be surprised by the primary focus on products and processes, and the often incidental attention to hiring and nurturing the right people. Employees are still too often thought of as a commodity, to be acquired “jus Read More

The entrepreneurs I see are always talking about “disruptive innovation” ideas, but the plans I read are more often linear extensions of a current hot offering, like one more social network with the best of Facebook and Twitter, one more dating site dimension, or another “must-have” accessory for s Read More

Unless you are a serial entrepreneur with a string of successes behind you, you need a business plan to convince investors that you can build a business out of the dream that has been driving your passion to change the world. Don’t believe that Silicon Valley myth that all you have to do is sketch Read More

A tidal wave of valuable data is surging from the Internet and connected devices today, and the volume is growing exponentially each year. It’s enough to drown any business which tries to fight it or ignore it, and it’s an opportunity to ride higher and faster than even the successes of Google and Read More

As a business advisor, I strongly believe that continuous innovation and design thinking are the keys to long-term viability and success. Recent surveys of global business leaders show that they overwhelmingly agree, but less than a third believe their organizations’ culture and leadership are read Read More