Small Business Habits

By Rolfe Larson on June 12, 2013

Here are a few habits for growing your business during the early years: Be Consistent With Side Tasks (create checklists, follow up on them) Clean and Tidy Up (literally and figuratively) Keep Books (too often overlooked or underemphasized in startups) Prepare for Tax Season Schedule Interviews (forSstaff) Before You’re Desperate Create and Follow A Business [...]

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Crowdfunding Update

By Rolfe Larson on May 13, 2013

Many entrepreneurs were excited last year when Congress legalized the use of crowdfunding for equity investments. This law, passed as part of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS), would allow a business owner to raise up to $2 million over the Internet from individuals who invest a maximum of $10,000 per person. Too good [...]

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Video Business Plans

By Rolfe Larson on April 23, 2013

Most business plans appear on paper or on a pdf, but a growing number are on video, or include a video component.  Often that’s done in the form of a YouTube video, which you can use to promote your new business in ways that are not possible via paper or email. And even if your [...]

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Typical Revenue Models

By Rolfe Larson on April 10, 2013

Every business has to attract revenues from selling products and services, and every business plan has to describe how that will happen. Trying to figure out how to do that for your business idea? One way to approach that problem is to look at common models  other companies have used, and see which ones fit [...]

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Lessons from Michael Porter’s Monitor failure

By Rolfe Larson on April 2, 2013

It’s been widely reported that the company co-founded by Michael Porter, the famous Harvard Business School professor who wrote The Book on business strategy, was forced into bankruptcy protection. We’ve written several blogs about Michael Porter’s insights. How could a business started by the guru of five-force analysis, possibly one of the most widely-adopted competitive strategy in [...]

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Online Classes for Entrepreneurs

By Rolfe Larson on March 12, 2013

Want to start a small business, but missing some skills? Here’s one option: take some online classes, where you might learn what you need, for a fraction of the time and cost. Improve your business plan AND your business. There are 100s of web-based business classes, many of them free (open source) or for a [...]

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Your Business Plan is About You

By Rolfe Larson on February 26, 2013

When considering whether to invest in a company,  bankers and venture capitalists look first at the entrepreneur, then at the plan. They invest in people, not plans. It’s not the content of the plan that matters, but rather what it says about the entrepreneur — how she thinks, how she collects confirming and disconfirming data, how she uses [...]

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All Business (Plans) Are Social

By Rolfe Larson on February 11, 2013

With the emergence of so many “social businesses,” there’s been a widening distinction made with what many people are now calling non-social businesses.  The distinction is that social businesses are built around a heroic mission to make the world a better place, while their non-social cousins exist for a crass purpose — solely to make [...]

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List of Business Plan Competitions

By Rolfe Larson on October 29, 2012

I’m generally not a great fan of business plan competitions, for two reasons. First, they can consume huge amounts of time often with little benefit to those who don’t win.  And, unfortunately, lately they have become more about the “pitch” and less about quality research and business competitiveness.  Actual success in the marketplace won’t be [...]

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20-Minute Business Model?

By Rolfe Larson on September 21, 2012

The drive to create a business plan in the least amount of time has reached a new high … or low.  Last week, Inc. 5000 published an article suggesting you can and should be able to present your entire business model on paper in (gulp) just 20 minutes.  The idea is from a recent book, [...]

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