Forums Search

Coming up with a great business idea isn’t a problem. The problem is in actualizing that idea and turning it into a profitable business. The next thing that follows is the million-dollar question: “Where do I get capital to turn my idea into a profitable business?” Unless you have ready cash laying in the bank or a wealthy relative ready to come to your rescue, raising capital to start or grow your business isn’t the easiest thing to do. Resourceful entrepreneurs will always find ways of bootstrapping their ventures. However, depending on the nature of your business, there is a limit to which you can do that. It reaches a time when you need hard cash to move forward. In that regard, you need to find ways of raising capital.

The source of yo...

The benefits of being productive are obvious:

Sweat equity is created when you or others contribute work to a business in the hopes that it will pay off in terms of an interest in the company as opposed to hourly or salaried wages.

You may hear a web designer saying that they took a 2% interest in a company that they paid for in sweat equity. They traded the value of their time for a stake in the company.

Trading time for equity is a time-honored tradition among startup companies and is used very aggressively. While at first it may seem like you’ve printed a whole bunch of Monopoly money that you can start using to pay people with, you’ll soon find out that there is a real cost to offering up stock early on.

Valuing Input

With sweat equity, it is critical that you translate effort into...

Question: What is one critical thing I should consider before starting my first business?

The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.

Marketing Plan

You should have a written marketing plan in place before starting your business. This is the most overlooked puzzle piece in modern business. You outsource your accounting and your legal, but most companies think they can do their own marketing without experience. While your business will evolve, why not get there quicker with a strategic marketing plan by a professional?

— Steven Newlon
SYN3RGY Creative Group

Unique Factor

Make sure your business concept can stand out in the crowd. If ...

In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create web products that are helpful in the development process, and that we would use ourselves for building websites for clients.

From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month.

In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all...

People are hardwired to value transparency. From an evolutionary perspective, transparency has always been essential for survival. Our safety has depended upon determining whether other humans are trustworthy. Complementing this need to understand is the psychological desire to understand and be understood. Transparency is an integral part of the need for belonging, which Maslow ranked next to safety in importance.

When you first meet someone, there’s little transparency, and little trust. Over time, as your new friend shares experiences, opinions, and insights, transparency — and trust — increase.

We, as humans, like transparency. And not just in friendships. Transparency makes business sense because we like companies and brands that are ...

So you’ve made the leap into the unknown and committed to finally starting your own business. Now what? The to-do list you have created looks huge and overwhelming, where do you start?

Business to-do lists will vary hugely from business to business, but there are a few questions you can ask yourself to decide which are the tasks you should be working on:

1. What will have the largest impact on my business?

Are there any tasks that have a leverage or scaling effect i.e. a little effort (or even a lot of effort) creates a much greater return on the time invested? For example; you may need to update your financial ledger with invoices paid and also come up with a new referral scheme, do the one first that has the biggest multiplier eff...

While it was once an afterthought, cybersecurity should now be a priority for every business. Large businesses are still the preferred target for hackers, but this trend is shifting, as more small businesses are targeted by adversaries each year.

However deciding which cybersecurity product to invest in isn’t easy. For one, the market is rapidly changing and it’s difficult to keep up to date on the best methods. Additionally, there is no all-in-one comprehensive package for a company’s cybersecurity needs. Most times, businesses have to buy each security software individually – including firewall, anti-virus, and spam-filter solutions, among others.

But just because security tools might be difficult for some small businesses to navig...

So much has been written about startups and founders, it’s challenging to sort through it all and make sense of advice that often ‘depends’. Here’s my guide to entrepreneurial sins from 2 decades of entrepreneurship.

Taking an honest look at your startup — never an easy thing to do.

But you must.

Being too Early

A startup needs to be early to market, to disrupt while an early market is not yet conducive to incumbent self-disruption. But being too early is often deadly. No amount of brilliant entrepreneurship will save a venture that is too many years ahead of the convergence of factors necessary for success.

How many years is too many? This depends largely on capital, but a few years of prematurity may suffice.

What makes this business sin...

Not long ago, promotions went to employees with the most technical expertise. Companies bent over backward to gain specialized industry knowledge, so it made sense to promote based on its merit. But the times, as they say, are a-changin’. At a certain point in history, technical ingenuity began to take a back seat to interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence (EQ). In fact, a recent study by Harris Poll found that 77 percent of employers believe these “soft skills” are as important as talents directly related to specific job functions.

I witnessed this shift while working with one female executive who rose through the ranks to a senior position based on her technical prowess. Those skills opened numerous doors on her path to leadershi...