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Today we’re announcing the launch of Bizplan– a modern business planning software platform that we think you’re going to love.

We’ve learned a lot in the last few years about how startup Founders do their early planning, or in lots of cases, avoid it altogether. Everyone seemed to want a plan, but the tools that helped them digest the process were just painful.

So we came up with a better way to help startups think through business planning efficiently, and by way of that, put together a platform they can rally behind.

SOLVING THE BUSINESS PLAN PROBLEM

Most founders associate business planning with some long-form academic exercise that feels like a college term paper assignment. We wanted nothing to do with that.

The customer experience. The task of any business is to shape the experience – to decide what it should looks like, figure out how it can be improved, and to listen to your customers. And, as Lara Crystal speaking about her company Minibar Delivery reveals, who you partner with, tech, company culture and more can play both direct and indirect roles in determining the quality of the customer experience that you provide.

…even when the outcome is something as universally appreciated as having wine brought to your doorstep, there’s so much that could go wrong. Or, if you wise up as to how things are done at Minibar Delivery, so much that can go right…

This morning’s Startups Live chat began with Lara Crystal introducing hers...

A prospective client asked me to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) the other day before we began working together. After agreeing to sign his document, I was promptly shown a boilerplate template of an NDA that the guy had downloaded from the internet.

I had to laugh inside because I always tell my clients to secure an NDA whenever they are showing company information, a business plan and especially financials to anyone, yet I think NDAs are documents produced for honest people to be reminded to be honest.

I’m wondering if anyone else feels NDAs provide a sense of security?

According to Wikipedia, an “NDA creates a confidential relationship between the parties to protect any type of confidential and proprietary information or trade sec...

They’re that special group of people who consistently produce innovative ways of thinking.

They write blog posts and give presentations that define the way industries approach problems and get results. They’re known as leaders in their fields, and people turn to them when they need answers to new and challenging questions.

So what makes them so unique? What causes them to think differently and come up with new ways of thinking? And how do they stay at the forefront of their industry and influence their peers so strongly?

Let’s find out.

1. They are insatiably curious

Like a cat poking its head to see what’s behind every corner, a thought leader is just as curious. They are always asking why, why, why? Trying to find out more information tha...

I’m going to come right out with it. We used the “L” word that we said we would never use. The word that rhymes with “haunch”. La*!%h. Shit, I said it again.

2 months ago we went dark. No more updates to our app, TransparentMBA. We wanted to refactor the app with a brand new design, a few new features, and a brand spankin’ new name — TransparentCareer. We had a la*!%h date set on our calendars and a la*!%h party organized.

As a company we tend to follow the “do what feels right and works for us” mentality. So from a product and development standpoint, over those two months, we went against our normal cadence of “sprints” and instead chose to take our time with this re-la*!%h. Jason Fried said it best when explaining how Basecamp sets up th...

There's a ton of risk in taking startup advice from "advisors".

It's not that the advisors themselves are bad people — they tend to be very well-intentioned folks. It's that most advice tends to be dispensed out of context, with very little digging on behalf of the advisor, and delivered in a way to assume what they have suggested is the gospel.

It's time to stop simply taking startup advice, and instead start calibrating whether the advice we're getting is even relevant to begin with. Because more often than not, the advice we're getting from our trusted advisors is just flat out wrong.

And what’s worse? We don’t even think to question it.

Advice out of Context

The likelihood of finding advice that is absolutely aligned with our situatio...

One thing I’ve noticed on the rise in my chosen field of real estate is the use of teams. Born in the mid-1990s to compete with individual agents, there are now between 35,000 and 60,000 active units working in 2016 according to research done for our 2017 Swanepoel Trends Report.

Still, real estate team-building isn’t without its potential barriers, including an absence in standard industry norms. But these aren’t exclusive to real estate teams; any time a group succeeds, managing those wins and the growth that comes with them presents added complexities.

Team dynamics, structure, and drivers remain fairly consistent no matter the team size. For leaders making the leap from smaller teams to larger factions, it’s important to pro...

We’ve all been to networking events where we’re bored to tears by the same mindless conversations. You swap credentials (and probably a few not-so-humblebrags), but the connection never goes beyond skimming the surface.

Networking is the first step of building a professional community, but you need to develop meaningful relationships to actually make an impact. In their book, “Superconnector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships That Matter,” Young Entrepreneur Council co-founders Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh advocate for a move beyond the typical boring, dead-end interactions.

In the chaos and noise of the social media age, the demand for authentic, credible voices — otherwise known as superconnectors — is at an a...

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

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I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup. His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing. All good news.

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining.

I wasn’t surprised. When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). But...

Do you have a startup business and are looking for an effective online team to keep it rolling?

You have probably been thinking about how you are in need of hiring affordable, reliable talent for your company. However, a lot of startup business owners fall into the same old traps when hiring effective remote workers for their business, causing their company to slow down on the road to success.

There are five top mistakes business owners make when looking to build an effective online team. I want to discuss how you can avoid these mistakes and create the dream team for your business as quickly as possible. Then you can begin building your business on a foundation of great workers.

#1 – You Don’t Know What You Need Outsourced

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