Raising Equity and Venture Capital on Main Street

I was speaking the other day with a coaching client of mine who felt his team needed a new presentation they could use in front of prospects. In their business, a "pitch book" is a common tool for sales calls. It can be presented in various ways: a PowerPoint deck with the pages printed in a flip-chart type of book; a PowerPoint deck that is projected onto a screen while the seller presents; a spiral-bound, printed PowerPoint deck that the seller makes a copy of for the prospect, with both of them flipping the pages.
All of these approaches are deeply unsatisfying.
Think about the last time you were pitched in any one of these ways. What went through your mind? My main thought centered around trying to figure out how many pages of PowerPoint I was going to have to endure, whether presented in flip-chart, screen-format, or book. ( "If she […]

Merrill Lynch has a great webcast called  Reinventing Retirement: Second Acts, recorded in June 2010. It profiles over-age-55 people who are starting businesses. Every Baby Boomer should watch it. I coach corporate executives who want to start businesses as encore careers. This webcast illustrates many of the key points I coach potential entrepreneurs to consider.  
One very important point the webcast addresses is that some people start businesses because they have been downsized and can't find a job. That's a predicament that's hard for anyone to deal with and even worse for older people.
Sally Krawchek, president of global wealth & investment management for Bank of America Corp., makes an essential point in response to ABC's Charles Gibson's statement that "you need to save, you need to have a nest egg. And then we see a lot of people saying, well I'm going to take that nest egg, and I'm going […]

My company sponsored a special event of a local industrial association recently and we made some good contacts. We had a booth at which we were promoting our products, and we saw about a hundred people. Of those hundred, exactly one called me afterward as a potential client. She's a commercial insurance rep.
Her phone call was brief, confident and effective. She said she'd like to get together with me to review my insurance and see if she can save me money. No long-winded build-up to asking for an appointment, no 20 questions to get to the moment of truth, no big speech about herself. Just a simple request for my time, which resulted in an upcoming appointment. I am happy with my current insurance, but some of that has to do with inertia and habit. The fact is, I haven't reviewed it for potential cost savings in five years. So […]

I like a good haircut. Not just because I feel cooler in this ridiculously hot New York summer, but because I talk to my barber, Nick, about small business.
Nick's about 35, lives in the same town as me, has a wife and two young children. In addition to cutting hair, he owns an Italian ice place in town that has been an institution for as long as anyone can remember. It's a great business. The gross margin on ices is about 90 percent and he owns the roadside, freestanding building that's open from May through September. I learned a few things from Nick:

A simple business is not the same an easy business. Last week, Nick and his wife (who's a schoolteacher the rest of the year but works in the ices store during the summer) had to drive 60 miles to Manhattan in the broiling heat to pick up […]

If you are a small business and haven't heard of crowdsourcing…well, the time has come.
How would you like to save hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars on projects ranging from designing logos to writing business plans to designing websites finding language translation services?
There is a growing number of web resources available to help small businesses accomplish their goals by putting a description of their project online, along with the price they are willing to pay, and then letting the creativity that is abundant on the Internet have at it. Rather than single-sourcing your project to one vendor you may have heard of, you put it out to the virtual crowd. Here are some examples of how small business entrepreneurs are using crowdsourcing to save money and increase creativity.
Effective Use of Crowdsourcing for Small Businesses & Entrepreneurs originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs […]

The rumors are circulating about what happened at Apple that produced its catastrophic iPhone 4. Some reports say engineers knew about the antenna/dropped-call problem but were made to understand that CEO Steve Jobs's wish was to keep moving forward and ship the product.
Let's say for a moment that Jobs didn't know there was a problem. It seems incredible that he would know about the problem and ship anyway. Jobs is known to be arrogant and mercurial, and it would not be surprising if there are people in Apple who don't want to tell him the truth. I can just imagine the conference room conversation:  "You tell him….I'm not telling him. You tell him!"
I wonder how many companies have engineering (or marketing, or research, or sales, or customer service, or human resources) departments that are afraid of executive management. Lots of companies give lip service to being able to fail without […]

Yay startups!
The Kauffman Foundation reported  today that startup companies drive employment growth while established companies eliminate more jobs than they create. "On average and for all but seven years between 1977 and 2005, existing firms are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year. By contrast, in their first year, new firms add an average of 3 million jobs," the study reports.
The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction, bases its findings on the Business Dynamics Statistics, a U.S. government dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. The BDS series tracks the annual number of new businesses (startups and new locations) from 1977 to 2005, and defines startups as firms younger than one year old, Kauffman said. I
It makes intuitive sense that new firms add jobs — after all they are starting from zero — and existing firms, which Kauffman defines as older […]

We've gotten a lot of feedback on our recent post, "Death to the Business Plan," in which small business CPA Michael Hanley said business plans are mostly unnecessary:  They hold back entrepreneurs, who use the lack of a plan as an excuse to not get their venture going. We've created a place for you to weigh in. Let us know whether you have a business plan for your entrepreneurial venture, and if so whether it's something you actually run your business with. Or does it sit in a file somewhere gathering dust? If you don't have a plan, what impact has that had on your business's success. Share your experience here.
Share Your Viewpoint on Business Plans: Are They Necessary? originally appeared on About.com Entrepreneurs on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 18:53:16.
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Many people these days are freelancing their services, either full-time, as a moonlighting gig, or as a precursor to launching a business. While freelancing offers a lot of great advantages — low overhead, flexible work schedule, interesting and varied projects — the business can have its dark side. You may have the hydra-headed client with everyone claiming to be in charge of a project;  you can be burned easily if you price your services incorrectly for the work you need to do;  and then there's the freelancer's biggest no-no: the "F" word, friend.  You'll be tempted to do projects for  friends and then risk losing friendships when business realities intercede, like being late paying your bill.
Successful marketing communications freelancer Barbara Kerbel provides answers to critical questions and business issues faced by freelancers in a three-part series. You can read the first part here and then continue to the others.
The Ins […]

Clate, I swear I'm not picking on you.
Clate Mask, CEO Infusionsoft, published a book on entrepreneurship this spring that I reviewed. I didn't love it. But this post has nothing to do with his book.
I read an article he published today on VentureBeat in which he wrote about the "entrepreneurial revolution" we are experiencing in the United States, brought about, he says, by a number of factors including peoples' disillusionment with corporate life, the job-killing recession, the ease of business entry enabled by the Internet, and the entry of baby boomers (hitting retirement or layoff age) into the entrepreneurship pool.
"[W]e see droves of people who've been forced into entrepreneurship," Mask says. "They lose their job, get a severance package, take a little time to think about what's next… and then commonly start a consulting practice or some sort of solopreneurship. And frankly, I believe this is a […]