Here’s some insider advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, from professional investors. Each of us has a list of things we look for early on when identifying whether we want to go to the next step in analyzing a plan. Come to think of it, these are good for challenging any business plan. Size of your total […]
Dave Berkus
Don’t Innovate From Want–Do It From Need
Most innovations come from responding to a customer’s needs, or finding a niche where products need improvement or extension. It is rare to innovate using a blank sheet of paper in a room with bare walls and no other contributors. A thought exercise Imagine the room in which several graduate business school student groups have […]
Is It Your Brilliant Plan or Your Execution?
“Everybody’s got a plan – until they are punched in the face” – boxer Mike Tyson Mike Tyson: brilliant business savant My experience personally reviewing over three hundred executive summaries each year, all sent to me unsolicited, seems to bear out the truth in Tyson’s statement. Anyone can build a good – or great – […]
Create a Great Product – the 3-Step Dance Method
Can you create a product in a vacuum? Creating a new product in a relative vacuum is an exercise in complete trust that you know what’s best for the customer, perhaps even without interaction with such a customer. It’s probably happened, but not often enough to trust this method as a formula for success. The […]
Have You Heard? Eyeballs Aren’t Everything.
Remember when…? Back when we were all trying to figure out the real value of traffic on the web, investors – and acquiring companies – got a bit crazy with metrics used to value acquisitions and investments. Since in most cases, there was no revenue in many of these companies, all trying to gain market share […]
Ready, Fire, Aim. Really?
You’ve surely heard the variations on this theme. “Ready, fire aim” was popular in the 1990’s, accredited to any of several authors. I used the term to describe my efforts in the artificial intelligence field, experimenting with new devices, the lisp programming language, and our first trial installations. It seemed an ideal way to describe […]
Can You Build a Company, Not Just a Product?
Some businesses are built around a single idea. And sometimes that idea is just too small a slice of the big picture to be interesting to investors. There was a recent investor event where I was keynote speaker, on stage only after several panels of experts had wowed the audience with their predictions and […]
My dad said: “Never take on a business partner.”
My dad was a smart businessman, even if not formally trained. He occasionally gave me advice that turned out to be more than wise, looking back at subsequent experience and events. His personal teaching event was a typical experience, as I reflect now upon the tens of partnerships I have counseled over the years. Most […]
Should You Include Your Sweat Equity in a Business Plan?
Investors love it when entrepreneurs draw little or no money from their startups. It extends the cash available for research and other necessary fixed costs and gives the fragile, young company more “runway” to get to breakeven. What are you worth to the business? But when forecasting the ultimate viability of a business, many times […]
What Is Your Biggest Error In Company Planning?
The biggest error in planning may not be spreadsheet calculation error. Or cost estimation. It is most often missed assumptions about the market, the competition, the speed of adoption, or other critical metrics you’ve researched, or selected, or even just guessed at to create your plan. Sources for your data Where did you get the […]
