a man

Marty Zwilling

Marty Zwilling is the Founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, a company that provides products and services to startup founders and small business owners. Marty has been published on Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Gust, and Young Entrepreneur. He writes a daily blog for entrepreneurs, and dispenses advice on the subject of startups to a large online audience of over 225,000 Twitter followers. He is an Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; and Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management. Follow Marty on Twitter @StartupPro.

Latest

10 Top Impediments to Creative Business Thinking

| Marty Zwilling
Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who think the most creatively, not only in their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth from startup to maturity. But even the best of them can easily slip into some bad decision habits that limit or hurt their business, due to natural human tendencies and the pressures of business challenges.

11 Key Traits of the Best in the Business

| Marty Zwilling
At some point in their life, hopefully everyone strives to be the best in their chosen profession. Most people think that being the best requires more intelligence, more training, and more experience. In reality, in business or even in sports, the evidence is conclusive that it is as much about how you think, as what you do.

Entrepreneurs Face Serious Communication Barriers

| Marty Zwilling
Founders have to communicate their ideas and products to investors, business partners, and the rest of the team. Communication is not just talking, but also listening, writing, body language, and “actions speak louder than words.”

How to Recognize Smart People for Your Startup Team

| Marty Zwilling
Helpers do what you say, while good help does what you need, without you saying anything. People who can help you the most are actually smarter than you, at least in their domain. Top entrepreneurs spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on any other components of their job.

Many Entrepreneurs Over-Think or Under-Think Issues

| Marty Zwilling
While technology and the Internet allow you to act and react more quickly than ever before, you need more than ever to consider decisions reflectively before making them. In addition to solving problems the right way, make sure you are solving the right problems.

How to Make Sure Your Startup is Built on Values

| Marty Zwilling
Strategy matters, but without a winning culture and the right values to drive it forward, your strategy will take you nowhere. Good leaders matter, but you need a positive values culture in order to attract the best leaders to compete effectively.

Investors Seek Out Entrepreneurs with Resilience

| Marty Zwilling
If you haven’t had a failure, you aren’t pushing the limits. If you are really an entrepreneur, you are a risk taker and less cautious by nature, so failures should be expected. Wear you startup failure as a badge of courage. Don’t go after failure, but embrace it when it does happen and grow from it.

Savvy Entrepreneurs Look for More Than Funding

| Marty Zwilling
Every entrepreneur needs help and support along the way, from developing the initial idea, to selling off the successful business (exit strategy). The challenge is finding and using qualified affordable support organizations for each stage. Don’t waste your resources on the wrong ones.

8 Key Focus Elements Will Attract Startup Investors

| Marty Zwilling

One of the most common failures I see in startups is lack of focus. Unfocused entrepreneurs boast that their new technology will generate multiple disruptive products for consumers as well as enterprises around the world. Investors hear this as trying to do too many things with limited resources, meaning the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition.

How to Say “No” With a Smile and Save Your Startup

| Marty Zwilling
Entrepreneurs have to know when and how to say ‘no,’ and be good at delivering the message. All startup leaders are besieged with requests for their time, attention, talent, money, or influence, and sometimes even good requests won’t fit into the time and energy you have available.