Tim Berry
Tim Berry is co-founder of Have Presence, founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and a co-founder of Borland International. He is author of books and software including LivePlan and Business Plan Pro, The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, and Lean Business Planning, published by Motivational Press in 2015. He has a Stanford MBA degree and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. He taught starting a business at the University of Oregon for 11 years.
Latest
Service for Equity Formula
Say you are a service provider—consultant, designer, coder—and somebody offers you startup equity in exchange for professional service. I pondered this question after seeing it on Quora. I turned back to decades as a consultant,…
What Do Business Plan Financials Look Like?
People often ask: What do business plan financials look like? You can get away with a sales forecast, spending budget, and cash flow plan. That’s enough for actually running your startup. It’s the essential numbers in a lean…
Forget Business Networking. It’s a Hoax
Forget business networking. “Networking” as a business activity is a hoax. Business relationships that you build as business assets are meaningless. As soon as you use this vocabulary, it’s self-serving, superficial, and ineffective. The people…
Test Your Leadership with These Two Questions
Are you running a business, or an organization, or a team? For a quick rating of your own leadership, ask yourself these questions about bad news: How quickly do you get the bad news? A real…
Startup Vision: Paradox of Consistency vs. Opportunity
The world is full of paradox, like this one. Here’s research on startup vision that shows “The tech landscape is lush with entrepreneurs whose success blossomed only after the founders had modified or even abandoned their…
Going Into Consulting? Prepare for Scope Creep
Are you new to consulting? Planning to start soon? Beware of scope creep. It’s a real problem in a lot of professional services. I ran into it in my years of consulting related to high-end planning and…
How to Protect Your Business Idea While You Build the Business
How to protect your business idea while you build your startup. I’ve been kind of hard-line in this space on the value of ideas. I’ve said they are a dime a dozen, aren’t owned, can’t be…
Angel Investment Red Flags
Last week at an angel investment meeting one of our group members asked whether anybody had a list of red flag problems that would immediately eliminate a startup from consideration by angel investors. That seemed…
The Billion-Dollar Idea Fallacy
What is wrong, you ask, with thinking your business idea is worth a billion dollar idea? That you have the next unicorn? Nothing… Nothing. That’s a dream. We all dream. We dream of writing a…
True Story: Missing Assets Equal to a Year’s Sales
You don’t think finance and accounting matter in small business? Here’s a true story, and it’s about a small business like the ones I write about, in fact one I was involved in, not a…