A pathway to START-UP

For those who would like to realise their 2014 Start-Up ambition, here is an illustration from Founders and Founders about the pathway to start a start-up.  

Additionally, there are top 10 tips from Aisling Brennan, Marketing Manager, eFax and Rory Whelan, Voice Marketing Manager, eReceptionist 

1. Have a business plan. Include sales forecasts, competitors and outgoings.
2. Work  from home. Save money renting an office by starting things off at home.
3. Manage your finances.
4. Find a business partner. Running a business on your own can be too exhausting – perhaps there’s someone out there looking to achieve the same goal as you.
5. Create hype. Use social media to get your business out there, and get people talking about it. Don’t underestimate the power of networking.
6. Think about your image and how your business is perceived by the wider public.
7. Pick up the cost. Use an 0800 number which is free to call from landlines.
8. Think digital – consider moving to the cloud.
9. Spread your time equally rather than spending too long on one particular area of your business.
10. Keep going! You are bound to meet obstacles along the way but stay focused and learn from your mistakes.

for details, click here

equity crowdfunding pitch

We often spend enormous amount of time on research and analysis during feasibility phase.  Following on that, it's the design of recommendations and presentation formulation.  There is always a deadline on everything, and even preparing documentation materials could be time consuming, not to even mentioned if you want to have perfect graphics, colours and layout,etc.

So after spending time on all those aforementioned, how much time do we allow for ourself for the final presentation? how much time do we spend on practising to perfect the pitch?

Equity crowd-funding pitch is not the final destination but maybe the ending of the first or second chapter. And if you are those startups with limited resources,  fund raising will be particularly important.

here is an interesting article highlighting some important factors about the equity crowdfunding pitch
http://www.crowdclan.com/the-equity-crowdfunding-pitch/#!

   

How far are you willing to go to embrace your own business values?

Every business has a set of values that it want to communicate to its customers.  Normally, the public can only learn about business values through the company's service offerings and products.  How does the business function or operate are often behind the closed door - unknown.

A San Francisco based social media start-up "buffer open" decided to push the conventional business rules and published its monthly revenue and performance, strategic conclusion as well as salaries of every employees on the internet.  The decision was based on the ground of its second value " default to transparency"  And they want to prove how serious they are at embracing their own values.

As you can see,

Salary = job type X seniority X experience + location (+ $10K if salary choice)

Currently,
CEO is on $158,800
COO: $146,800
CTO:$137,600
CHO:$106,000

and more ...........

It is a very innovative (outside the box), bald and perhaps a very confident approach.....some people may ask, why confident? well, we know that there is always a gap between ambition and execution, even the other competitors copied the business approach, it is very unlikely that they will yield the same outcome like "Buffer" does.

To fight the start up battle and to success, today, there is no right or wrong way of running business and only time will tell whether "buffer" has made the right decision and whether it will work once the team grows bigger.

To find out more:
http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/

Problem Solving with Global Perspective

Unlike what we learned at school at a young age, in the real world, black and white answers rarely exit.  There are often many shade of greys in-between, and this all depends on your background, culture, life experience and personal values.  So how do we solve a problem that we come across?! and how do we decide what approach to go for?  

Thanks to modern technologies, today, people can travel from one city to the other in less than 24 hours or simply "Google" the information to obtain the information needed.  Interestingly, Google now is being widely used as an action verb.

Well, as always, it's always easy say than done, to come up with the right solution to the problem requires expertise, but to be able to execute it and give you the result you expected requires experience.  

The table below is an interesting stereotype of problem solving for different nationalities.  I would recommend you to take a pinch of salt and take it as an entertainment, however, based on my experience so far, I would say there is a strong percentage of truth in this illustration.