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It is critically important for the founders of a company to intimately understand the company’s Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”). Founders cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without an almost obsessive focus on its KPIs. Why? Because KPIs, if constructed correctly, give management and potential investors a cold, analytical snapshot of the state of the company, untainted by emotion or rhetoric. This focus must not be limited to the KPIs themselves, for they are merely measurements of outcomes. We look for founders to have an understanding of what levers can be pulled and what tweaks can be made to improve the business, which will then be reflected in its KPIs. So the focus should not be on the KPIs themselves, but the mea...

If you’re looking to improve your sales process — look no further than the “2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report“. Buyers want things to be easy. So easy, in fact, that 89 percent of survey respondents said that they chose vendors that made a return on investment easier to prove or that could be easily justified with a business case. They also preferred speed over price — with 80 percent of buyers citing deployment and ease of use as “very important.”

Your customers want to understand how to use your product — not sit through a pitch and wonder if it’ll actually fit their needs. Selling is less about explaining why buyers should buy and more about showing how an easy-to-use product or service will help them.

Ditch the dead-end “why” part of the c...

Pitching your product line to a retailer? There are so many areas to cover. Do you know which three facts matter most to the decision-makers?

The greatest challenge product companies face is convincing retail buyers your brand will sell. If you want shelf placement in Target, Walmart, CVS, or ANY retailer for that matter, your retail pitch (or as I call it, the Retail Story) needs to address retailers’ key needs. And their primary need revolves around mitigating their sales risk.

The following are the 3 most effective ways to show retailers how you will mitigate their sales risk as you’re pitching your product to retailers and stores:

#1: Demonstrate Sales Potential

The best way of showing how you will mitigate sales risk is by showing the...

“Make yourself at home.” It’s what we tell our guests when we want them to feel comfortable in our space. We say it as a courtesy. But if we really mean it, we’ll add information. We’ll tell our guests that there’s a pool table in the basement, snacks and refreshments out on the island in the kitchen… To immediately feel at home in new environments, most of us need to find our bearings first, to be shown around the place.

The same holds true for web-based applications, where invitations to make ourselves at home are pretty lackluster across the board. To be fair, a lot of energy is devoted to creating intuitive user experiences, but this isn’t the same as being shown around.

If you truly want your guests to feel at home in your app, you mig...

Question: Name your best tip for training summer interns as seamlessly and quickly as possible.

Plan Ahead

“Have a plan and lay it out clearly before they begin. Copying interns on emails prior to their start date has proven to be helpful. Also, ensure they have someone to shadow so they can hit the ground running.”

— Ashley Mady
Brandberry
@KickAshMady

Make Everything Transparent

“Provide interns with complete transparency on company initiatives, even if it doesn’t relate to their job spec or day to day tasks. I’ve found companies hold back on what they share with interns. But if you provide the same level of transparency you provide employees, interns tend to learn quicker, feel more tied into the organization and empowered to work harder...

What is one surefire tip to find investors and/or making the right impression on an investor?

The following advice around how to find investors is provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Have Your Legal House in Order

I’ve seen investors decline to invest in startups because their founders were so unsophisticated about legal formalities and/or because there is no documentation about intellectual property ownership. Before you find investors, you need to form a legal entity...

Question: If you have an educational stipend for your startup employees, how do you decide what your company should pay for and what they should pay for out of pocket?

The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs.

See if It Benefits the Client

We’ve chosen to pay for any continuing education, no maximum, that adds immediate value to our client roster. If it’s a service or skill set that will improve our client’s experience with our company, expand our service set or improve the quality of the campaigns we run, then it is quickly approved. We also provide a free book library of management and self-development for al...

Creating culture doesn’t just seem easier at a startup — it is easier.

When you’re a four-person team, you’re family. Collaboration comes naturally, and with everyone in every meeting, miscommunication is all but impossible. Scheduling a happy hour? It’s as simple as sending a text.

Then, you grow. You’re grateful to have help, of course, but that familial feeling fades a bit. No longer can everyone fit around the same restaurant table. Spontaneous outings happen less and less often. Communication starts to seem more like a chore than texting friends.

To a degree, cultural shift is natural as your team expands. No 50-person company will be as close as a five-person one. Still, with careful cultivation, your startup culture can be preserved....

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For those of us who have never raised capital or built a startup before, there's a commonly-held myth that startups get funded with great ideas.

If the idea is so wonderful, an anxious investor will jump at the idea to get rich with an early investment. It must be true — we saw it on Shark Tank!

The truth is, startups get funded at all different stages, from the initial idea all the way up through proven traction. The problem is that the uninitiated don't quite understand what the difference is.

What if we had the idea 9 seconds ago?

If the idea is just that — an idea — and there's no other development or traction to the business, the only likely funding sources are going to be our credit cards and perhaps an incredibly supportive relative....