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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....

Last year, when we launched our team building company HeyTaco!, my business partner Blake and I knew we wanted to build a customer first company. Both of us are inspired by the success stories of customer-centric companies like Costco, Zappos, and Trader Joe’s. We knew that putting customers first and a focus on customer experience would be the foundation of our business.

As the Chief Taco Officer at HeyTaco! (Yes, that’s my real title), I’m constantly obsessing over new ways to improve the customer experience.

Over the past year we’ve discovered five ways that help us create lasting relationships with our customers.

1.) Be Responsive

In the fast paced world we live in, customers expect quick responses. They don’t want to wait for answers....

Let’s face it. Bootstrapping sucks. In theory, it should be liberating to be self-funded and self-sufficient at the early stages of running a business. But reality is much less glamorous. For one, we’re small peanuts surrounded by unicorns: our presence in the media, as a result, is almost zero. We’re competing with 10-figure marketing budgets and grinding our teeth to get there. We spend more time scratching our heads than making actual decisions.

Then, we see success stories like Basecamp, a company that could have been a unicorn but chose not to—growing to 50 employees and a customer base of hundreds of thousands along the way.

Holy shit, maybe it is all worth it.

While founders in the VC world are chasing their burn rates, Basec...

Creativity is the name of the game. Think about your favorite brands — are they creative? Are they above average on being original? I bet they are.

From Apple’s creativity in engineering and marketing, to Hubspot’s creativity in creative (pun intended) and Coca-Cola’s creativity in advertising — all the successful brands rely heavily on creating uniqueness and being original.

In these years where creativity is a must for every company, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain and optimize creativity for yourself and your teammates.

Coming from this thoughts, I’ve delved in the topic of “sustainable creativity” (as we know “sustainable” is a buzzword and should be used everywhere). Through my research I’ve identified two very very po...

As a business owner, you’ll need to make an important distinction every time you hire paid help: Is the worker an employee or an independent contractor?

In this guide we’ll show you how to determine if workers are employees or independent contractors. But first let’s look at why you need to classify your workers at all.

Classifying Workers: A Taxing Situation

One of the most important reasons to classify your workers is to determine which taxes get paid at which time, and by whom.

In the eyes of the IRS, there are four classifications for workers:

1. Employee
2. Independent Contractor
3. Statutory Employee
4. Statutory Non-Employee

The two classifications that are most common to small business owners are Employee and Independent Contractor.

If your ...

Friends — today I’m excited to share two very big announcements and to give you a peek at what’s in store for 2015.

We’ve Acquired Clarity.fm

Yep, the family just keeps growing.

Clarity was founded by well-known serial entrepreneur Dan Martell to help Founders get personal advice from startup experts in every field, from marketing to fundraising to product development.

Over 4,000 experts have joined Clarity, and last year alone they spent more than 181,026 minutes on the phone helping entrepreneurs. To put that in perspective, that means that 1 out of every 3 minutes of the day (or night) someone on Clarity is on the phone helping a Founder. It’s awesome.

They’ve also created a fantastic Q&A product where Founders can ask hard questions abo...