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Don’t miss out! Check out the previous editions here:

–Getting Your Idea Going: There is no perfect idea
–Getting Your Idea Going: Popular Excuses for Not Starting
–Getting Your Idea Going: When to Jump Ship

Every entrepreneur daydreams about walking into their boss’s office to proclaim: “I quit!”—and then loudly declaring “Freedom!” a la WIlliam Wallace in Braveheart.

However—If you recall—this also involves the part where you get ceremoniously beheaded which (let’s face it) kinda-sorta ruins the whole celebration.

Before you quit your job and get all pumped to be the Founder of a new startup that writes checks instead of cashing them—let me give you a few things to think about.

You Need Personal Runway

Everyone talks about how much “run...

Conventional wisdom advocates the concept of ‘all hands support’ — getting everyone from the CEO to the lowliest intern supporting customers so the entire team understands the customer’s problems. It’s a great goal, but is there a downside? What if your dev team starts spending much more time than usual on support and it eventually starts impacting your business?

Our Churn Issue

Around January 2015, we noticed an unusual increase in customer churn. A user churn rate of 3.9% had increased to 7% in just a couple of weeks.

We’re a revenue transparent company, so yes — these are our real numbers.

And it didn’t stop there. Over the next couple of months, our user churn slowly increased to a peak of 9.8%! This was alarming, so we decided to go a...

Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives; agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc.

What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any better.

It Can’t Be Done

I was just rereading Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work, and a common thread through the stories reminded me that there is a type of technology innovation that occurs in startups when a founder/team simply doesn’t know what they’re attempting is impossible.

Steve Wozniak at Apple building the Apple II floppy disk controller without ever seeing one. The original Fai...

Ok. You have a great thing going with your new startup and are thinking about applying to an accelerator. Good on you. You have done your research to figure out if your company is a fit for a program like YCombinator, Techstars, UpRamp, or one of the many others in the world and now you are ready to start the online application process. Good friggin’ luck, because you have likely already lost the game.

Out here in Colorado there is a consortium of 70+ accelerators called the Global Accelerator Network, and their members report that 30% or less of their accepted cohort startups come to them from online submissions. The other 70% is accepted based on investor, mentor & alumni referrals. Knowing that the typical accelerator only accepts 1% of...

One thing I’ve noticed on the rise in my chosen field of real estate is the use of teams. Born in the mid-1990s to compete with individual agents, there are now between 35,000 and 60,000 active units working in 2016 according to research done for our 2017 Swanepoel Trends Report.

Still, real estate team-building isn’t without its potential barriers, including an absence in standard industry norms. But these aren’t exclusive to real estate teams; any time a group succeeds, managing those wins and the growth that comes with them presents added complexities.

Team dynamics, structure, and drivers remain fairly consistent no matter the team size. For leaders making the leap from smaller teams to larger factions, it’s important to properly manage...

A source of employee dissatisfaction is ALWAYS a lack of communication. It’s in the top three complaints your team has. I guarantee it. Your team wants more info than you give.

Inevitably you’ve tried a weekly team meeting. You put it on the calendar.

The first one was a resounding success. You had so much to say that the meeting ran into overtime.

The second meeting wasn’t bad, but the content dropped.

By the third meeting, you struggled to scrape together enough to fill the time. You shifted to monthly as a compromise.

Within four months the meeting was gone from everyone’s calendar. Or worse yet, it has continued as a painful time waster spent reviewing long to-do lists.

Think about this. For a team of 25, a one hour meeting is costing y...

Don’t miss out! Be sure to check out Chapter 1!

CHAPTER TWO: Create Tools To Prioritize, Deflect & Destroy

In This Chapter:

1. Create a priority contact list to sort email quickly
2. Buy more time to respond with time-delaying filters
3. Send unnecessary emails to purgatory

Take a few minutes and reflect on what you’ve accomplished this past week. We’ll wait.

Ready?

How much of your day was spent handling random, one-off things that either could have been handled by someone else, or took priority over what you really needed to get done?

Yeah, we thought so. Fortunately, we have got you covered. We can get through this together.

While we suggest joining forces with one of our stellar VA’s—You can take care of the enemy that is email by doing one...

What exactly does bootstrapping your startup mean?

For the uninitiated, a bootstrap startup basically means that you self-fund your business, i.e. using the existing resources and internal revenue to drive your business, instead of raising any external funds. Given the wide scale availability of angel investors and venture capitalists, it’s hard to resist the chance to build a steady business without accepting external funds.

In fact most startups today forget the importance and the advantages of starting out on a shoestring budget. At this point, I can almost feel the startup founders scoffing at the idea of starting out with a minimal budget, but hear me out. Granted, bootstrapping your startup isn’t exactly a bed of roses. It’s rather a...

I bet, even if it was just once, that many of you set up a lemonade stand as a kid. As we grow, we begin to experience the world and all of it’s challenges.

And many of us experience our moments of brilliance in the shower. You know what it’s like when you’re soaking under hot water, your mind begins to drift and suddenly you have great idea. Sometimes it’s a solution to a current problem, sometimes it’s a business concept and sometimes it’s both.

Generally people solving their own problems make the best entrepreneurs, especially if they have industry or market experience.

Now, to give you some context here, I have background in professional photography. So, a couple of years ago, on sunny spring morning, I’m in the shower, reflecting on m...

Don’t miss out! Check out the previous editions here:

–Getting Your Idea Going: There is no perfect idea
–Getting Your Idea Going: Popular Excuses for Not Starting
–Getting Your Idea Going: When to Jump Ship
–Getting Your Idea Going: Don’t Quit your Day Job
–Getting Your Idea Going: Share your Idea with Everyone

Long before you set up shop and hang your shingle, your job as a Founder is to spend as many cycles as you can validating whether your business idea even merits a logo.

Validating your business idea isn’t a dark art. It’s literally asking people whether they would use or buy what you’d make.

The challenge is: How exactly do you go about doing that? Since most Founders are only validating a business idea for their first time, they d...