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The first thing to realize as a founder is that many investors make quick judgements and bucket founders into basic groups: “promising” or “not promising.” Unfortunately, many judgements are influenced by widely held beliefs, and generalizations about someone’s age or gender that may or may not be relevant to the present situation. For instance, an investor may automatically perceive a young white male with a CS degree from Stanford as more qualified than a female founder of equal or greater status even if he has had significantly less experience. According to a recent Babson College Report, only 15% of VC-backed startups have a female founder, and just 2.7% of Venture Capital backed companies have female CEOs. Moreover, the report also co...

Are you in the startup or growth and establishment phase of your business? Odds are you’re already thinking about the importance of location.

Where you’re located might not be a huge concern when you’re the sole member of your “team”. However, once you grow the business past a critical point, you’ll need to attract additional talent and investment.

The temptation to set up shop in an inexpensive city is entirely understandable. On the face of it, it seems the most cost-effective option. After all, startup hubs such as New York, San Francisco, London, and Singapore regularly rank in the top 10 most expensive cities in the world, both for cost of living and cost of doing business. So why not go somewhere cheaper? Or even further afield: to a ...

How do business loans work?

A business loan is an amount of money a business borrowers from a financial institution, with set requirements for the amount of time it will take to pay back, as well as interest rates. Businesses get loans in order to help them start or to fund expansion. They’re one of a range of funding options for startups.

Here’s a look at how business loans work, starting with the types of business loans that are available to startups and right through to how to apply for a business loan.

Types of business loans for startups

There are five main types of business loans that are relevant for startups: SBA small business loans, business credit lines, short term loans, invoice financing, and merchant cash advances. Let’s take...

There are busy entrepreneurs, and then there are people who live, eat, breath, and sleep work. They’re driven by a passion for getting the job done, and they are most happy when they’re being productive. In fact, a study from the University of Warwick found that happiness can make people up to 12% more productive.

Are the most effective, successful, and productive entrepreneurs killing it with their daily schedule because they’re happy, or is there something else driving them?

I recently sat down with serial entrepreneur Neil Patel, someone I consider to be one of the busiest, hardest-working people I know.

With multiple successful startups under his belt, like Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg (and a constant stream of new content on NeilPatel.c...

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...

One year. Did you know that’s the average tenure of an employee at giants like Google and Amazon?

When the average salary for a Google software engineer is $111,149, you can’t really argue that the tech giants underpay their employees. So why do good employees leave high-paying jobs so quickly, and what can companies do to combat it?

Motivation and “Progress”

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile conducted a study observing the daily activities and motivations of several hundred employees over the course of a few years and found external incentives, such as salary and perks, have little to do with employee tenure.

She notes, “the key to motivation…doesn’t depend on elaborate incentive systems” at all. In fact, Amabile’s study revealed the top mo...

So, you want to fire an enigmatic, high-producer who is loved by all? Maybe you feel threatened by them, maybe you’ve realized they’re better than you, or perhaps you just can’t stand them. The most diabolical managers, such as yourself, know that you must create, at least, a modicum of just-cause (even in a no-fault state) to fire someone and avoid accusations of wrongful termination. It can be especially tricky to fire someone who is, begrudgingly, doing a great job. So to help you get rid of a perfectly good employee who’s done nothing to deserve it, we have put together a list of 6 superbly butthole moves that will get the job done and leave you smelling like roses.

1. Give them an impossible problem to solve

Your superstar employee w...

"Oh look! Someone just sold a company similar to ours for a million billion trillion dollars. And look at that, they raised a bunch of money along the way. I bet if I had raised money I would be a huge success too."

Whether or not we think about it daily, many of us have this nagging thought in the back of our minds of the "what if?" of raising capital. We picture this alternate universe where we took on investor funding and grew to become the next great darling of our industry.

The problem with that thought process, though, is that it puts "raising capital" in the same bucket as "executing properly" which is very different.

There's a time and a place where raising capital absolutely makes sense, but often we're either not there or we misu...

Great business mentors are one of the most valuable assets a startup Founder can have. They can shave years off of your startup journey simply by avoiding costly newbie mistakes. They can make life changing introductions to investors, customers and key executives. They can accelerate your ability to grow your startup by orders of magnitude.

But they can’t do any of that unless you know exactly how to use them.

On it’s surface, it sounds easy enough – find someone who seems to be an expert and ask them lots of questions. Yet if you’ve ever sat in the business mentor seat as I and thousands of others have done, you know that the value you get is directly tied to exactly how you manage the mentor relationship.

If you have a business mentor, o...

Let’s face it, while launching your own business can be incredibly rewarding, it can be also be just plain stressful. We had the opportunity to speak with Charlie Hoehn, best-selling author and launch strategist, about some of his tips for combating startup burnout.

Charlie graduated in 2008 from Colorado state with a degree in Marketing and Media Studies. Like many of us, he didn’t know exactly what he what he wanted to do right off the bat. What he did know was that he didn’t want to work for a big corporation for the rest of his life. Since graduation, he has worked with bestselling authors like Seth Godin, Tucker Max, and Tim Ferriss, and wrote Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety. His work has been featured by NPR, The New Yor...