Entrepreneurship
2009 Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey
This is my 100th official post to the blog! I spent a small amount of time trying to come up with some sort of cheesy, bloggy way to celebrate, only to eventually decide most of the ways were, well, cheesy. So I’ll just say that it’s been a lot of fun writing those 100 posts, [...]
4 “Must-Haves” for any Entrepreneur
While I work with entrepreneurs of every stripe and color (the requirement being a technology focus), our program tends to attract mainly very early-stage entrepreneurs. In many cases, they are pre-revenue, and a large majority of them are looking for funding. What they need is coaching and mentoring, not simply an injection of cash, but [...]
11 pieces of advice for entrepreneurs
The Weatherhead School of Management is a venerable Cleveland institution. Each year, they publish the “Weatherhead 100“, recognizing the region’s fastest growing companies. The 2008 list was recently published in another Cleveland institution, Inside Business magazine. Feel free to click the links for more information, if you like. This is the first year I’ve really [...]
The “One Page Strategic Plan”
The wait is over! With this post, I’ll provide you with an excellent tool for not only documenting your start-up strategy, but managing the growth of your business. While this tool was presented to me during a NBIA (National Business Incubation Association) conference, I do believe it is applicable beyond the confines of early stage [...]
Vote Early, Vote Often
No, this is not a post about Chicago politics. One of the entrepreneurs I work with is a contestant in the 2009 Leading Moms in Business competition. The competition celebrates “America’s top 200 mom-owned business and the women behind them.” The ranking is based on a simple vote tally. That’s where you come in. Check [...]
Oh, so THAT’s an Entrepreneur
A week or so ago, I posed the question what it means to be an entrepreneur. Different than the “qualities” of successful entrepreneurs that we’ve discussed, there are also certain parameters to simply being, or becoming, an entrepreneur. So following are my thoughts on what defines an entrepreneur. At the end, I’ll also talk a [...]
“Ignite” Your Company Promotion
I just signed up to present at a local event called Ignite Cleveland. It’s an unusual format; the first of it’s kind I’ve been exposed to. I know some of you out there are involved in promotion, so you might find this interesting. Here’s how the event runs, straight from the website: We’re looking for [...]
So, what exactly IS an Entrepreneur?
So, I have a challenge for you all. One that I think many of you out there can identify with. Help me start to define what it means to be an “entrepreneur”. I’m not talking about entrepreneurial qualities either. My Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey series of last year did a great job of getting a conversation [...]
Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey – Wrap-up and Moving Forward
This is follow-up post 3 of 3 to my original survey. In interested, here is the previous recap: Survey follow-up 1 of 3 (Review of necessary and supporting qualities) Survey follow-up 2 of 3 (The big list of comments) Continuing my examination of the entrepreneurial survey results, in this post I’ll share changes to the [...]
“The Idea” or “The Team”
Walking around our incubator last week, I stopped in to talk with a younger employee of one of our tenants. In the middle of our chat, he asked me if I had an opinion on the question of what contributes most to a start-up’s success: the product/service/idea or the team developing it and taking it [...]
