Whether it’s a business or personal interaction, multiple studies show that as much as 50-65% of the communication is nonverbal. That means that people who are addicted to text messaging and email may be sending only half the message, and receivers often misinterpret even that half.

Yet the use of text messaging for business purposes continues to grow, in concert with more of Gen-Y entering the workplace, and a continuing increase in the global rate of texting by everyone. This total rate for 2011 has been estimated at 7 trillion, or nearly 225,000 text messages sent every second, according to the Quora statistics website.

But are these text messages an efficient and appropriate business tool? Where body language is part of the message, it definitely is not. Let’s look at the most commonly recognized forms of body language, and see how they apply to business:

• Eye contact. The eyes are the most powerful part of our body language, and can express everything from happiness, annoyance, interest, to pain. Frequent eye contact is interpreted as honesty and forthrightness. Staring is interpreted as too aggressive. These are obvious in person, but lost in a text message.
• Posture. If you are trying to appear dominant or authoritative, stand erect with shoulders back. A slumped position usually indicates insecurity, guilt, or weakness. A dominant sounding text message, on the other hand, generates anger rather than acceptance.
• Mirroring. Most people feel more comfortable and open with people in a similar position to themselves. An example would be sitting down to meet with a key vendor, rather than standing to deliver demands. Good managers practice this one for personnel issues.
• Handshake. This, of course, comes into play to signal openness or goodwill at the beginning of an interaction, and agreement at the end. Palm-to-palm contact is important for sincerity. This cultural icon is totally missing from text messages and emails.
• Hand-to-face. Even when the words sound good, hand-to-face movements such as holding the chin or scratching the face shows concern or lack of conviction. If a person is covering his mouth while telling you something, he may be lying.
• Facial expression. A critical message delivered with a smiling face will have a totally different impact than one delivered with an angry face. ‘Smiley face emoticons’ were invented to simulate this in text messages, but they don’t always work, because the sincerity is lost.
• Arms and legs position. Folded arms or crossed legs, perhaps turning away slightly, indicates a lack of interest and detachment. Later uncrossed arms and legs may be a sign of acceptance of your position or terms. An extrovert will have toes pointed out, introvert will keep them pointed in. None of these come through in texting.
• Space occupied. Some people stand up and move around to be more dominant, maybe even threatening. Even sitting, you can stretch your legs to occupy more space. Standing while talking on the phone will make your voice sound more urgent. Maybe all CAPS will satisfy this one.

Sure, there are many cases where a 10-word text message, or 140 character tweet will communicate a simple message more efficiently than a face-to-face discussion. But most business processes, like negotiating a contract, closing a sale, customer support, or managing employees, are much more complicated than just words.

Overall, the most successful people in business learn to use the right tool for the right job. I’m supportive of using text messaging for agreeing on a time and place for a customer visit, but when I read that text messages are the new pink slips for layoffs, that’s just wrong!

I’ve always said that startups are all about execution. Sometimes I encounter self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who have been “thinking” about a concept for many years, and haven’t started yet. Some of these may be visionaries, but none are real entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs live by the principles discussed by Leonard A. Schlesinger, President of Babson College, in his book titled “Action Trumps Everything” which he wrote in conjunction with friends Charlie Kiefer and Paul Brown. In it he explains how the power of entrepreneurial action helps people create what they want in an uncertain world.

One of these principles is that action trumps thinking, when the future in unpredictable. This one caught my eye, since the future of everything for startups these days is unpredictable. Here are some of his key reasons that I can relate to on this one:

1. You find out what works and what doesn’t. Every startup will tell you that no matter how certain they were of their solution, and the path to success, they had to pivot a few times in the face of unforeseen challenges. Great solutions are never obvious before the fact.
2. If you never act, you will never know if you are right or wrong. You may think you know, but you won’t be able to point to anything concrete to prove you are right. The problem with that, as Mark Twain pointed out, is: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
3. You will find out if you like it or you don’t. Your action, for example, the decision to take steps toward starting a restaurant, may cause you to find out that you love the cooking but hate talking to people, may convince you to go into high-end catering and hire someone to deal with the clients.
4. Acting leads to a market reaction, which could take you in another direction. Action leads to evidence, which becomes fodder for new thinking. You act, therefore something changes, and in observing that reaction you gain knowledge that could never have been gained from thinking alone.
5. As you act, you can find people to come along with you. For example, in talking to your suppliers, you end up meeting the world’s most organized person. She may soon be a 10% owner running the day-to-day operations of your catering business.
6. As you act, you can find ways to do things faster, cheaper, better. You discover, after making your world-famous chicken Parmesan fifty times, that you can prepare the dish in eight steps instead of eleven.
7. If you act, you won’t spend the rest of your life wondering “What if . . .?” If all you ever do is think, you can gain tons of theoretical knowledge, but none from the real world. You become like that woman in the fable who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
8. If all you do is think, you are less interesting as a person. In other words, if all you ever do is think . . . all you do is think. Who would you rather sit next to on a plane, someone who started a rock-climbing store, or someone who only thought about it?
9. If you act, you learn from other people. You always want to know what’s real. Talking to people is acting . . . at zero cost. You can learn an awful lot, and it usually doesn’t take much time. Just make sure you act on what you learn.
10. Thinking without acting feels like zero cost, but actually may have a huge opportunity cost. From a dollars-and-cents point of view, zero cost may be right. But while you are still thinking, somebody else could be stealing your market or the opportunity itself may end.

But before you act, you should always double check to see that the future is as uncertain as you think. If there is a more than reasonable chance that the future is knowable, you are better off going with a prediction, and that is a good thing.

If there is no way of knowing what the future will be like, act. It is the quickest way to learn. Take one small step toward your goal when it is far away or difficult to accomplish. Then evaluate where you are. A journey of a thousand miles really does begin with a single step.

After the idea, it’s all about execution. I often hear from investors that a great idea is necessary, but not sufficient. The most important thing is a proven team, meaning one who has built a startup before, and has experience with the execution process in this domain.

I’ve talked before about the best personality traits for a good entrepreneur, but I’ve never talked about the importance of process. Yes, even entrepreneurs need to follow a disciplined execution process if they want to maximize their probability for success.

Even though John Spence in Awesomely Simple, was talking about larger organizations, I think his concepts adapt equally well to a startup. Here is my adaptation of the key steps to ensure a winning execution in any business:

1. Create a vision and instill values. The vision may be yours alone, but the communication has to include your team, potential investors, and customers. For most people the communication is the hard part – written, verbal, over and over again.
2. Define a focused strategy. Limit the focus to a few critical areas that will yield the highest possible return. If your strategy has more than ten elements, it’s not focused. Not everything can be a priority. Do not spend any time on unimportant goals.
3. Get stakeholder commitment. People who are not committed cannot be held accountable for delivering ambitious results. The guiding coalition must demonstrate 100 percent unity, or there will be a mutiny. The worst case is a silent mutiny.
4. Align the objectives of principals. I have seen startups implode when principals were pitted against each other on mutually exclusive objectives, like adding more technology versus keeping costs down. Quantify time and cost goals early, get agreement from all, and measure results regularly to verify alignment.
5. Every process needs a system. Define and use well-thought-out systems, manual or automated, to ensure repeatable success of every key process. The most basic element of every startup system is a written, agreed, and measurable business plan.
6. Manage priorities. You must relentlessly communicate to all constituents the current priorities, and keep the total to a manageable number. One of the biggest mistakes I see in startups is a new and larger set of priorities every week, causing the team to lose momentum and lose commitment.
7. Provide team support and training. People are your most valuable asset, so start with the right ones, and make sure they have the tools and training to deliver the results you are asking for. Don’t assume they know everything you know, or learn as fast as you do.
8. Assign and orchestrate actions. Leaders must make sure all team members are taking the right actions (and behaviors) on a daily basis to deliver long-term performance. Even after all the previous steps, great leaders can’t afford to be merely observers. Lead by action.
9. Measure, adapt and innovate. Things change in a startup, and things will go wrong. You won’t notice if you don’t measure. Measure four or five key drivers, not twenty or thirty things. Motivate everyone with an insatiable curiosity to make things one percent better every day (kaizen).
10. Reward and punish. What gets measured and rewarded gets done. Be exceedingly generous with praise, celebration, recognition, small rewards, and sometimes money. Set high standards for performance and use the three T’s (train, transfer, or terminate) to deal with people unable to effectively execute the plan.

I’m not suggesting that your task execution will be perfect if you precisely follow these steps. There are far too many pitfalls and risks in a startup to imply they can all be avoided. But if you adopt this blueprint, it’s much less likely that when things get tough, your investors will be thinking of an alternate meaning for the term “execution.”

For most new high-tech products, the first customers are always “early adopters.” The conventional wisdom is that early adopters are the ideal target for new products, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, and secondly, their feedback may lead you directly away from your real target market of mainstream customers.

The term “early adopters” relates to the people who are eager to try almost any new technology products, and originates from Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations book. Early adopters are usually no more than 10%-15% of the ultimate market potential, and marketing to them may be necessary, but not sufficient in marketing to the mainstream. Witness the market struggle for 3DTV acceptance over the past couple of years.

The good news is these people will readily provide candid feedback to help you refine future product releases, and push towards new features, increased control, and interoperability. The bad news is that they hardly ever push towards simplicity and increased usability needed by the masses.

The result can easily be the classic death spiral, driven by a small but vocal portion of your market, for more and more features, when you can least afford it in time or money. Equally bad, implementation of input from a few early adopters can actually prevent your products from being adopted by the majority, as follows:

• Minimize value of usability features. Features you designed for average users, like wizards for configuration, and simple buttons to eliminate complex processes, will get no feedback, or removal recommendations. Early adopters like to see tricky and elegant details, rather than general usability.

• Increased control and flexibility. Product suggestions by early adopters often ask for increased user control over details of the technology. However, each increase in control that you hand over to the users also increases user interface complexity, and the opportunity for pitfalls for the average user.

• Emphasis on engineering robustness. Early adopters love the technology, sometimes to a fault. Technical issues like execution speed, file size, and memory usage are typical examples that always need further optimization. At some point it becomes compulsive engineering, rather than engineering to increase value for the average user.

• Higher product price. They want new features automating complicated but obscure tasks. These features will likely be used by only a tiny fraction of the entire user base, but increase complexity for everyone. Early adopters are normally less price sensitive, so may mislead you in finalizing your pricing model.

The dilemma that we all face is that the most valuable customers might be the least vocal (silent majority). The users who scream the loudest are usually a minority segment. The challenge of every business is to proactively seek out a cross section of core users and ask them for feedback, rather than responding to random noise.

I’m certainly not suggesting that you ignore early adopters. Simply recognize them as a specific and important small market segment, and treat them with respect. Early adopters have money, and if they like your product, they’re generally very vocal about it and provide invaluable word-of-mouth press. You need their evangelism and passion to get enough momentum to start attracting mainstream consumers.

So don’t be lulled into complacency by early adopters as your first customers. Temper your feedback assessments, product changes, and marketing strategy to the mainstream market. Ten percent of your projected market won’t make either you or your investors very happy.

Go-to people get things done. As an entrepreneur, you need these people, and you need to be one, if you expect your startup to be successful. That may be easier said than done, since resumes do not tell the story, and without real nurturing, they won’t stay around long.

To highlight how rare this breed is, Jeffrey Gandz of the Richard Ivey School of Business relates a quote from a new CEO in a large company, “I have more than 1000 people in my head office organization, 900 can tell me something’s gone wrong, 90 can tell me what’s gone wrong, 9 can tell me why it went wrong, and one can actually fix it!”

Finding and nurturing that one is the challenge for every company and every startup. I like his summary of how go-to people are different from other people, not necessarily because they have unique skills, but because of the ways these skills are configured and integrated with other leadership characteristics:

• Know how business works and how to work your business. They have what we might call “street smarts” as well as real intelligence. They have a special ability to help people achieve, clear away road blocks, and resolve impasses that are frustrating people. Then they use those skills to build support for required actions.
• Politically astute without being politicians. Unlike many political operatives these people are seen as dedicated to the goals of the business, rather than feathering their own nests. This leaves them with the reputation for being politically astute rather than being labeled with the stigma of being a politician.
• Know how to use power when it’s needed but seldom use it. They recognize that people are persuaded by those that these people, in turn, can persuade. So they open themselves up to recommendations from those they are trying to persuade. They recognize that people want recognition, so they reward people who get-with-the-program with attentions for doing so.
• Consummate negotiators but getting it done is non-negotiable. They are adept at seeing situations from others’ perspectives, separating people from principles, building bridges between positions, and bringing people to their senses. But they are laser-like in their focus on project completion, and never sacrifice deadlines for compliance.
• Networks of reciprocation rather than deals. However, these exchanges of favors and reciprocity are not conditional negotiation elements, but usually based on having done someone a favor without requiring anything in return. The favor is often motivated not by future consideration but by a genuine desire to help someone else.
• Think out of the box while acting inside the box. Go-to people are creative people who are constantly looking for better ways to get things done. Barriers are challenges, obstacles are opportunities for innovation, the words “can’t do” register as “how can we do.” They use the culture to change the culture, and use channels effectively.
• Analytical and intuitive, aggressive and patient, confident and humble, deliberate and decisive. These sometimes paradoxical characteristics of highly effective leaders are present in abundance in go-to’s. They escalate what needs to be handled at a higher level and don’t feel that they have to resolve everything themselves.

While many resumes portray people as leaders, resumes are heavily weighted toward “initiators”, those who start things and develop new ways of doing things. Few talk about completions – driving things that they have initiated through to conclusion. You need both, and don’t confuse the two.

If you are not that natural leader, remember that becoming the go-to person in your organization is equally powerful in raising positive perceptions of your value. It’s all about who you know, what you know, what you do, and how you can help. Best of all, it’s fun to get things done.

First things first – your startup needs a name! This may seem a silly and frivolous task, but it may be the most important decision you make. The name of your business has a tremendous impact on how customers and investors view you, and in today’s small world, it’s a world-wide decision.

Please don’t send me any more business plans with TBD or NewCo in the title position. Right or wrong, the name you choose, or don’t choose, speaks volumes about your business savvy and understanding of the world you are about to enter. Here are some key things I look for in the name, with some help from Alex Frankel and others:

1. Unique and unforgettable. In the trade, this is called “stickiness.” But the issue of stickiness turns out to be kind of, well, sticky. Every company wants a name that stands out from the crowd, a catchy handle that will remain fresh and memorable over time. That’s a challenge because naming trends change, often year by year, making timeless names hard to find (remember the dot.coms).
2. Avoid unusual spellings. When creating a name, stay with words that can easily be spelled by customers. Some startup founders try unusual word spellings to make their business stand out, but this can be trouble when customers ‘Google’ your business to find you, or try to refer you to others. Stay with traditional word spelling, and avoid those catchy words that you love to explain at cocktail parties.
3. Easy to pronounce and remember. Forget made-up words and nonsense phrases. Make your business name one that customers can pronounce and remember easily. Skip the acronyms, which mean nothing to most people. When choosing an identity for a company or a product, simple and straightforward are back in style, and cost less to brand.
4. Keep it simple. The shorter in length, the better. Limit it to two syllables. Avoid using hyphens and other special characters. Since certain algorithms and directory listings work alphabetically, pick a name closer to A than Z. These days, it even helps if the name can easily be turned into a verb, like Google me.
5. Make some sense. Occasionally, business owners will choose names that are nonsense words. Quirky words (Yahoo, Google, Fogdog) or trademark-proof names concocted from scratch (Novartis, Aventis, Lycos) are a big risk. Always check the international implications. More than one company has been embarrassed by a new name that had negative and even obscene connotations in another language.
6. Give a clue. Try to adopt a business name that provides some information about what your business does. Calling your landscaping business “Lawn and Order” is appropriate, but the same name would not do well for a handyman business. Your business name should match your business in order to remind customers what services you provide.
7. Make sure the name is available. This may sound obvious, but a miss here will cost you dearly. Your company name and Internet domain name should probably be the same, so check out your preferred names with your State Incorporation site, Network Solutions for the domain name, and the U.S. Patent Office for Trademarks.
8. Favor common suffixes. Everyone will assume that your company name is your domain name minus the suffix “.com” or the standard suffix for your country. If these suffixes are not available for the name you prefer, pick a new name rather than settling for an alternate suffix like “.net” or “.info.” Get all three suffixes if you can.
9. Don’t box yourself in. Avoid picking names that don’t allow your business to move around or add to its product line. This means avoiding geographic locations or product categories to your business name. With these specifics, customers will be confused if you expand your business to different locations or add on to your product line.
10. Sample potential customers. Come up with a few different name choices and try them out on potential customers, investors, and co-workers. Skip your family and friends who know too much. Ask questions about the names to see if they give off the impression you desire.

If you are still unsure of yourself, you should know that there are many dedicated firms, like Igor and A Hundred Monkeys, that can relieve you of $1 million of your hard-earned funds to come up with just the right appellation. Hmmm. I wonder how much they spent on their own names?

Mid-level or even top executives who “grew up” in large companies often look with envy at startups, and dream of how easy it must be running a small organization, where you can see the whole picture and it appears you have total control. In reality, very few executives or professional stars from large corporations thrive in the early-stage startup environment.

The job of a big-company executive is very different from the job of a small-company executive. The culture is different, the skills required are different, and the experience from one may be the exact opposite of what you need for the other. I agree with the seven survival issues summarized by Michael Fertik, in an old Harvard Business Review article, for executives making the transition:

1. Empire-building skills are counter-productive. Establishing and wielding influence may help you move resources in your direction in a large business. Similarly, acquiring a larger footprint of direct reports is often a sign of success at large businesses. These instincts kill you in a small company, where requiring more resources is a negative.
2. Forget your staff and entourage. This is one of the harder transitions for people joining small businesses. The axiom applies to all matters, tiny to large. Small-company heroes are consistently self-reliant. At a small company, if you’re constantly demanding more support, you risk turning your net impact into overhead creep rather than value creation.
3. Never cover your a$$. There’s no place for CYA in a small company. This attitude sows division and mistrust at exactly the early stages when the business most needs to build precious esprit de corps. When you’re considering a job at a small company, look for colleagues and founders who don’t tolerate CYA.
4. Go faster. Large companies move slowly because they are usually in reasonable financial condition, with less urgency, have a lot to lose from making bad decisions, and have built layers of management sign-off over the years. These conditions don’t apply in a small business. Speed gives you the greatest chance of success.
5. Be very selective about the problems you attack. Managers at large companies often have the obligation and luxury of thinking about problems that may arise at some future time if things go well. Startups spend little time on this — the risks of enormous success are so remote they aren’t worth major planning.
6. Get used to dynamic budgeting. Large companies usually operate with annual budgets, and often the budgeting process is locked down months before the start of the fiscal year. At start-ups and smaller businesses, budgeting can happen opportunistically, monthly, or even on an ongoing basis.
7. Understand that your daily impact is huge. Many of your managerial decisions will have enormous and possibly fatal effects on a small business. Larger companies rarely face life-or-death opportunities or threats. Small companies can face them daily. The most practical way to adapt is to focus on learning to evaluate and trust your judgment.

I’ve spent years in large-company environments, and many years later in startups, so I’ve seen and felt the pressures of both. One positive aspect of having worked in a large company is that they usually provide actual training and education for a new role, rather than all “on-the-job training.” This transfers well to startups, and should give you an advantage.

On the other side of the ledger, big company executives tend to be demand-driven by initiatives handed down from the top. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In startups, you have to drive multiple initiatives concurrently or the company will stand still. Well defined and well documented processes don’t exist to guide you.

For startups, the time to do the people filtering and fit analysis is before the hire. Look at previous company results, and listen for evidence of self-sufficiency, problem solving, and a thorough understanding of your product, technology, customers, and the market. If you don’t see a self-awareness of the differences required, your candidate probably won’t bridge the gap.

Since the days of Henry Ford, mass production has been the Holy Grail of business, rather than build-to-order. Too many businesses haven’t noticed that we have come full-circle, where mass customization is required now to win. Customers have come to expect immediate and tailor-made responses to their needs, and the businesses that fail to deliver quickly fall behind.

Changing the culture and mindset in an existing businesses is difficult and slow, so this becomes another “opportunity” for smart entrepreneurs and startups to excel. John M. Bernard does a great job outlining seven key steps to success today in his new book, “Business at the Speed of Now.” They apply to any business, but every startup better lead with these:

1. Prepare your team to always say “Yes”. This starts with always assigning people on the front line with the responsibility to solve problems, not just report them. Obviously, they must have the communication and system tools needed, and all the behind-the-scenes workers who never see a customer understand their role in delivering now.
2. Leverage the game changers to gain the speed you need. These game changes include using social media, to provide real-time two-way communication; cloud computing, which enables efficient, lower-risk automation of business processes; and the millennial mind-set, which does not tolerate anything that moves at a snail’s pace.
3. Make excellence through breakthroughs a habit. Breakthroughs are not just incremental improvements, but step-function changes in performance and capability brought about by deliberate planning and exquisite execution of skilled people. Top management has to set the expectation and provide the authority to make decisions now.
4. Close the execution gap through real-time transparency. Business transparency is making sure you whole team always sees and understands the real business challenges. Lies and misuse of accountability generate fear, and nothing paralyzes a team more than fear. Transparency highlights new behavior, new thinking, and new levels of maturity.
5. Equip everyone with core skills to solve problems now. Replace preventing people from doing the wrong thing to helping them figure out for themselves how to do the right thing. That means hiring help, rather than helpers, and providing the resources they need to stay current. It also means assigning responsibility and measuring accountability.
6. Enable the team by building trust and banishing fear. People want to do the right thing, but they quickly learn from negative consequences, real or imagined. Trust requires a clear vision from the top, line of sight to their role, resources to do the job, and full transparency to make people feel safe and confident.
7. Stop bossing and start teaching. You can get a lot more accomplished working with people rather than trying to get them to work for you. Today, every business needs everyone to learn something new every day, and everyone to teach, with humility. Teachers make mistakes, and when they do, they must admit it.

In summary, all of these steps are really about rethinking the definition of “employee engagement.” Today it’s not about people feeling all warm and fuzzy; it is about people possessing the knowledge, skills, and authority to act swiftly and skillfully without waiting for permission.

According to the Gallup Organization and numerous other respected analysts, 49 percent of current American employees admit to not being engaged, meaning they just show up, follow orders, and keep their mouths and their brains shut. Another 18 percent actively sabotage the company’s performance. These perspectives evolved through the age of mass production.

Entrepreneurs and startups today have a clear opportunity, and a clear survival requirement in the new economy of mass customization, to avoid the customer satisfaction and productivity penalties implicit in poor engagement. The good news is that the steps to change, as outlined above, are not rocket science. Just don’t wait for your competitors to get there first.

If you are looking for an outside investor, you need to know how they see you. Different types of investors look for startups at different levels of maturity. If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, fishing for money is a waste of time for both of you.

For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts. It wouldn’t work anyway, since your valuation at that stage would be less than the funding, meaning you would have to give away all ownership for the money.

You also will find that the stage your startup is in dictates where you go to seek funding. Funding sources specialize in certain growth stages. Angel investors typically provide early-stage funding, while venture capital firms typically come in at later stages.

Of course, growth and development are really a continuum. Yet most investors will tend to categorize your progress into one of the following five stages:

• Idea stage. This is the initial excitement period, the time when you dream of riches and fantasize the life of a business owner, but you have no real plan. At this stage, no professional investor will touch you unless you have a beautiful track record of success with previous startups. Funding will only come from you, or friends, family, and fools.
• Early or embryonic stage. Investments at this stage are typically called seed investments. Funding of $250,000-$1 million is available from angels, if you have credentials and have done the homework of a good business plan, financial model, and executive presentation. Anything less the $250,000, or any amount at this stage with no credentials, still has to come from friends and families, loans, or federal grant sources.
• Funding or rollout stage. This is the realm of venture capital professional investors, with funding amounts of $1-10 million, often referred to as the “A-round,” or first institutional funding. At this stage, your startup better be selling a commercial offering, have price and cost validated, with significant customer sales and a real revenue stream. Lesser amounts remain in the angel realm.
• Growth stage. Additional funding rounds for growth are often called the “B-round” through “G-round”, with each being in the $5 million to more than $50 million from venture capital and other sources. Companies at this stage must have a large market, good traction, and be focused on scaling infrastructure and market adoption. This normally means more than 30 employees, and more than $1 million in revenue.
• Exit stage. This is the final stage of investment in venture opportunities, and is the point where investors expect to see the return and gain from the original investment. At this stage, you need investment bankers to negotiate a merger or acquisition (M&A), go private, or help you go public with an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

As startups pass through each stage, they must attract appropriate financial partners that can provide the increasing credibility, capital, and industry networks to support movement to the next stage. Typically, they must also change and tune their executive team, to keep up with the increasing demands of a growing company on process discipline and sustainable success.

Another important thing to remember when selecting investors is that not all money is the same. VC money, for example, usually comes with high expectations of milestones met, board seats, and dominant control. Angels may be less demanding, but typically add less value. Friends and family hopefully believe fully in you, and just want you to show them success.

Obviously, if you bootstrap your business, you can avoid all these stages and the investment implications. Otherwise, not paying attention to the expectations associated with each stage will likely jeopardize your one chance to make a great first impression on potential investors, and landing the big one. Do it right and enjoy the journey.