My family loves to watch So You Think You Can Dance, so I’m sort of forced to watch it also. Over time, I’ve concluded that even startup entrepreneurs can learn a few things from this one. Of course, you must ignore the pomp and circumstance of the TV staging.

I’m on the selection committee of our local angels group, so I know that every CEO approaching our group for funding goes through ten minutes of creative “dancing,” to give us a basis for selecting startups that are most qualified and “ready” to proceed to the next level. If selected, they go through it again in the real meeting of 20-40 investors. It’s tough and not fun for either side.

The business “dance” obviously has different particulars than TV dancing, but there is serious business and artistry involved in both cases. Here are some observations I can offer to startup founders looking for funding, analogous to the aspiring dancers on the show, hoping to move to the next level:

• Judges evaluate the person first. Investors want to look the CEO in the eye, and be convinced that he or she can lead the company to success – it’s more important than the creative idea. On the TV show, I’m sure you all see contenders that have lost before they start, just because they lack the enthusiasm, presence, and confidence of a winner.
• You only get a few minutes to make the case. In fact, your case is usually won or lost in the first couple of minutes. In business, as on the show, wins can turn to a loss if you bungle or skip relevant basics in the short time allotted. Everyone wants a longer time or second chance to win you back, but it would rarely ever change anything.
• Skip the bravado, but don’t be immobilized with fear. I subscribe to a quote from another TV show too old to mention, where the hero said “He who is not afraid – he’s a fool.” Let your adrenalin help you deliver an outstanding performance, but trying to wow investors with jokes or stories of unending success will not move you up a level.
• Play to the audience in front of you, and adapt your message. If the panel is looking for value and return for the investor, skip the technology pitch, or customer sales pitch. Some entrepreneurs give the same talk, no matter what the audience. If you have only one dance, don’t be surprised if it wears thin quickly with the judges.
• Dress appropriately and professionally. Under-dressed may impress on TV, but it’s better to be over-dressed in the business world. Business casual is the standard for investor presentations. Remember that most investors are from a generation where faded and torn jeans were on the wrong side of success in business.
• Practice, practice, practice. Even if you are an experienced dancer, you practice your craft with renewed determination before a big show. Business entrepreneurs need to do the same thing, maybe in “presidential debate” style with their team for critics, until they master the timing and can handle every unanticipated slip or challenge.

Even though I’m certainly no expert on dancing (I’ve taken Beginning Ballroom Dancing three times now), most of the reviews I have seen call the TV show realistic, with the panel of judges giving reasonable critical and technical feedback. That’s a welcome relief from Donald Trump’s pompous calls on “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Depending on one’s perspective, this is either the perfect time or an awful one to start a business. So, if you plan to face a business version of the dancing challenge soon, watch the show and check the recommendations above. Show some energy and enthusiasm, and don’t let the technical steps required overshadow your creativity. Break a leg!

Once you are able to achieve some real “traction” with your business (paying customers, revenue stream), it may seem the time to relax a bit, but in fact this is the point where many founders start to flounder. All the skills and instincts you needed to get to this level can actually start working against you, and you can fail to scale.

Investors often say that successfully navigating the early stages of a startup requires lots of street smarts, guts, and luck. For successful scaling of the business, there has to be a transition to “executive” mode in the more traditional business sense. Certain behaviors between these two modes are incompatible, and can cause real problems.

Way back in 2002, John Hamm published some early work on this subject in “Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Scale” in the Harvard Business Review. Here is my interpretation of that work, incorporating my personal experience, identifying some strengths of an entrepreneur during early startup stages which can become a problem for scaling:

• Perseverance. This is generally a required quality for a successful entrepreneur, but it can turn into an unhealthy stubbornness during the scaling stage. The key is to make decisions from data and feedback, once your business has real customers and real products. Trusting your gut at this stage isn’t good enough.

• Absolute control. During the early stages, you are the company, processes are not documented, you don’t have much help, so you need a fanatical attention to detail. To scale the business, you have to find people who can do the tasks, and delegate appropriately. Control freaks are doomed to failure.

• Individual loyalty. Most founders form very close relationships with the small team that gets the startup off the ground, and that is important. Scaling requires that you expand the team, probably with people you haven’t known. You also have to deal with the inevitable personnel challenges, even within the original team. Total loyalty can be toxic.

• Isolated and insulated. Working in isolation is fine during the creative phase of the startup, where the founder is often the designer and architect, as well as the builder. Now this same individual has to step into the spotlight, and meet with customers, analysts, and investors. Insulation from the real world will not work during scaling.

• Tactical versus strategic. Early stage startup founders have to think tactically. Even business school courses don’t teach you to operate strategically, deal with people objectively, and create loyalty within a diverse workforce. These are areas where past stumbles are the best teachers. Investors don’t want to fund your stumbles.

Every founder moving into the executive role has to step back and take a hard look at what works, and what doesn’t work. The best ones can do that, and they adapt. Investors and advisors see this as a critical part of their role, and often are the “bad guys” who ask the founder to step aside, while they bring in a “more experienced” CEO to take over the helm.

Unfortunately, some founders won’t adapt, and won’t step aside. Even if they are pushed out, they can cause terminal damage to the business by negative versions of their strengths, now seen as stubbornness, unwillingness to give up control, testing loyalty, and hiding from reality.

Thus my best recommendation, if you want to scale and to survive, is to open up and work closely with an “outsider” that you trust, such as a respected board member, a coach, a mentor, or an investor. The key is to expedite your learning, and take deliberate steps to confront your shortcomings. That way, you will become the leader your company needs, learn to stop floundering, and begin to fly.

A spin-off is merely a startup spawned by a mature parent (company), and conventional logic would dictate that it has a survival advantage over the lowly startup. Yet spin-offs seem to most often fail to launch in the real world. I was part of one myself a few years ago, and felt the pain, so the phenomenon has intrigued me ever since.

My first thought is that spin-offs are like struggling adolescents with over-protective parents. When companies spin off a division (sometimes called a demerger or deconsolidation), they naturally want it to grow and succeed on its own merits, just as they have. But like protective parents everywhere, they tend to shelter it in ways that stunt its growth in the long run.

Before we look at my specifics, I should mention some of the reasons companies make the spin-off decision in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, according to a report by A. T. Kearney, these go well beyond an organization getting rid of its “problem children:”

• Deconsolidate—shed non-core functions to focus on core competencies. An example would be Time Warner spinning off AOL—to end a disastrous, dot.com-era marriage.
• Mingle and learn from the startup culture and new technology – without losing control. Foreign companies in the US like to use spin-offs to find expansion opportunities.
• Unlock shareholder value, which the spin-off can do as an independent entity. They may not be so constrained by monopoly fears and Sarbanes-Oxley controls.
• Grow faster, which a spin-off can do outside the parent company. Airlines, for example, have difficulty scaling up through mergers and acquisitions (M&As), but they can spin off their maintenance businesses and let the spin-off do the M&A in its own field.
• Grow in new dimensions from the parent company. Service operations such as call centers can grow far beyond their parent companies, especially if their services are more generic.

In retrospect, as in the case I was part of, I believe there were several areas in which the parent company consistently fails in their discipline:

• Rewarding without earning. The parent company guaranteed the spin-off a revenue stream and provided incentive bonuses based on artificial objectives, rather than competitive or market driven targets. The guaranteed revenue and incentives were only loosely tied—at best—to the spin-off’s performance.

• Fostering dictatorial leadership. Effective management skills in a startup are actually quite different from those in a large enterprise. The dictatorial leaders who survived and prospered in the enterprise parent, were ill-suited for the collaborative and highly adaptive spin-off and startup requirements. Yet they had “earned” the right to run an autonomous unit, and were not easily dislocated.

• Supporting them for an undefined period. Parent companies provide services or infrastructure to the spin-off at below-market prices or for an excessively long period of time. In the reverse direction, this “support” carried the high overhead that is standard in the enterprise, but not financially sustainable in the spin-off.

In my view, fostering successful spin-offs, like raising adolescents, often requires tough love, embodied in the tough financial objectives and a firm timeline that startup investors impose on their charges. No free passes, and no bailouts.

In most other ways, the success of a spin-off depends on the same factors that are critical to a startup, but sometimes get forgotten or taken for granted as a corporation matures. These include a clearly articulated vision and business strategy, communicated from leaders in a way that heightens motivation and lessens team anxiety of the unknown.

For entrepreneurs, this analysis should be a positive message, but it should also be a wake-up call to the overriding value of leadership and effective communication. For all of you who all too quickly tie your business success or failure to funding, or the lack of it, think again. Sometimes it helps to be “hungry” in that respect.

Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to dazzle investors today? The team is the same. The company’s market is the same.

The only difference might be the start of another recession like the last one, resulting in a lower valuation for Internet ventures, and that makes all the difference. Herein lies a key principle of decision making – “Any decision is better than no decision.”

Even better than any decision is a good decision made quickly. What separates good decision-making from bad decision-making? H.W. Lewis, author of “Why Flip A Coin? The Art and Science of Good Decisions,” summarizes good decision making as:

• Identifying all reasonable actions.
• Listing the potential consequences of each action and the utility of each consequence.
• Evaluating the probability that each action will lead to a given consequence.
• Choosing the action quickly which has the best expected outcome or positive contribution.

These points may sound obvious, but the process is certainly contrary to the popular “shoot from the hip” approach that is practiced by some entrepreneurs. The idea here is following a process can actually force you to think. You don’t have to do it perfectly to stay ahead of the game.

Beyond not thinking, another failure is not really knowing what you want to achieve through the decision. This is a problem with many product-based companies. Their goal is to create profitable products, but too often they don’t research what their customers really want, and what they are willing to pay. It’s difficult to create a high-demand product by guessing.

In all cases, be sure to distinguish between ideas and opportunities. A business idea is not a business opportunity until it is evaluated objectively in the context of a specific business plan. I like focus, but if you focus too early on only one business idea without a plan, you are more likely to become attached to it, and lose your objectivity.

Some entrepreneurs seem to know instinctively that a certain product or service has great potential for success. This comes from much industry experience, and is not irrational. On the other hand many unsuccessful would-be entrepreneurs are unsuccessful precisely because they were irrational, so avoid that pitfall.

Decision-making in the face of risk is one of only a handful of unique characteristics that successful entrepreneurs possess. After all, the very nature of a true entrepreneur is one that embraces risk. Often this risk-taking is mistaken in part to be “the reason” the entrepreneur succeeds in their business.

Some decisions involve risk, at times a great deal of it, but there are a greater number of decisions that can be thought through and analyzed to determine on some basic facts, whether or not they are good or bad ideas. Smart entrepreneurs always use facts, when they have them, rather than their gut.

If you are someone who never uses your gut, and exhaustively researches a purchase prior to making it, you are most likely not cut out to be an entrepreneur. This type of decision making, careful and cautious, is certainly a great attribute to have in the corporate business world, but it’s a killer in startups.

Making no decision doesn’t work in any business. So your first test here is to see if you can decide which category of decision maker you best fit. The headlights are approaching…

You Never Learn Anything While You are TalkingBuilding a business is all about building relationships, and one of the most important elements of a relationship is effective communication. Communication doesn’t happen unless both parties practice the art of effective listening. Check to see if you are practicing the key disciplines of listening, as outlined by Brian Tracy in “No Excuses: the Power of Self-Discipline”:

• Listen attentively. Listen as though the other person is about to reveal a great secret or the winning lottery number and you will hear it only once. Since you always pay attention to what you most value, when you pay close attention to another person, you tell that person that they are of great value to you. You will be remembered.

• Pause before replying. When you pause, you avoid the risk of interrupting the other person if they are reformulating their thoughts. It also enables you to hear not only what was said, but what was not said. Then you can respond with greater awareness and sensitivity.

• Ask for clarification. Never assume that you automatically know what the other person is thinking or feeling. It is when you ask questions and seek clarity that you demonstrate that you really care about what he or she is saying, and that you are genuinely interested in understanding how he or she thinks and feels.

• Feed it back. The acid test of listening is to see if you can paraphrase what you heard in your own words. It is only when you can repeat back what the other person has just said, in your own words, that you prove you are really listening, and understood the message. For all feedback, be sure to mirror the other person’s pace and communication style.

Even good communicators average only about half their time listening. Yet experts assert that most people listen with only about 25 percent of their attention, hear about 25 percent of what is said, and after two months, remember only half of that. That’s not effective communication.

There are also things you can do to encourage others to listen to you, when you do speak, to improve the overall communication:

• Lower voice, no emotion. This causes the other party to listen more carefully, and facilitates a more pleasant and more effective conversation.

• Adapt to listener interests. Use analogies and terminology that are easy for the other person to relate to, and they will respond with attention and higher comprehension.

• Choose the right environment. Wait for the right opportunity, when you can be easily heard and understood, and the listener is in the right mood.

• Address people by name. This gets their attention and focus. Sometimes it helps to bring others into the conversation to support your input.

In business, you need to always be listening – to customers, to advisors, to investors, and to your team members. When you do talk, concentrate on making it effective. You don’t have the time to have things repeated to you four times before you really hear and understand them.

Responsible, effective listening is a rare skill that will give you a sustainable competitive advantage over your peers and your competitors. It’s also a skill that can be developed with practice. You can never know enough in business, so even top entrepreneurs find time to listen. Are you learning anything these days?

I’ve often said that creating and building a business is not a one-man show, even though it usually springs from the mind and determination of one person – committees don’t start successful businesses. But taking an idea to a business success requires many people to work together effectively, and that requires entrepreneurial leadership.

Leadership is not a skill one is born with, but it can be learned and honed from experience and failures. We all start with what researchers term the “knowing-doing gap.” We know what should be done, but we don’t know how to get it done. Many people assume the solution is to find the recipe, or leader’s checklist, and follow it methodically.

I think it takes a few more steps to “activate” the checklist and fruitfully engage in the activities that lead to leadership success. Michael Useem of Wharton, in his new book, “The Leader’s Checklist,” outlines 15 mission-critical leadership principles, and also includes six avenues of learning for new entrepreneurs to activate their leadership skills:

1. Study leadership moments. A first step is to become a self-directed student of leadership. This study can take many forms: reading leaders’ biographies, witnessing leaders in action, and joining leadership development programs. What’s critical is witnessing how others have worked with a full checklist or fallen short, often a powerful reminder to examine whether you yourself are employing all the necessary principles.
2. Solicit coaching and mentoring. Solicit personal feedback from individuals who can provide informed, fine-grained advice on not only the leadership capacities that you already exhibit but those that require better display. It is hard to correct what you do not know you are not doing.
3. Accept stretch experiences. Ask for and accept new responsibilities outside your comfort zone. By testing fresh territories and experiencing the setbacks they can bring, you can grow to appreciate the shortfalls in your own leadership style even as you learn to more consistently apply it.
4. Conduct after-action reviews of personal leadership moments. Look back on leadership actions just taken, asking what worked, what was not invoked, and even what was missing from the original checklist. Through such efforts, entrepreneurs who actively pursue feedback from their team and their customers are on the road to success.
5. Endure extremely stressful leadership moments. Transform a chilling experience into a learning opportunity. We often learn as much from setbacks as successes—sometimes we learn even more from setbacks than successes—and with unflinching study of the stumbles, you have a greater readiness to apply real leadership the next time.
6. Experience the leadership moments of others. The final step is to vicariously or directly experience a leadership moment of a mentor or peer. When you walk in another’s shoes during a critical test of leadership, you will build a better appreciation for when and how to invoke your own leadership elements.

The core principles of leadership for every entrepreneur include articulating a vision, think and act strategically, act decisively, communicate persuasively, motivate the troops, build relationships, and building leadership in others. Of course, these need to be customized for every culture and every business environment.

In every environment, there is a final and most vital leadership principle – common purpose comes first and personal self-interest comes last. In business, it appears in Jim Collin’s appraisal as one of the defining qualities of those who lead their companies from “good to great.”

Entrepreneurial leadership has its greatest impact in times of uncertainty and change, like the present. How wide is your knowing-doing gap, and how actively are you working to close it?

Everyone knows that that startups are risky, but they also expect that the job will be exciting and potentially very lucrative (think early employees at Microsoft and Google). Yet we have all heard stories about the high turnover, unstructured work environment, lower base pay, and unpredictable expectations from the top.

Assuming you are lucky enough to get hired, what can you do to survive, and even stand out above the rest in this environment? Here are some tips from a recent book by Harvey Mackay, titled “Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door,” which work even better in a startup than they do in a bigger company:

1. Make yourself indispensible. The truly indispensible person in a startup is a problem solver, because every startup has plenty of problems. Very few people are willing and able to take on any challenge, and make it work. You can’t outsource that one.
2. Volunteer. This is related to the first item, but more specifically means the willingness to take on tasks that others could and should do, but hate to do. There will always be a place in this world for the person who says, “I’ll take care of it.” And then does it.
3. Stick out and shine. Many employees like to keep a low profile, thinking that will minimize their workload, but it also maximizes their risk. It pays to be visible in any way that’s positive for the company. It could be managing the company picnic, or being the office “go-to” person for computer questions.
4. Don’t hang out with gloom and doom. Some people love to gripe about management, the pay scale, and career opportunities. Even if you never utter a negative word, don’t tag along with this bunch, or you will be written off as a silent sympathizer.
5. Be a builder … and a rebuilder. When the organization changes, be the first to help the new organization work, even when it costs extra hours and sweat. If you see a customer service problem hurting the company, step up proactively with a proposal to fix it.
6. Always position yourself as number two to your next career opportunity. Initiate activities that improve your chances of being the chief’s backup. Then focus on ideas that will likely get your boss promoted. You will likely be the dark horse that fills the slot.
7. Persevere. In a rotten economy, it’s so easy to throw in the towel. Executives always have their eye out for people who do the opposite and engage themselves in tough challenges. These are the ones who stick with finding a solution even after many reversals.
8. Educate yourself one notch up. Study the resumes of managers on the next level and do your best to match or even surpass their career credentials. Not just degrees, but loading up on books, business journals, and blogs that your top executive favors.
9. Pay attention to your image. You attitude and the clothes you wear assert your authority to subordinates, peers, the media, and customers. Your company is spending real money on its image, so make your own personal “brand” an asset to the company.
10. Think big picture. Some issues aren’t worth winning. You can win the battle and lose the war. If you boss takes credit for one of your ideas, use it as an opportunity to point out how you think alike, rather than berating him in public for the lack of attribution.

In the real big picture, if your prime focus is keeping your current job, you are already in trouble. You should be thinking about your promotion to the next level in this company, the next level in the next company, and then on to starting your own company. The satisfaction of creating jobs is a lot greater than keeping this one.

A term I’m hearing more and more these days is “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to create and manage a venture to make social change.

On the surface, this sounds like entrepreneurs who want to build a non-profit organization. Yet the term seems to be more often associated with people whose work is targeted toward long-term socio-economic change. Think Margaret Sanger (birth control) or Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent), as opposed to the leaders of the Cancer Society or Goodwill Industries.

Whether the objective is to generate profits or social capital, the common element for all entrepreneurs is the recognition that there is a problem which needs solving, or there is an opportunity to improve the status quo.

The vision is always to be a change agent, to invent and popularize new approaches, and to persuade people to take a leap forward. In every case this requires a committed ultimate realist with the determination to persist in the face of daunting odds.

Another way to distinguish between the two types of entrepreneurship is by identifying what social entrepreneurship is not:

• Not a fundraising strategy for nonprofits. A social enterprise may actually be profitable, or it may be non-profitable, but the generation of funds is deemed secondary to success on the environmental or social issues in the vision. Generating funds should not be the highest priority.

• Not about profit before social impact. A social enterprise must be financially sustainable only as a means to the end, which is its social or environmental impact and rate of change. The business entrepreneur mission is profit always, social impact maybe.

• Not a new definition for the nonprofit sector. The evident and real purpose of the social enterprise must be to make the world a better place, through the operation of the business. This certainly also has potential for enhancing the vitality of the nonprofit sector, but it doesn’t move it to a higher moral plane.

• Not an investment opportunity for business investors. I still get inquiries about how to find angel investors and venture capitalist to kick-start a social enterprise. Funding such an enterprise is in the realm of philanthropists, government grants, or bootstrapping. Business investors are looking for a financial return, not a social capital return.

• Not about entrepreneurship in the government sector. So far, the largest source of services and funding for social enterprises and social entrepreneurs has been federal, state, and local governments. Yet the enterprises are not government enterprises, and the process for success makes them good business enterprises.

• Social entrepreneurship is not socialism. The socialist doctrine dictates compulsory taxpayer contributions to finance social initiatives, while the social entrepreneur uses the standard business model and innovative approaches to attract customers, fund activities, and accomplish social change.

The common element in both types of entrepreneurship is that an entrepreneur rather than an administrator is required. This is someone who is willing and able to create a new enterprise, based on an innovative idea, and is willing to assume total accountability for the inherent risks and outcome.

So, if you are an entrepreneur at heart, but you are driven by a higher cause than making a profit, social entrepreneurship may be for you. It is an emerging field with diverse and shifting interpretations, but most agree it’s really about making the world a better place. There is certainly plenty of opportunity in that space.

I’m sure you have all been frustrated at least once at not being able to get the Internet domain name you want for your company. Who owns all of these names, and should you ever buy one for a premium? The simple answer is that if you want to be found and remembered on the Web, the perfect domain name can easily be worth several thousand dollars.

Snagging an unclaimed great one is almost impossible these days because domain investors gobbled up a lot of the catchy real estate several years ago. Kevin Ham was the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of in 2007, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire of over 300,000 domain names.

Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to realize that people can register a name and return it without cost after a free trial. He grabbed hundreds of thousands of names, and returned many. He’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from millions of people who mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name.

He also capitalized on the trend to try “direct navigation,” and millions do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in “weddingshoes.com” – a site that Ham happens to own – and you’ll land on what looks like a shoe-shopping portal, filled with links from dozens of retailers. Today there is big money in this aftermarket, where these valuable names are driving prices to new heights.

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham established a relationship with the Cameroon government and did the work to route the traffic his way. He is now on a campaign to win Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) as well.

Frank Schilling, who recently moved into the number one spot in this arena, had the guts and foresight to sweep up names shed during the dotcom bust, and is now the landlord of some of the most valuable real estate on the Web, estimated to be in the $500 million range.

But that’s all history, and you have to live with it. So as an entrepreneur, here are the steps to get the name you need for your business:

1. Pick the right name. This is actually the hard part, and is easier said than done. Review my previous article on this challenge – 10 Rules For Picking a Company Name That Sticks.
2. Register the name if available. Domains cost between $7 and $15 per year at GoDaddy.com or Register.com, if nobody already owns it. It’s a good idea to also buy between three and 20 names that are close to your primary address or that could be confused with it.
3. Otherwise, find the owner. But with 105 million names already in use, chances are someone else already snagged it. First you have to find the current owner, using Domain Tools, or other lookup functions available on the net.
4. Negotiate for the name. The median price is now $5,000 for an average name, to $16 million paid for Insure.com a couple of years ago. For these prices, you should consider an intermediary like Moniker.com or Escrow.com – for a $250 to $500 fee – to help ensure that sellers truly transfer title to the address. If the name is perfect, pay the price.

Whether by crafting a great new name or wresting one from a previous owner, every new business needs to master the domain game. With the current explosion of sites, it’s usually better to leverage search engines than to build a new mountain on your own through advertising.