Keeping Your Minimum Viable Product Lean and Simple
“Scope creep” (or feature creep) is an insidious disease that kills more good startups than any other, especially high-tech ones, and yet most founders (who may be the cause) never…
Learning is an Entrepreneur’s Lifelong Job
Learning is at the core of entrepreneurial success. Not only do successful entrepreneurs know how to learn, they know what to learn, and they organize their work/life schedule so that…
Ghosts of Competitors Past
When selecting a location for your retail storefront, it's necessary to identify where the competition is. This Halloween season, we also want to know where the competition was. Find the…
How to Become a Residential Real Estate Developer
A residential real estate developer may be an entrepreneur or an established business. The developer envisions a residential real estate project and then takes it from a vision to paper…
The Four Cornerstones of Every Business Plan
The thought of preparing a business plan for the first time can be very intimidating. There are many "moving parts," and it’s easy to get lost in the details. The task becomes much easier if you think of your plan in terms of four essential cornerstones that serve as the foundation of all business plans: Opportunity, Solution, Execution, and Outcomes.
Improve Your People Skills
Investors invest in people, not ideas. Customers buy from people, not companies. Employees rally for a great leader. As an entrepreneur, you need relationships to succeed. That means relationships with…
How to Start a Bank
Question: Are the steps necessary to open a bank in Alabama the same as in Angola? Answer: pretty much, yes. If you are surprised, don’t be. Certainly, there will be…
How to Create a Business Plan Cover Page
We’ve all heard the adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. However, the truth is that people DO judge books by their covers – especially busy investors…
How to Start a Restaurant
As we’ve mentioned previously, we write many business plans for restaurant entrepreneurs. And, of course, we’ve published several blog posts on the subject. In 2014, we explained that the operational…
How to Start a Food Truck Business
The Food Truck Market is On Fire In 2012, when we were just beginning to understand the popularity of food trucks, we wrote a blog post titled Food Trucks are…