Unchained Entrepreneur – Business Advice

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!This Guide to Angel Investing Organizations is a detailed listing of more than 225 angel investor groups throughout the United States and Canada – as well as several international organizations. Although this guide is substantial, it does not purport to [...]

Continuing with our series on financial statements, today we are going to examine the Balance Sheet in more detail. Let’s evaluate the “left-hand” side of the Balance Sheet – Assets. Today, we’ll review the specific categories of Assets and examine some of these classifications in more detail. Cash is clearly the most liquid of assets. [...]

This article was first published as “For Want of a Nail . . .” on Technorati For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of [...]

This article was first published as “Smart vs. Hard” on Technorati Woody Allen famously said, “Ninety percent of success is just showing up.” The fact is, in a startup environment, you have to show up A LOT. Grinding out 12-plus-hour days is certainly a hallmark (if not a badge of honor) for many successful startups. [...]

Lack of self-confidence, or belief in your product/solution, can kill your startups chances. However, this risk characteristic is one that I rarely encounter amongst startups. Most entrepreneurs have a healthy dose of confidence – perhaps bordering on arrogance. In fact, this other extreme can be just as dangerous to startup success. Over-confidence in your abilities, [...]

The balance sheet is a snapshot of the financial condition of a company. Essentially, it reveals – at a set moment in time – what the company owns or possesses (assets), what the company owes (liabilities) and what the company is worth “on paper” (equity). Balance sheet items can be evaluated in various ways, but [...]

Before we finish with our examination of the Income Statement, it’s worth addressing some of the “games” that can be (and have been) played in reporting. Why is this important? At some point, you will likely be comparing your company to others in the industry for the purposes of analysis and valuation. Understanding some of [...]

When sitting through entrepreneurs’ presentations, I often find myself cringing when the “Advisory Board” slide makes its appearance. Advisory Boards have been in vogue for some time. In the “go-go” years of the first internet bubble, every company had such a group filled with household names. Even today, I find many startups use advisory boards [...]

Venture Capitalists, Investment Bankers and related professionals love to sprinkle their conversation with esoteric terms – most notably the fabled EBITDA and EBIT. Let’s examine the calculation of these items and, more importantly, why they are used. EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. Although this can be calculated from the Net [...]

More often than not, I find that business plans that are presented to me are woefully inadequate when it comes to the Go To Market section. We’ll explore Go To Market planning and needs in more detail in a future post. Today I want to address the “strategy” that many entrepreneurs expound when I draw [...]