Entrepreneurship Tips

By Harvy Simkovits Are you starting the new year over-extended, over-committed, overwhelmed, and over-stressed in your business? Maybe you suffer from being under-leveraged as a leader! "Too much to do and not enough time" is a common mantra for most business owners. Too many demands and expectations from customers, employees, vendors (even consultants), not to mention your own family (who want a piece of your time), can throw off-kilter your well-intentioned New Year's business resolutions (those important "to-do's" you promised yourself in December to get to in January). Here are some thoughts to leverage yourself better (using yourself to your utmost capability, and better working through...

In any startup company, EACH employee MUST wear many hats. In a large company, job specialization is the rule. However, job specialization does not make for a successful startup, as it requires too many people and both the costs and risks would greatly increase with the added levels of people and communication. It is a well-known fact that there are diminishing returns with each layer and additional employees on any project. This is even more pronounced in knowledge-intensive areas and professional services like software engineering and other knowledge and design-intensive areas.  (Read The Mythical Man-Month). In early-stage and smaller companies,...

Launching a startup company may be the hardest thing you ever do.  This is a big question with many moving parts and hundreds of things to get right that comes from experience and art, not just black and white answers. However, there are many things that can be easily agreed on that will go a long way to getting you there.  First, let's talk about the stages because it is clear that there are very different skill sets and modes of operation at different stages of the company's development.  Let's call these stages Raw Startup, Early Revenue, and Established.  Raw...

John F. Welch Jr., CEO of General Electric, identifies four types of managers: 1) People who deliver on commitments and share the new values—retain and reward these people; 2) People who don't meet commitments and don't share the new values—these people must go; 3) People who sometimes fail to meet their commitments, but who share the values—give them a second chance; 4) People who meet commitments but don't share the values—they must change or go, because their results aren't worth the price.   Southwest Airlines has been successful hiring by the smile. Power vs. Powerlessness Powerless Empowered Create bureaucracy Do...

Giving Toothless Boards Some Bite  By Peter Cohen   Most directors are stuck in a system that makes it tough for them to protect shareholder interests. The author offers two solutions. The possibility of directors paying out of their own pockets for corporate misconduct occurring under their watch has been raised by three recent cases. On January, 18 Enron directors agreed to pay $168 million -- 10 of them spent $13 million of their own money -- to settle their portions of securities class-action suits. In February, a deal fell apart that would have had 10 former WorldCom directors settling...