How I Financed My Startup

I have started writing posts about my experiences launching Commercial Capital LLC, my factoring company. My last post covered how I changed industries to launch the company. In this post, I am going to tell you how I financed the company. By the way, this is not a tale of interminable venture capital pitches or […]

How One-Minute Meditation “Work Breaks” Boost Productivity and Creativity

I have been working on a little experiment. Like everyone, I take a number of breaks during the work day. During each break, I usually do one (or many) of these four things: Check twitter Check Facebook Check news/browse the Internet Go out and get some fresh air I noticed that while my breaks where distracting, […]

The Most Important Skill Every Startup Employee Should Have

My first job, right after college, was with a company called Metrica. The company was a software technology startup right in the middle of the Telco boom of the late nineties. The owners sold it to ADC Telecommunications for a tidy sum at the time. Landing that job was probably one of the luckiest career […]

How Meditation Can Make You a More Effective Entrepreneur

Looking to increase your effectiveness as an entrepreneur? Here is one trick – meditate. Sitting down (or lying down) for 5 minutes a day to meditate can have a dramatic effect on your business. You will make better decisions, handle adversity more effectively, and feel better overall. Every entrepreneur should do it. Meditation has gained […]

How I Launched My Startup and Learned a New Industry

Starting a business in a new industry is pretty challenging. It’s probably one of the toughest things I’ve had to do in my life. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to pull it off. And I emphasize the term “lucky.” I’m convinced that luck played an important role in making it past the first couple of […]

Getting Useful Real-Life Advice for Your Business Plan

One of the biggest problems with most business plans is that they are so inaccurate that they could qualify as works of fiction. This is a well-known problem in the business and investment community. As a matter of fact, most investors consider business plans to be virtually useless. Why? The overwhelming majority of plans lack realistic information. […]

How To Finance Growth After a Successful Kickstarter Campaign

Let’s assume that you have a great product that you want to launch. It solves a very specific problem, has mass appeal, and is destined for success. If you are like most entrepreneurs nowadays, you will create a crowdfunding campaign to see if your product has traction. Entrepreneurs do this every day through well-known platforms such […]

Laid off? How Starting a Business Can Help You Land a New Job

Losing your job can be very stressful and challenging, especially if the job loss came as a surprise. Obviously, you have to deal with the psychological impact of being laid off and with the loss of income. And then there is the subject of trying to get a new job. The search for a new […]

My Experiment with Conversion Rate Optimization

I recently decided to do a marketing experiment with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. I manage a factoring company that wants to increase the size of its portfolio, and I thought that PPC would work well for us. In case you don’t know what factoring is – it helps small companies by financing their slow-paying invoices. As you can imagine, […]

Should I Ask Friends and Family to Invest in My Business?

Finding the right type of business financing – or any financing, for that matter – is one of the greatest challenges that entrepreneurs face. Unfortunately, a brilliant business plan (or idea) won’t help you much unless you have the money to launch the startup. Asking your friends and family to invest in a business is a […]