Archive | June, 2019

If any of you read one of my blog posts entitled “Six Things VCs look for in an Investment,” you may remember that the first entry on the list is “An Extraordinary Entrepreneur with Unique Insight.” I recently watched an outstanding presentation called “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek (embedded at the bottom […]

Reason 1: Market Problems A major reason why companies fail, is that they run into the problem of their being little or no market for the product that they have built. Here are some common symptoms: There is not a compelling enough value proposition, or compelling event, to cause the buyer to actually commit to […]

This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points. Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with the goal of converting prospective customers into paying customers. The process is often thought of […]

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup […]

This is part of my series on Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. In this post I provide a case example to describe how one successful company built their Sales & Marketing machine. JBoss was an Open Source company providing free middleware software to it’s customers. By the end of 2003, JBoss had been downloaded […]

Starting a business is an exciting time, and its understandable that you want to introduce your new company to the world and believe that everyone – young or old, male or female, urban or rural, you name it – needs what you’re selling. As a small business owner, it’s important to feel enthusiastic about your […]

Small businesses are the backbone of most rural communities, but maybe more important than the businesses a community currently has is the ones it will have in the future. Will there be more or fewer? As another class of graduates leaves school behind, how many of them plan to run their own businesses? How many […]

    Getting ready to open the doors to your new business? Before you get started, you may want to spend some time evaluating what is important to you and your company. There are a million details that need to be attended to as a new business owner, and setting yourself up for success means […]

A lot of people think that starting a business is easy. This is not the case at all, in fact, it’s much harder than you’d think. After all, you need to think about the financial and legal repercussions, and even your reputation too. Be True to Yourself Before you even think about starting your business, […]

If a few years ago choosing a country to open a company was quite easy, nowadays competitiveness among governments has made the decision a hard one, especially when coming from a country like the Netherlands. While the Dutch already offer an excellent infrastructure and corporate taxation system, Europe has several countries which boast similar facilities […]