Articles & Insights

If you run a small services business, you spend a lot of time thinking about where your next customer will come from. Given the time you invest in building a sales pipeline, you might be surprised to learn that almost everything you have been told about the sales process is wrong. Traditional sales thinking puts all the emphasis on stuffing the funnel with prospects. If you cast your net wide…

Which is better, the business plan or the executive summary? Academic institutions and the marketplace appear to be moving in opposite directions on this question. While many business students are required to develop 30- to 50-page business plans, we’ve found that these lengthy documents are used less and less in the real world, with the exception of more mature businesses in private equity or M&A transactions. For most early-stage businesses,…

In my career, I have probably read over 2000 business plans from entrepreneurs seeking their first round of investment capital. I tend to cringe (as do all venture investors) a little bit when folks ask me for an NDA simply to hear their idea. As a general rule, I believe the entrepreneurs who are taking this approach have been given bad advice and often tend to be putting too much…

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of online commerce. Many people often ask me, what is affiliate marketing exactly? The easiest answer I can give is that it is the process by which online businesses give other websites access to tools and marketing collateral to sell products from their website on the company’s behalf. Just to get the terms right, an “affiliate” (i.e. Mike’s Tech Reviews) is…

One of the great things about starting a business today is the number of smaller consulting firms that can help you. These outsourced partners can serve as an integral resource for your team at an early stage but there is a catch. You can’t do it all so that’s why you hire the experts. This is what we do at Acceleration Partners and along with other service providers who excel…

So I am reading the lead Wall Street Journal article this morning about the failed performance of the Sprint/Nextel merger. The author goes into all the ways that Sprint has botched the integration, from diluting the Nextel brand to failing to integrate the two networks. He also talks about how the company has had massive turnover and has lost customers at a time when other carriers are growing. However, none…

We swore we’d learn from the meltdown of 2000, but we haven’t. In many ways it’s almost worse this time, because we know how the story ends. Here are my Top 5 reasons for believing we’re in a Web 2.0 bubble. 5. Too Much Money While it is a bit harder to get financial backing these days, the companies that do get funded often get over funded. Venture firms today…

I have been following the residential housing market closely for many now years and have tried over and over to make the case to friends, colleagues and family members that reduced lending standards were the primary driver behind skyrocketing real estate prices over the past five years; not the economy, not interest rates and certainly not immigrants, which is a favorite fallback rationale for the mortgage industry and the real…

I read an article recently about the gentleman who invented office cubes that said he felt his invention was a great disservice to society. I feel the same way about these companies who decided that the way to help businesses better manage customer service inquires was to provide stock answers for agents to respond to questions with so that they wouldn’t actually have to deal with the nature of problem…

Imagine a restaurant where dinner was free. That’s right, free. You and your significant other are invited to this four star establishment to enjoy a five-course meal served by a world-renowned chef. This restaurant is in a great location and is always booked on weekends. So there must be a catch here, right? Well, sort of. At the time of your reservation, the hostess will ask you a few basic…