Do you believe your­self to be an entre­pre­neur or busi­ness owner? Most often peo­ple use the term inter­change­ably… espe­cially when talk­ing about start-ups or small busi­nesses. This is a mis­take that I often run across, and most of those I’m talk­ing with are involved in estab­lished busi­nesses. One shouldn’t con­fuse man­age­ment with entre­pre­neur­ship. And here is why, despite both being processes, get it twisted and your entity will go down in flames.

Entre­pre­neur­ship is the process of iden­ti­fy­ing an oppor­tu­nity for which a mar­ketable need exists then fig­ur­ing out a con­sis­tent way to make mean­ing­ful returns from solv­ing that abyss.

Busi­ness Man­age­ment is an ongo­ing process of oper­at­ing an estab­lished busi­ness. Man­agers must be able to deal with the chal­lenges of:

• hir­ing
• react­ing to cus­tomer needs
• mak­ing sales
• keep­ing cash flow positive

Entre­pre­neurs exhibit the fol­low­ing behaviors:

• cre­ation – starts a new business
• inno­va­tion – estab­lishes a new pro­ce­dure, process, mar­ket, or organization
• risk assump­tion – bears risk of poten­tial loss
• gen­eral man­age­ment – allo­cates busi­ness resources
• per­for­mance inten­tion – expects high level of profit or growth

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

While I never going into depth about the finds, I do encour­age you check them out if they sound interesting.

How to Test a Busi­ness Model Like a Sci­en­tist
Whether you like it or not we base our deci­sions on the way we believe par­tic­u­lar things work. This is both good and bad; the good is that what we really are doing is putting together a series of hypoth­e­sis that develop a model, which means it can be tested. The bad is that this is so ingrained in human nature – think wis­dom – we often fail to real­ize that our insights are just those insights not facts. A sit­u­a­tion that in my house­hold often leads to some­one ulti­mately say ‘What I had in my head was that… ’. This post opens the door on how Steve Blank exploits this fact to bet­ter sit­u­ate businesses.

Are You A Small Busi­ness, A Startup, Or An Entre­pre­neur?
I must admit that it took me more than a minute to fig­ure this one out back in the 1990’s when I was first start­ing out. We often use, hear, refer to these terms as if they are inter­change­able. In real­ity they all have dis­tinct mean­ings although at times slight they can have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the sus­tain­abil­ity of a busi­ness or you own energy level. Read this post on Busi­ness Insider to see which you iden­tify with the most?

Visit my main site DonaldMcMichael.com to see the rest.

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

photo via LinkedIn

While I never going into depth about the finds, I do encour­age you check out my sum­mary post on my hub if they sound inter­est­ing.
 

• NBC News Dig­i­tal Chief: Video News Con­sump­tion is Big­ger Than Ever
• Don’t Com­pete — Change the Game
• How Hulu Lost Its Place in a Net­flix World
• 10 Mobile Trends for 2011
• Visu­al­ize your LinkedIn net­work with InMaps

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

Here’s a ques­tion or you. What’s the first thing you want to do once you’ve come up with a busi­ness concept?

Answer:  Deter­mine your legal struc­ture  — in other words, what kind of busi­ness are you going to legally establish?

Not the answer you were expect­ing. I’m not sur­prised, most peo­ple don’t.

So how do you choose the right busi­ness legal struc­ture? A good start is to answer the following:

1. Are you run­ning the busi­ness by your­self or with others?
2. Is it more impor­tant to you to have a sim­ple busi­ness and tax struc­ture or less per­sonal lia­bil­ity for debts and cor­po­rate judgments?
3. Will you need to raise a sub­stan­tial amount of cash?
4. Is the busi­ness form pre­scribed by state law / regulation?
5. What’s the expected life (dura­tion) of the venture?

Here are the options:

• Sole Pro­pri­etor­ship
• Part­ner­ship
• Cor­po­ra­tion (C or S)
• Lim­ited Lia­bil­ity Company

What’s the right choice? The one that best matches the pur­pose of the busi­ness in ques­tion, the level of per­sonal risk you’re will­ing to accept, and the one that best allows you to real­ize the answer for the above questions. 

Com­plex? Yes, but the deter­mi­na­tion is not hard. As always I encour­age you to seek expert advise, in this case form an attor­ney or CPA. There are many laws and reg­u­la­tions that apply to busi­nesses so it would be wise to arm your­self with the appro­pri­ate knowledge.

One last cau­tion­ary note, don’t con­fuse the legal form of own­er­ship with the size of the busi­ness. There are many cor­po­ra­tions that are small busi­nesses and LLCs that have hun­dreds of mil­lions in revenue.

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

This quote comes from a post that Bob DeSena penned for the Medi­a­Post blog TVBoard.

No ele­ment of media is unaf­fected by enabling tech­nol­ogy, cer­tainly not TV,  and because tech is sexy and smart and not the core com­pe­tence of most prac­ti­tion­ers, it seems to be emerg­ing some­times on its own.  It might need a new warn­ing label:   “Func­tion­al­ity does not enable provider to make money.”

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous