Planning, Startups, Stories

Speed Mentoring in Corvallis Thursday

If you're within striking distance of Corvallis, I'll be speaking Thursday at Iovino's Ristorante on the Riverfront, at noon. Here's the info: Speaker Lunch - business in Corvallis, Oregon.

Please Join Me Tomorrow, Wednesday

Allow me to invite you to tune in to WDEL, 1150 AM in Wilmington, Delaware, or to join via Internet radio at www.wdel.com, where I'll be a guest of host Rick Jensen for his daily talk show. The topic is starting your own business, sort of -- I had a nice talk with Rick yesterday, I suspect he's going to let that topic drift a bit, to baby boomers, retirement or not, recession, starting a business during a recession. That's just a hunch. Here's how Rick announced it on his blog:

Call-In Line: 478-9335

Thinking of ways to make a little more money as the cost of EVERYTHING goes up? Do you have an idea for a part-time business? Talk with Tim Berry, president and founder of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, co-founder of Borland International, author of books and software on business planning, Stanford MBA. He's done it, written about it and teaches how to get it done.

Talk with Tim at 2:07 PM, tomorrow, Wednesday, June 25th!

That's 2:07 PM Eastern Time, so 1:07 Central Time, 12:07 Mountain Time, and 11:07 AM on the (good ol') West Coast.

Join Me and John Jantsch on Tuesday

I'll be in live audio as the guest of host John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing this Tuesday as part of his Small business coaching expert series podcasts. That's Tuesday at 2 pm CDT, noon PDT and 3 pm EDT. The session is free but you need to enroll first (which is also free).

Radio Interview

I had a good time on the Jim Blasingame show last Thursday, a nice break from vacation ... here's the audio:

Can You Really Start a Business in Three Weeks?

Yes, you can. Maybe not all businesses. Maybe not any business. Some businesses, though, can start in three weeks. My first business started the day a former client called and asked my to do a market study in Venezuela. That changed things from one day to the next.

That's a true story. If you're curious, I posted that one a few months ago on this blog as The First Day of a New Business.  That's one example. There are millions.

There are 21 million companies in the United States without employees. I wonder how many of them started up in 3 weeks or less.

A 2006 study sponsored by Wells Fargo and Conducted by Gallup found that the average startup cost was about $10,000. I wonder how many of those started in three weeks or less.

It would be easier to count the businesses that can't start in three weeks, because there are a lot fewer of them.

• You can't do it in three weeks if you have to raise significant money to start with. I have indications that angel investors financed about 60,000 new businesses in the United States last year, and venture capital investors are doing about 2,500 deals per year. That's a very fine stratum at the top of the new business picture, a small percentage of the 800,000 or so new businesses started in an average year.
• You can't do it if you have to wait longer than three weeks for a bank loan. Some bank loans can take less than three weeks. That's more likely if you're borrowing off an established and solid asset, like your house equity (if it is solid and established, and not a victim of the sub-prime mess).
• You can't do it in three weeks if you have to establish a location, build a team from scratch, manage prototypes, prove your viability. All those are among other reasons.

Even in those cases, however, you can play with the definitions. You can call it starting in three weeks if you get the team together, the basic idea settled, the first legal steps taken, and you start the search for the location and start the search for funding.

Why do I care? That's a reasonable question. Yesterday Sabrina Parsons and I finished our compete draft of a book called "Start Your Business in Three Weeks," to be published by Entrepreneur Press next fall.

That was the second book draft I've sent to Entrepreneur in two months, and the last for a long time. Of course I/we didn't write them that fast, they were both a long time coming. That's what happens, I guess, when you name a new CEO for a company and task its long-time president with blogging writing, teaching, and speaking.

687 Blog Posts and Columns

Yesterday I implemented a DabbleDB database of my blog posts and columns and such, including this blog and Up and Running, plus a few posts on Small Business Trends and Huffington Post, my blog on Allbusiness.com (which doesn't get many posts these days).

The DabbleDB idea is working quite well, if you are (as I am) willing to compromise sometimes and do things the way the technology wants (or rather, the way the programmers want). It's free too, because I've allowed it to go into the public domain.

I'm working on a better keyword search, but in the meantime you can use the search facility on your browser (probably in your edit menu) to search for any specific word or phrase.

The nice thing is that anybody with an editor password can update the database at any time, it automatically flows into what's available on this page.

The other nice thing is, well, er, 687 posts.  I can see why that might be irrelevant to you, but it's very convenient for me. I get an instant hit on what I wrote where.

If you're curious about DabbleDB, that's at www.dabbledb.com. I'm going to be looking at the Amazon database facility that's just recently been set up to go along with the S3 storage and Web facilities, but in the meantime, this seems to work.

Events Coming Up

This coming Saturday, Jan. 19th, I'll be in Corvallis, Oregon speaking on "Essentials of Business Planning for Nonprofits," as part of an event sponsored by Financial Stewardship Resources.

On Friday, Jan. 25, I'll be in Miami as a panelist in the Women's Congress session on succession planning.

On Thursday, February 7, I'm giving a workshop in the Portland, Oregon area on Plan-as-you-go Business Planning. That's from 1 pm to 5 pm, starts out with plan-as-you-go planning and goes into one-on-one coaching and tutorial for your specific business plan.

Posting from Oxford Today

So I'm tired today, writing from the Old Bank Hotel in Oxford (UK), where I'll be speaking to MBA students on Monday. Oxford has a very attractive MBA program. Alan Gleeson, Managing Director of Palo Alto Software Ltd here in the UK, is a graduate.

Not much else to say. Given that I spent last night on a plane, probably better I stay brief.

One advantage of living in Eugene, OR, is that when you get to Oxford in early January, the cold gray weather is not all that different from home.

Join Me with Jim Blasingame Nov. 13

I'm very proud to be scheduled on Jim Blasingame's 10th anniversary radio show at 8:30 am EST  on Tuesday Nov. 13.  You'll be able to listen live by clicking onto Jim's home page at the Small Business Advocate and the archived recording will be up later, so you can still listen even if you can't make the live session.

If you don't already know Jim's Small Business Advocate show and the accompanying website -- I've recommended it on this blog in the past -- now is a good time to go there and start exploring. Jim has an amazing inventory of archived shows, great advice, and excellent value. He's an excellent interviewer and he's been bringing in expert guests for 10 years now, five days a week, two or more hours per day.

Check out his archive.

Radio with Me Tomorrow Nov. 6

I'm going to be Anita Campbell's guest tomorrow on Small Business Trends Radio at 1:30 pm EST which is also 10:30 am PST and a couple of hours in between as well. There's a "listen live" link on the home page.

The topic is Plan as You Go Business Planning, my most recent attitude adjustment on the growing need for agile and flexible business planning that assumes rapid change and constant uncertainty. The closest thing to that already posted here is the Not so Big Business Plan post from a few weeks ago.

Please join us!