And so do you.
Whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or Joe Schmo starting your first business, you’ll need the right tools to do your job effectively. This is obvious, right? Well, not so much. Oftentimes a business owner will only buy what they need – not what they should have.
A mechanic could work this way as well – instead of buying a (more expensive) ratchet set, they COULD get by with just an open wrench. If mechanics worked this way, they’d take twice as long to get the job done. And no, this doesn’t mean they’d make twice as much money – soon the customer will realize they can go elsewhere, and pay half as much for labor costs. Does an oil change shop really need that fancy (expensive) drive-in setup to change your oil? No. Do they make more money because of it? Yes.
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For most entrepreneurs, ambition far exceeds even a superhuman workday. No matter how you slice and dice it, one person can only do so much. To do more, requires something more than working really, really hard. It requires delegation.
There may only be one of you in the world, but there are plenty of other people. So to overcome the speed bump of your own personal capacities, you’re going to need to get other people to do your work. This can be quite a daunting prospect, after all how do you find people? How can you trust them to do a good job? How do you pay them? What if they don’t work out?
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It’s a long, arduous road, coming up with a brandable business name. Here are my tips for your road trip to reaching your desired destination, a memorable and trusted brand name. 
Plan your destination (plan for the unplanned) - Before you even start the journey of finding the perfect name for your startup you need to know where your coming from and where you plan for your business to end up. This attempt at plotting your final destination seems easy, but focus on more than where you hope your business to go, take into consideration where the business COULD go. Southwest Airlines, originally the small airlines from Dallas Texas has become the affordable flight of choice, their slogan “You are free to move about the country” says just that. However, their name no longer matches with what they do and what their slogan says. Planning for your business to go places you never expected helps ensure that your name will fit with whatever your business becomes.
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A recent email exchange which touched on the subject of startup companies got me thinking. What really set me off was the question of when does a company stop being a startup. There is no doubt that at some point they all stop being a startup, either because they have matured into full fledged businesses or simply because they have failed.
There is no set time within which this must happen. Some companies go through longer startup phases than others, while a few actually mature very fast. Still, there is one thing that you can carry on with you even after your company has become a well established business: The Startup Spirit. Read More
Back in the summer of 2001 when I was in my final year of university, I had a part-time job at an internet cafe. It was in a dingy old pub with prehistoric computers and a barely-better-than-dialup connection shared amongst fifteen computers. Because it was such a crappy internet cafe no-one ever really went there. So I found myself with plenty of time to learn Photoshop, HTML and to dabble in PHP.
At that time the Dotcom Bubble had recently burst and though there were some ragged survivors like Amazon, the majority of the high flying, aeron buying, dotcom elite had come and gone. I used to sit in my internet cafe waiting for the nonexistent customers and think, “If only I had gotten into this web stuff five years ago, then I could have been part of all that excitement!” Read More
