Posts Tagged ‘recommendation’
How to Write an Effective Business Plan in the 21st Century
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010David Ronick has penned a winner.
If you’ve never drafted a business plan (and need to), “Hit the Deck” is a great investment.
The title of Chapter 1 is “You Need a Business Plan. (Yes, This Means You)”. We absolutely agree, so we read further.
We’re glad we did. Ronick really “cuts to the chase” about what a business plan of the 21st century should look like and why it’s important not only for pursuing investors, but even more for the entrepreneur to set a solid foundation to enter the marketplace and complete.
Lots of step-by-step guidance and examples.
If you’re new to investing, it’s a great book for you to read as well; here, you can learn what you should be understanding and what you should be seeing from the entrepreneur pitching you an idea.
The days of a business plan looking like a 48 page master’s thesis are gone. David shows you how to craft a solid plan quickly and with both internal and external impact. Again, it’s a book you should add to your library, a quick read, and won’t set you back more than $15 or so.
You can buy “Hit the Deck” by clicking here.
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Fear: It's Part of the Process. Don't Pretend It's Not.
Thursday, December 9th, 2010“I would wake up in the middle of the night literally like clutching my chest, like, ‘What have I done?”
This quote could likely come from most of us entrepreneurs at one time or another. However, most of us may be surprised that it very recently came from one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time: Oprah Winfrey*.
We should be encouraged that even Oprah shares common entrepreneurial fears when launching a new venture. Fear is often part of the equation, but like risk, you shouldn’t try to ignore it or pretend it’s not there. You should be willing to manage both fear and risk and be able to absorb a higher dose of each, or seriously consider not taking the plunge into a new venture until you’re ready for this reality.
Again, you are not alone with this emotion, and there are many resources like ActSeed and local organizations in your own neighborhood that can help you confront the issues that “keep you up at night”.
Below are two video testimonials on how a couple of ActSeed Entrepreneurs deal with their professional fears:
*This quote comes from Oprah’s upcoming interview on ABC television with Barbara Walters tonight (December 9). Click here to learn more.
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An Innovative Guide to Nearly Every Aspect of Marketing for New & Emerging Companies
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010A highly recommended, workbook-style, practical yet innovative guide to nearly every aspect of marketing, pricing, and measurement for new and emerging companies. This book provides advice, examples, insight from industry leaders, and easy to use templates for key marketing, channel, and planning deliverables.
Monique Reece is a creative subject matter expert, and her integration of social media as a component of market development is current and relevant. Her presentation of the PRAISE methodology is easy to understand, explain, and implement across the organization.
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Jing it!
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Ever needed to quickly capture a specific section of your computer screen, maybe annotate it and paste it into an email for someone to clearly understand a point you’re trying to make? In less than 30 seconds? Jing it.
Before Jing – a nifty product from a Michigan company called TechSmith - I was using the “Prnt Scrn” button to capture the entire screen and customizing the view with annotations and cropping in PowerPoint or Adobe Photoshop Elements (the limit of my graphics capabilities) before pasting into the email. Time required: LOTS more than 30 seconds.
Now, I have a small sun at the top of my screen that I can click, which enables me to “draw” a rectangle on my screen. In this screen, I can either capture a still image or even start a video capture that pulls whatever occurs within that drawn screen area. Using my microphone, I can also comment on what is occurring on the screen, and I can even send the captured video segment directly to my YouTube channel or save it as an mp4.
When developing and debugging ActSeed’s community platform with a development team located in the US, Spain and India, we used Jing extensively to rapidly and clearly capture issues that needed modifying. We’re going to use Jing with one of its sister products (Camtasia) to create ActSeed video tutorials.
In summary, it’s worth your time to check out this clever tool. They offer an image capture version for free and the version that captures video (“Pro”) is only $15. If you don’t know me yet, I’m a big fan of paying for value, so I purchased the $15 version and think the price might even be a tad low for the value received. If you’re using a similar tool called Snagit, then you’re already familiar with this type of tool and guess what? Jing and Snagit are both siblings of the same parent company (TechSmith)!
You can download the free or Pro version of Jing here.
Disclaimer: Jing didn’t give me a free download. They didn’t pay me to say nice things. I pay my own way, but want to share this cool tool with other entrepreneurs and business people. We’re generally all the same – lots of needs, short on time and limited resources, so it’s nice to share a way to leverage our common reality with a tool like Jing!
Do you have a story to share about how you use Jing? We’d like to hear it, so please leave a comment if you can.
Do you have another cool tool or service that you think we should highlight? Please tell us!
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