Posts Tagged ‘tips’
Recent Congressional Act May Be the Catalyst You Need to Secure Your Investor
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010If you have been “doing the dance” with a prospective investor who’s “almost there” with respect to investing in your company, we just received a tip worth sharing from Portland, Oregon law firm Roberts Kaplan that might be a positive tipping point for your negotiations. 
Apparently, the US legislature recently adopted new Act that effects small business investments. Within certain limitations (see some below), investments between September 27, 2010 and December 31, 2010 may qualify for a 100% exclusion of gain from the sale of small business stock.
From an investor’s standpoint, this could be HUGE and from an entrepreneur’s standpoint, anything that is this beneficial to an investor certainly has to factor positively in a decision to complete the deal.
The limitations on a qualifying deal may include:
- Must be made before year-end
- Company must be a C Corporation
- Investment must be held for 5 years
- Available only to non-corporate taxpayers
- Direct /original issue by the C corporation (can be through underwriter)
- The business must have assets of less than $50 million
- The business must also use 80% of its assets in a qualifying active business (no financial institutions, hotels, restaurants, farms, professional service firms) for substantially all of the holding period
Again, this may be helpful in raising capital by year end if you have potential investor “on the fence”, but here’s where ActSeed provides its disclaimer: While this interesting tip may be useful for you to explore, you should do it with an attorney and possibly even an accountant.
If you don’t already have an attorney, the folks who shared this information with us may be able to guide you and one of their specialties is working with small businesses and startups around the USA. For more information, contact Cliff Spencer at Roberts Kaplan: 503.221.0607. ActSeed is not compensated for referrals, but as always, we want to continue our mission to bridge capital from where it resides to where it is needed.
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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If You're Raising Capital (and you probably are), Read This Book
Thursday, May 6th, 2010“You can tell a story in a sentence; you can tell a story in a paragraph; and you can tell a story in a 20-minute pitch. Startups need to do all three.”
– from “Pitching Hacks” introduction
I’ll try to be as concise in my post as the book is in guiding you toward successful fund raising.
Nivi and Naval have a storied career with startups, both as fund-raising entrepreneurs and as investors, not to mention facilitators for other entrepreneurs and investors.
I’ve authored more business presentations, projections and plans than I’ve read about how others do it. But I’ve read a few books, and “Pitching Hacks” is the most concise, the most pragmatic and the most useful.
If you are about to “walk the fundraising gauntlet” – even if you’ve lived on Sand Hill Road before – read this book. For the first-time entrepreneur, it’s a gold nugget of guidance. For the seasoned startup veteran, it’s a superb refresher.
As authors Nivi and Naval say: “Investors don’t invest in businesses. They invest in stories about businesses.“
To buy this incredibly affordable book (<$19), go to the Amazon-powered ActSeed Marketplace (or if you prefer, go directly to Amazon)!
How to Get More "Information" and Less "Technology" from IT
Friday, April 30th, 2010Information technology is often a “third rail” of small business planning. IT is empowering …until it’s crippling. Planning and managing IT infrastructure in a small business usually seems massively distracting and expensive, right?
If you’re one of the rare companies that doesn’t even need a computer, read no further. On second thought, how are you reading this in the first place? For the rest of us business owners who need a little or a lot of IT to get our job done, I found a great book.
Leslie Knight recently published a book called “Navigating the IT Minefield“. It’s a very readable font size – 11 chapters and 150 pages of useful information for us small business owners who want a framework to address our technology needs and keep us from getting swindled by consultants. It’s not full of jargon. It’s full of useful and well-organized information. It’s not available in stores or Amazon as of this post, but you can find it here.
How about this scenario:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where.”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
While this is actually an excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it could be a conversation between a small business owner and an IT consultant (with the last statement likely being what the consultant is thinking, not saying out loud).
Leslie’s 19 years of IT experience (Amoco and Gartner Group) is just part of where the value of this book is derived. Her work in management consulting and involvement in “CEO Space” helps her relate to the rest of us who aren’t IT gurus.
What is the value of a fire extinguisher? That somewhat depends upon if you use it, but investing in a fire extinguisher is no different than investing a couple of hours reading Leslie’s book and having it handy for reference.
I’m not paid to promote Leslie’s book, nor is ActSeed an affiliate marketer of this book. It’s just a book I definitely believe is worth a few of your shekels.
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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? I’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 me!
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Leveraging Our Realities to Make Yours Better
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009…and hoping you’ll be doing the same for us!
I’ve benefited from many random but excellent recommendations and suggestions over the years. Have you ever overheard someone talking about a productivity-enhancing tool or widget, tried it and found it to be irreplaceable? Have you ever had a colleague recommend a service in casual conversation that becomes indispensable to your business?
Well, I have for sure. Many of them, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you.
When we can, we’ll do our best to not only suggest processes, technologies, services, etc. that can increase your productivity, boost your efficiency or generally protect your sanity, but we’ll also try to give you the “entrepreneur’s perspective” and possibly even share a word or two from the entrepreneurs who are responsible for the innovative solutions we’re championing.
We want this to be a two way street as well. Please share tips, tools and services that you discover. Inspire us! We hope to return the favor here…
