All business verticals have their own mechanics, some of which aren’t as obvious from the outside looking in. I’ve spent the last 8 years in the wonderful world of ratings, where the acronym PEARL is an easy way to remember an important mechanic. The great thing about PEARL is that it applies to any situation […]

Our friends at the Young Entrepreneurship Council asked eight entrepreneurs to share their top tips for pitching investors, based on their own success and failures. Here’s what they found: Share your vision, not a product tour It’s a rookie error for an entrepreneur to pitch an investor with the equivalent of a product tour. Investors are usually more […]

It stinks when clients leave you. All that effort to win them over, and then, unexpectedly, they give their next project to someone else. We’ve all experienced that. It’s normal to lose some clients, but some hard lessons over the years as well as a recent conversation with Rajat Paharia, author of the bestseller Loyalty […]

When you’re swamped with work and every helping hand is tied up elsewhere, you’ll need to decide between hiring a full-time employee or a freelancer. Wrong decisions can play mightily on your cash flow and productivity (two pretty important factors for startups), so here are some thoughts to keep in mind. 1. Look in the […]

Community management is one of those roles for which everyone assumes that they know exactly what it is that you do. “Oh, you’re a community manager …so, you do social media, right?” If only the answer were that simple. Community is a discipline within an organization, such as engineering, design, marketing or business development. Let’s […]

Just a few years ago, most companies’ social strategy was limited to a simple Facebook page cluttered with one-way promotional messages. Those days are gone. Customers are turning to social to help guide their buying decisions and inform their brand loyalty; in fact, nearly half of online users rely on social when making a purchase. […]

“I do biz dev.” Few times in history have more ambiguous words been spoken. Ask ten “VPs of Business Development” or similarly business card-ed folks what is business development, and you’re like to get just as many answers. “Business development is sales,” some will say, concisely. “Business development is partnerships,” others will say, vaguely. “Business […]