Noozhawk.com in Santa Barbara has written a nice piece on our work at Formation Solutions, as well as a mention of a blog we started to highlight entrepreneurship in Santa Barbara.

From the lead-in:

In The Art of War, the general Sun Tzu observes that every battle is won or lost before it ever begins.

In modern-day parlance, it can be argued that every startup business venture either succeeds or fails long before a single transaction is completed. Or, to paraphrase a well-known cliché — failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

Matthew Burgess, founder and CEO of Formation Solutions, is quite familiar with the preparation involved with forming a business entity, and he is bringing that knowledge to bear to help people navigate the complex, often intimidating, entrepreneurial battlefield.

Noozhawk: Formation Solutions Smoothes the Steps to Starting a Business

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Recently, at a conference in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, I had the opportunity to see Jim Bunch, “The Ultimate Life Entrepreneur”, speak to a crowd of business professionals like myself. He introduced himself, and shortly thereafter played a clip of Chris Farley’s SNL skit where he is motivational speaker, Matt Foley, to illustrate that he’s not a motivational speaker. If you haven’t seen it, find it on YouTube, as it is pretty hilarious. Getting back to the topic, Jim’s message is simple: you have control over your own success, as he is living proof.

Jim Bunch has been extremely successful in business, while still maintaining his own personal version of an Ultimate Life: a wife, a 3-year old boy, and a healthy lifestyle. To say that he did really well during the “dot com” boom is an understatement. His achievements include being the pioneer of Bamboo.com, Ipix, and CoachGenie.com. He has already retired three times, and looks to be under forty years old.

The Ultimate Life, Jim Bunch’s philosophy, maintains that it is possible to have success in all areas of life: happiness, health, and wealth. You begin the process by looking inward at what is holding you back from living your dream. He explains that our belief systems are instilled in us in the first seven years of life, and we carry these around with us into our adulthood. He demonstrated this by starting sentences like, “money doesn’t grow on…” and we would all answer, “trees”.

He outlined the Seven Strategies to Creating Your Ultimate Life, and they are as follows (from his website, www.jimbunch.com):

“Strategy #1: Design Your Ultimate Life. Using a combination of exercises and mind-mapping, you’ll create a clear, focused plan for the upcoming year…and beyond. We want you to create true happiness, health, and wealth in your life and in the lives around you. What does your ultimate life look like?

Strategy #2: Determine Your Big Wins for the Year. Using measurable goals and scorecard, you will be able to track your goals and identify what areas you need more support in. This a great tool that keeps you focused on your current goals and taking consistent action.

Strategy #3: Design Your Pre-Game Strategy. You will break your year-long design into 90 day practices and habits that will enhance and support your plan. You’ll learn how to accomplish more with less effort so you have more free time and income.

Strategy #4: Become a Pro: Training and Development. This is where you’ll identify and develop the skills you need to support your ultimate goals. In learning what skillsets you have, you’ll also identify which skillsets you lack, which takes you to Strategy #5.

Strategy #5: Recruit Your Dream Team. As we mentioned above, if you’re missing a certain skillset that’s needed to support your ultimate life, you’ll need someone else who has it. So, what skills will you need on your team? What about as a back-up? What about the networks that will help you move faster and farther? You’ll identify all of this and be able to create your dream team for complete support.

Strategy #6: Play Full-Out and Play to Win! It sounds simple enough, but playing full-out is deeply rooted in awareness, accountability, and responsibility. You’ll discover how you can become more aware, accountable, and responsible to really play full out.

Strategy #7: Master Your Ultimate Plan: Review and Debrief. This is VERY important. To master your plan, you need to review what has worked and what hasn’t. The scorecard will help you identify this, but it’s also important to actually schedule time to do this. Most people do not review this type of feedback, and it’s one of the most integral aspects of your learning to be more successful.”

The seven strategies are just the beginning of living to your best potential. Learn more about Jim Bunch and start living your “Ultimate Life”.

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Joey Tamer talks about the loneliness of the CEO in a recent post on her blog. She discusses how to find the right consultant to work with on the questions and problems that you can’t take to others in your company.

The Loneliness of the CEO & A Way to Find a Solution

I’ve known Joey since she was introduced to me in 1999 by Mark Jeffrey, now CTO of Mahalo, and she joined the Board of Advisors of a technology startup we had co-founded. She has a certain calmness that you wouldn’t normally expect from someone packing so much raw brainpower. Exactly the sort of thing you need when you’re steering the ship of startup. She refers to her work as a “shadow” CEO to entrepreneurs of capitalized startups.

Take a look at her article and look around her site to learn about her consulting practice.

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Cash flow management is a critical part of running an effective small businesses. The first step to taking control of your cash flow is to get a clear picture of your cash situation, and understand how it changes from week to week, month to month, and quarter to quarter.

Benefits of good cash flow management include:

• Make sure your business doesn’t ever run out of cash.
• Foresee cash flow problems long before they arrive.
• Plan for seasonality and periods where you expect to have cash flow issues.
• Build and improve relationships with vendors.

The bottom line is that every small business should have a clear view of their cash flow picture. So how do you get this view?

Aaron Dyer at Dyer Consulting Group recently wrote an article on this topic:

Closing the Gap: Effective Cash Flow Management Practices for Small Business

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I’ve been discovering Mark Suster’s blog, Both Sides of the Table, where he discusses life and times of early stage technology companies. Having been both an entrepreneur (many times over) and now a venture capitalist, he brings a unique voice to the conversation.

In a recent blog post, he opines on the Most Common Early Start-up Mistakes. A summary:

1. Moonlight Responsibly – how to get started when you’re still stuck in your cube.
2. Register a company – he’s talking about forming an LLC or corporation: this is where we (Formation Solutions) can help. OK, he mentions other companies, but you know you love FS.
3. Pick the Founding Members – founding team should never have more than 2 members.
4. Research Your Market – not new advice, but always worth repeating
5. Get Customer Input – to what he says on this, I would add that there are many ways to use PPC advertising and informational products to test markets before even fully productizing. Ask me if you’re interested in what I mean.
6. and much more. Highly recommended blog: Most Common Early Start-up Mistakes.

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The Promise of a city repurposed by entrepreneurship.

The Declaration of Innovation tells the story of how New Orleans is rebounding from the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history. A passion for community  and problem solving helped us survive. Now innovation is taking the city to new levels of success, growth and joy.

Hard to know exactly what this campaign is, or where it is going, but I like the sentiment.

Declaration of Innovation.

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President Obama announced increased public sector funding of research that will drive innovation.

Entrepreneurs, start your engines.

The president spoke on Sept. 21 at the Hudson Valley Community College in New York about the adminstration’s efforts to boost innovation and sustainable growth in our country through higher greater accessibility to higher education and funding for the basic research.

From the Washington Post:

President Obama called Monday for “a new generation of innovation” as he outlined a strategy to build on more than $100 billion in economic stimulus funding to promote progress in such areas as clean energy, health care and basic research.

First step outlined by the president: strengthen education.

Through the adminstration’s American Graduation Initiative, they intend to reform and strengthen community colleges, because “a new generation of innovations depends on a new generation of innovators.”

Next: Increased Funding for Innovative Research

From the President’s remarks:

A former senator from New York, Robert Kennedy, once told us, “The future is not a gift.  It is an achievement.”  It was not an accident, not a gift, that America led the 20th century.  It was the result of hard work and discipline and sacrifice, and ambition that served a common purpose.  So it must be in the 21st century.  Future success is no guarantee.  As Americans we always have to remember that our leadership is not an inheritance; it is a responsibility.

The President announced a new committment to increased funding:

When we fail to invest in research, we fail to invest in the future.  Yet, since the peak of the space race in the 1960s, our national commitment to research and development has steadily fallen as a share of our national income.  That’s why I set a goal of putting a full 3 percent of our Gross Domestic Product, our national income, into research and development, surpassing the commitment we made when President Kennedy challenged this nation to send a man to the moon.

Washinton Post: Obama Pitches Innovation in Upstate New York
Full Speech Text: Remarks by the President on Innovation and Sustainable Growth

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Partner Spotlight – Dyer Consulting Group

Is Your Business Prepared for the Recovery?
7 Strategies to Ensure Future Success

We recently sat down with Aaron Dyer, president of Dyer Consulting Group, to learn about how he’s working with businesses to manage through the recessionary period and prepare for the opportunities that lie ahead.

We were very impressed with his knowledge and his passion. A true entrepreneur, on a mission to help other entrepreneurs. Our kind of guy.

He specializes in working with entrepreneurs and small businesses to help them develop more targeted and effective Strategic and Financial Plans. These plans help Dyer Consulting Group’s clients make better decisions, reduce their expenses, and boost their bottom line.

In these uncertain times, it can be challenging for entrepreneurs to know how to spend their time, how to assign human resources, and how to allocate their budget to go after the right opportunities, in the right order, and with the right level of aggressiveness.

Dyer Consulting Group works with businesses to identify opportunities and challenges, and in doing so, make better decisions.

Aaron recently wrote an article that we feel could be helpful to our clients and blog readers. Here are some excerpts.

Is Your Business Prepared for the Recovery? 7 Strategies to Ensure Future Success

When will this “great recession”, and the constant talk of it, end? Recovery may or may not be quick in getting here. But it will be coming. What I want to focus on is what businesses can do to position themselves for when things turn around. Many of us have been plodding along doing what we can in this “doing more with less” era. So, what can we do to prepare and position ourselves for this coming recovery? Here are 7 critical areas that you need to focus on.

Starting with:

Create a Strategic Plan

What is the point of surviving this recession if you’ve learned nothing from going through it? The new world will be different. Reflect on what has changed, both inside your organization and within your marketplace, and create a new vision based on what is now on the horizon. Strategic plans are key to managing the various aspects of a business because they help you focus on the factors which will drive success. It is also important to communicate this vision and work towards aligning your employees, so everyone is moving in the same direction. If you’re working on planning for the better times ahead, you’ll not only have a better chance at surviving the current storm, you’ll be ready to ride the next wave.

Aaron has a background in banking and finance, and he clearly brings a high level of competence to the table on matters of small business financial management. His next “critical area:”

Get Your Financial House in Order

You’ve got to create a firm foundation for growth if you want to participate in the upturn. To get your small business ready to take advantages of opportunities in the marketplace, you must understand the financial ebb and flow of your company. Understanding the patterns of cash flow in and out of your business is a larger part of success than many entrepreneurs realize. You should be tracing and managing this continually. Doing detailed financial projections, including cash flow budgets, will allow you to better anticipate the road ahead. You must also have at your disposal quality monthly (at a minimum) financial statements so that you can see trends in your business and plan accordingly. If you can measure it, then you can manage it!

The other 5 critical areas that Aaron highlights:

• Get the Right People on Your Team
• Look to Your Customers
• Look to Your Competitors’ Customers
• Leverage Technology
• Invest In the Right Areas

He closes the article with commentary on what is possible in the growth period ahead.

The recession crept up on us and we were unprepared. The recovery may be slow, but it will happen. This time there will be no excuse for being unprepared. If you keep doing what you have always done, you will continue to get what you have been getting. Change is inevitable. Don’t let it just happen — be the one who drives it.

Check out the entire article:
Is Your Business Prepared for the Recovery? 7 Strategies to Ensure Future Success

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I have something to say that is off topic for this blog in some ways, and yet in other ways it is entirely on topic.

My wife and I attended a funeral visitation last night, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

A young man that she had gone to high school with had passed away. He was in his early thirties, and he met a sudden, tragic end.

I did not know him, but the tragedy of this situation weighs very heavy on my mind and my heart. And it causes me to reflect.

Seeing his family gather in the funeral home, as hundreds and hundreds of people filed through to offer their condolences, caused so many thoughts and emotions to fire through my mind.

First, the thought of what they must be going through is heart wrenching. I can’t begin to imagine the pain.

He and his wife had been married just two weeks earlier. Can you imagine what she must be going through?

At the front of the room, on a picture board, were pictures from their wedding.

One photo really hit me. It was hard to get my eyes off it, and it has stuck with me. It was a picture of the couple dancing at the wedding reception, arms fully extended, nearly ready for a ballroom pull-back. They each had huge grins. They were so flush with pure life and pure love, a feeling I still carry from my wedding just over a year ago.

And as I looked away from the photo board and turned, just 5 feet to the left of this incredible photo was the casket. It was open, and inside was a much-too-young man with his hands crossed on his chest.

The moment of seeing into a casket, in the half dozen times I’ve witnessed this in my life, always shocks my system so deeply. There is no vision more striking to me than this.

The reality of our mortality and the utter finality of it all is so clear and so unavoidable at that moment, standing there, looking down.

And the contrast to the photos that I’d just seen was absolutely crushing. It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking out crying, just for the sadness of the moment.

So why am I writing about this here, on our blog, in close company with long, dry articles about naming conventions for LLC’s allowed under California Code, and about annual corporate compliance requirements?

Because it’s all part of what we do and why we do it. There are the fine details, and there is the big picture. Both are so important.

Our business is, to a great extent, about the fine details. It’s what we’re good at. But we are always motivated by the big picture. And a goal of our work is to free up some extra brainspace in our clients’ minds, so they can focus on the big picture as well.

As entrepeneurs, as members of our families, as humans; we work hard to build our businesses, so we can have the time and opportunity to live life. To cherish and spend time with those we love. To give back to our communities. To add value to the world.

Here’s wishing all of you a successful 2009 and 2010 ahead, with growth in your business, and safety and good health to you and your loved ones.

- Matthew

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There is  a great video that we’d like to share with you.

It was produced by a company called Grasshopper. They offer virtual phone systems, and we’re in the process of reviewing their offering, among others like it, so we can make recommendations to you all here, on our blog.

No conclusions yet on their service, but we do give this video Two Thumbs Up, Five Stars, etc.

It really captures the energy and excitement that we feel every day, as entrepreneurs, and as people fortunate enough to work with and for other entrepreneurs.

I have to admit, I got a little goosebumpy. 

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