Capitalizing Your Venture, as Easy as ABC

by Brad Axelrad on April 22, 2010

So often, it all comes down to money. To capital. To Investment.

How many times have you started a business with the best of intentions, only to realize that you quickly become so close to running out of your startup funds that you need to expand the business and take on clients you can’t possibly satisfy in the long term just to keep the doors open?

There’s nothing worse than taking on work just because you have to, instead of thinking about the long term. There’s little worse than managing fires rather than making sure they don’t start in the first place.

Capital is the lifeblood of any business, of course. But amid the strategic planning, the pie-in-the-sky hopes and the belief that prosperity is just around the corner, small business owners overlook that basic need for capital.

Whether you are an author, widget dealer or Internet marketer, capital could propel you to levels far beyond your vision, and it will certainly make the ride much more fun and easy. But what happens when the money is gone?

The goal is to create leverage plays with the capital.  A.B.C.:  Always be capitalizing.  Most entrepreneurs, or technicians having an “entrepreneurial seizure” as Michael Gerber calls it, will get stuck working in their businesses, without stepping away long enough to work on their business.

When businesses are infused with capital, much more time and energy can be spent on building alliances and more leveraged plays.  You can outsource, build teams, plan ahead, in short do whatever you need to get into revenue much quicker and in a much broader, more sustainable way.

At Prosper Now, Bill Walsh, the CEO/Founder of Business Coaching/Venture Capital firm Powerteam International, will be teaching you the ins and outs of capitalization. He explains what it takes to create success from the inside, rather than from the outside. Part of this is perseverance, rather than motivation, inspiration, vision and understanding – but also the knowledge of how to gather the proper funding to realize your dreams.

www.prosperevent.com

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Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances

by Brad Axelrad on April 20, 2010

In one of his most famous songs, the great playwright and songwriter Noel Coward sang, “I travel alone,” about his life of staying aloof from others and avoiding actual commitment.

May people today do the same thing when it comes to promoting themselves and their work. They prefer to do it alone. Here’s another line from that song: “Imagination is a form of flagellation.” People are afraid that they’re giving too much away of themselves if they offer their ideas to others to work with.

But if this age of text-driven social upheaval, of flash mobs, quantum computing and brainstorming via random-access memory drives means anything, it means this: we cannot do it alone. It is so much tougher to get our message out in a big way when we approach our marketing by ourselves, without the support of others.

The goal here is to understand collaboration, the entire give-and-take and inspiration that comes from the collaborative process. With true collaboration, people want to see you succeed as much as they do themselves. With collaboration, it becomes clear that the world has no limit on success.

Being truly in service to each other, while rewarding in itself, can also lead to success in business. And if it doesn’t, you’re not there by your lonesome, but in the company of others who are all after the same thing: moving ahead together.

One of the things we will talk about at Prosper Now is how to build your team to your weaknesses. That is, seek out people who knows a lot more than you do. It isn’t an “All About Eve” kind of thing, where the seemingly starry-eyed ingénue is actually plotting to overtake the established leading lady. It’s that no one is indispensable, and that you are only as good as your ability to attract the best people.

When you seek and attract people who will support your mission with grace, with an ease that comes form you, you’ll find that not only will people believe in you, and themselves, that you’ll more likely succeed than fail.

The fastest way to success is to team up with others, not traveling alone. Why is it that most do not do that?  For many people, it’s about ceding control. Most of these people don’t realize that they cannot control others. That life isn’t an us-against-them proposition, but one in which we are all collaborating in one way or another.

www.prosperevent.com

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Social & New Media and PR tactics

April 17, 2010

For many people, social media is like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one can really do anything about it. Well, sort of. Everyone does talk about it, as if it’s some arcane area of human understanding and strategic communications that only the chosen few (or high school students) can comprehend. And may [...]

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Powerful Mindset and NEVER giving up

April 14, 2010

As my dear friend and mentor Greg Reid says, “turn your obstacles into opportunities.” Well, most of us don’t do that. Most of us don’t have the persistence to make it. Greg talks about those mindsets in his book, “Three Feet from Gold.” Malcolm Gladwell talked about the paths to success in his bestseller “Outliers” [...]

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Strategy in the New Economy

April 12, 2010

Ah, the economy. Ah, the information age. Ah, the humanity. Topics for so much speculation. So many regrets. So many opportunities lost, realized, capitalized, squandered. Bubbles burst, new ones forming. Seismic shifts in the financial world and along the communications fault lines have led many of us to wonder where we go from here? Not [...]

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Following your purpose and your calling

April 11, 2010

Most of us – well, probably, all of us – have had  moments when we knew we wanted to do something better with our lives. For some, such a moment came as early as high school, when we yearned to get into a college that would help launch our career. For others, it was that [...]

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Welcome… Let’s expand the universe together

January 11, 2010

Welcome to my world!  As I type this, I wonder how to be as witty as possible.  Or maybe I should just be as authentic as possible.  What does it all mean?  How does a person be more authentic?  Isn’t it truly just about living from your heart’s calling and purpose more than anything else?  [...]

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