GIVE Potential Investors What they WANT

If you are thinking of starting your own business and want to get funding from venture capitalists or angel investors, there are some important things to think about, to increase your chances of success.

Venture capitalists engage in pattern recognition. They listen to many business plans and pitches and see many successes and failures. Over time they develop an ability to recognise patterns that occur in successful ventures. What you need to do, is understand what patterns they typically look for and develop/position your business idea as a new instance of such patterns. Here is what you need to keep in mind and think about:

Quality of management: The management team is important because investors want to be assured that when things go wrong, the company will be able to cope properly. They will look for signs of integrity, adaptive capacity, passion/motivation, number/depth of contacts and relevant experience

Value proposition: Is your solution/service/product a vitamin or a pain pill i.e. is it a nice-to-have or does it solve a pressing need for your target customers? Look not only at the product offering but also at the buying experience and the usage life cycle. How can you add benefits and/or eliminate costly benefits with little value?

Target market attractiveness: The market segment that you are targetting should provide a large enough customer base and attractive margins

Opportunities for growth: Is there enough opportunity to reap the benefits of economies of scale and scope. In the end you need to provide a return of 3-4 times the investors initial outlay

Competitive advantage and barriers to entry: How long can you hold off competition and is there anything about your business that they will not be able to replicate

These are some of the key issues to consider when starting a new venture and seeking funding. Each of the points covered has many aspects that need to be dealt with and there is too much to cover through articles. However, I hope this provides you with some good food for thought and sets you off in the right direction.


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This is a guest post by Amit Puri. He is the Managing Consultant at Sandbox Advisors. He has over 10 years of business and HR related experience, with companies such as Bain & Co, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Sandbox Advisors is based in Singapore and provides career management and HR consulting services in Asia.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

Link Building | Essential to Successful Website Building

Among the popular misconceptions among novice or young online entrepreneurs is that once you have created a website for your products and services, coupled with on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you are on your way to a successful online business. But this were not so.

An excellent product or service, a well-designed website and a SEO optimized webcopy are but necessary requisites. These are only the components of your website’s first level foundation. There is more.

Search engines, especially Google, are very dynamic, so much, so that their algorithms are sometimes too complicated to predict or analyze. They’re always changing. This is primarily to protect the integrity to their SERPs or Search Result Pages. Many black SEO practitioners out there are relentlessly looking for ways to go behind the current established algorithm. Thus, from time to time you will notice diluted SERPs in your queries.

There is a consensus among SEO practitioners, both legit and black hat, that link popularity still plays a huge part for ranking high in search engines’ results. However, not just links or reciprocal links in some cases, but links coming from relevant sites. Moreover, appropriate anchor texts are also being given a high importance by search engine spiders.

The question now is, would link building services can still provide you these quality and relevant backlinks you need for your site to rank higher in SERP? Yes. Definitely. I think there is no contention on that.

However though, for novice and young entrepreneurs, these could be costly. Hence, when I am asked what is the best way to get these relevant incoming links, I would always proffer the conventional way doing it, by commenting on other blogs and writing quality contents that are link-worthy.

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About the Author

Nor Franco is the Managing Director and Virtual CEO of nextManager.net. He's a former corporate executive whose passion is bringing out the full potential of HR in Businesses. This time that passion is pursued through Virtual Management. He writes and blogs about his management views and insights here. Follow him on Twitter.

Does Corporate Culture Contribute to Performance?

Synopsis

This article explores connections between corporate cultures and corporate performance in various industries. First, it provides a brief background on the notion of "culture"; second, it sets out a brief typology of corporate culture. Third, it examines various corporate cultural types in relation to industry performance; and finally, some conclusions are drawn on the importance to corporate survival of organizational and cultural adaptation to competitive environments.

Introduction and Context

An expert on cross-cultural management, Geert Hofstede (1984, p.21) defines culture as "the collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes one human group from another ... Culture in this sense includes systems of values, and values are among the building blocks of culture." A few years later, his notion of culture broadened into "mental programming ... patterns of thinking and feeling, and potential acting" (Hofstede, 1991, p.4). Sociologists (Namenworth & Weber, 1987, p.8) see culture as a "system of ideas that constitute a design for living." For our purposes here, culture is viewed as a system of values, norms, and ideas, shared by a group of people, that when taken together provide a design for thinking, living and potential acting.

There are, however, many types of cultures, including national, country or regional (Hofstede, 1984, 1991; Schneider & Barsoux, 1997; Terpstra & David, 1991); global electronic (Targowski, 1990); ethnic; gender; generational; business, professional; occupational; and organizational, or corporate (Bloor & Dawson, 1994). While this paper draws from the international management literature, which has long acknowledged the importance of national cultural characteristics as determinants of management behavior (Farmer & Richmond, 1965; Schneider, 1988), it serves only to position the notion of corporate culture within a broader context. Read full article here by TheFreeLibrary.com