EQ Journal

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Negative Cost Selling Solar Arrays

School Board Pays Negative Cost for new Solar Panel Installations Rex Parris, Mayor of Lancaster, California doesn’t like to lose. It must come from his class-action lawyer background where he won almost $1 billion in claims for his clients and himself. Three years ago he decided to make the city where the sun (almost) always [...]

An Entrepreneur’s Journey

Govindh Jayaraman Tries to Change the World and Himself (This article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, May 28, 2012: Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, March 5, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.) I met Govindh Jayaraman when he was a student and I was with the Ottawa Senators back in the day. He [...]

IOE, Institute of Entrepreneurs

IOE5100, Advanced Business Models Exploriem.org’s Institute of Entrepreneurs presents IOE5100, Advanced Business Models for Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and Artpreneurs, an MBA level course (For available dates and times as well as more information, please contact: Ms. Theresia Scholtes, tscholtes @ exploriem.org or @tclsholtes) Come study with Prof Bruce, a leader in designing and building business models [...]

Bootstrapping Your Own ETA Business

(Executive Travel Apartments Are Not Subject to RTA, Residential Tenancy Agreement) (Reducing Capital Requirements for Startups) A former student recently introduced me a new form of Bootstrap Capital, or at least, one I hadn’t considered before. It seems obvious to me now but I think it takes some creativity to apply it to any business [...]

Financial Leverage: A Simple Model

(Is Bootstrap Capital a New Form of Capital?) (What Occupy Wall Street is Really Complaining About) Leverage or gearing means using OPM, Other People’s Money, in one of your projects. Simply put, when your project’s rate of return is higher than the coupon rate (interest rate) on money you borrowed or used to capitalize it, [...]

Learn from Failure

T.C. Transitus Communications Inc. Case Study Introduction Unfortunately it is often true you can learn more from failure than you can from success. This was true of the Starflyer and it was true of Transitus as well. Just as the Starflyer was a can’t-miss idea of mine from the 1980s, Transitus was a can’t-miss idea [...]

CGI—Big Company, Small Attitude

(This article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, Jan. 9, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444) You expect a company with 31,000 employees and revenues of $4.32 billion in fiscal year 2011 which make it the seventh largest systems integrator in the world to have a big attitude. But meeting with tall, fit 40-something Scott Lawrence suggests a different [...]

Case Study: Digicel’s Decision to Enter Haiti Cell Phone Market

(Undergrad Mid Term Exam) I reproduce below a case study we did on Digicel’s decision to enter the cell phone market in Haiti. It was a controversial decision by Digicel CEO Denis O’Brien to go into Haiti, by far the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Digicel already had 11 million customers in 32 other [...]

Real Estate Investing Made Simple

I met with a couple in their early 40s last week and they asked me to lay out a program for them so that in addition to building their portfolio of financial assets, they could create a real estate portfolio as well. They agreed that the latter would not include a ‘flip this house/as-seen-on-TV’ approach–they [...]

Grasshoppers, Squirrels and Ants in Grassel

Occupy Grassel Movement Picking up Steam/Government Planning Action The majority of the population of Grassel is made up of Grasshoppers, Squirrels and Ants. Mensa Ants account for 1% of the population. These are the groups that populate the World of Grassel, viz: Grassel World, 100 Rows x 100 Columns 1. Grasshoppers are low wage earners [...]

Rent Curves

How Developers can Make More Money and Urban Design can Improve by Exploiting Vertical Rent Curves It has always amazed me that many developers, those veritable profit maximizers, don’t understand that neo-urbanist principles* can improve their returns while at the same time making them better city-builders and I suppose better corporate citizens. For example, most [...]

IRR, Internal Rate of Return

Power of Leverage/Goal Setting Determining the Internal Rate of Return Probably the truest measure of a project’s rate of return is its Internal Rate of Return. The IRR is that interest rate that exactly balances the discounted value of future net cashflows with the investment required to develop the project or enterprise. The higher the [...]