EQ Journal

Category

Why Businesses (Really) Fail

And Why Even Mighty IBM Can’t Forget the Basics Below are some data published by BusinessWeek on why businesses fail. I’ll bet you that the top five reasons (too much debt, inadequate leadership, poor planning, failure to change and inexperienced management) are in fact related to number six on their list: not enough revenue; i.e., [...]

70 Ways to Raise Bootstrap Capital

There are certainly hundreds or even thousands of clever techniques entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are using to raise cheap/free capital, aka bootstrap capital. No list is ever going to be complete. But here is our summary of what people are doing these days to self-capitalize their new products/services/enterprises. If you would like to add to our [...]

Raising Capital by ‘Issuing’ Script

(Plus Tapping Sponsors/Co-Branders/Strategic Investors and Partners for Free Capital) There’s nothing new about raising money by issuing script. The Reynolds Brothers ran a sawmill (established in 1870 by Orson L. Reynolds) in the Adirondacks that in addition to central logging and operating their mill also ran a company store and developed other sources of income [...]

Large Companies that Suck at Customer Service

I heard a rather pathetic story today which underlines just how bad many large companies have become at (what is now an oxymoron): customer service. Here’s how it went: A deadbeat customer of Virgin Mobile gave Virgin Mobile the cell number of his ex-roommate, who is a former student of mine. So Virgin Mobile starts [...]

The Complete Business Model

Author: Bruce M. Firestone, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, January 2010. Introduction The Business Model (BM) has come a long way in the last few years from a one page pictogram (or flowchart) of the ‘engine of your business’ to a many faceted model that fully describes the ‘engine room’ of the enterprise. [...]

Good Corporate Citizen

The City of Ottawa is yet again embarking on a planning exercise for rapid transit in Canada’s Capital City. Based on LRT (Light Rail Technology), the last initiative foundered badly, not because of the technology, not because the financing wasn’t available, not because the public interest wasn’t there in Light Rail but because of political [...]