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Things Every Tech Startup Needs to Know about Business Models

By Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (Civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD Abstract The Business Model is supplanting the Business Plan in many organizations. It not only describes the complete business ecosystem, it is a mechanism to discover profitable new relationships amongst stakeholder groups. The Business Model is more resilient than a plan and harder for competitors [...]

Moneyball Movie

10 Things You Can Learn about Sports and Business from Moneyball What the Ottawa Senators did Right to Make the Playoffs 12 out of 13 Years Television’s Golden Age could be Ahead not Behind I am an Aaron Sorkin fan from his days writing A Few Good Men, The American President and, of course, The [...]

How did Ross Video Experience 21 Consecutive Years of Growth?

(Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, March 30, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.) The sky is falling, the sky is… Many observers of Ottawa’s tech scene seem to think it’s the end of Silicon Valley North but try telling that to David Ross, 90% owner of Ross Video. The other 10% is owned by [...]

On Leadership (Continued)

(Prepared for Professor Matthew Archibald’s 4th year Seminar on Leadership Development: Friday March 9, 2012 from 1 to 3 pm in DMS 4140) For more on this subject, please refer to: Defining Leadership, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2668. Corporate Culture, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2656. The Entrepreneur Skill Set: A to Z, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=1274. On Leadership, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=1155. 10 Things that Entrepreneurs can Learn from [...]

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 [...]

Lost Knowledge

Are we losing the skills of the greatest generation ever? Recently I had the chance to interview Len Anderson, young dynamic founder and CEO of Ottawa-based Renaissance Repair and Supply (http://www.renrns.com). You can hear his interview on the FirestoneClarkReport.org (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/firestoneclarkreport/2012/01/25/len-anderson–ceo-renaissance-repair-supply). Len bootstrapped this business to $10m per year in sales in three years starting with [...]

Miss Buril

For our recent Xmas party, we decided on a rather unorthodox gift for every invitee. In addition to making wine together at the Wine Garden (see: http://thewinegarden.ca where everyone took home 12 bottles!), having a four course meal, listening to live music, hearing a mercifully short speech from the host (moi), people also got their [...]

S3 Growing at Exponential Rate

(This article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, Nov. 14, 2011: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444) I recently interviewed tall, charismatic 30-year old Select Start Studios’ CEO, Tariq Zaid in their cool headquarters in an old stone building fronting onto Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa. They’ve just remodeled the studio so that it can fit up to 25 highly-skilled, [...]

Defining Leadership

Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, says leadership is about getting people to do things they know are not in their best interests. WRONG. This is absolutely not what leaders do, at least, not the successful ones I have known in RL (Real Life). So for Adams and others, here is my attempt at defining what a [...]

Russian Dachnik Movement

Introduction The Russian Dacha and the Dachnik movement have been around for more than 100 years and the home garden for more than 1,000. The Dacha is typically a one-room cottage perched on one hectare of land—large enough to grow fruits and vegetables to support a single family via intense, mostly manual labour. One-room Russian [...]

How to Establish a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

The Story of Paul Vallée and Pythian Group Paul Vallée bootstrapped Pythian (pronounced ‘pith-ee-ann’) Group beginning in 1996 when he left a contract consulting position in Minneapolis that paid him $175 per hour and provided his family with a lovely lifestyle to come to Ottawa and live the impoverished life of an entrepreneur. His T4 [...]

Prof Bruce’s Startup DNA Checklist

“Those mundane and tedious little things that, when done exactly right, with the right kind of attention and intention, form in their aggregate a distinctive essence, an evanescent quality that distinguishes every great business you’ve ever done business with from its more mediocre counterparts whose owners are satisfied to simply get through the day,” Michael [...]