EQ Journal

Category

Bundling

I think bundling is going to be a big factor in terms of leveraging entrepreneurial ventures in this century. For example, Lululemon Athletica not only sells active wear they also have Yoga classes in their stores. In essence, they are housing two complementary businesses under the same roof. But there is no reason why they [...]

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 [...]

Finding Bootstrap Capital Where You Least Expect It

(How one company made $800,000 from their below market office lease) Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs work their magic every time they launch a new company/product or service with little or no funding. They’re amazingly good at finding niche opportunities and exploiting them to raise cash. Here’s one I learned from Rod Bryden who was on the [...]

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 [...]

Negative Cost Selling a Mobile App

Put Leverage in Your Biz Model What’s the most common reason a municipality or non-profit turns down a project? “We don’t have the budget for that!” There was a time not too long ago (circa post WWII) when municipalities thought of things like roads, sewers, power lines and water mains as investments; today, they think [...]

Highest and Best Use

A Guiding Philosophy for Neo-Urbanist Designers Why Nimby’ites are Wrong to Oppose Higher Densities and Mixed Use Negative Property Taxes Urban Catalysts/Anti-Catalysts Highest and Best Use “Highest and best use for a property is achieved when the value created by its development for a specific set of physically possible, permitted uses (its functional program) and [...]

Due Diligence

The process one goes through in purchasing a piece of real estate is remarkably similar to the process one utilizes to determine a site’s highest and best use (http://www.dramatispersonae.org/HighestAndBestUse.htm). It also resembles the process Banks and other funders use to determine their risks from lending to a proposed (or existing) project. Duly Diligent What are [...]

Landlord from Hell

Ten Reasons Why Your Landlord Wouldn’t Lease Space to God I recently saw a notice from a property management group that I thought just might be the worst form of ‘client relations’ ever. I scrubbed it of identifiers and here it is: Worst Client Relations Notice Ever As you can see this Landlord has pretty [...]

Commercial Rents

Commercial Leasing is Trickier than Residential Commercial rents in Ontario are more difficult to understand and calculate than residential rents. Residential rents are pretty basic: typically, the Tenant pays monthly rent in advance. There is no HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) on residential rents so if your apartment rent, say, is $1,000 monthly, that is what [...]