March 2010
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Archive for March, 2010

Unconventional Mentors

( 25 Steps to Business Success and Bootstrap Capital and Bootstrap Entrepreneurs-- Case Studies and Branding and Business Models and Creativity and Value and Differentiated Value and Entrepreneur Skill Set and Financing and Gadgets and Gizmos and Mentoring and Pre-selling, Finding New Clients, Keeping Existing Ones and Sponsorship and Value Differentiation and 'Pixie Dust' and Venture Capital )

When student entrepreneurs are looking for mentors, they are often referred by well-meaning friends or relatives to the usual suspects: bankers, accountants and lawyers. There is only one problem with that—most of these folks don’t know very much about entrepreneurship.
I prefer to refer them to what I can only call unconventional mentors—people who know the [...]

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New Form of Financial Capital

( Bootstrap Capital and Business Models and Financing )

I have written extensively here and elsewhere on self-capitalization or bootstrap financing. It occurred to me though that self-capitalization might, in fact, be considered a new form of financing.
Think of it this way—financings have been done forever using two basic types of capital: equity and debt. It didn’t occur to me that self-capitalization could be [...]

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Engineering Ethics

( Ethics and Litigation and Political Economy )

(This is an essay I wrote in March 2010 before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico occurred. It seems even more important today. For example, if you are an engineer on the Deepwater Horizon rig and someone gives you an order to keep drilling even though the blowout preventer’s battery is dead, [...]

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Don’t Trade in Your Old Suit (Yet)

( Bootstrap Capital and Bootstrap Entrepreneurs-- Case Studies and Build and Hold and Business Models and Cash Conversion Cycle and Entrepreneur Skill Set and Financing and No Money Down Real Estate Investing and Receivables and Venture Capital )

[This article first appeared in OBJ, Ottawa Business Journal: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.]
“The world is a tough, competitive place,” said Jerry McGuire in the film of the same name. When I was a boy, there were about 3 billion people on this planet. Now there are nearly 7 billion. If you are a young person today entering [...]

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