We get it. With all that experience under your belt and the results to prove it, you feel like you’re a thought leader in your field. You’re probably right. But what do you do now?

To Expand or Not to Expand

You probably don’t want to rest on your laurels. Too much stability can easily turn into stagnation. Even if you are at the top now, there’s always the chance of falling behind your competitors. One must always adapt to changing market conditions in order to maintain their dominance.

Besides, it’s only natural that most business owners who obtain consistent results still want to continue to expand their company–– they’re not the kind of people to settle, even for a good thing. True entrepreneurs only settle for the best.

This is especially true for serial entrepreneurs, who build a business in one market and then move on to another. (Lifestyle entrepreneurs, on the other hand, can afford to stay put once they’ve earned enough revenue to automate their business.)

The Downside of Familiarity

Too often we mistake our familiarity for Expertise. While gaining familiarity in a certain field is essential for developing expertise, it can also make us shortsighted when it comes to discovering novel and ultimately more convenient ways of doing things. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt as often as it breeds blindness.

Think about it. If you haven’t outsourced certain aspects of production or service to outside agencies, your hands-on knowledge has likely prompted you to question the way you and your employees do things. You’ve probably done a lot of bookkeeping for your company and noticed that some of your production or service costs look way too high to be reasonable. You’ve probably gone through the same extended process to produce a product or service for a client and realized that there must be some obvious way to save time. Maybe you want to expand into a new market, but feel like you’ve lost the creative edge you had when you first started out. You’ve probably tried to think of solutions to these bothersome problems…but you can’t. Why?

It’s not because you’re ignorant––you wouldn’t have gotten this far if that were the case. Rather, it’s precisely because you’re so enmeshed in the day-to-day operations of your business that you can’t think outside the box to produce solutions. Your point-of-reference is too close to the problem. 

But this is exactly why many business owners consider hiring outside firms to audit their company and devise cost-cutting or growth-hacking strategies. Sometimes in order to see into the heart of things, we have to see them anew.

But what if you don’t have the funds to hire a consultant or agency? The next best thing is to do a self-audit. But wait, didn’t we just say being too involved in your business prevents you from thinking creatively? Yes, but that doesn’t mean your creativity is gone for good. You can get it back, and it’s literally as easy as taking a step back. 

Let’s do some mental exercise.

Go Back to Square One

First, for just a moment, pretend you’re not knowledgeable about your company. Pretend you’re a complete novice, looking at your business with fresh eyes.

If you’re looking at adjusting your business’ overall long-term goals, or expanding into new markets, pretend you’re back at square one as a wide-eyed entrepreneur with little to no experience. Get back into the head-space you had at the beginning of this journey. If you were a wide-eyed entrepreneur and you were handed the company as it is now, what would you change? Is there anything you would rebuild from the ground up? Is there anything you wish you had done at the start but hadn’t out of laziness, fatigue, or fear of undoing a settled business process? If you were furnishing a service or product that’s totally brand-new, but still connected to your brand, how would you do it?

For even better results, consult the notes and plans you made when you were first starting out. Where did you think you were going to be at this point in time? Have you exceeded your expectations, or failed to meet them? By how much? Which larger obstacles to growth caused you to adjust your goals if this was the case? Did your adjustments succeed, or are you still saddled with the same problems?

Get a Second Opinion

You might want to ask some of your trusted friends of a more entrepreneurial bent to put themselves in your shoes. Tell them some of the problems you’ve been facing, and ask them how they would go about solving them.

If you’re looking to reduce time and money spent on ordinary business operations, it’s helpful to put yourself in the position of the people who know that aspect of your company the best–– your employees. For each role in every business process, consider all the duties assigned to the employee who fulfills that role. Look at the SOPs these employees follow daily. If you were such an employee, is there anything you would consider cutting out? Is something wasteful, redundant, or time-consuming? Is the hardware or software used to carry out these duties up-to-date? Do you have two or more layers of safeguards when you only need one?

Next, think at a higher level of complexity: that of the process as a whole. Managers are usually tasked with coordinating employees, and if you can put yourself in their shoes and ask the same questions you asked your employees, you’ll be able to refine things at the process level. A classical music composer is unable to create or refine a piece of symphonic music unless they intimately understands the role of each instrument and its player. 

Better yet, consult your employees and ask them these very same questions. Without being intimidating or judgmental, ask them what they think the biggest problem with their daily procedure is and what their solutions to these problems would entail. This way, you are more likely to get honest, unfiltered responses (because sometimes we like to tell ourselves lies and half-truths for the sake of psychological convenience or comfort).

Conclusion

If you ask yourself these questions, you’ll be that much closer to creating not only the most efficient business possible, but also a business aligned with a long-term goal that’s been tailored to past experience and existing reality.

SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure and refers to a procedure which your company performs in the course of business. An SOP is not just a simple step-by-step process. A process is usually a high-level description of what goes on in your business, in the same way the “high concept” of a movie is a general statement of the movie’s theme and plot. In contrast, an SOP outlines in greater detail the series of steps needed to ensure the smooth operation of a business process. Crafting an SOP doesn’t always mean putting together a series of steps which runs backwards and forwards. It could also include multiple layers of steps and several sets of required conditions before the employee can move between steps. In other words, an SOP often looks more like a complex flowchart than a laundry list.

An SOP could run from anything like a step-by-step production line procedure for the purposes of producing new products and training staff, to a series of rules designed to ensure compliance with provincial law, industry regulations, or a company’s own internal standards for quality control. 

Ultimately, all SOPs are designed to create efficiencies–and thus profitability–in any business process. They also ensure consistency and reliability, whether a company is involved in the production of a product or the provision of a service. SOPs accomplish this goal by disseminating information relevant to execution of the process to employees; the more employees know, the fewer errors they are likely to make. Moreover, employers don’t have to worry about repeating themselves or remember what they told a particular employee at a particular time.

SOPs also have a tendency to improve the workplace. On the legal side, they often foster a healthier and safer work environment and protect employers from potential liability (especially where inspection by any regulatory body is concerned). Likewise, they have the ability to improve a company’s relationship with partners, potential partners, and clients by furnishing them with clear evidence of safe and orderly operations with high work and production standards. In terms of emotional health, SOPs can be a godsend; they reduce conflict in troubleshooting by providing a needed focus on the problem at hand and a roadmap for solving a wide variety of issues. When employers evaluate employees, personal bias needn’t intrude–– the SOP is the gold standard for determining how well an employee has done their job. Without a doubt, SOPs come with a bevy of benefits that can only add value to your business and make it far easier to run. 

Below we’ve compiled a list of tips to follow when crafting SOPs for your business. While we understand that each and every business is unique in terms of its market, leader’s own personal style, and industry’s best practices, there are a few general guidelines you should follow when putting pen to paper. 

Make It Before You Try It

If you’re running  a startup, try to craft SOPs before you initiate a new business process. This is the best way to ensure that you’ll always have a plan and that everyone in your company knows what’s expected from them with regard to each and every business process.

However, founders and CEOs of larger companies may not always be able to plan ahead due to time constraints and the difficulty of managing greater personnel and resources. In this case, you should have a manager write out the SOP as they implement a business process for the first time. If a manager is unavailable, you can have an employee or virtual assistant do this as well. This way you will always have an SOP on hand, even if your managers or employees have to shift gears. Some companies have project managers who handle company SOPs exclusively.

Get a Little List

We get it–– coming up with SOPs for your entire business, when up to this point you haven’t used any, can be daunting. No worries, getting started is as easy as talking to your employees and their managers to get a good idea of what everyone does and how they do it well. From this information you will be able to put together a list of people and duties.

Focus on Who, What, When, Where, Why, How: Who is executing a task, What is the task, What time frame do they have for executing the task, Where do they execute the task, What larger purpose does the task serve, and How do they execute the task?

You may then segregate your employees into clearly defined roles and your actual business activity into separate business processes. To save yourself some future trouble, make sure you cut out any redundancies once you have this list.

Speak Plainly

Now, for the actual writing. Think about who will be executing the business process in question. If you were explaining the process to them, what kind of language would you use to communicate most easily with them? In most cases, the same language they would use to describe the business process to someone who is seeing it for the first time!

Take this as an essential point of departure whenever you sit down to write an SOP for your business; if everyone can understand each other clearly, then operations will run smoothly. This will make your SOP readable not only to every employee, but also trainees, and saves you the hassle of producing a version for each. When in doubt about whether a reader will understand a piece of jargon or not, err on the side of defining everything.

Although they should always be crafted in the format, language, and style best suited to your business, an SOP rife with ambiguous language or technical jargon is of no use to the employees tasked with carrying them out. Any ambiguous language will only reinforce the lack of clarity that existed before you instituted the SOP.

Stick to plain language so that the most amount of people will have the easiest time understanding what’s expected of them. If you don’t know what “plain” is, ask your employees! Ultimately, writing SOPs is a collaborative process.

Strike a Balance

With every business process, you should always ask yourself, What is the minimum amount of detail and safeguards I need to ensure the maximum level of performance? Sometimes providing too much detail will overwhelm your employees; they might end up skimming over necessary tasks, lost in a sea of black ink. This is especially true if there are multiple ways of completing the same task. Go for the most efficient, tried-and-tested means of getting the same result consistently. Employees only need the best way to do something, not the most fastidious or the quickest.

Likewise, sometimes an excessive number of safeguards will cause them to ignore tasks vital to ensuring quality control. Does your employee really need two layers of verification to send a message to a client, or only one? Is that extra layer of verification worth the hassle?

Get Testy 

Once you have an SOP down on paper, don’t rush it into implementation. Test it out yourself, or pass it along to a single employee or set of select employees, before you make it the law of the land. This will prevent you from implementing an SOP which looks good on paper, but fails miserably when put into action. Building an SOP isn’t like building an abstract philosophical system–– its worth is solely dependent on the assistance it offers your employees and the results it produces.

In Plain Sight

Keep written SOPs onsite or online so anyone can access them when necessary. Ignorance might be bliss for those seeking to cut corners, but you should eliminate the possibility of ignorance and you have produced an obligation to excellence.

Review Annually

Revisit your SOPs at the end of every year. Assess what worked, what didn’t, and what needs some tweaking. Make sure that any unwritten SOPs that have developed over the course of implementation as best practices are incorporated into your main set of SOPs. A written SOP quickly becomes outdated and useless if no one executing a business process bothers to update it.

Conclusion

As you can see, SOPs become increasingly necessary the more complex your business processes become. Integrating the practice of creating SOPs for all your business processes, no matter how big or small, is a great way to get ahead of the curve. At the very least, you might learn a lot more about your business than you had ever expected!

In this article, we’ll explain what MVP and USP mean and why they’re better together.

What’s an MVP?

A company’s MVP is its Minimum Viable Product. A Minimum Viable Product is a cost-efficient product a business can market in the early stages of its development in order to determine whether the product, once fully developed, will succeed in the future.

The purpose of producing an MVP is learning. If an MVP is released into the market and succeeds, the market has essentially offered a proof of concept for the product in question. If it fails, the company has learned that the concept has failed. This saves the company time. It will not spend excessive time and money getting a product to market which will ultimately not find an audience.

An MVP is also a convenient, and sometimes necessary, prerequisite for securing funding from investors. This means you should bring an MVP to market sooner rather than later. Waiting too long to develop the “perfect” product will only hold up your business venture and prevent you from securing much-needed funding. You will only be able to develop the perfect product with greater funding and after several tests. An MVP is, by definition, an imperfect product. 

What’s a USP?

A product’s USP is its Unique Selling Point. This is a feature of some product or service which makes it most attractive to potential consumers.

Why the Two Should Always Go Together

Any company looking to compete with other businesses offering similar products has to have “Edge,” or a feature that positively distinguishes one product from another. A product’s Edge should always be its USP.

Why? Because an MVP is essentially a stripped-down version of some product or service. It is designed to achieve a minimum of consumer interest, and this can be difficult to do without a feature which makes it stand out amidst the competition.

Another reason is because an MVP without a USP won’t be very distinguishable from other business’ MVPs. As a business owner, you might hope to make your MVP’s Edge something other than a USP, such as a lower price or purely cosmetic design. But this doesn’t really suffice as an Edge because your competitors could lower their prices (resulting in a “price war” which often hurts everyone’s bottom line) or consumers will quickly figure out that a competitor’s brand is just as good as yours.

By making sure MVP correlates with USP, you avoid the aforementioned situations. A Unique Selling Point is one of the strongest Edges your MVP can have because it is unique to your product or service and not easily replicable by competitors, like prices and purely cosmetic designs are.

For instance, suppose your MVP is a type of sugary energy drink. If its edge is simply its price or its can design, customers aren’t guaranteed to buy your drink over other drinks with similar prices and designs. This is especially true if other, competing energy drinks have lower prices or better designs. But suppose your energy drink has a USP–– perhaps it has a better taste, or is sugar-free, or only uses natural caffeine. If the other energy drinks on the market don’t possess these traits, then you have an MVP with a real Edge over its competitors.

The only situation in which a company doesn’t need an edge is when it has no competitors. This is called a monopoly, and these are fairly rare. They’re largely found in public utilities sectors, where the cost of extracting natural resources is so prohibitively expensive, only a natural monopoly is best suited to processing and distributing them. But monopolies, even natural ones, are rare and probably don’t apply to your business.

Again: MVP and USP should go together like two peas in a pod.

Simply put, your presentation should tell viewers everything they need to know about what your company does and why they should care in the first place. You should include information about the different, yet relevant aspects of your company that illustrate why moving forward would be worthwhile. It’s common practice to make sure your pitch deck touches on all the following ideas, not in any particular order. 

1. Problem 
2. Solution/Vision
3. Market Validation
4. Target Market
5. Business model (typically for pitch decks shown to investors)
6. Product/Service (MVP of your product)
7. Traction/Milestones
8. Team (highlighting the core specialties if your team and whether you have any co-founders)
9. Competition (including direct and indirect competitors)
10. Advantages (what gives your company an age)
11. Request (how much money you’re asking for, and the % of equity you’re offering)
12. How the funds will be allocated in a graph
13. Appendix

Pitch decks are beneficial to make because they give the recipient relevant and easily accessible details about your business in a fashion that’s easy to read and understand. If you don’t quite know where to start, here are a few short tips to help you create a compelling, well-put-together pitch deck.

If you want the person, or group of people, looking over your deck to care about your company, you need to give them a reason to. 

This is the opportunity to get prospects excited about your vision and eager to work together. If your financials get your deal closed, then think about the creation of an emotional connection as being your first foot through the door. 

In other words, although numbers and facts are great tools to illustrate a company’s significance, establishing some sort of bond is much more emotionally engaging to those viewing your pitch deck. To make others feel connected to your vision, don’t be afraid to tap into your story-telling skills. Talk about the company’s journey, or why you started this whole thing in the first place. Talk about the values your business has and why. Do both parties share any? There’s plenty of possible subjects to touch on when it comes to giving your story and vision more personality.

Pay attention to your overall design.

Pitch decks are typically sleek in style and stick to a consistent aesthetic. Simply put, things like color schemes, font type, font sizes, and other general formatting modifications should be exactly the same throughout all slides.

Your slides, although relatively minimalistic, should have a decent amount of thought put into them. This doesn’t mean that you have to whip up some intricate, fancy slides to get your point across, but they should look like you put effort into them.

Finding the balance between overcomplicating and oversimplifying your slides is the key to making a note-worthy pitch deck. Don’t dwell too long on the design though, the points you bring up are still the main focus!

Draw attention to the overall appearance. 

As founders, it’s only natural for us to want others to understand why we’re so passionate about the things we do. However, although your company may be very connected to its vision or have really great potential, adding too many details may drown out some of your main points.

The last thing anyone wants after creating a pitch deck is for prospects to start skipping over bits of information or losing interest in what you have to say. Keep your presentation at a reasonable 12-15 slides long to give your deck a favorable impression, but feel free to create an appendix section if you think you’d benefit from adding case studies and any other relevant information to your slides.

This way, those who are presented with your pitch deck will then remain engaged and attentive.

Consider adding an appendix. 

Adding more slides into your presentation provides further insight about the reliability and trajectory of your company. Usually, people include their financials (a forecast of their initial four years, quarter-by-quarter), some case studies, and a few commonly asked questions about their brand. 

These extra slides will show that you’re prepared when potential investors or partners ask questions, since you’ll have slides to pull up in an immediate response. Having tangible information to look at is useful for both parties, so don’t worry if you prepared a pretty lengthy appendix!

To conclude.

Pitch decks allow you to share the vision you’ve created with exciting future prospects. The possibilities are endless. No matter which stage your company is at in the Mavenaire Model, it always pays to have a few slides on hand to explain the passion behind what your brand has to offer. 

But just because people are acting liking it’s the end of the world certainly doesn’t mean it is. In fact, more often than not, there’s a silver lining to all these market disturbances waiting to be taken advantage of by those with the right amount of business acumen.

Below are a few ways to maximize your business opportunities in the present moment.

Deliver the Goods

If you haven’t already transitioned your business to delivering the majority of its goods or services, you’re behind the curve. Most essential businesses––especially those involved in the food service industry––already have.

This transition is meant to limit social interaction to a minimum. In doing so, many businesses have had no choice, either by law or for the purpose of maintaining sales, but to offer take-out options for their goods. Customers simply aren’t going to walk through your doors if they’re unwilling or unable to do so because of the outbreak. Make the change and come to them!

If you’re a restaurant, Yelp will let you broadcast the fact that you’re still open (you’d be surprised how many people overestimate the extent of the closures). It also lets you telegraph the fact that you do deliveries or takeout, and any changes in your hours. Yelp has even partnered with Grubhub to offer “contact-free” delivery options, a move many other food delivery apps have taken in recent weeks. (And if you’re not a restaurant, Yelp will let you issue banner notifications for virtual services like online consultations, classes, or performances!) Consider partnering with Instacart too. They’re a convenient way of getting groceries delivered and they’ve become an extremely popular option with customers during the lockdown. Make sure your business takes advantage of these changes, especially if you use or are partnered with any of the above. 

More people will be willing to order from you if you make it as easy as possible to purchase online or over the phone. Even letting people sit in their cars while you drop their food off, like old-school eateries like Mel’s Diner or Sonic, is better than nothing.

Promote “Buy Local”

During the lockdown many have taken it upon themselves to support local businesses. If you’re a local business or local employer, make sure your community knows! Everyone needs help right now, and your neighbors are willing to patronize your establishment precisely because it invigorates the local economy and keeps people in the area employed. The relationship between local businesses and communities is symbiotic, not parasitic, and nothing could help your business more than by advertising that fact.

Market Creative and Playful Package Offers and Deals

Everyone’s seen the viral videos of people waiting in long lines for bundles of amenities like toilet paper and hand sanitizer. The fact that these videos have gone viral shows how much the shortage of high-demand items currently weighs on the minds of consumers. It also highlights the fact that consumers want to limit the amount of times they go shopping by increasing the amount of food and amenities they buy.

Take advantage of this virality and begin marketing package offers and deals to your clientele. If you’re a vendor of food or high-demand amenities, this is especially easy––customers will want to snap up your valuable goods in bulk right away. The attractiveness of such an offer increases drastically if you discount these items as well. You should strive to paint your business as a one-stop-shop for your customers. They’ll reward you for the convenience in turn.

A little humor can’t hurt either, especially when consumers are inundated with negative news and statistics. The more adventurous entrepreneur might even pair their standard wares with a few bottles of hand sanitizer or rolls of toilet paper. Not only would this incentivize customers to buy simply for the sake of these high-demand items, it also adds a playful, humorous spin to any marketing strategy and increases its likelihood of going viral (no pun intended).

Invest in Digital Advertising

You’d be surprised, but many businesses aren’t taking advantage of the slump in sales to invest in advertising, especially digital advertising. So much of the economy has transitioned to “contact-free” methods of sale in a short period of time, and this means online shopping is even more important than traditional brick-and-mortar operations than ever before.

Luckily for you, digital advertising has become even cheaper as online shopping has become more popular. Even better, Google is offering $340 million-worth of free online advertising to small and midsize businesses in the wake of the outbreak. With everyone cooped up at home browsing the internet, this is a great opportunity to begin advertising on popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and search engines like Google.

If the chief means consumers have of interacting with your business through the internet, then no amount of traditional advertising will have a similar effect. Digital advertising isn’t just the future of advertising–– it’s the present.

Expand Social Capital through Social Distancing

By now, everyone knows about the guidelines for “social distancing”. Individuals should avoid large gatherings and maintain at least six (6) feet apart from one another at all times in order to avoid community spread during the outbreak. But for many restaurant owners who operate dine-in establishments, social distancing seems like a heavy blow to their business model. Fewer people indoors means fewer purchases and drastically lower sales, not to mention the fact that many consumers are opting to stay home altogether.

But there’s an upshot to all this abundance of caution. In times of trouble such as these, where the stakes for every social and economic interaction are far higher, consumer choice is more strongly oriented around trust, a vital form of social capital. If consumers trust a company to abide by the best practices outlined by the CDC and local public officials, they are more likely to patronize that company over others.

In this era of uncertainty, trust is everything, and building trust is vital to your business success. This means going above and beyond to ensure your business is following all relevant health regulations and recommendations, and making sure your clientele know it. Essentially, this is an opportunity to gain greater visibility by being safer.

Building trust with your consumer base can be as easy as providing hand sanitizer to customers and employees in a visible way (putting up a sign, notice, or flyer in the workplace is a good idea).

You might even put down markers indicating the distance customers should allow between one another when waiting in line. You can also clean and sanitize the surfaces your customers are most likely to touch, such as keypads and countertops. If your employees are handling food or money, washing hands for at least 20 seconds in warm water and/or changing into new pairs of gloves often is an easy way to build social capital with your clientele in a cost-effective manner.

If customers see you creating a culture of cleanliness within your business, their trust in you will increase drastically. In short, social capital pays.

Conclusion

As you can see, with great risk comes great reward. If your business is already suffering from a lack of sales, you’ll be incentivized to think creatively and scale your company through these difficult times. In short–– seize the day rather than letting it seize you.

In all likelihood, they probably don’t have an army of social media managers producing content for them…because they don’t need to! It’s more than possible to produce a large amount of content in a short time all by yourself. Here’s how.

Block Your Content Production

The key to becoming a prolific content-creator is… doing it all at once! This piece of advice seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t it be better to stick to the idea of moderation, i.e. spreading out your content creation so you only spend a small amount of time on it each day?

In reality, blocking will save you more time in the long run. It’ll also open up your schedule and lower the stakes. If you’ve already gotten all your content creation out of the way over the weekend, you won’t have to worry about missing a day and falling behind.

Do Some Division

By blocking, we don’t mean producing all of your content at once––we also mean planning projects that can stand alone and be divided into further units of content. This way, you avoid the hassle of having to create piles of brand-new content for a single social media platform.

As an example, suppose you need to upload video content to your YouTube channel or record a new podcast for your SoundCloud account. You might decide to do a longer video or podcast, perhaps anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes long, meaning that you’ll probably want to cover multiple topics. Instead of creating one long video multiple times a week, record one long video and then divide it up into multiple topic-based clips. This way you’ll have a short video for every day of the week, in addition to the full recording.

Turn Your Day Into Content

Does your work frequently draw you outside the house to meetings and events for deal-making and networking? If that’s the case, why not save yourself some trouble and double your return for doing these mandatory day-to-day tasks!

If you need photos for your Instagram posts and stories, snap some pictures with the people you’re meeting or with the food you’re eating! This way you’ll be getting necessary meetings out of the way and content production at the same time, all the while appearing busy (and exciting) online. This trick can work for pretty much anything you do, including messages you send to others as correspondence. (So long as the person you’re talking to doesn’t mind sharing their conversation with you!)

Re-Purpose with a Purpose

Blocking and dividing your content creation is a great start, but you can go even further by repurposing content meant for one platform and using it for another. With this trick, you can quickly double or triple your content creation in a short time.

For instance, if you already find yourself writing posts or commenting on news in order to produce content for your Twitter, you can screenshot these posts and comments and throw them up onto your Instagram. Cross-posting across multiple platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat stories) is also an easy way to achieve the same results.

Create a Schedule…or Automate Your Posts!

After content creation comes content posting. While there might not be any trick to getting around this hassle short of hiring someone else to do it for you, if you create a consistent schedule you’ll avoid the pitfall of being inconsistent. If you do have some money to spare, Hootsuite is an excellent way to automate and time posts across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Conclusion

There’s really no downside to following the above tips and tricks. There are dozens of ways to block, divide, and repurpose content. In fact, the only limit to your success is your creativity!

However, seeking investments might not always be the right decision, especially if you’re not willing to give up any of your company’s equity. By giving up equity you as a founder are relinquishing some control and say over the decisions your company will make. Furthermore, it can either positively or negatively impact the company depending on the value of the guidance given.

Venture funding can come in different forms, including convertible notes (financial loans that are repaid with equity) or safe contracts (investors purchase stock in exchange).

Bootstrapping is also an alternative and effective business development technique. Bootstrapping essentially means utilizing the resources you have at hand to grow your company. This could include crowdfunding, using your own money, or raising a friends and family round. Although different circumstances call for different solutions, it’s important to keep in mind that bootstrapping may save you more money in the long run.

Be careful not to over fundraise, since over-valuing your company could make you fundraise a round devaluing it in the future. The right course of action for your startup is dependent on your company’s financial standing. We’ve come up with a short list of pros and cons to help you weigh each option and make the best decision. 

Bootstrapping:

PRO: You have more control of your company.

• With bootstrapping, you have the freedom to be more selective with who owns equity in your company, if you allow anyone to at all! Giving away too much equity runs the risk of losing your vision. With bootstrapping, you safely own a majority of your business and have the freedom to move forward with your own decisions.

PRO: Makes you more creative.

• Some people argue that needing outside funding implies that you might have a weak business model, don’t understand your target audience, or have a weak business concept. Bootstrapping forces you to take care of those fundamental issues head-on, which more often than not results in a company’s long-term survival.

CON: It takes longer to get to where you want to be.

• Growth benchmarks may be more difficult to reach because capital is typically less readily available through bootstrapping. Since companies acquire capital at a much slower rate than they would be accepting investments, they often have less money to allocate towards certain resources. 

Investing:

PRO: Capital is easily accessible.

• After an investment is made, you’re free to immediately use that money to serve your business. Being strapped for cash when running a company makes it virtually impossible to upgrade your resources and grow. Company benchmarks are met with more ease in this sense, although may be more costly in terms of monetary value in the long run. 

PRO: More capital = better competition.

• Competition is everywhere, and nowadays beating your competitors means getting bigger and better resources to improve your performance. Having easily accessible capital at hand allows businesses the freedom to make more decisions than they would have under tighter fiscal constraints. 

CON: You have to give up equity. 

• Investors get a say in what goes on at your company, consequently limiting your freedom to make decisions regarding your own business. 

To conclude.

Exploring Venture Capital and Bootstrapping as viable funding solutions allows founders to distinguish the choice that is best for their company’s growth. Pinpointing the most effective funding option is important when developing your business strategy or company infrastructure, so be sure to keep the pros and cons in mind!

Its title, MAVENAIRE, is an acronym for the different stages of a business life cycle. It stands for– Maturation, Attacking, Validation, Efficiency, Networking, Advertising, Industry, Review, and Expansion. Noting the nuances of every level will give you a new level of understanding with regard to your business strategy.  Here, we introduce you to the Mavenaire model, with the basics of every stage explained: 

1. Maturation

This stage is known for new growth and excitement. It’s when a founder starts curating their vision and solidifying their business idea. The most challenging part of life at this point in the life cycle is raising enough capital to perform well, pay bills, and pay for labor. If a business can overcome these initial fundamental obstacles, they’re able to develop into the attacking stage.  

2. Attacking 

Here, company decision-makers tackle the problem of growth. Companies are slowly becoming more sustainable as their founders deal with oncoming growing pains. They’re struggling to pay for bills and labor, but move onto the Validation stage once they overcome these challenges.

3. Validation

Now, business is more stable and established. Founders are no longer worried about week-to-week cash flow and have relatively regular growth and profit. Work environments are often more disciplined at this point in the cycle, because a typical company’s objective at this stage should be growth. Founders are validated in their business’s potential. 

4. Efficiency

Here, companies are optimizing their performance. They have a clear focus on their objectives, and the stable infrastructure to get them there. The company recaptures the spirit it had back at the Dreaming stage, bringing entrepreneurship back to the foreground. 

5. Networking

At this stage, companies typically work on maintaining and developing their corporate image while learning to be responsible for a diverse stakeholder group. Here is where a true company culture is developed. 

6. Advertising

Here, larger marketing budgets work to the company’s advantage and, if executed well, results in positive return on investment. Larger audiences are now engaging with and buying from your brand. Companies at this stage have a large digital marketing presence and have garnered mass followings on various social media pages.

7. Industry

Companies are incorporating industry trends into their strategy in order to stay modern and relevant. Measuring consumer interests and competitor actions allow businesses to make the most well informed decisions when it comes to matters of growth.

8. Review

At this stage, brands are working on maximizing their efficiency. This is vital in order to develop into the Expansion stage as it is demanding of a strong foundational basis of your company. Businesses should always be reflecting inward in order to tackle any issues that may be prohibiting them from further growth. 

9. Expansion 

Companies in this final stage are inclined to reach out to unfamiliar markets with new products. Here, they’re finally implementing entrepreneurship within the business by founding new businesses––coming full circle.

As founders, it’s important to remember why we’ve started our projects in the first place. We’re here to create a lasting impact on the world, and that will naturally come with some setbacks. But understanding our place in the Diamond lifecycle allows us to analyze where we are versus where we want to be, and makes seeing ahead a bit easier.

Stay away from social media!

If you’re using your personal computer in the comfort of your own home, it’s often tempting to open up a new Facebook tab and get lost in the world of social media. It starts off with one click and then boom—you’ve somehow ended up on the weird side of YouTube again. So how do you combat the urge to mess around on social media? Make it harder for yourself to browse websites that don’t serve a productive purpose. 

One tip to try is using incognito windows so that you’ll be logged out of your social media accounts and would have to log back in. As an alternative, you could also download an extension that restricts your access to different websites for a certain period of time. This way, scrolling through websites that eat away at your productivity seems less enticing. 

Create a to-do list for your day. 

As mentioned earlier, mixing your work and home life together makes it all the more difficult to stay organized and on-task. A great way to avoid falling behind due to the lax structure of home-life is to create a schedule for yourself that you can adhere to. Make sure you not only give yourself adequate time to complete your goals for the day but also factor in breaks as well. 

Try the Pomodoro Technique–– a time management method that breaks work into 25 minute intervals separated by short breaks. This not only increases productivity, but also helps visualize your progress during the day. 

We recommend checking out Todoist and Asana if you’re going to search for online scheduling tools to help with time management.

Let people at home know what you need. 

The people you live with—roommates, pets, family, or your spouse—often mean well but may be distracting at times when you’re just trying to work. That’s why it’s important to communicate your expectations with them so they can give you the space you need to focus on your priorities. The last thing you need is a pantless roommate rummaging through the kitchen in the background of your video call! Set up some office hours for the day, and let them know when you should be done. That way, you can still keep your work and home life separated. 

Pretend you’re going to work. 

Point blank, the environment we work in significantly affects our productivity. If someone were to wake up whenever they felt like it and started working in their pajamas on the couch, they’d probably be much more inclined to indulge in distraction because they’ve conjoined work and home life. Over time, this leads to a decrease in motivation and productivity. 

We first suggest waking up at a relatively early hour since you’ll be much more available to your teammates. 

Another tip is to get dressed as if you were going out, as loungewear typically makes us think we can take it easy, even subconsciously. 

Lastly, if you’re able to, arrange an office space in your home. It doesn’t have to be a whole room—just a desk in a corner will do the trick too. This way, the line between work and home becomes much more clear. 

Get some fresh air. 

When you work from home, it’s really easy to get so caught up in what you’re doing that you forget you’ve been cooped up in the same spot for hours. Taking a short walk on one of your breaks not only lets you stretch your legs, but the change of pace and scenery might also help you clear your head and encourage creativity. Sometimes, a walk is what you need to straighten out your thoughts and keep your focus for the rest of the day. 

Invest in a pair of headphones. 

Even with the tips above, sometimes certain aspects of home-life are simply unavoidable when working from home. Whether you live in a busy, high-energy environment or not, some noises are going to be distracting. The television, phones going off, the doorbell, etc. can make it really difficult for anyone to keep their focus. So how can you stay motivated without any disruption?

Noise-canceling earphones not only mute the outside world around you and muffle typical household noise, but also allow you to fully immerse yourself into any music that might help get you into the flow of things. In your search for a pair, we recommend the Airpod Pros or the Bose 700.

To conclude.

While staying productive at home can be difficult, taking advantage of the tools we have at our disposal can help us separate our home life from our work life. This is incredibly beneficial when it comes to maintaining a balance of mental, emotional, and physical health, so keep these tips in mind if you’re working from an office space at home!

First, add content. 

Whether it’s photos of your product, service, or team, having relevant content to post on your social media accounts establishes a digital presence that can easily foster a connection between your brand and potential consumers. Although the industry may have you convinced that in order to cultivate a large social media following, you need to be using fancy editing software or a costly new camera, content creation can actually be pretty inexpensive if you know how to work your way around it.

Even though your camera doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest in film technology, it should be able to pick up your image clearly. A typical smartphone camera usually does the trick if a real one isn’t accessible, because they tend to have fairly good image quality depending on the year and model of your device. 

In terms of set locations, public settings such as a beach or park offer a great place to shoot content for free–just make sure you’re going at times most people don’t, so your shoot won’t be disrupted by others.

Alternatively, you could also opt for an at-home shoot too. Just make sure the photos are set up the way you like and you’re good to go! A good tip to keep in mind is that natural lighting will always give your subject a more flattering finish. Also, feel free to get creative and pin sheets to the wall as a backdrop, anything can look like it was taken at a studio with the right angle! 

If you don’t have access to a camera, you can also visit websites like Shutterstock or Unsplash for thousands of high-definition, copyright-free photos you can use at your own disposal. 

Stick to a consistent posting schedule.

In general, publishing media is great for encouraging brand awareness and acts as an invitation for engagement with every post. By posting consistently, consumers are more exposed to your brand’s content and your page will then rack up more impressions. Note, however, that posting too infrequently defeats the purpose of brand awareness, and posting too often is usually bothersome for consumers. We recommend posting 4-5 times per week.

When planning your posting schedule, keep in mind that traffic on social media varies by the day and by the hour. For instance, it’s safe to assume that most people take their lunch breaks at around noon, so more people have the free time to scroll through applications like Instagram. Posting a photo at 6 o’clock in the morning, however, won’t get you much attention and engagement, which is why it’s always important to pay attention to the times you’ve scheduled your posts.

There’s a multitude of scheduling tools out there to automate posting for you, the most popular being Later and HootSuite. 

Next, it’s time to establish relationships.

As mentioned earlier, every post is an invitation for a potential customer to interact with your brand. Responding to comments and direct messages is a great way to establish a strong relationship of trust and satisfaction with your consumers. 

Additionally, another great way to connect with your niche consumer base is by using hashtags that represent your brand and describe your photo. That way, people who are interested in the topics you’ve tagged will come across your post as well. 

Ever thought of starting a newsletter?

The best way to ensure that people will see your latest product drop, campaign, or promotion is through email. In this day and age, most people check their inboxes quite frequently, so email campaigns are still common practice in the marketing field. 

Aside from increasing website traffic, having a newsletter also allows you to connect with your customers in a way that’s significantly more personal than a simple Facebook or Instagram post. It allows you to establish better consumer trust and rapport, which is ultimately what converts a one-time buyer to a loyal customer.

Sending out a newsletter may seem like an overwhelming process–but we recommend using a tool that can help automate it all for you, such as MailChimp.

To conclude.

Establishing a strong social media presence attracts more awareness surrounding your brand and invites potential shoppers to explore the passion behind your company. By engaging and interacting with your audience, you’re creating a loyal community of consumers with a positive impression of your business. We hope these tips have been proven useful to you!