photo credit: sergeant killjoy
Do you treat your patents as a fence or a tollbooth? If you wish for your start-up technology company to obtain investment from or acquisition by a bigger player, you had better understand the difference.
Most start-up technology company entrepreneurs and CEO’s understand that patents can be key to establishing the value of a new business idea. Typically, entrepreneurs and CEO’s such as yourself will engage patent attorneys to build an IP portfolio that protects the start-up’s technology and products to the fullest extent possible. The motivation for this effort and expense is, of course, to to protect your start-up’s idea from use by others. As management of a start-up you may be seeking to build an ongoing business around the patented technology, but often the goal of building a solid patent portfolio is to make your business an attractive target for investment or acquisition by a larger company. Continue reading ‘Start-ups – If Your Goal is Investment Or Acquisition by a Big Company You Are Patenting Wrong’
photo credit: eyeliam
Recession is often defined as a state of the economy when the gross domestic product is very low. There is a need for income earners to be able to tell the difference between recession and expansion by watching the levels of their personal incomes. Some widely-embraced market indicators are very deceiving.
Sometimes you need to look no further than the trend of your own incomes as a business owner or even an employed person. Recession needs to be differentiated from expansion for the right business decisions to be made. Continue reading ‘Differentiating Between Recession and Expansion Using Income Levels Approach’
photo credit: Kenn!Craig Berman beamed noticeably after completing his board presentation. Berman, CEO of a startup that develops nanotechnology applications for the defense industry, had just closed a $ 20 million equity round. Berman finalized the round at an equity valuation that made the whole board blush. Only six months earlier, Berman’s team faced a daunting technical delay that set the company back three months. With only four months of cash remaining from a previous equity round, the delay would cause Berman’s company to burn cash faster and to fall short of an important benchmark.
The prospect of raising additional equity earlier than expected and at a much lower valuation than anticipated was a chilling thought for Berman and his board.
Just as things appeared to be headed downhill, the company’s CFO broached the idea of obtaining $ 1.5 million in venture leasing. Roughly $ 600,000 of this financing would be used to finance existing equipment. The balance could be used for upcoming acquisitions of computer workstations, servers, software, and test equipment. Continue reading ‘How Venture Leasing Added Millions To A Startup’s Equity Value’
photo credit: liqueneThe unraveling sub-prime mortgage market has spewed its wreckage across a vast cross section of the financial markets. Investors and lenders continue to smart from massive losses on investments and loans tied to this market. As some scramble to assess the implications of the sub-prime meltdown, many investors and lenders have either abandoned higher risk asset classes or are approaching them with great caution.
Residing in a far corner of the financing panoply is a financing vehicle known as venture lending. This form of financing is used by start-ups supported by venture capitalists as a means of funding working capital and equipment acquisitions. A less expensive form of financing than venture capital, start-ups use these loans to extend the runway between equity rounds and to avoid ownership dilution.
Venture lending is in the midst of a strong rebound that started in 2003. This segment is recovering from a sharp decline that followed the bursting of the ‘New Economy’ bubble earlier in the decade. During the late 1990s, prior to the bubble burst, equity investments in start-ups topped $100 billion. Continue reading ‘Will The Sub-Prime Debacle Derail Venture Lending?’
photo credit: Haeroldus Laudeus
International Business is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United Kingdom alone and international trade is increasing by the year. If you think your future lies in the international trade industry, here are some tips to help you establish your own international business successfully.
The first step towards doing international business is deciding on what you want to do. You will need to decide on what product or item you are going to trade in and the countries you want to trade with. If you are not sure about these two things, contact the embassies and consulates of different countries and research the trade that takes place between your country and theirs to help you identify the commodity that is most in demand. Most consulates will be based in the capital city of most nations, but you are also likely to find information you need on their website online. Continue reading ‘A Beginners Guide to International Business’
photo credit: jurvetson
Today’s credit crisis is the worst disruption to the global financial system in the lifetime of almost everyone alive today. This is truly ground-breaking stuff, and no one can be at all sure where it will end.
The fact that governments around the world have been forced to take the extraordinary step of guaranteeing inter-bank loans in an attempt to unfreeze bank-to-bank lending is a stark pointer to the paralysis in international financial markets, a paralysis born of mutual uncertainties about the extent of bank exposures to overvalued or worthless securities. This situation within the financial sector is at the heart of the difficulties being visited upon companies whose forward performance projections are based on assumptions about continuing debt financing. Continue reading ‘The Global Credit Crisis – Time For Business to Revisit Budgets and Cash Flow Projections’
photo credit: david.orban
Running a business is not a child’s play. Moreover, managing small business bookkeeping is again a Herculean task. We all are very well aware of the fact that managing and maintaining financial records consume lots of time and personnel resources. Hence, there is one solution that can solve a problem of bookkeeping for small businesses. What is bookkeeping and how does it help in saving time and money? The answer to your query is that bookkeeping is a process that involves maintaining of records of the various transactions that have taken place throughout the year.
The functions of small business bookkeeping includes looking through the total revenue, profit, loss and expenses, dates of the transactions and various other minute financial details incurred by the company. Continue reading ‘Small Business Bookkeeping Is A Good Way To Maintain Records’
photo credit: cchen
Maintaining consistent cash flow is one of the biggest challenges faced by small and medium scale business enterprises today. The cash flow constraints particularly occur in businesses that offer credit facilities. According to cash flow management experts many debtors have a tendency of failing to honor their pledges to clear their debts within a stipulated period of time that may between 30 and 60 days. It is during such circumstances that a business entity may be required to rise to occasion by supplementing its operations through sourcing of funds either internally or externally to boost the cash flow.
One of the convenient ways of sourcing for funds is invoice factoring. Factoring refers to the process of speeding up cash flow in your business by selling the credit worthy invoices for cash. The viability of factoring as one of the most effective debt collection methods has been a blessing to many small and medium scale business enterprises. This cash flow tool has been around for many years and has effectively evolved into a very important moderator preferred by many small business enterprises for use in competing effectively with larger businesses. Continue reading ‘How to Finance Your Business Through Factoring Receivables Invoices’
