My Experience with Startup Mentors It’s now been almost 4 years since I moved to Orlando, Florida from the Northeast United States. When I first moved down to the area, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed entrepreneur working on my first eCommerce business on the Amazon Marketplace. For the first year...
Is your business at the point where you’re spending hours on repetitive and scheduled daily tasks to keep the company running? Build a Core Team Around your Founders If so, it’s time to start hiring a core team of support players around your founding team. The goal of the founding...
How to Use Outsourcing for your Startup As you begin to build your startup and reach a point where systems and processes are in place, you will run into a period where you begin to run out of time in the day. You’ve built up the tasks within your business to...
Introduction If you want to build your startup past the 1 year mark, you need to make sure that you correctly delegate startup roles and responsibilities between you and your cofounding team. Most businesses in the world start and shut down within the first year. That can be due to...
A Quick Review In my last column, I introduced the first step to turning your idea into an actionable business plan: understanding the four pillars of starting a business. The four pillars can be defined as such: People Product/Service Financials The Customer Market If you can answer all of the...
Have you ever wondered what the CEO does at the start of a new business? What I first started learning about the executive team role and in which I may best fit, I scoured the Internet looking for definitions of the CEO, COO, CMO, CSO, CFO, etc. I found a...
Recruitment is Tough! Recruitment is a complex process of meeting individuals, understanding their skill set, taking a shot on their personality, and making a decision whether you believe they would fit within your company. As the individual going through the process, it is equally as nerve-racking remaining calm, boasting about...
From an early age, John Mayer’s music has spoken to me and challenged me think about my life in a variety of different ways. The passion that he pours into his music inspired and motivated me to find similar passions that I could pour my all into. One of his live...
In How Employers and Applicants Should Approach the Recruitment Funnel Part I, I introduced the concept of a recruitment funnel and provided a depiction of the six step process. I dove into the intricacies of the first three stages and how both employers and applicants can approach each to achieve their...
Introduction When you decide to start a business, you have a tough decision to make…well, you have an endless amount of difficult decisions to make…but this one will directly impact the initial founding. Do you find a cofounder or do you start it on your own? In this column, we’ll...
In this post, I’d like to reflect on the importance of the CEO on company culture and the influence that they play on its growth over time. For the past 5 years, I have been studying the responsibilities of the CEO in an effort to best characterize the role for my...
The Chief Executive Officer For hundreds of years, there have been CEO’s at the helm of companies driving their value and leading the team that surrounded them. To this day, they have been come to be known as the “boss” or “the individual with all of the power.” While almost anyone...
Today, I pulled up a popular question from Quora that thousands of individuals are interested in learning about…”What do I ask the CEO of the startup that I am interviewing with?” From my experience as the CEO of Portlight, I’ve compiled a list of four main topics and 17 questions...
Everyday around the world, another entrepreneur starts a company that has ambitions to address a need in the market that they have identified. They work diligently on their plan of action and months or years later, they find success or they hit major road blocks forcing them to scale down...
Today, I’m going to share advice on writing a cover letter to accompany your resume when you are applying to any position that you are interested in. Most employers will request a cover letter along with a resume in order to learn more about your writing skills and if you are...
Are you a professional seeking to join a young and growing startup? If you’re reading this, you probably are! I have been in the startup world as an entrepreneur for the past 5+ years and have interviewed over 100 applicants from the United States and abroad. Through these interactions, I’ve...
Over the past month, I have been taking a course led by Laura Gallaher, a close friend and organizational psychologist in Orlando. She is an entrepreneur and owns her own company called Key Talent Solutions. She works closely with leadership teams of large and small companies to help them work...
As a small business owner, you wear all the hats when it comes to completing your day-to-day tasks. Between providing products and services, billing customers, and managing your books, you have little time to do anything but work on your business. At some point, your workload might become too much...
How Do You Find a Cofounder? If you’re at the point where you are asking yourself this question, this article is going to really help you in making your final decision. The question of whether to find a cofounder or not is a huge choice that you must make as...
