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Accounting, Finance & Funding
498 posts
6 Strategies for Local Startups to Scale Up Nationally
If you’re thinking about launching a business or have started one recently, there’s no need to restrict your goals to the local area. Here are six ways to compete on a national level. 1. Create products that address common pain points. One way to increase your chances of becoming nationally relevant is to ensure your...
How Local Startups Can Leverage Small Business Funding
There are many small business loans available for startups. Learn more about the different financing options and how you can get a startup loan for your business. There’s a bit more that goes into running a business than a million-dollar idea and an endless supply of Red Bull. Profitability is the metric of success and...
An SOC 2 Audit: Why Your Business Should Get One
Information security is more important than ever, and part of that includes conducting SOC 2 audits. SOC 2 stands for System and Organization Control 2 report. Simply put, an SOC 2 report is designed to instill confidence in business owners and stakeholders by proving that all operations are happening in a secure manner. However, there's...
5 Essential People to Have in Your Network as You Begin Your Entrepreneurial Journey
Succeeding as a new entrepreneur might seem more challenging now than ever before. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of new businesses don’t survive for more than a year, and nearly half survive only five years. Looking through the lens of COVID-19, recent reports show that millions of businesses could close in...
WJR Business Beat: Capital Investment Surges Into Women-Led Companies (Episode 318)
On the Business Beat, Jeff talks about an influx of venture capital funding into businesses run by women. Tune in to the Business Beat, below, for details on what this surge represents and why it's important: Tune in to News/Talk 760 AM WJR weekday mornings at 7:11 a.m. for the WJR Business Beat....
Don’t Fall For This Small Business Loan Scam
A business owner looking for a deposit for a building he wanted to purchase says he wound up losing $1,200 to a loan scammer, according to a complaint filed on the Better Business Bureau website. He’s not the only entrepreneur who has reported being ripped off while trying to find financing. The “BBB Scam Tracker is...
The Top 5 Accounting Mistakes Startups Make
Our team has worked with hundreds of startups, and year after year we inevitably come across the same common issues around financial reporting. There are remedies for these accounting mistakes, but it’s crucial to flag them as soon as possible, ideally before a startup begins a seed round or approaches any major growth. One of...
Scaling Your Bootstrapped Business: 3 Tips for Lean Entrepreneurs
Like most entrepreneurs, you have likely spent hundreds of hours developing skills to build your business. By the time you start turning a profit, you’re likely to spend thousands of hours and dollars trying out different business models and seeing what works for you. Many entrepreneurs who start turning a profit think that the hardest...
Is Your Business Scalable? Why the Answer Matters to Potential Investors
Financing a small business initiative by offering investors a percentage of ownership equity in your business is called equity financing. When angel investors or an equity firm invest in a company, they don’t do it for a loan payment. They do it for a percentage of ownership, or equity. And, instead of periodic payments, the...
4 Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Ask Themselves
Time is the most important asset you have. Unlike money, once you’ve spent it, you can’t get it back, and how you spend it is important. They say time is money, but time is your dream. When you’re running a startup, you’re in the dream business. And every minute you can spend on your dream...
4 Ways Startups Can Empower Their Remote Finance Teams
Finance teams worldwide emerged as strategic leaders for startups with the onset of the pandemic by recognizing ways to efficiently manage remote teams, their finances, company operations and associated cost-cutting mechanisms. Now more than ever, as the remote work landscape continues to change, startup leaders need to reevaluate whether they’ve enabled their finance teams enough...
4 Key Reasons to Consider Microlending to Fund Your Startup
Among the financing solutions available to startups and small business owners, microlending is one of the more accessible. Also known as microcredit, microlending has been gaining popularity in recent years – and for good reason. Keep reading to learn more about microlending and why you should consider this option to fund your startup. What is...
How Quality Reporting Helps Smart Entrepreneurs Build Investor Trust and Long-Term Returns
Think of investor reporting as the foundation of trust between a company’s founders and its investors. That trust is earned over time and is strengthened by timely reporting of company results. Strategic entrepreneurs will see good investor reporting is both the foundation for a company's success and an entrance to later investing. Done correctly, early...
7 Ways to Find Startup Funding
You’re embarking on the adventure of starting your own business. You know you’ll require startup funding, but aren’t sure where to start. Will you self-fund and bootstrap? Will you take investment from others? There are several ways to fund your business, and there's a process to work through which type of funding is best suited...
How to Boost Your Startup’s Profitability with This Old Improv Trick
Where does revenue come from? And how can we make more of it? When you’re building a business, everything comes down to these two questions. The more specifically you can answer the first, the more opportunities you’ll see to answer the second. To see the big picture, you have to get small. You need to...
The Venture Capital Diversity Gap and Why It Matters
Despite the growth in awarded venture capital (VC) funds, a staggering disparity remains between the amount of total VC funds invested in entrepreneurs and the portion of those funds invested in ventures founded and/or led by women—particularly women of color. The dream of virtually every entrepreneur, regardless of their innovation or industry, is to land...
How to Fix a Racially Biased Venture Capital Model and Commit to Diversity in Entrepreneurship
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and nationwide protests, venture capital firms are making newfound commitments to invest in, or at least evaluate, potential investments that are led by diverse founders. Although commitments such as SoftBank’s $100 million fund to support people of color may seem like a leap forward, when we...
6 Ways to Keep Your Startup’s Finances Balanced Year-Round
Now that we are halfway into 2021, it is time to think about how you can further improve your startup’s operations to guarantee greater success in the latter half of the year. During this process, you will want to ensure that your cybersecurity measures are up to date, properly organize all of your old customer...
3 Tips to Grow Your Business in the Post-Pandemic Era
Summer is in full swing, and in some areas of the country, mask mandates have lifted and event production companies now have packed schedules. It seems like we are starting to finally overcome and move beyond the COVID-19 crisis. If you’re a business owner, you may be wondering what steps to take to ensure the...
Entrepreneurs Must Optimize Their Fundraising Strategy to Move Forward
Despite the recent radical economic changes, entrepreneurs have been resilient and adapted their business models to cope and sometimes even go public. However, entrepreneurs often make costly, avoidable errors in their funding strategies. Entrepreneurs can optimize their fundraising strategy by learning to avoid cash management pitfalls and how investors evaluate startups. Every successful entrepreneur knows...