Some Theory

Porter’s five forces analysis is a framework for the industry analysis and business strategy development developed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School in 1979. It uses concepts developed in Industrial Organisation economics to derive five forces which determine the competitive intensity and therefore attractiveness of a market. Attractiveness in this context refers [...]

Those of us that have been using the Internet for a while now have seen the topics of paid content and micropayments (which would enable paid content)  come in and go out of fashion several times.

There has been a standard objection to the idea of paid content as a business model, namely that users will [...]

It’s no secret that most new business fail.
It won’t take long to find numerous web pages listing the top 5, 7 or 10 reasons that businesses fail. Here’s such list:

Management in Complete Denial
Over-expansion.
Poor Capital Structure.
Failure to Control the Controllable Costs.
Failure to Prepare for Volatility of Uncontrollable Costs.
Add New Products or Divisions that Drag Down [...]

 
The producers of the Channel 4 series The Secret Millionaire are currently looking for new benefactors to take part.
The Secret Millionaire is a reality television show in which millionaires secretly go into low income communities with a view to to giving away tens of thousand of pounds to worthy causes/members of the community. The members [...]

I’ve previously written about business transfer agents in my post Selling A Business: Don’t Waste Your Money On Business Transfer Agents. As you can gather from the title I wasn’t impressed.
I’m even less impressed now. Let me recap:
Having drawn up a shortlist of businesses for sale I set about contacting the vendor / vendors agents [...]

It’s no secret that most small businesses fail.
For those of us that have spent most of our professional lives working in, around and with small businesses it’s no surprise that small businesses fail.
Sadly, in my experience, most small businesses are doomed to failure before they are even started (I’ve also explored this theme in [...]

One of the common mistakes in early stage businesses, particularly technology or software businesses is to chase individual sales. Why might this be a mistake?
If your product or solution is relatively complex and, especially for those big show-case projects, has a long sales cycle, it is easy to be lured into chasing the big projects. [...]