Milestone number one – the idea. You can’t move on with just a great idea until you figure out how you are going to build it and what it will cost you. Five quick questions:

You have to build what you are going to sell. It may…

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And now for balancing faith. The winners-never-quit question! The how-canyou-walk-away- when-we-are-so-close-to-the-end defense. I keep coming back to Sarwar’s last comment at Dana Point: “I can accept anything but a shortage of faith from you.” Was it shortage of faith or something deeper? Given a bad day can I just quit? Is that what Sarwar meant? How do you tell true catastrophic failure from a bad bout of self pity?…

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Balancing faith is recognizing when you can win and when you can’t. It is going the distance when you can and cutting your losses when you can’t. Once again clichéd. In real life: Have you ever pulled the plug on the ventilator of a dying loved one? (I haven’t and never want to)

Now that we understand what each of these factors signify, let’s take a look at the tests….

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The marked-for-death syndrome is quite common in first- and second-time ventures. Cookaracha Guides, my venture number two as well as a Type I failure, was done and finished with within three months. The idea was to give paid advice to aspiring MBAs and business school students before, during, and after the school application process. Attract them with original content, sell a little advertising, give advice, part free, part charged….

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The need for a framework arose when I realized it was difficult for me to retain an objective point of view when my ventures were cross fading between economic cycles. Instead of troubleshooting, which made things worse, it would have helped if there had been a list of common diseases, symptoms, and cures that I could refer to figure out what had gone wrong and what I needed to do…

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John Whitney, the turnaround specialist and management professor at Columbia Business School, did an interesting, inward-looking exercise in his “In Search of a Perfect Prince” course. He asked students to look back at their lives and pick one instance each of when they were a follower, a manager, and a leader. The objective was to teach that more important than being a leader is the ability to recognize that…

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I believed that we needed high-potency leadership from day one for us to attract talent, money, and customers. I was wrong. We wasted many hours and expensive international air time (four-figure MCI World Call phone bills during months of recruitment effort) interviewing and convincing candidates in the U.S. and elsewhere to talk to us, when we should have been spending the same time chasing customers.

To be fair, this belief…

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Is there any correlation between targeting large customers, executing large orders, and new venture failure? I believe so. New ventures, with rare exception, lack the depth to handle large assignments and contracts. Without sufficient depth, new ventures make bad short-term calls on pricing, delivery terms, hiring, concessions, and service-level agreements that put them on track for eventual failure.

It’s about evolution. Success is built on a collection of small wins,…

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Should you really care about what brings revenues into the company? Why is diversification a four-letter word? Because diversification comes in many distracting forms – none of which add any value and all of which solve a short term logistical problem called cash flow. From owners doing freelance consulting on the side to pay bills, to vendors getting into ancillary services to close contracts, new ventures get into areas…

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