Bootstrapping

Today’s advice comes from Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson’s Q&A column at Entrepreneur:

“[A] partner with money is very useful, but a partner who will also provide you and your team with the space, time and freedom needed to build the business is a true friend — and that friendship will stand the test of time.“

Branson’s ideas about partnership align with his infamous rogue attitude. He sacrificed some of the speed of his company’s growth to keep all the equity in his businesses. He wanted to maintain control, and only took on partners for practical reasons.

“I have found that our partnerships at Virgin turn out best when we find an investor who takes a minority stake in a venture and provides capital and support, but leaves us to run the business and hire key employees,” he says.

“When you are evaluating a proposed partnership, do not focus only on the capital you need to kick-start your business.

Ask: Will this person or group give us the space and time we need to build a great business?”

Author: Burke Franklin

I‘ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners for more than 40 years — mostly from within our Business Power Tools software apps and templates, and thru my blogs and book Business Black Belt. In the early ’80s, I was the electronics buyer and copywriter for the Sharper Image catalog. Later, I also sold some really cool word-processors in Silicon Valley. After Macs and PCs became popular, I started my own business creating sales literature for tech companies. A friend had a deal going to sell his engineering software to Apple. They wanted to see his business plan to be sure his company would stay in business to upgrade and support the system. At the time, I viewed a business plan as an elaborate brochure that sold his concept to people at all levels, and responsibilities with various perceptions, biases, and interests. (I learned that from selling word-processors.) We got the deal. Over the next year, people came to me with some brilliant ideas, but their plans weren’t getting funded. I helped them fill-in the missing parts to succeed. Along the way, I saw that business plans have a fundamentally universal structure. Hmmm… I took all the content I’d developed, redacted everything proprietary, but filled in the blanks with a variety of customizable multiple-choice options, and offered it as a software template that many people could use… This became BizPlanBuilder. And my new company took off! We followed-up with MarketingBuilder, which picked-up where BizPlanBuilder left off, then we went even further with PRBuilder which included sample press release templates… In another direction, we added EmployeeManualBuilder and SafetyPlanBuilder full of actual policies and procedures. Altogether, we had 10 products in about 3,500 retail stores and built a $12 million company with 30 employees… Today, all of our products have been integrated into a streamlined online dashboard. And we’re the leader in business development software templates.