MicroConf 2012 Review

I can’t begin to describe the feelings I have now that MicroConf is over. But I’m going to try anyway. MicroConf 2012 was somehow better than last year. I spoke with several others and we couldn’t quite pinpoint why, but it was better. We upgraded the venue, we seriously upgraded the Monday night party (Thank…

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Re-branding Products, Services and Companies

The past several weeks I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the work associated with and the consequences of rebranding something. In part, I’m talking about my Blog but also some of the products that I have developed and some of my services offerings through my consulting company. The process made me sit down, think about re-branding in general, and do some research. Here’s what I learned.

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Outsourcing for Entrepreneurs

If you’re an entrepreneur, you should try to outsource as much as you can possibly get away with.

In the tech industry, ‘outsourcing’ is a dirty word. Outsourcing. The very word invokes thoughts of high technology jobs being sent overseas from the US to be fulfilled by people in India or China. This is seen to be unfortunate for tech workers in the US. It’s a widely accepted misconception that if you don’t speak English well, then you’re somehow less intelligent. If you don’t speak English at all, you’re somehow better off than if you spoke it poorly. No English means you never learned and it’s not your fault. Poor English translates to idiocy. This is obviously wrong, but I digress.

What many people don’t realize is that outsourcing is an entrepreneur’s best friend. Now, before you track me down and smash my car headlights with a baseball bat, let me explain what I mean.

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The Lifestyle Entrepreneur

Some 20 years ago, I knew I wanted to own my own company. At the time I couldn’t differentiate between being the CEO of a company and owning the company. As the years went on I began to realize the differences, but it never changed what I wanted. Throughout college, I watched as many of…

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How to bootstrap a consulting business

In my previous article, I received a question in response to “Myth #1: I need to get VC funding to make my company successful.” I was asked to explain what it really takes to get a consulting company off the ground. How much money does it take to start a consulting company? How much constitutes a…

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