You’ve raised and spent most of the initial round of capital needed to get your product or service launched. You’ve dealt with the unpredictable elements, some of which cost you more money than you had set aside for such contingencies. Positive cash flow from operations is still a number of months away. What are you going to do?? It’s time for the ultimate sell job.
I got a call out of the blue from a banker last week. It was Doug Bryant, now Regional Manager and SVP of Wells Fargo Bank. Doug and I hadn’t talked for several years and I had forgotten some of his particulars. “I remember your dad,” he said, to jog my memory. When your dad’s […]
In February 1984, my first entrepreneurial venture went bust, and I ended up owing the Cambridge Trust Company$50,000 (2005 dollars: ca. $100,000). Not a really big deal in retrospect, except that I was in the family- and career- formation stages with an at-home wife, five kids, and a big mortgage. Fortunately, all of my eggs […]
More than a few years ago, I found myself doing the same thing at the age of forty that I was doing at the age of ten – delivering newspapers. However, instead of the Herald and Globe on my battered old Schwin bike, I was distributing The Cambridge Express in my battered old Ford Maverick. […]