Business Opportunities Weblog

January 31, 2006 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

Jeff Cornwall:

There are many really good business opportunities that never make it past paper. Would-be entrepreneurs agonize over every detail of their plan to the point that it never gets off the ground, or they miss their window of opportunity.

One of the virtues that Mike Naughton and I are writing about in our new book The Good Entrepreneur is prudence, which entails being good stewards of the resources we have at our disposal. Entrepreneurs who agonize over getting started are often concerned with being good stewards of their own resources they plan to put into their business and of the resources they will get from friends, family, other investors, and creditors.

But there are two critical errors that one can make when looking at how the entrepreneur manages their resources. One error is being careless, reckless and wasteful with resources. In this case the entrepreneur spends money without thought often on things that will do little to create sales and grow the business. For example, they lease expensive space or build huge and opulent buildings, they pay themselves huge salaries, or they hire more staff all that the business cannot support. They burn the investment on things that will not create a sustainable business within the time that their seed resources will carry them.

However, another error is to not ever put those resources to use. It is like the parable in the Bible of the man who buried the money that was entrusted to him, never putting it to use.

via Startup Fever.

In Entrepreneurial Lifestyle | 1 Comment