It’s hard to know for sure whether your startup is actually on track or you’re just telling yourself a good story. There’s no guarantee of success, but there are real signals worth paying attention to along the way. From cash flow to how customers find you, here are the three biggest signs your early-stage startup is headed in the right direction.
More often than not, the person most responsible for your business problems is staring back at you in the mirror. It’s rarely bad luck—it’s usually a handful of poor decisions rooted in roadblocks you’ve placed in your own path. From misplaced persistence to chronic self-doubt, here are the three most common ways entrepreneurs unknowingly sabotage their own success.
Every candidate puts their best foot forward in an interview, which makes hiring top talent trickier than it sounds—you often don’t know what you actually got until after they’re on the payroll. If your team feels stuck or your best people keep leaving, the problem might not be the candidates at all. Here are four common reasons the best talent keeps passing you by.
ZTE who? If the headlines about the Trump administration’s fight with the Chinese tech giant left you confused, you’re not alone. But strip away the politics and there’s a straightforward business lesson underneath: bad compliance decisions can bring down even a massive company. Here’s what every entrepreneur should take away from the ZTE fiasco, and what to do if your own business ends up out of compliance.
Starting a business gives you the chance to build credit that’s completely separate from your personal finances—a separation that can protect you if either one takes a hit. But good business credit doesn’t happen automatically; it takes deliberate steps to establish and maintain. Here’s what entrepreneurs need to know about securing a debt instrument, building payment history, and keeping your credit files error-free.
Successful people all seem to share a certain set of daily habits, and it’s not a coincidence. Most of us never stop to question our routines or notice which parts aren’t actually working for us. From knowing when to say no to avoiding other people’s drama, here are the daily habits that separate highly effective people from everyone else just going through the motions.
The T-Mobile-Sprint merger has generated plenty of headlines, along with plenty of disagreement over whether it’s actually a good idea. Mergers always come with real trade-offs—job cuts and culture clashes on one side, improved efficiency and new markets on the other. Whether or not you’ll ever merge with another company yourself, the pros and cons here offer a useful lesson in weighing risk against opportunity.
Firing someone is uncomfortable enough on its own — but what happens the next morning, when the rest of your team notices an empty desk? Say too little and rumors fill the silence. Say too much and you look unprofessional. Here’s how to handle the conversation with the employees who are still there.
Most new businesses fail, and plenty of established ones stumble too when they chase the wrong idea. The tricky part isn’t coming up with ideas — it’s knowing which ones are quietly doomed before you sink time and money into them. Here are the warning signs that separate a promising concept from a dead end.
Customers want to feel like your business is an open book — but building that kind of trust doesn’t happen by accident. Transparency starts inside your organization, long before it ever reaches a customer’s eyes. Here’s a look at what it actually takes to create a culture of honesty your customers can feel.