There are several creative ways to get this deal done. Feel free to call or email me.

This is hard to answer without knowing the size of company you are targeting...

I don't know if I would suggest a book on "fundraising" because this is a situation in which personality, quality of team, execution and overall market potential play a determinant role in you getting funded. I've read a lot of books! I mean really a lot!! Mainly because i enjoy it, but the books that have helped me most as entrepreneur aren't even entrepreneur guide books. What you seem to need is a resource that can help you shape your mentality into the right approach to pitching. Check out my blog: unthinkeverything.blogspot.com there I have some books listed, among them is one I honestly love and currently rereading for my 4th time: Presentations Secrets of Steve Job. This book helped me secure half a million in my first try. It did take me a few versions and a lot of time practicing and desiging my pitch but it worked. And that's what you need, results not generic motivators that are written to sell books but not give you tangible rules and tools.

Central CRM in the cloud that everyone has access to. Infusionsoft might be a good solution. Obviously you need email follow up series integration and sales funnel automation.

I would recommend setting up a profile on elance or freelancer.com and look at doing freelance work. Pick something specific that you are good at (e.g. Windows PC maintenance or Network Administration) and focus only on that for your profile. Set your rate low compared to similar people with the same skills as you need to build up references before you can charge more. Then, contribute to online forums around your area of expertise to build up your profile. Just some thoughts...

Please resist the urge to pull the band-aid. I'm not a fan of keeping a poor performer, but unless this person is a behavioral or "for cause" termination, he deserves some professionalism here. 30-day Performance Plan, make the goals aggressive and stick to it - he can consider that his head start to either buck up or start searching. Remember, your other employees watch how you treat their former colleagues. A quick termination before a holiday is prickish, an aggressive performance plan is taking care of business.

This is an extremely vague question, but let's see if I can help you out. When deciding what product or service you're going to provide, it's very important to be sure there is product market fit and you have a unique selling point. When deciding what your products should be, you should first decide what "problem" you're solving. I specialize in helping entrepreneurs get started and start the building phase. If you would like more guidance on how to get started or what product to create, shoot me a message so I can get more detailed information on what you're trying to achieve. I'd love to help.

Find the right investor interested in this area and the answer is yes. investors come from many walks of life and are interested in things just like everyone else. Find wealthy individuals who are open to investing and find your area of business interesting and ideally understand it and could help with it as well.

It is very hard to give actionable feedback without more details. You asked about creative, "unseen" opportunities on your balance sheet. Also make a list of things you and the team, or your product, are good at. A great example of this is the story behind Slack, it was just an internal communication tool for a gaming company. When the gaming company struggled, the released the communication tool and it took off as its own business. Inventory what you have, what works well, what needs your clients have, and what you can offer to solve those problems. I'm happy to schedule a call to discuss more.

Here is the deal: as an entrepreneur, you must be the best sales person at your company. There aren't any excuses that can combat that. Then, once the business has a revenue stream, you may hire a small sales team to continue new business into the sales funnel. In order to become successful, you (and your co-founders) must make an effort to pursue those leads on your own. If you need help on developing a system or a sales process, do not hesitate to message me. I would love to help. I have done sales strategy consulting and coaching many times and have trained many entrepreneurs to become successful in sales. If you schedule a call with me and do not think it was worth your time and money, I will refund your money no questions asked. However, you should shoot me a message and explain to me a little bit better what your situation is exactly so I can figure out how I can best help. I always give free email support until your goals are achieved. Hope to see a message from you soon. - Colin

You should be so lucky that someone will steal your idea. The truth is that its all about execution and not ideas. Facebook wasn't the first social network, they just executed better. Same for Instagram, Yammer and Airbnb - all Billion dollar companies built in public.

Are you looking for prospects or someone to test the usability and functionality of your process?

From an ethical standpoint I would tell him that he cant wait until you have an exit or sufficient cash flow to buy him out. First he quit. Second, he wasn't performing to expectations, Third, he wasn't there long enough to make much of a difference in the business. You obviously owe him what you told him, but I would not try and perform any superhero feat's to make it happen in the short term. Having said that, if the amount is minimal and you have the cash you may just want to buy him out now, so that you don't have to deal with him in the future.

The technical legal answer is unless your subscription agreement or convertible note allowed for some type of rescission right, a contract was formed when he executed the subscription doc that generally can't be unilaterally rescinded. From a business and relationship standpoint, you may want to allow him to rescind anyway. As an entrepreneur myself who's raised outside capital for my own company and helped other companies raise capital, I've learned you don't want investors on your cap table that aren't advocates of your company, or who may cause problems or take too much of your time. This is somewhat unique since he already holds a convertible note and has money in your company whether he converts or not. You have to determine what effect enforcing the contract will have on his relationship with your company and whether it will do more damage than good. Have you tried having a meeting or call with him to talk through and understand his concerns?

You absolutely do not need to work at an agency before starting one of your own! I have never worked in the industry at all before and just started offering digital marketing to companies a few months ago and already have 9 clients - literally starting from nothing. You don't even need to know HOW to do the marketing like Adwords, SEO, etc, because you can outsource all of that. You just need to start by reaching out to companies with over $500k/yr in sales that have a poor internet presence, and have an average sale of over $800 and you can help them grow for sure. If you need help, I can set you up with the contractors to outsource to, and give you some pointers on how I landed my first client 3 months ago. You can do it!

I've been successfully using ShellyCloud for couple of years. It's linux based cloud platform deployable via git push, MySQL support is also available as MariaDB. https://shellycloud.com

Hi, that's because you're marketing it all wrong. I checked out your app and the free content doesn't seem compelling enough to want to pay for the rest. Your messaging is all over the place trying to target every possible audience within the college environment. An app like this should be native. Look for ways to couple college living with tips and answers that would benefit students. Pick channels and stick to one goal/audience per channel. Today's marketing is not about throwing ads at people and expecting growth. Ask yourself - How can I efficiently reach and had a conversation with my customers? How and where can they best reach me? My services? How and where can I facilitate my customers/users reach each other? (Promote word of mouth?)

Putting aside for a moment that the messaging market is pretty flooded with many competitors and that your app offering would need some unique differentiator (or an amazing marketing/PR strategy)... your questions that can be answered in a variety of ways depending on details you have yet to share. But speaking broadly: Mobile app development costs vary depending on a couple of things: 1. Functionality (how little, how much) 2. Integrations (OS and external) 3. Backend / server-side hosting components. 4. Depth of testing and iteration. You also have to realize that building an app and maintaining an app are two different costs. You need to find an app developer or partner and define the above before you will have the costs you are looking for. Generally speaking the initial development costs could range from 50-150k (or more) depending on the developer/partner and the above variables. Before going all out and build a full feature app, you should consider looking at the base functionality and build a MVP Building an MVP could cost as little as finding a solid app developer and paying them for their time. With an MVP, a good business plan, and some solid market data you would be better armed to start the hunt for funding.

There are so many opportunities to systemize the content production process. Make a detailed list of exactly what the end users wants to accomplish, how they can accomplish this (your secret sauce), and how it can be delivered. I'm happy to jump on a call to discuss details.

For my services, there is no long-term obligation. You can hire me for as little or as long as you want. Once we agree on a scope of work, I can quote you a fixed price for specific deliverables or I can quote you an hourly rate to do what you need done. I am very flexible. I am here to serve my clients so I will always work within your range of budget. It will just always depend on how much you want done. Feel free to contact me with a specific need and I am always happy to provide an initial consultation at no cost with a quote you can say yes or no to.

Can the model be franchised? Are your margins large enough such that a franchisee will be able to make a profit AND pay your franchise fees? If you go down the franchise route, you will be changing the nature of your business from being a gym operator to being a franchisor, or seller of business systems. Do you have your systems perfected to the point where someone will pay for them? Do you have the resources to start supporting the needs of franchisees? What kinds of needs will they have? Coaching, support, etc. They will be expecting innovation in marketing and product delivery from you. Are you prepared to sell off your existing locations as franchises and focus solely on this new business model for yourself? In 2007 I owned a small business with a partner and faced the same question you are now. In the end we decided to sell our operating company and sell the IP within our systems in a 'do it yourself business kit.' It's worked brilliantly because we required no further investment but get a cash flow from the materials. If you'd like an idea of how to format an attractive franchise opportunity. I recommend my recent book Franchise Warnings. Available from Amazon.

Hi there, Congrats on the new venture! Seems like you're making some awesome progress already. If you're looking to incorporate a startup, feel free to check out a company I started called LawTrades (http://www.lawtrades.com) -- in short, we help startups get legal stuff done. We work specifically with startups and connect them to experienced startup attorneys who are available on demand and usually 60% cheaper than a traditional law firm. Aside from the incorporation, you can find help on contract negotiation, making your business structure "investor friendly", securing IP, executing a convertible note and more. Always free to connect with an attorney to get a feel for him/her. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Let assume that you are a patient and you know that your health is not well. To fix your health, you may have tried few medicines that you thought will solve the issue but you found nothing worked. Now you have 2 options - keep on trying to fix your health or consult with a specialized doctor to fix the problem. If we consider patient = website and doctor = business analyst and strategist then you can understand you need a business analyst and strategist help to fix your problem. Before meeting any specialist first try to gather as much information you can gather for your business. This information can be statistical details about your website, or customer behavior or even SWOT analysis data. Besides these, ask yourself questions. Like: a. What is your main goal and your current status? b. What are the main obstacles to achieve the goal? c. Is the website technically sound (loading time, responsiveness)? d. What are the most converting marketing channels? e. What are your customers saying? Collect information, make a basic plan that you think is effective and then consult with an expert to fine tune it and then implement. All the best.

You can check out 2 sites: www.aliexpress.com/‎ and www.alibaba.com. alibaba has the ability for you to contact distributors directly. Debbie

Meet people. Entrepreneurs, marketers, investors. Meet enough of them and you become their matchmaker as well as promoter. And if you pay attention to what's going on, then you might end up their advisor too. Hello.