From The London Times: May 15, 2009

Outside the Bristol Zoo, in England, there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 coaches, or buses.

It was manned by a very pleasant attendant with a ticket machine charging cars £1 (about $1.40) and coaches £5 (about $7).

This parking attendant worked there solid for all of 25 years. Then, one day, he just didn’t turn up for work.

“Oh well”, said Bristol Zoo Management – “we’d better phone up the City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant…”

“No”, said the Council, “that parking lot is your responsibility.”

“Err … no”, said Bristol Zoo Management, “the attendant was employed by the City Council, wasn’t he?”

“Err … NO!” insisted the Council.

Sitting in his villa somewhere on the coast of Spain, is a guy who had been taking the parking lot fees, estimated at £400 (about $560) per day at Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years. Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over £3.6 million ($7 million)!

And no one even knows his name.

You’ve started your enterprise and you’re short of funds a long time before you thought you might need money. What do you do?

Let’s check out your Equifax and Beacon (aka FICO) score. If your credit check works out to acceptability according to the bank’s standards; congratulations, you can get a personal loan.

Try telling them the loan is for your new business venture. The very first thing they will ask you for is a personal guarantee and financials for the last 3 years, but wait aren’t you a startup? Read the rest of this entry

So you need a web guru and don’t know what to do about finding one. Where does one start? Do you get your buddy who makes those flashing webpages we all made in the 1990′s to do it because it’s free?

The first thing you need to do is to figure out your needs. Do you need a creative guy who can make a marvelous looking professional site or do you need the computer nerd who makes incredibly competent websites that are functional but probably lack the creativity. Read the rest of this entry

A friend and colleague hired a web company to produce her website. Supposedly, a very reputable website developer. She was told it was $30,000. She didn’t know the back end from the frontend, the CRM from the DB. The Web guys did though but failed to tell her. Nice guys they took payments at about $10,000 a crack. Read the rest of this entry

I like to tell my clients to be very careful choosing their business name and I actually do a workshop on the topic. A good friend of mine told me of his new company name, Dubble Exxpress Go. Now anyone would have the devil of a time finding this in the phone book because rightly so the spelling is not usual for those words no matter how disjointed or perhaps inebriated a person may be. My friend, Xerxes, is a lovely guy and the fact that he is from India should not be relevant to his choice of business names but wait – Imagine for a moment Xerxes answering the phone in an excited East Indian accent. Read the rest of this entry