Variation

Variation means that not everything is the same. Some people are tall some are fat. Some are men and others are rodents. People are old and others are rich. Sometimes it's raining and other times it's cold. Some people have red hair and others wear jeans.

We're fat one day and thin after we lose weight. Or we're poor when we're young but become wealthy through hard work or luck or both. Or we're born men but have our sex changed and become women.

The concept is simple in definition but incredibly difficult and complicated in implementation. We'll talk more about variation as we go. Entrepreneurs will need to learn how to define what they mean by variation and how to measure it and how to interpret it.

Variation itself varies. The temperature varies on a Fahrenheit scale from around minus 200 degrees to plus 200 degrees. People's ages vary from 0 to 120 or so. People's gender can only be male or female. Their religion can be any number of classifications: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islam, Buddhist, and so on. Protestant can be further broken down in to Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Quaker, Swedenborgian, and so on.

In the English alphabet there are only 26 characters. Only 26. Yet those 26 characters depending upon how they are combined and ordered and how they are used produces millions of words. There is only a finite number of genes. Yet combining those genes in different ways produces millions of different kinds of people.

Variation is one of the wonderful things that the world offers us. We just have to learn how to understand it, measure it, analyze it, and find meaning in it.

Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of my professional activities. For my books, go to amazon.com and plug in my name and you'll come up with both mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red. Neither is ready yet for the Kindle.

The Extended Enterprise

The concept of an extended enterprise represents a broadening of our view of the firm. Rather than contained within the bricks and mortar of a physical business, we think of our business of both the thing we represent on an organizations chart and which exists within the four walls of our business but to include our partners and connections that also make up what our business really is.

Wikipedia says it's a loosely coupled, self-organizing network of firms that combine their economic output to provide products and services to the market. I think it is more than that--it includes the connections that tie it to others.

Thus, Starbucks isn't just the coffee shop, it's the coffee shop plus all the coffee drinkers who buy the coffee, the employees involved in selling the coffee, the growers who supply the beans, and so on and so on.

That's a lot.

We need to think in broader terms because thinking that way gives us more ideas about how we can grow and thrive in whatever market we are obliged to compete in.

Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of my professional activities. For my books, go to amazon.com and plug in my name and you'll come up with both mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red. Neither is ready yet for the Kindle.

Discounted Feasibility

Here's a little more on feasibility. Feasible means stuff like practical, doable, realistic, appropriate. But feasible with regard to what? Here are some things to think about.

Personal feasibility. Are you the right person to do this? Do you have the necessary skills, money, connections, etc.?

Economic feasibility. Does the expected financial gain from whatever you want to do outweigh the total costs of doing it? Remember you won't be able to anticipate all the costs; there will be some unintended consequences for you to deal with; and you are going too put too rosy a view on the benefits because you are passionate (as you should be) about what you want to do. So be sure to discount your estimate of its economic benefit by half and inflate the anticipated costs by a factor of 3 to correct for your bias in favor of a positive outcome and to try to estimate unanticipated costs.

Schedule feasibility. Taking into account all the steps needed between planning, start up, getting to market, getting to generate positive cash flow, getting to profitability and exiting, can your project be done while the window of opportunity is still open? That is, if you have only 2 years to get the thing up and running, and you estimate the window of opportunity at only 6 months, maybe you better think again. Also, inflate the time you estimate because everything always takes longer and discount for the time the window will be open.

Remember, everything is always more difficult, is more expensive, takes longer than you think and often is not quite as cool as you think it will be. Include those factors in your calculations. You can't always estimate them exactly, but try to account for them as much as possible.

If the answer to any of these questions is "no," you should rethink things and figure out what reasonable attempts you can make to turn them into "yes," or maybe think about a different project where the answer is "yes" to all of these questions.

Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Liquidation

I reached into my grab bag and found liquidation from November, 2008. This is an interesting word. It means changing some thing's physical state from solid to liquid.

Wikipedia has the term referring to "the process by which a company (or part of a company) is brought to an end, and the assets and property of the company redistributed.

See the annoying use of parentheses? The sentence would read better without them. Their presence stops the eye's progress across the screen and slows comprehension. In fact you don't need the comma either.

The word "liquidation" has a fluid metaphor embedded in it. Maybe submerged below it. We see this fluid concept underlying business terminology. A house whose appraised value is less than the amount owed is referred to as "under water." A Liquidator gets cash for objects. Liquid assets are things that we can turn into cash. Cash flow is money coming in or going out., Stopping the bleeding means to keep a company from running out of cash. Red ink (as in blood) is debt." "Dissolution of a business is ending it. Retained earnings are what owners of a company get to keep. We talk of a business sinking into debt. People who can't get money when they need it have "liquidity issues." And so on.

Maybe this water metaphor is used so often because water is a very powerful concept. We evolved from water and we are almost all water. We have to drink water to stay alive, so maybe we make an implicit analogy between personal survival and the survival of humans. Whatever, we think of a good company as fluid and having a robustly positive cash flow which will allow everyone to prosper. That's what all of us want, to prosper and have good lives.

What do you think about this? I'd like to know. Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Tics, Ya Know?, in Oral and Written Communication

Tics are repeated verbal or written behaviors that other people find annoying. La Law did a show back when in which the black attorney had a client with a severe case of Tourette's Syndrome such that the client would blurt out unpredictably various racial and ethnic epithets including the "N" word.

Tourette's is a very unfortunate condition such that those who suffer from it display uncontrollable physical twitching or verbal utterances. In the La Law episode just mentioned the attorney knew that his client was not doing saying those things on purpose and couldn't control any of it, but found the behaviors distressing anyway.

You find presenters who don't have Tourette's but who suffer from verbal tics. They pepper their presentation with words or phrases like "uh," "er," "um," or "you know." An entrepreneur who wants to persuade others to give him money needs to learn how to speck without showing these ticks. These can be gotten rid of with some work.

Physical tics can include straightening your hair, fidgeting with your hands, pacing back and forth, picking your nose, clipping your nails, wiping your glasses or other annoying mannerism. A graduate professor I had once had a tic. Once every five minutes or so during a seminar he would clean out his pipe and reload it and light it up. He'd spend the time between lighting's talking and the thing would go out so he'd have to do it all over again. I'm sure he was unaware of what he was doing.

An advertising guy I know has Tourette's. During a presentation he interrupts his sentences with kind of a weird physical twitching. But he always explains to people very matter-of-factly that he has Tourette's and asks that they bear with him. He does a very nice job and I don't even notice the tics except once in a while. In general, the problem with verbal tics is that they distract from your message. People end up being annoyed with the tics and forget to hear what you are saying.

Writers also have tics. I'm reading a book now in which the guy uses "however" about twice in a page. He also overuses semicolons and commas which are annoying and slow the reader down. When people are pressed for time and don't read as much, the last thing you want to do is shoot yourself metaphorically in the foot. Paragraphs with lots of adverbs also slow the reader down. These are not really tics but they have the same effect and should be gotten rid of. Same goes for empty phrases such as "it goes without saying that..." or "It's needless to say..." So---don't say it. Written tics are a problem in a business plan or proposal because they make the text harder to read and them require the reader to spend more time reading it. They also slow the reader down and distract him or her from getting your point. Not a good idea if you're trying to get somewhere.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Financial Capital

Financial capital is the second of three forms of entrepreneurial capital. Capital is resources and financial capital is financial resources: money or access to money.

Money can be cash as in a suitcase full of fifty $100 bills. It can be the balance of your checking account. It can be stocks or bonds or investments that can be liquidated. It can be a house that you have just sold or which you can mortgage to get cash. It can be a car that you can sell.

It has to be something that you can either pay for something else with or which you can use as collateral for money that you can use to pay for something with. It could be a rich uncle who says you can have $100,000 for whatever you want just tell him and give him a few days to sell some non-performing stocks.

Financial capital is not the most important resource, but you need money. You need to have it so that you don't have to begin your business by borrowing. If you are thinking of a business that you can only start if you incure a huge amount of debt before you can start, I would recommend you think up another business you can start on no or very little money.

Plastic financing used to be big for entrepreneurs because banks weren't going to lend them money and most of them weren't eligible for angel investors or venture capital. But it's harder to bankrupt out of debt and credit card interest rates are through the roof so that's not as attractive as it used to be.

Shakespeare said "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." There's a lot of wisdom in this. But if you do have to borrow money, make sure you can pay it back. I wanted to join an expensive business club here in Philadelphia. I needed $4,000 up front and it would have been difficult for me to get it. But I was getting a pension from Wisconsin and I set the payments so that monthly payment would at least make the repayments. And I had some IRAs that I knew I could use to repay if the worst happened. My father-in-law gave the money and I repaid the loan about 2 months early. He was quite impressed.

If you borrow it from a family member, make sure you write out a schedule of repayments and if there's interest to be paid, make sure it's reasonable. And make sure you make your payments on time or maybe even pay off the loan early. That way they'll be happy to lend to you in the future.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Venture Capital

Venture Capital is a very specialized resource for a very few, very risky businesses who show great potential of making a lot of money in a short period of time. Commonly known as a "VC", a Venture Capital investor is a person or a fund that provides very large amounts of money to companies who have a proven concept, are close to taking their product to market, and can demonstrate to the VC that they have a chance of paying back the VC's investment 10 times over in a year or two. VC's are looking for the next Microsoft Corporation. It's a rich pot of gold but one that very few can actually reach into.

Usually the VC will want part ownership of they company it funds and is willing to provide a lot of management and other assistance in order to make their investment pay off. And they're going to want a say in what you do. So, it's not for everybody. In fact it's for hardly anybody. It's especially not appropriate for service firms or for restaurants. But then, hardly anybody's going to lend money to a restaurant.

These days VCs are not giving money to new businesses. They're using their funds to help succeed those businesses in which they've already invested so they can get their money back.

So if you're thinking of relying on venture capital as a source of funds for your new business, don't.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Failure Analysis

Failure is a fact of life. Things fail all the time. People get fired. Jobs don't get done. Things fail part. Teams lose. Objects break. Groups don't reach their intended targets. Failure analysis is simply analyzing data to understand why things have failed and what you can do about it. It's only a big deal if you let it be a big deal. You learn a lot more from failures than from successes.

Virtually every successful product was born of failure. Quicken was born of a prior product that didn't work. Wikipedia rose out of the ashes of Nupedia. Ted Turner failed to get into Harvard. Microsoft failed a couple of times and had to get resurrected.

There's a story allegedly about Edison, the American inventor who really started General Electric. He told someone at a party he'd run 500 experiments trying to get the light bulb to work but hadn't yet. The person listened and said, "Isn't that a waste of time?" Edison allegedly looked at him blankly and said, "Not at all. I have found 500 ways not to make a light bulb."

I don't know whether that story is true or not, but it's instructive. Failure can be good if the person who fail treat it as a learning experience. Why did something fail (i.e. not meet goals)? Then correct the mistakes and get in there again.

Many people try repeatedly to smoking and fail. We call those practice attempts.

The key to learning from failure is to write down what you want to accomplish ahead of time, how you want to accomplish it, and how you'll know whether it's working or not, what information you need to collect so that you'll know and how you're going to collect the information and how long you'll run the experiment. Then implement the project, collect the data, and at the end of it measure how you did against goal. If you exceeded goal, you were successful. If you failed, that is didn't at least meet goal, you need to analyze your data to understand why your effort failed.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Overconfidence Effect

The overconfidence effect is that bias in people such that they are right far less often than they think they are. Human judgement is flawed and in many cases your first judgement is correct, it often turns out that it isn't and unless you back up your intuition with data you run the risk of going off in the wrong direction.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink deals with this issue.

Many people who have an idea for a business or product overestimate the odds that it will be successful. It's related to the proximity effect which I've blogged about previously. Entrepreneurs have to guard against suffering from the its effects by consulting others who are disinterested in the outcome of your efforts.

If you're interested in this, read the Wikipedia article and follow the links. For fun make up a list of ten statements that you think are true about the world, such as "X% of Americans smoke," then do some research and find out if the facts are consistent with your view. Chances are you're not but then I could be wrong.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Feasibility

Okay, it's been two years since I said anything about this. Feasibility simply refers to the question of whether it's possible to do something. Can you make a something for $X.XX a unit, bring it to market by November X, 20XX, have it generating a positive cash flow by January XX, 20XX, and make it show a profit by a date two years of that? The process by which you figure this out is called feasibility study. If it is found to be feasible a report is usually written. If it's not feasible, the studiers generally bury the whole thing so as not to waste anymore time on it unless the funders require something in writing to show what was done with their money.

Whether it's feasible is one thing. More important is should you do it? History is replete with examples, which I'm not going to mention, of things that were feasible but never should have been undertaken. Consider: even if you can build a thing and produce it at a huge profit and generate boatloads of cash, is it the right thing for you and for at least one segment of Society? This gets at a more fundamental issue and needs to be settled in at least in a preliminary fashion before you even examine the feasibility of it.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Redundant Networks

Redundancy in Britain means unemployment. The redundancy rate is the unemployment rate. What I mean by redundancy is that your network has more than one link per node. After all being able to reach a connection through two or more other people is inefficient yet redundant and probably more effective.

Here's what I mean. If you, A, have only one connection, B, with the target, C, and you lose contact with B for some reason, you are no longer connected to C. But connection with B" But if you have two connections with "C", call them "B1" and "B2" and you lose your connection to B1, you're still connected through B2. Even better, you know C independent of either B1 or B2, the redundancy of your network is even greater.

Once a while ago I had a client in the Midwest and the Director of Marketing and Planning and I were very tight. I did several studies a year for them. I had tried, not not as hard as I should have, to cultivate another connection to the CEO but never did. One day my contact told me she was retiring but that she'd forwarded my material with a strong recommendation that they continue to use me on to her boss.

Guess what: about a month later I was told that they were changing to another firm. Not that my work was bad, just they wanted to try something new. I wonder how that person would have felt if their supervisor said they were letting her go, not that her work was bad but just because they wanted to try someone new.

Still, you have to decide how much redundancy you afford, either money, time, or attention. You can't be redundant with everybody.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Effective Network

Effectiveness refers to the quality of the effort made to accomplish your goal, efficiency to how streamlined your efforts are.

Consider this: Two people, person "A" and person "B", accomplish the same objective, but "A" achieves his goal better than "B" does, even though B's efforts are more efficient, A's work has been more effective. In general effectiveness is better than efficiency alone.

In network terms let's say you want to both connect with person "D" yet develop a stronger position with him, you might want to connect with "D" directly, which would be more efficient, but you might also want to connect with "B" and "C" who also know "D." That way if you lose contact with either "B" or "C", you are still connected with "D".

Your work is more effective than if you had connected with "D" alone with no other connections. Efficiency is good but effectiveness, while more expensive, is better. The question is, is the "better" worth the time, attention, and money you have to invest in acquiring the connection?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Efficient Networks

Efficiency means an objective is an outcome is achieved with a minimum of input. If you spent X resources to achieve Y result you would have been twice as efficient than if you'd spent 2X resources to achieve the same Y result. And if you spent X resources to achieve Y result you'd have been half as efficient as someone who spent .5X to the same outcome.

In terms of network development assume you are "A" and the person you want to connect with is "D" and two intermediaries are "B" and "C." If to connect "D" you first must connect with "B" and then with "C" you're building your network less efficiently as if you could connect directly with "D" without having to connect first with through "B" and "C." Not having to connect with "B" and "C" means you spent less time and attention and probably money to achieve your objective of connecting with "D" and your efforts are more efficient.

Efficiency is good but as we shall see it's not everything.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Why Networks are Important

Networks are important. You remember that Ron Burt says that personal capital is one of the three weapons entrepreneurs bring to the competitive arena. The other two being human capital and financial capital.

Networks contain the roadways over which information and opportunities get from person to person. Say there's a contract to be let at corporation A and your best buddy works there and gets you on the bidders' list for that company. You're going to get a request for proposal while your competitor who is not on the list isn't going to get one. They can't get here from there.

You know of a job at XYZ corporation and you have a connection that can get you the name of the hiring manager or, better yet, the president whereas the 10-11 people who might be qualified won't get in there.

Networks are important because markets are bumpy. There are roadblocks, crevasses, mountains, etc. that keeps information and opportunity from getting from point "A" to Point "B" easily. Networks are the bridges across the crevasses and around the mountains.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Network

The network is the most elegant concept thought up ever. Something is elegant if it is simple yet pregnant with meaning. A network is just that. It's a set of nodes and links. Nodes are points and links are lines connecting the points.

People have been studying networks for over a century. Sociologists noticed that people tend to hang in groups and began to study that. Mathematicians find the network a very elegant model and like to do some pretty sophisticated math. Engineers study networks too. Power companies study "the grid." Traffic engineers study the road system which is a network with the intersections as nodes and the roads as the links.

Business consultants study the working arrangement where the workers are the nodes and the relationships are the links. Then there's the worldwide web which I won't get into. An uncle used to say that even a spider was smarter than him; the spider had a website and he didn't which shows you that networks exist in nature too. Bees have a well-defined social network. So do ants.

A big step forward was made in the middle of the 20th century when a researcher came up with a "sociogram" that allowed people to actually draw a network. You can't draw a very big one though because after you get past five or six nodes it gets harder fast to draw a network in two dimensional space.

The terminology is a mess. A node is also referred to as a vertex or a point. A link can be called a line or a connector etc. I just nodes and links. And you have directed networks and non-directed networks and ego networks and so on and so on. You have cliques and partial networks and so on. Every new researcher likes to create his or her own language.

And the amount of work already done is vast and getting vaster so fast that no one can get a hold of all of it. And you don't have to. A lot of it is so abstract and mathematical and irrelevant to daily life that unless you are a mathematician you'll never get it and not useful even if you did get it. And there are a lot of goofy terms, like betweenness centrality. As for me, my mind flips off when I see an ugly equation.

Thing is, you don't have to understand everything to help yourself. Just knowing some things about it will be helpful. For example, think of your market as a network. That's what it is. It's customers and their connections, nodes and links. And you can use that to understand how you can get your word out to customers and others and sell your products. You don't have to be able to compute the betweenness centrality of the nodes in your network find network analysis useful. Of course if you could, you'd probably learn more and come up with additional insights that would help you. Maybe not.

If you want to learn about social network theory without spending your life doing so, go to the Wikipedia article and follow its links. That should keep you busy.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

The Writer Entrepreneur

Changes in the publishing system over the past few years have brought to my mind the concept of the writer entrepreneur. Writers have always been entrepreneurs until recently they've been able to hide under the rubric of artist.
That writers are entrepreneurs there can be no doubt. "Undertaking an enterprise within an atmosphere of uncertainty and risk" perfectly describes a writer. Previously he or she could focus on writing his or her story then delegating the selling of it off to an agent. Now we are our own agents. It's the way it should be.

Writers really are natural entrepreneurs. After all you have to craft a voice as both writers and entrepreneurs and you have to get people to buy into your vision as both a writer and an entrepreneur. Plus, entrepreneurs have to know how to write so they can craft clearly-conceived and written business plans and pitch decks.

Yes, my friends, writers are entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs need to be writers.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Partnership

Simply stated, a Partnership is a specific form of business organization in which each of the partners shares in the revenue and each is liable for 100% of the debts of the company.

There are lots of different kinds of partners like limited partners and general partners and managing partners but that's for larger organizations with investors. But look into it. Wikipedia is a good place to start but don't stop there.

If you don't do anything special but just go into business and start selling stuff on your own you have a sole proprietorship. Most of the time a sole proprietorship is all a person really needs. If you want investors (really?) or to employ people (watch out) or you want the business to outlast your death, you might want to go for something else. It yuse to be you had a standard C corporation, sub-chapter S, or partnership to choose from. Now there's a buch more. LLCs seem to be popular.

The word partnership is often used to mean a collaboration, as in "We're partnering together." To be more accurate a "partnership" is a form of business organization defined above. where two or more people act together in a business and each derives income You should contact an attorney to determine whether you want to be in a partnership. You should also ask an accountant. If you ask Tim Bosworth he's almost always recommend against it.

But, if you do, after talking with your attorney, decide that a partnership is the right way to go, you had better make sure you have a good partnership agreement. This specifies what you're doing, how you're making money, how the revenue is to be accounted for, who is liable for what, and what happens should the partnership agree to go out of business or if one of the partners is unavailable to the partnership because of illness, accident, death, or fraud.

Also, make sure you know the person with whom you're going to form the partnership. Make sure they are trustworthy and will be able to work together. You don't have to be close pals. If you don't know them or they have less than great credit don't go into business with them. If they're that important take them on as an employee or outside vendor with your relationship covered by a good employment agreement and a non-disclosure agreement.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Mental Accounting

Accounting is a process that assigns value to things. Mental accounting describes the mental process people use to categorize their assets as belonging to current income, current wealth, or further income. I'm not sure everybody uses those categories, but the process of framing is such that we assign things to mental accounts.

As entrepreneurs it's an interesting way of thinking about how our minds' processes work.

By the way I have a new novel ready on Amazon.com. No Stop in Red and takes place mostly on Cape Cod and cooks up a delicious murder mystery of one part terrorism and one part homelessness and one part organ transplantation.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.