Aspan Maria - Startup Money Made Easy: The Inc. Guide to Every Financial Question About Starting, Running, and Growing Your Business

CONTENTS

Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

2019 HarperCollins Leadership

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Book design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates.

ISBN 978-1-4002-1225-5 (eBook)

Epub Edition January 2019 9781400212255

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018960959

ISBN 978-1-4002-1224-8

Printed in the United States of America

18 19 20 21 22 LSC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

W HEN WE SET OUT to compile a comprehensive guide to startup money and the financial questions every company founder faces, we found that most of the answers were already at our fingertips.

After all, Inc. has spent the past forty years providing advice, education, and inspiration to the leaders of fast-growing private companies.

Our unrivaled editorial contentproduced by veteran reporters, all-star editors, and expert columnistsis much of what you see in this books pages.

A special thanks to former Inc. reporter Anna Hensel, who in early 2017 took on an assignment for me and spent several weeks asking countless startup founders to share some of their biggest and most embarrassing financial mistakesand the wisdom they earned by fixing or recovering from those mistakes. Anna, along with several colleagues who assisted in the reporting, compiled that advice into a fun, occasionally painful, and illuminating feature article I edited, in Inc.s June 2017 issue. The Smartest Money Advice I Ever Got directly inspired this book.

Both the article and this book are also indebted to the countless company founders Inc. has covered over the years, who have laid bare their financial souls to share their most devastating financial mistakes and the money wisdom theyve learned through the years while running their companies. Our thanks to all of them; this book wouldnt be possible without their groundbreaking work.

I OFTEN DESCRIBE FINANCE AS the broccoli of running a business. Its good for you, full of nutritional necessities to sustain lifebut its all too often something completely unappealing, overwhelmingly strong, or boiled down to something limp and useless.

During four years spent overseeing the money coverage at Inc., Ive tried to turn startup finance into the fun, delicious broccolithe financial vegetable sauted with lots of extra-virgin olive oil and red pepper flakes and showers of chopped garlic. The sort of broccoli you might go to a restaurant just to order. The sort of thing you look forward to reading about, and spending time thinking about.

As the leafy green vegetable of almost any project, money is essential to starting, running, and expanding a business. Its something that all successful entrepreneurs have had to deal with, and that theyve disliked intensely at some point in their companys journey from idea to empire. Its something that has caused each successful founder to make mistakesmany, many mistakesover the course of that journey.

Just ask Venus Williams, a woman who knows a thing or two about overcoming setbacks. The Wimbledon champion, US Open champion, and Olympic gold medalist spends her not-very-copious spare time running her startup, sportswear and athleisure maker EleVen by Venus.

In her role as founder and CEO, Williams has faced more than sports injuries and on-court rivalries; shes overcome the bankruptcy of her retail partner and costly manufacturing mistakes. And she managed to recover, and then some, turning her business around so that it tripled sales in 2016.

I always dreamed of being an entrepreneur, Williams told Inc. in 2017. That was one of my lifelong goals.

If youre reading this book, that dream probably sounds familiar. As will the mistakes that Williams made with money, and that many other successful and prominent entrepreneursincluding Mark Cuban, Bobbi Brown, Jack Ma, Christina Tosi, and Daymond Johnall surmounted as they built their businesses.

This book will share their stories, and those of many other startup founders, as it walks you through the biggest money questions youll face about your business: How much money do you need to start something new? How should you raise the necessary funds, whether from banks or venture capitalists or family and friends? What financial hurdles might you encounter, after your business starts to expand? And maybe even, someday, how can you sell or retire from your business, and enjoy everything that your hard work created?

The answers lie within this guidealong with lots of stories and advice from todays most successful entrepreneurs. If youre looking for some inspiration, and a whole lot of commiseration, youll find plenty on the pages of this book.

Y OU WANT TO START a business. Youve got the idea, youre ready to hustle, but how much money do you need to launch your startup?

Ten years ago, the average cost of starting a small business was $31,150, according to one study. That seems laughably large today. While some businesses still require lots of money to get off the ground, at Inc., we regularly hear from founders of fast-growing companies who started their businesses for hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.

Today a smart entrepreneur with a website can start making in six months what we were making after six years, says Bert Jacobs, cofounder of the apparel company Life Is Good.

Technologys rapid advance is bringing down many startup costs, as Jacobs points out. He and his brother John launched the first iteration of their company in 1989, with $200 borrowed from another brother, Allan. The early days were scrappy, to say the least, as Jacobs told Inc.s Leigh Buchanan:

We would have used that technology if wed had it. Instead, we spent years building a company with employees we met at pickup basketball games; customers we joked with in the streets while keeping one eye peeled for the beat cop; and advice from retailers up and down the East Coast whom we dropped in on. It may not have been the most effective process. Definitely it wasnt the most efficient. But a lot of our companys values came out of that early need to do things cheap and in person.