Scaling a business is hard. Over the years, I have helped hundreds of entrepreneurs all over the world grow their businesses. It has always been super fun, exciting & fascinating for me to see the innovative ideas that smart, motivated people work on to create employment and do good work. 

Over that time, I have learned that every entrepreneur is a little bit different in their mission, vision and execution. There are certainly some common success attributes (hard work, good leadership skills, focusing on priorities), but the goal of a good start-up advisor is to help the entrepreneur achieve the goals they set out to achieve when they started the company. 

To that end, we have been circulating this document since 2015. We call it 'How to Create a Successful Start Up in 2021' and it is designed for advisors to discover enough essential information to see if and how we can help companies scale.

If you want our help to scale your business, we will need you to answer these questions.

If you fill them out and email them to me at dan@dantyre.com I will review and schedule time to review and see how we might be able to help.

Building a Successful Start Up in 2024

February 2024

 

Name of Company:

URL:

Incorporation Date:

Number of Full Time Employees: 

  1. Are you working on this business full time?
    1. If not, why not:
  2. Do you have domain knowledge that would give you a competitive advantage to build this company in this industry?
  3. Why do you want to start this company?
    1. What problem are you looking to solve?
    2. Why do you want to solve this problem now?
    3. Have you thought through the personal and professional implications of working in a start-up?
  4. What kind of company do you want to build?
  5. What are the tangible goals of the company over the next 12 -24 months?
  6. Do you have a co-founder?
    1. What is her/his role?
  7. Do you have a concise business plan (3 pages) with the following that would allow us to better understand the structure and future of your business that includes the following?
    1. Executive Summary
    2. Overview of the Industry
    3. The problem that you solve
    4. The Company – name, location, website
    5. The Team – all full time employees (or critical contractors)
    6. The Product – description of the product or service
    7. Competitive advantage, special sauce or why you will win
    8. Your sales & marketing strategy
    9. Manufacturing or delivery strategy
    10. Business model by month for the next 12 months with # of customers, revenue, cost of goods sold, expenses, profit/loss, employee headcount
      1. Note: All financial projections should be in a spreadsheet format by month to show MTM growth
  8. Have you identified three advisors that you can meet with quarterly that can help you scale the company?
  9. How will you know when you have proven the concept to make your effort an investable company?
  10. Do you have access to friends & family capital to bridge through the proof of concept or angel round?

If you fill out these questions and send them to me, we will take a look and see how we can help. Good luck in the scale.
Dan Tyre

Written by Dan Tyre

Dan Tyre is an authority on inbound marketing and sales and has become a regular public speaker, blog writer, mentor, and coach for those who want to harness of the power of inbound marketing to improve their bottom line. He joined HubSpot as a member of the original team in May of 2007 as the first salesperson for the company. Since then, Dan has held various positions in sales, sales management, recruiting, training, and expansion of the HubSpot sales team.

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