Step up to the moon (and find your investor)

I am convinced that it is necessary to have high expectations to achieve great goals. Throughout the years that I have worked with entrepreneurs I've come across two types of people: those who pose a project that provides a comfortable life ends meet, and who want to become Napoleon and conquer Europe. Continue reading " Step up to the moon (and find your investor) . "

Tags: alejandro suarez , undertaking , company , investor , Moon , Press

A financial plan to make your business stronger

Rigorously plan sales forecasting and cost, funding streams, the cash position and when the benefits reach are critical aspects of your new business a success. Read PDF .

Tags: alejandro suarez , undertaking , company , financial plan , Newspapers , Tribune

The top 10 countries to undertake

Friends of the rankings quite often ask me: What is the best country to undertake? The simple answer is: maybe not the best, but the easiest, is always ... yours!. Continue reading Top 10 countries to undertake

Tags: alejandro suarez , undertake , countries , Press

They do not sell bikes: the fraud of "if you can"

I have a good friend, a professional-for-political disgrace, that he laughs when I hear people say that "not everyone is used to undertake" sounds a bit Nazi. His speech is quite the opposite. Continue reading They do not sell bikes: the fraud of "if you can"

Tags: alejandro suarez , Entrepreneurs , take , tribune

The entrepreneur who is fooling himself

A few weeks ago, in a meeting with students of an MBA in Madrid, I happened to ask how many of them would want to start their own company. This is a question I do for years with some frequency, and with mixed results. I've found everything from curious cases in auditoriums where hundreds of people stand up and shout declaring his vocation by first becoming officers, to mixed audiences. Continue reading "The entrepreneur who is fooling himself"

Tags: Entrepreneurs , take , ride company

10 ideas to stimulate your entrepreneurial spirit

Being an enterprising company is an asset. You may be retired, a student, officer, Employee or self, and be both an entrepreneur in any of these fields. Being an entrepreneur is a core value and we all can-and must-tend to be both in our personal and professional aspects. Continue reading "10 ideas to stimulate your entrepreneurial spirit"

Tags: entrepreneur , undertake , there is a guru in my soup

Dignifying self-employment

Now that seems to be popular the concept 'entrepreneur', possibly because of its social necessity and the few alternatives offered by the live-time, I would emphasize the importance of people, plain and simple, unpretentious, generate his own self. Continue reading "dignifying self "

Tags: entrepreneur , undertake , there is a guru in my soup

Ideas are like fleas: jump from one another, but do not bite anyone

Quite often I receive emails from entrepreneurs seeking investment - well, today emails and even Facebook messages and Tweets - in which I talk about a business idea "unique". Even some, more daring, I could tell that the "opportunity of a lifetime." Continue reading "Ideas are like fleas: jump from one another, but do not bite anyone"

Tags: Entrepreneurs , take , there is a guru in my soup , Investment

With the devil in your bed

Only a small percentage of entrepreneurs seeking venture capital. Many still do not even know their existence. Those who seek Him often believe that is a deal with the devil. Continue reading "With the devil in your bed"

Tags: Venture Capital , Entrepreneurship , undertake

Undertake 'low cost'

I leave new grandstand in Five Days published on February 13. You can read it in full below or download it in PDF .

Undertake 'low cost'

When investing in a company, one of the hardest things for a private investor is to distinguish, from an early time, between a viable business and one in which it is not worth investing.

It seems obvious, but it is not at all. Many businesses can be viable and very profitable for the entrepreneur and at the same time not be attractive as a financial transaction to a private investor or business angel. In a way, we could say that, from this side of the table, is to separate the dust from the chaff, to guess, ultimately, the size of the project that they're up entrepreneurs. At an early stage, with just a presentation full of ideas and dreams, not much room to find something tangible that allows minimum security success.

If to all this we add this special socioeconomic situation, critical in terms of business financing and autonomous, where the entrepreneur must sharpen their wits as possible to achieve the funding you need, we can easily conclude that it is time to value an option often discarded: to wage a guerrilla approach or low cost.

Far from being a drawback, implement a basic business structure, or an initial prototype, even with very limited means, and get a first sales-even if they seem testimonials-shows, first, that the company is viable and the another, tenacity and entrepreneurial team's ability to implement its business.

I have the impression that many entrepreneurs pay more attention to use brute force-ie-funding for current and unclog the funnel, which sharpen the wits and overcome the problem not to remain closeted in need of investment. In my opinion, it is more natural to start the business from a guerrilla structure and then, with something tangible in their hands, could go back to hunting the inverter.

Interestingly, few developers do. And that is a huge mistake in the situation we live in today. There are dozens of companies involved in start-up or expansion phase snorkeling in the capital market in search of money to develop their project. Today the situation is similar to a masked ball in which uneven, due to the high number of participants of the same sex, it is difficult to find a dance partner. Banks are not nor were they expected. The few business angels of our country are overwhelmed by the number of projects received, resulting in a problem of attention and appropriate management.

The differentiating factor is to have a prototype, have gotten a first initial sales milestone, having launched, albeit modest, to validate the business model, thus abandoning the comfortable warmth that seems to be following a power point. Take a step forward invites the investor with a special sensitivity values ​​that project and add differentiated value to that team sponsor. Given a scenario of scarcity must try to stand out, and nothing better to start getting down to work.

Today, more than ever, take low cost is a valid option and subsequently spread to more easily financed.

Tags: alejandro suarez , five days , undertaking , tribune

"The university was a thousand euristas factory and is now unemployed"

I leave an article published in the Diario de Sevilla a few days ago where I talk about the present and the future of Spain, of the university and currently unemployed in our country. To read the full article click here: Part 1 .

Tags: alejandro suarez , engage , interview , Technology , tribune

Back to the garage

This text is an article published in The World Economy and Business of Venezuela and can be read in pdf here

Last night pondering the projects longed garage ... Those were the days! and wanted to share some thoughts about it. Those who like me have spent more than 10 years in Internet we remember well, and at least I wistfully, garage projects. The concept, as always imported from the U.S., we came to pass that talent, the idea increasingly obsolete, and its implementation could make from a small town in Arkansas, two buddies in his spare time, after school, do something important on the Internet and build a project that could spread beyond and reach the world. It was as real as utopian: online "you can be the English Court".

In Spain, my country, there were many projects really well, but it existed in the U.S.. Many of the companies mentioned in cyber space late 90s literally born in a garage.

People like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs started well, in a garage. But for years the romantic concept of these spaces has fallen from grace. I imagine that it was foreseeable and it's probably even healthy, but those "garage projects" have not disappeared, they have become. What in 1998 was an idea, a computer, a small footprint and a dead hours of programming, creativity, Pronatura and work forward, today has become a Power Point or at most in a pdf, and a string of visits to business angels, family offices, venture capital and various events.

I do not want to prejudge or position myself clearly, but I do a little thinking aloud that do generate opinion: Do not spend time today "looking for money" literally, unlike 10 years ago when the previous generation or arose initially conduct a Business Plan? They just wanted to start showing its concept, its implementation, its media-often rudimentary, and ability.

In the late 90's were young boys, often pre-university, who implemented the project. Today entrepreneurs are rarely less than 24-25 years. Almost always ers who have completed or are about to finish the race, that is, when "have to leave" to make a living, but not before. With the generational change we have not delayed the timming? Would it be a total change, once the concern of the need?

Those high school kids, under 20 years of age, who had created their project and illusion, no longer exist? And finally, if the crisis off the tap of money, what sense have these PDFs and Power Points circulating like crazy from table to table? Sharpen the wit that? Illiquidity? That is, back to the garage? I do not know if we will be able to return to that point, but I think if it were, in a way, would all much more charm.

Tags: Business Angels , Venture Capital , start , steve jobs

The merit of creating business

This text is an article published by The World Economy and Business and can be read in pdf here

Undertake today has some merit. The entrepreneur now is a mixture of a dreamer, a Don Quixote and a crazy surreal modern feeling that goes against the mainstream of the society around him and often get confuse to desist in their epic battle. The world needs more entrepreneurs, more initiative, more innovation and possibly less spirit officials. In these tough economic times, the crisis is being carried forward to the first: the daring and innovative. Times are tough in every country, but you need to have people able to take risks and jump into the void, a choice of high complicated, wildly contrasting with other options very controlled and safe at work. Is something like jump or dive into empty net as we are seeing in the case of many autonomous. An entrepreneur is nothing more nor less than an officer or employee.

In a society like ours, all sensitivities are needed and it is understandable that there is a high number of people who want to secure a job for life, but the global economy also requires risk takers. Dignifiquemos the term entrepreneur! They are very necessary.

First, because we all, with varying degrees of success, provide initiative within a "momentum" mostly mediocre and unchanging. Second, because the entrepreneur is the embryo of the entrepreneur who creates wealth and value. Are there few entrepreneurs? Very few. Yes, it is true, but it is also true that many of them are sensational. Institutions, the financial system and capital risk, very rarely support new entrepreneurial initiatives, and when the support, sometimes they do so aggressively a mentor with the project, they just strangling.

You have to fend for yourself, without expecting any help and, above all, do not believe that will aid option constantly advertised on television if you are finally in business critical moment, we all fear. Moreover, to all we like to take a moment also comes in which we identify with a few years younger, but this time on the skin of a new entrepreneur, inquietoyllenodeideas.Apostar and support a new generation of entrepreneurs and act as "Business Angel "is to some of us as vocational as creating a new project in the first person.

It is an illusion as special as we have all experienced our first project to generate and create that first company. Often it is difficult to undertake and assist any third party to undertake. That's why you are missing specific support to the sector of dreamers, builders of illusions and, indeed, to mentor them, they are even harder to find than the former. Governments of different countries should push through legislation that will become a stimulus for entrepreneurs and their mentors.

Tags: Entrepreneurs , take , stands

But ... you can do business in Spain?

This is a column published on May Day Wednesday April 21. You can view it online here or download it in pdf Can do business in Spain?

Tags: Entrepreneurs , undertaking , company , business , Spain

This is undertaken

Tags: coaching , Entrepreneur , undertake