Studying Entrepreneurial Case Studies May be What You’re Missing

You don’t need to be British or a business start-up expert such as Guy Rigby to know that most start-ups fail not because the idea was bad, not because of external pressures such as a recession or industry downturn, but because funding ran out before full potential could be reached.

A good approach to start-up funding is being both knowledgeable and wise about the potential pitfalls not just your business, but all businesses at your stage are privy to or vulnerable to.

One of the things you should do as you prepare to talk your business up, network and ultimately pitch your idea and create your business plan, is consume, imbibe, inhale, entrepreneurial case studies.

What did and didn’t work for the entrepreneurs you admire? Who is kicking butt in the business you want to be in right now? Are you going up against a man named Wally or a company called Wal-Mart?

Market research, studying predecessors and picking the brains of contemporaries from afar is crucial to streamlining your business plan, making it unique and covering all the bases so that most of the skeptical question you would ask yourself can be answered thoroughly before you sit down and a potential financier asks you the same question.

For those in the web game, the new economy – for those who are 2.0 and above – there are sites such as Startupreview.com where you can find fun and easy-to-navigate case studies of obvious and not so obvious winners in the start-up game.

For instance, did you know that Craiglist has less than 30 employees but that its revenue averages a million per employee in a year? Did you know that Facebook’s founder dropped out of Harvard  but that his original site was only for college students? Did you know that the first two rounds of funding that social networking dynamo got were nine-figure infusions based on merger and acquisition offers that were turned down and NOT on a revenue plan. Did you know that for companies such as this, venture capital funding is the revenue plan for now.

Maybe you knew this stuff, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you have it all figured out. But know that it pays, literally, to be knowledgeable and wise. It pays to be knowledgeable from the standpoint of knowing your threshold, your limits and your competitors. The wisdom comes from learning from your own experience and the experiences of others, past and present.

About the Author
Jabulani Leffall, 33, is an award-winning journalist and writer who attended Journalism School at the University of Missouri. His work has appeared in the Financial Times of London, Dow Jones Marketwatch, The Baltimore Sun, Investor's Business Daily, Variety, CFO Magazine, Compliance Week, Redmond Magazine, Black Enterprise, the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News among other publications. He has been a George Washington Williams Fellow for the Independent Press Association where from 2002 to 2004 he studied the effects of subprime lending on poor communities. After what happened in 2007 and 2008, he feels vindicated as a journalist for having called what was going to happen. What else? Yeah, he also contributed vital research to the 1998 book University of Missouri History Professor Robert E. Weems, which is titled "Desegregating the Dollar." Additionally, he has appeared numerous times on ABC World News and CNN as a commentator of business and world affairs, again pretending to know what the heck he is talking about. Mr. Leffall is currently a the Associate Editor of Special Projects and content with FactSet Research Systems News and Media Relations Group. Lastly for the part where Mr. Leffall lives, he resides in a four cornered room where he stares at candles and his mind plays tricks on him. Read his articles and blogs please lest he go completely mad.
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