-
Jan 7, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
In my experience, any thoughtful strategic plan you come up with to scale and mature your business is going to take a minimum of 18 months and as much as 5 years to execute. At my school for business owners, Birthing of Giants, we look at each 12 months as a fundamental building block to achieve those longer-term milestones. The great thing about stacking up one year plans is you have to think long term but you have to take action in the short term.
-
Nov 18, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
Entrepreneurs are starting to learn about a new kind of buyer that wants to purchase companies on more favorable terms for the seller. They’re called Founder-Friendly Funds. These funds are a relatively new “sub-asset class” or category of capital with conditions that benefit the owner more than they have in the past. To fully understand how an entrepreneur can benefit most from founder-friendly funds, it’s important to know some terminology and history.
-
May 1, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
Risk: it’s an entrepreneur’s badge of honor and defines who we are. But as we grow our companies, a new word gets tossed around by those who might buy or invest in our company: De-risk. De-risking is just what it sounds like – taking risk out of your business.
-
Apr 4, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
Whenever I explain to others that I run a school for entrepreneurs, they often say, “Maybe I should take your class. I have an idea for a start-up.” That’s when I explain that there are “Startups”, “Keep Goings” and “Take-offs” — and our class is for the owners of the “Keep Goings” and “Take-offs”: companies that already do several million in revenues and want to grow their businesses to even higher heights.
-
Nov 30, 2023 | 
worth.com | Sean Captain |Lewis Schiff |Amanda Claypool |Larry Kantor
-
Oct 25, 2023 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know that I’m all about transforming a smart, moneymaking business into a moonshot. In fact, I lead a weeklong workshop at Oxford University called Moonshots & Moneymakers for entrepreneurs looking to do just that.
-
Oct 24, 2023 | 
worth.com | Lewis Schiff
There’s an origin story that business magazines and other press outlets love to tell about the so-called unicorns of Silicon Valley. It usually starts with a visionary genius (bonus points for being a college dropout) asking “What if?” What if anyone could run a taxi business? Or a hotel? What if we could connect millions of users to each other?
-
Sep 18, 2023 | 
worth.com | Lewis Schiff
Bringing a valuable healthcare service to an underserved population is a commendable goal. But providing that service while pioneering a total addressable market of $300 billion is just smart business.
-
Sep 11, 2023 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
Ron Steptoe, co-founder and CEO of Warrior Centric Health, can trace his family’s military service back to the founding of the United States. Not only are he and his wife West Point graduates, but he has a family legacy dating back to the Revolutionary War. Steptoe’s fifth great-grandfather was one of 5,000 African Americans to fight during the Revolutionary War, along with his son—including the decisive Battle of Yorktown.
-
Aug 7, 2023 | 
forbes.com | Lewis Schiff
Entrepreneurs are some of the most motivated, focused people I know. But sometimes you get a reminder that they’re human beings as well. Beth Scanlon, who joined us at the Birthing of Giants Fellowship Week in fall 2021, recently told me about not one, but two, of those reminders that happened within a month of each other at the beginning of 2023. Beth is president of Scanlon Excavating and Concrete, a company she co-founded with her husband in 2010. “My husband is my business partner.
