Category: Blog

  • 5 Ways to Avoid Hitting the Wall

    5 Ways to Avoid Hitting the Wall

    I remember half way through building my third company I was feeling the pressure, big time. A few months earlier I finished raising another round of financing. It was quite a bit of money and was supposed to get our product designed and ready to be launched. Except we were not hitting our numbers or…

  • How Entrepreneur Training Helps You Succeed in Life

    How Entrepreneur Training Helps You Succeed in Life

    How you do anything, is how you do everything.  –Unknown Yep, happened again.  It never fails. And while the group may be different, the reaction rarely is.  This time it was a great group of about 25 tech startups I was training last month. I insisted they must know their financials, to be successful in…

  • New Yorkers: Do You Have a Big Tech Idea? Apply Now to Take It Further at FastTrac TechVenture

    New Yorkers: Do You Have a Big Tech Idea? Apply Now to Take It Further at FastTrac TechVenture

    I’ve been facilitating FastTracNYC since Bloomberg put it into place in 2009. It’s a free, intensive entrepreneurship education program for residents of NYC. The program is administered by Small Business Services (SBS) in conjunction with Kauffman and SUNY Levin Institute. I wanted to take it one step further. A small team of us pitched FastTrac®…

  • Challenging All Entrepreneurs:  Never Give Up!

    Challenging All Entrepreneurs: Never Give Up!

    Ever since I was a small child I remember my grandmother being there for me during many of my most challenging moments.  From typical childhood stuff like not doing well in school or a girl I had a crush on rejecting me to more intense things later in life like when I took company #2…

  • How Can you Adapt to Your Environment?

    How Can you Adapt to Your Environment?

    Helping others achieve an “ah-ha” moment is usually a gratifying experience in my line of work. Let alone 9 people, simultaneously. During a day’s session training a team at a large technology company that works with small businesses, they all of a sudden realized some times they were actually helping their clients be something they…

  • Six UnReasonable Steps to Raising Capital

    Six UnReasonable Steps to Raising Capital

    For the past few weeks I’ve been laser-focused on raising a round of capital for my seventh company, the Shift Group. And having done this many times before, I thought I knew what I was doing. That is, until I met up with Andrea Kihlstedt. Andrea has been a fundraiser for non-profits for many years. …

  • Quick Guide To Knowing Your Crucial Numbers

    Vince Lombardi was considered by many to be one of the best NFL head coaches of all time. The Super Bowl trophy is named after him. And whether you like American football or not, many of his strategies and principles are applied in business today. For example, Lombardi was famous for going into the locker…

  • Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul — Stefan Doering Interview for TV Show The New Yorkers

    Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul — Stefan Doering Interview for TV Show The New Yorkers

    In 2002 I was nearly killed in an assault on the street. After regaining consciousness from a coma, I had lost 95% of my vision, much of my hearing and almost all of my balance. Doctors announced I might never walk again. When I left the hospital, I decided to set a seemingly impossible goal…

  • My First Unreasonable Goal: From Coma to Running in Central Park Within 90 Days

    My First Unreasonable Goal: From Coma to Running in Central Park Within 90 Days

    Stefan Doering was crossing a busy Brooklyn street when he was hit by a man in a car. He careened backward and smashed the back of his head on the pavement. An ambulance ride, a skull fracture, a coma, and three weeks of memory loss later, Stefan found himself in a muted world, seeing double,…

  • How to Know When to Let It Go?

    How to Know When to Let It Go?

    Walking into that board meeting was one of the hardest things I had to do. Having spent the past six years working over 80 hours a week almost every day of the year, I was exhausted and feeling like a failure. While our company started off on a really great run, it was now losing…