Financing Your Business in a Credit Crunch

It’s a big week in London this week, and it’s not just me saying that, it’s a quote from TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher. Yesterday was SeedCamp, today is Geek’n’Rolla and last night I chaired the Mobile Monday London session on “Financing Your Mobile Business in a Credit Crunch.” Raising Finance Raising finance is an almost inevitable part of running any business, […]

Continue Reading

Too Late To Learn?

Tortoises. That’s it. Tortoises. We all need to be like tortoises. I’ve been listening to what John Cleese has to say in the video clip here, which is what got me thinking about them. I have to admit, it wasn’t where I started thinking. You might not associate tortoises with creativity or learning, but they […]

Continue Reading

Love the Gaps

Interstitial time is a wonderful thing, used wisely. In today’s action-packed world, gaps and pauses are increasingly rare things. A gap in a market often signals an opportunity, although sometimes the gap is there for a good reason. Either there isn’t a demand, or the economics don’t work out. Gaps between projects or jobs can be […]

Continue Reading

Crowds Are No Wiser Than They Ever Have Been

Malcom Muggeridge once said, “All new news is old news happening to new people.” Economic times are tough and many people are rightly concerned about what 2009 holds. This is at least the third ecomonic down turn I have experienced so far, and they don’t get any easier. What is to be learnt? Every time […]

Continue Reading

On Startups and Hiring – Michael Smith

One of my mantras is to hire slowly and fire fast. It is absolutely critical that you have a great team around you that believe in the product and are passionate about it. As soon as you get a few people who are “average” or only “quite good”, it can affect the whole team; it can damage the dna of the whole business as you go forward.

It is always good to get an experienced opinion, so when Hermione Way asked if I had some questions to put to Michael Smith on Techfluff.tv I got typing. Michael Smith is co-founder of firebox.com (turnover £12m) and CEO of Mind Candy. I squeezed two questions into my 140 characters of twitter message: @bmje: What defines the difference between a good and a […]

Continue Reading

Get Innovating. Start Asking Stupid Questions.

A confluence of thoughts on innovation and questions running around my head, so it must be time for a blog post. Innovation is further up the hype-o-meter than social media in UK business. Everyone wants to be innovative, and quite rightly so. There are innovation conferences, innovation consultancies and innovation workshops springing up all over the place, of varying quality. Innovation is a core survival skill, isn’t it?

Continue Reading

Caught by CauseWired

Hang on to the furniture, this post is going to be a bit of a ride. I’m holding Tom Watson and his CauseWired book responsible. I normally read a book very quickly, I’m almost legendary for my tree digesting abilities. I read. I mark with scraps of paper. I digest, note and move on.

Continue Reading
Older EntiresNewer Entires

About Benjamin

Find Benjamin on twtter, LinkedIn or his personal blog: Benjamin Ellis on the Web.

Categories

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.