[VIDEO] The 6 Traits VC's Are Looking for in CEOs

I was recently interviewed by ASBN, an online "television network" serving the small business community, about what traits venture capitalists are looking for in CEOs that they back.  This video will help you assess your own skillsets, to see if you have what it takes to attract investors.  I thought this video turned out great, and I wanted to share it with all of you. I hope you like it!!

The embedded video player didn't give me the option to change the size of this video.  But, if you want to see a bigger version, simply click the expand size button in the player above.

Thanks again to Jim Fitzpatrick and the ASBN team for having me on the show.  I look forward to our next interview together.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.

[VIDEO] Can't Raise Venture Capital? Try Raising Private Equity Instead!

 

I was recently interviewed by ASBN, an online "television network" serving the small business community, about how to raise capital from alternative sources if you are having trouble raising venture capital.  This presented the idea of buying a larger company producing cash-flow through private equity, to enable growth through new ways.  I thought this video turned out great, and I wanted to share it with all of you. I hope you like it!!

The embedded video player didn't give me the option to change the size of this video.  But, if you want to see a bigger version, simply click the expand size button in the player above.

Thanks again to Jim Fitzpatrick and the ASBN team for having me on the show.  I look forward to our next interview together.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.

Lesson #384: Think 10 Steps Ahead--Living in The Present Can Hurt You Long Term

 

All entrepreneurs have lived through a cash squeeze at some point in their history.  There is nothing worse than worrying about if you will be able to fund your next payroll or can stay liquid enough to survive another day.  That fear of running out of money can cause you to become desperate, willing to take cash from whoever happens to show up to save the day.  But sometimes taking that cash can have unintended consequences, that had you thought about its longer-term impact, you may never have taken that cash in hindsight.  This case study will help teach you how not to make this same mistake in your business.

A Case Study—Living in The Present

I met a retailer that had a chain of boutique jewelry stores.  They preferred to locate their stores in affluent suburban areas of highly populated metropolitan markets.  They started to experience a downturn in the sales when consumer spending started to slow, which created a cash squeeze on their business.  With no excess cash in the bank, they needed to quickly find an investor to save their business.

Luckily, they did find an investor that was willing to infuse the much needed capital into their business.  But that cash came with strings attached.  The investor was a fan of the store, and wanted a new location opened up closer to where she lived.  The problem for the company was the investor lived about 30 miles outside of the city center, in a less affluent, more rural community.  The entrepreneur was very skeptical a new store in that location would be successful, but she was desperate for the cash, and she made an exception to her new site location strategy to close the investment deal.

The good news is the company’s bank account saw the much needed cash infusion which allowed it to live on and fight another day.  The bad news is, when the new store opened in the investors’ home town a year later, it was doomed to fail before it even opened.  There simply wasn’t enough affluent people in the area that were interested in high-end jewelry.  After investing half of the funds raised into this new location, and losing a year of time getting the new store off the ground, the company decided it needed to close the location after about three months of it being open.  That put the company right back in the same situation it was a year earlier, in a cash squeeze with nothing to show for it.

But this time it was worse.  When she approached investors this second time around, she now had the egg on her face of having to explain why their newest store opening was a failure and needed to close so quickly after it opened.  The new investors started to question her expertise in finding good site locations, which had them questioning all the new store opening assumptions in her growth plan.  And what do most investors do when they have newfound uncertainty in a business plan . . . they typically do nothing, which is exactly what happened here.  The company was unable to raise the capital needed the second time, and was forced to take the company out of business entirely.  What a mess!

The Same Case Study—Living in The Future

If this entrepreneur had been thinking in the future, not the present, and was willing to stick to her defined strategy for new site locations, this business could have survived.  She should have told the first investor her rationale for why she did not want to open a location in a “non-prime” market.  That investor would have had more respect for her, demonstrating the clear discipline she had in running a successful chain of stores.  Maybe that investor would have walked, but that is perfectly okay.  You simply find a new investor that won’t make you run through unnecessary hoops that your own gut instinct would have told you was a bad decision.

Part of the point here is that all cash is not the same shade of green.  Cash that comes with strings attached that knowingly hurts your business is not cash at all, it is potentially a precursor to a death sentence, as it was in this case.

Closing Thoughts

Running a business is like playing chess; you always need to be thinking ten steps ahead.  Because if you don’t, and you succumb to the needs of putting out a short-term fire, you may end up tying a noose around your neck in the process, and didn’t even know it at the time.  Every action has a consequence, some of them are good, and some of them are bad.  Just be smart enough to see “the forest through the trees”, planning far enough ahead, to make sure you are not sparking an unintended wildfire.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.

Never Sacrifice Your Priorities When Making Decisions

I have recently been looking for new site locations for my co-warehousing business, Blue Co.  What an eye-opening experience that has been over the last couple of months, rife with ups and downs and business lessons for all. The short story is: as a startup, you only have a few opportunities to open a new location, and you have to get it right to impress your investors. No opportunity is perfect, and you may need to make some sacrifices. But knowing what elements are non-negotiable could be the difference between keeping your business growing and potentially “sinking the ship.” Allow me to explain.

Read the rest of this post in Entrepreneur, which I guest authored this week.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.

Lesson #383: Leadership Lessons From Dusty May's Championship at Michigan

I have been a lifelong University of Michigan basketball fan.  When I was a student there, they had won the national championship in 1989, where I had a front row seat as a member of the basketball band to see Rumeal Robinson’s hit his game winning free throws to beat Seton Hall.  But since then, it had been 37 years without a national title, and the passionate U-M fan base was aching for another championship.  U-M had gotten close a couple times, in 1992 and 1993 with the Fab Five, and again in 2013 and 2018 with John Beilein’s gutsy teams, but we just couldn’t summit the mountain.  That was until Dusty May was hired in 2024, after U-M’s worst season in their history, finishing with a dismal 8-24 record.  His two-year turnaround to a 37-3 national champion will go down as one of coaching’s greatest accomplishments.  This post will highlight a few of his leadership lessons that you can apply to your businesses.

Who is Dusty May?

The 49-year-old coach’s history with college basketball went all the way back to 1996, when he was a 19-year-old student manager for the legendary Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers. He worked his way up through the coaching ranks from Eastern Michigan to Murray State, UAB, Louisiana Tech and Florida, before getting his first head coaching gig at FAU, where he lead the Owls to an unexpected Final Four in 2023 as a significant underdog.  Dusty May was officially the hot up-and-coming coach, and Michigan wasted no time in hiring him in 2024 to replace Juwan Howard.

Why He Was So Successful?

There were several reasons Dusty May was so successful as a coach.  First of all, he was a wicked smart student of the game, understanding how to put high level schemes, game plans and side-line coaching adjustments in place.  Second, he knew how to assemble unlikely rosters of under-appreciated players that he saw promise in through the transfer portal, and get them to succeed and gel in a short period of time.  Third, he got his players to believe in a “Team Before Self” mentality, which is hard to do with a bunch of elite basketball players that had previously thrived in the individual limelight at their previous schools.  And lastly, his calm/consistent demeanor, and treating his players as “family”, endeared him to his players.  Let’s dive into each of these traits at a deeper level.

Crafting The Right Strategy Matters

Dusty knew that competing in the Big Ten against some of the best teams in college basketball (sending 5 teams to the Elite Eight) required him to have a better strategy to win.  And in crafting the best strategy, Dusty was a pro and breaking down the film on his competitors, finding their weaknesses and leaning into those to create his advantages.  That allowed his team not only to win, but to win big by an average margin of 18 points during his championship season (and by an average of 22 points during the NCAA Tournament when it mattered most).  Michigan finished their regular season with a record of 19-1 during Big Ten play, a record four-game advantage over the second place teams with a 15-5 record.  And they didn’t lose a single game on their opponent’s court, which is so hard to do with home court advantages.   How well thought-out are your business strategies and how well researched are you on your competitors?

Get The Right Players That Fit Your Desired Strategy

You don’t normally see a basketball team with more than one 7 footer on the roster.  But Dusty’s rosters typically have multiple big men on the floor at the same time.  And these “giants” were not only great at rebounding, blocking shots and scoring inside, most of them are also good when shooting from three-point range.  His centers were basically playing like guards, flying around the court with an ease not typically associated with big men.  Dusty knew that basketball is a game of inches, and those extra inches in height and wing span, would matter come tournament time.  Do you have the best, most-versatile team members filling your employee rosters to give your business that extra “inside edge”?

But it just wasn’t setting the right strategy of using a lot of versatile big men, it was also picking who those exact big men were.  His transfer players like Vlad Goldin, Danny Wolf, Morez Johnson and Aday Mara were good players on their previous teams, but not all-star great players.  He saw “diamonds in the rough” that he believed he could coach up into all-star players, and sure enough Goldin and Wolf were drafted into the NBA last year, and Johnson and Mara were drafted to the NBA this year.  And players that were criticized for underperforming, like Elliot Cadeau at UNC, were now most valuable players of the NCAA Tournament under Dusty May’s tutelage.  How good are you at developing your employees and turning them into all-stars for your business?

Put the Team First, Before the Individual

Yaxel Lendeborg, the Big Ten Player of the Year and consensus First Team All-American, only averaged 15 points a game this season.  He could have easily been like any of his fellow All-American’s averaging 20-25 points per game.  But Dusty May emphasized to his players, that the team results were more important than any individual statistics.  That extra pass to an open team mate, may hurt your personal scoring stats, but it could help seal a victory.  And all this team cared about was winning in a self-less way, which is why 8 different players lead the team in scoring this year.  Opponents never could predict which one of them would be the star of the night, which was really hard to defend against.  That was a very special group of players that listened to their coaches and led Michigan and became their most-accomplished team in history. What are you doing in your organization to promote team work and getting the staff to act as one unified group committed to winning?

Calm and Steady Wins the Race

When you would see Dusty May on the sideline, you would never even think he was coaching in the middle of a game.  The expression on his faced was calm and collected.  He never let himself get wrapped up in the high and low emotions of the game.  It was all business following his proven playbook.  And his players followed suit; they appreciated his style of leadership and they knew the “ship” was in good hands with Dusty at the helm.  And they applied that same calm approach in their style of play.  They just knew every team member had each other’s back and they would figure out how to win, regardless of the opponent they were playing.  And the bigger the stage, the better they performed, often blowing out some of the best teams in the country.  How do you think your staff is responding to your vision and leadership style?

Closing Thoughts

Dusty May knew what the goal was from day one of this season—win a national championship or bust with the talent he had around the table.  He instilled an “April Habits” mindset from day one of the pre-season practices, knowing that the work they put into over the course of the year would propel them to championship heights in the Final Four in April.  He was even seen on the sideline of the first Final Four game between Connecticut and Illinois, scouting those two teams, when you would have guessed he would have been in the locker room with his team getting ready for their big game which would follow.  But when a reporter asked him about him not being with the team, he calmly responded, “nothing I would tell them in the next hour would change the result of the game—the results of tonight’s game would be decided months earlier in the work they put in leading up to tonight.”  He knew they were prepared, he knew they would win in the Final Four and he was getting a step ahead to ensure they would win on championship night.   I hope you are all putting in that same level of work and discipline in your businesses.

Now, if you can figure out how to get Dusty May back to Michigan after the Dallas Mavericks stole him as head coach last month, that would be great!  Hopefully, the new U-M head coach, Mike Boynton, a Dusty May assistant, continues in Dusty’s winning ways. Go Blue!

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.

[VIDEO] Strategic Partnerships Can Accelerate Sales

I was recently interviewed by ASBN, an online "television network" serving the small business community, about how strategic partnerships can help you accelerate your revenues.  If you can find a large company that sees value in what you are selling in terms of helping their customers, it could be a great win-win opportunity to grow both of your businesses, hanging on their coattails as they take it to market.  I thought this video turned out great, and I wanted to share it with all of you. I hope you like it!!

The embedded video player didn't give me the option to change the size of this video.  But, if you want to see a bigger version, simply click the expand size button in the player above.

Thanks again to Jim Fitzpatrick and the ASBN team for having me on the show.  I look forward to our next interview together.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.