The Back to Fundamentals Series

This is from a webinar given in November 2008. The total is 50 minutes. It divides into four parts.

• Part 1: Back to Fundamentals
• Part 2: The Heart of the Plan
• Part 3: Flesh and Bones of the Plan
• Part 4: Dressing and Growing

Nancy Duarte On Slide Presentations
The book is Slide:ology, and this five-minute video on Bnet is a great summary.

If you can’t get the video off of this site, click here for the source video on bnet.

Tim Berry: Video Summary of Business Planning

This interview is a couple of years old now, but I thought it was a pretty good summary of business planning as applied to real-world companies. It was done on the floor of a trade show of eBay vendors.

Seth Godin: Nine steps to Powerpoint magic

This is a nice quick and easy reminder from Seth Godin about PowerPoint presentations:

Seth’s Blog: Nine steps to Powerpoint magic

This interview is a couple of years old now, but I thought it was a pretty good summary of business planning as applied to real-world companies. It was done on the floor of a trade show of eBay vendors.

The book is Slide:ology, and this five-minute video on Bnet is a great summary.

If you can’t get the video off of this site, click here for the source video on bnet.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

The IRS offers free publications to help you wade through all the tax laws and regulations for your business. Click on each link to view the document online or choose the option to download the document in a portable document format. These and other online resources are available at irs.gov

• Tax Guide for Small Business (Publication 334)
• Business Expenses (Publication 535)
• Travel, Entertainment, Gift and Car Expenses (Publication 463)
• Circular E, Employer’s Tax Guide (Publication 15)
• Employer’s Supplemental Tax Guide (Publication 15-A)

Locate an Accountant

• GoodAccountants.com = registry and referral service of certified public accountants, public accountants and bookkeepers
• AccountantWorld.com = free resources, web-based softare solutions, tools and services for accountants; includes a directory of accounting professionals
• 1800accountant.com = Free consultation for businesses with a local neighborhood accountant

Tax Preparation

• TurboTax =online tax preparation for individuals and businesses
• H&R Block =online tax preparation and tax guidance for individuals and businesses

The reading provides a lot of detail and background. In addition, here are some additional Online Resources that might help:

• This three-minute piece on youtube.
• The Forecast Your Sales chapter of the online book on business planning, www.hurdlebook.com.

Marketing, advertising, social media, branding … it’s hard to draw the lines. What’s what? I like this post on Conversation Agent (although not its title) because it draws some useful distinctions. Taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying things, isn’t that important. But it helps to use the right words and phrases, so that other people know what you mean.

What a resource: check out this list of 250 top blog posts on advertising, marketing, media, and PR. I got the tip from Seth Godin’s blog post of last week, which started with that list, and then highlighted his top 20 favorites from his blog.

Add Duct Tape Marketing to that list, and you have the ultimate course in 21st century marketing.

I had lunch yesterday with one of my favorite people in the textbook publishing industry. Seeing this list today, again, and thinking about that lunch and the world of textbooks reminds me, it has to be hard to sell a marketing textbook these days, when the really good stuff is coming up every day in the blogs.

And it has to be hard, from the professors’ point of view, to select and recommend marketing texts costing the students $100 or more, when the real world is happening so much faster on the web.

Guy Kawasaki –  The Art of the Start

About a year after his book, The Art of the Start, was published (and after a lot of previous engagements speaking on it), Guy Kawasaki chose this video as the one to post on the web. It’s a very good live and in-person presentation of most of the same content as in the book.

Tim Berry — Three Types of Startups

This is a five-minute video interview with Tim Berry, business-planning expert, talking about the 3 types of startups on the SBTV site.

Nice summary, an excerpt of a book on business structure.