AHN Sports Staff Los Angeles, CA, United States (AHN) – Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre has reportedly decided to step down from his post after the season, the team reported in a statement Friday. A press conference is scheduled for 5p PT, and former Yankee great/Dodgers bench coach Don Mattingly will be named his [...]

If your company is at a point in its history and experiencing solid growth where you are considering looking for outside investors for your capital needs, then you want to know if your business will be or can be attractive to investors. If you plan to search for equity investors, you should know that they will expect a significant return on their investment (20% to 50% is not uncommon) and many times within 5 years. These investors will look carefully at the candidate company to characteristics that include, but are not limited to: a solid and proven management team; potential company growth; solid business plan; and evidence of strategic thinking and planning in a strategic plan with vision, mission core values and short term & long term goals.

Before you ever submit your business plan to venture capitalists or angel investors, allow it to pass through a business plan review first. No matter how meticulously prepared your business plan is, you will never accurately gauge how it would look under an investor’s astute scrutiny. You would need an outsider, one who is not [...]

Avoid embarrassment and win the approval of business investors when they probe these key areas of your business or business plan.

Anytime is a challenge for entrepreneurs looking for venture capital but now even more so. Competition is fierce and the jousting for the prize of venture capital funds bloodier.

“In fact, we often joke about “having a case of the Mondays” because nobody ever does.” I have mentioned in previous articles that I approach leadership from the “servant leadership” mindset. This means that I put the interest of my team before my own (of course, with the interest of my company’s overall welfare as [...]

In this case, I am talking about early-stage investors and the sins that they sometimes commit when they decide to back a start-up company. I spend a lot of time engaged with such companies – and much of that time is spent working to set right things that were set in place when the first round of angel funding occurred. What follows is a partial list of ‘sins’ and a few suggestions that might both mitigate their impact and improve the investors’ prospects.

Here are some inside tips on what investors look for when making a decision to fund a company. Investors love to provide “growth capital” to a company rather than “seed capital”. Find out why.