77 questions every business plan should answer

Today’s Globe & Mail has an article by Doug Steiner about the questions a small business owner seeking investment capital should be ready to answer. He cites an old photocopy of a handout entitled “77 Questions Every Business Plan Should Answer,” but unfortunately only lists six of them. (In the comments, I inquire after the rest.) Here’s what he shared:

Your business wants my money? Good luck

Question 1 is meant to be a quick killer: “Why will this business succeed?”

If you can’t answer that, then your hope of getting anyone other than mom and pop to throw you a financial bone is pretty slim. You say you have a unique idea? I doubt it. The only unique ideas I’ve heard pitched were complete eye-rollers — as in, “You have to be kidding.” One guy who came to see me during the Internet boom wanted to start a website that would help tenants trade their way out of building leases online. Could he have found anything more likely to fail?

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Tutorial: Adding products and categories to your new Magento website

When friends and family come to me for advice on starting up an e-commerce website of their own, I typically refer them to Magento, which is to date the most polished and full featured e-commerce platform I’ve ever seen. Even better, Magento Community Edition is available to download for free, and professionally designed templates are widely available.

There is, however, one rather sizable snag. While the technical installation of Magento is both easy to follow and well-documented, the basic install then leaves you with a blank home page and no real instructions on where to go next.

That’s what this tutorial is here to help with. By the end of this guide, you’ll have logged in as the administrator of your new Magento website, you’ll have become familiar with Magento’s category system, you’ll have created your first product for display and sale on the site, and you’ll have created a simple product listing layout to allow your customers to peruse what you have for sale.

Ready? Let’s go!

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So you want to buy a chef’s knife

Stellar advice from Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential:

You need, for God’s sake, a decent chef’s knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers – all those medium-size ‘utility’ knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers – not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here’s all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef’s knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand.

Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously.

But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won’t)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I’d forgo the Germans.

Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has – in addition to its many other fine qualities – the added attraction of looking really cool.

Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef’s knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip.

Here’s the Global 8″ chef’s knife on Amazon.com for $99.95. Occasional sharpening is accomplished with the MinoSharp Water Sharpener for an additional ~$40.

Toronto’s new Sugar Beach

Lately I’ve only been taking pictures with Christabel’s new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Here are a bunch of photos taken at Toronto’s newest beachfront, Sugar Beach.

Inside the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill

TIME Magazine’s excellent finance-focused blog The Curious Capitalist pointed me the way of this interactive Wall Street Journal graphic on what’s found inside the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. I highly recommend giving it a read.

Real leaders have real self-confidence

I’m not a fan of Ms. Kay, but I couldn’t agree more with this statement.

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Even the best-organized plans can be derailed by bad weather or glitches nobody can have foreseen, but whether the incidents or gaffes blow over quickly, or whether they become legendary tipping points has a lot to do with impressions that have already been formed subliminally in the public perception about the leader’s internal authenticity and confidence.

When leaders have self-confidence — the real kind, that comes from within and glows in the dark, or rather glows in luggage-losing interludes — they can fumble the ball and shrug it off. If Trudeau had fumbled a football, he would have made it seem as though it were the football’s fault for being such a stupid shape. Barack Obama has all kinds of blippy things happen to him — the Rev Wright fiasco would have sunk a less confident man – but he never loses his cool because, say what you will about his leadership, he is supremely confident inside with an unshakeable sense of his greater destiny. That can go a long way to cover up gaffes. Clinton has it. JFK had it.

The things you never have time for

Don’t forget to sit down every so often and write down the five things you wish you were spending your time on each day. Enormously helpful.

jgehtland, July 6, 2010

The Conquest KNIGHT XV

About The KNIGHT XV

Conquest Vehicle Inc’s flagship vehicle, the KNIGHT XV defines the future of the ultra-luxurious, handcrafted fully armoured SUV. This one-of-a-kind, V10, 6.8-litre, Bio-fuel powered SUV was inspired by military vehicle designs and features security appointments that are unrivaled in today’s SUV marketplace. The production of the KNIGHT XV will be limited to 100 vehicles.

Are you ready to be Knighted?

I’ve never heard of Conquest Vehicles Inc. before seeing the vehicle mentioned above on Series 15 of Top Gear. Oddly enough, the company is headquartered right here in Toronto, Canada.

Don’t sit up straight

Don’t Sit Up Straight

Sitting with your torso flexed 135 degrees from your legs — halfway between bolt upright and flat on your back — is best for your spine, even though you’ll have a tendency to slide off your chair, say a team led by Waseem Bashir of the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada.

On the basis of MRIs, the researchers say the 135-degree position is better than sitting upright or leaning forward. 32% of people in the UK spend more than 10 hours seated, and half don’t leave their desks even to have lunch.