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What creates revenue? This should be very simple as in the example I have provided. It should be some “units” time average selling price (ASP). ASP is the average amount of revenue that you receive per unit. This is after discounts and commissions you pay to resellers. It is the actual money that flows into your bank account.

In this chapter, we will teach you how to develop a model to generate projections of your business that provides insights, meaningful projections, a potential path to greatness, and a planning tool. I have heard intelligent people say “meaningful five-year financial projections?!?! – come on! They are surely going to be wrong. How can they be meaningful?”

All people are born entrepreneurs and it is then society that slowly dilutes this and even threatens to take it away. From the beginning of time, people survived by making things, trading things or providing services to people in order to survive.

Think of this as “Financial Literacy” which is not going to earn you a degree in finance but it will give you the fundamentals so you know how to run and keep track of your business. We will dive into these high level concepts as we move forward, especially in the modelling phase which will come next but for now, let’s just level set on the most foundational concepts and then build up from there. We will focus on operational concepts as opposed to accounting concepts for now.

It's the start of a new year, so what could be better than kicking it off with the first chapter of the upcoming book on financial literacy for founders? The only thing better than it would definitely be to get your thoughts on this new material, have you comment with thoughts and suggestions, and further share this material with others who might benefit from it, even in draft form.

One of my proudest projects from the past few years is the Trust Center Antifragile Entrepreneurship Speaker Series, which is now available to watch for free in its entirety. These 8 sessions were designed like a course to help the viewer understand what it takes to become more antifragile in concrete ways within the context we are living in right now.

In my career as a CTO I’ve built many products; a few have been successful, while many have fallen short of expectations. However, embedding Disciplined Entrepreneurship at the heart of how I approach new proposition development has helped the businesses that I coach to test, learn and succeed more often.

Thomas Edison and Walt Disney are not just America’s greatest creative problem-solvers. They are paragons of all the antifragile entrepreneurial skills we have discussed. Edison is famous for the thousands of “failures” it took to come up with the right filament for his lightbulb. Disney’s businesses failed several times, and he almost went bankrupt in the midst of creating two of his many masterpieces – the film “Snow White” and Disneyland. Indeed, it was only after he lost his first…

The idea that the head of the country’s patent office predicted the end of invention is laughably ironic until replaced by the irony that it was the opposite of how Commissioner Duell actually felt. How then more absurd is the actual prognostication 56 years earlier, also by the head of the country’s patent office. Want some more irony? Samuel F.B. Morse would invent no less than the telegraph in 1844, a year later. Fortunately for civilization, entrepreneurs are more the Duell types. There is…

“How do you make God laugh? Make plans!” This tiny maxim is at the core of how applying improv techniques to your life and your business will help make you an antifragile human. Of course, plans are crucial to the entrepreneur. But what happens when the plans go south? What do you do when life happens?