Pitch

So you have a great idea for a start up and you want to try to get funding from an established venture capital firm. You have hired the private equity attorney who was referred to you by a trusted mentor as the go to private equity attorney on the Street, or Silicon Valley. And you think your mentor may be right, because low and behold, you have gotten the impossible hour long meeting with the private equity group.

Now you are a tangle of nerves. What are you going to do? The best advice I can give you is to spend some quality time working on your pitch. The way you pitch your idea to the venture capitalists, the more likely you will achieve success in getting them to fund your project.

Venture capitalists want to fund projects. They are looking for good deals. So know your product inside out. Ask all the what ifs before you go in for the pitch. Play devil's advocate with yourself and your partners. If you do have partners make sure everybody is on the same page and that they understand the product, market, channels of distribution, trouble shooting, etc.

The idea is to impress the venture capitalists so much that their enthusiam for your project gets the better of them. If you can't pitch the idea, you won't be able to convince and persuade the venture capitalist to take you on.

And the art of the pitch is applicable to scenarios that do not necessarily involve vc's. It could be a bank you are trying to persuade to give you a small business loan, or the SBA, or your uncle Mitch.

Or maybe you are pitching a potential client or customer. The rules are the same. Persuade, impress, and know your stuff inside and out. Make it so that their enthusiam for you and your project/product/services, gets the better of them and they have no other choice but to say YES.

Obama

Obama pulled off a stunning and emotional win tonight to become the 44th President (elect) of the United States of America. The historical significance of his win cannot be over-stated. Many are jubilant in the streets of America, regardless of their color, national origin, orientation, religion or gender.

What will Obama mean for small business? Only time will tell, but if what he said during the campaign holds up, small business can expect less taxes (this will please Joe the Plumber), assistance with health care (this will please Hillary Clinton), and possibly increased funding opportunities. According to the Wall Street Journal, "SBA-Backed Loans have dried up and the substantial decline in Small Business Administration-backed lending is fueling criticism that the federal government isn't doing enough to help small businesses that are in dire need of cash." Surely, this will change with an Obama adminstration.

The President Elect has made it clear that if a business makes less than $250,000 that business will not get a tax increase. So small businesses should like that since only about 5% of small business generate revenues anywhere close to $250,000 per year.

The Obama administration will probably have one of the most developed green strategies of any president in recent memory. Big on his agenda seems to be the issue of alternative energies and reducing the country's dependence on foreign oil. This will also impact small businesses just like it will impact multinational corporations with global geopolitical influence.

Obama's style has been a conciliatory one throughout this campaign. If that continues, that is going to be very good for America and for America's small businesses. By working in a non-partisan way with the Congress, Obama will surely get more of his agendas (including those that pertain to small businesses) across than if he doesn't.

Obama supports young people and he supports education. Young people are one of the most experimental, innovative and business-minded demographic in the U.S. today. They are the computer geeks, the IT gods, the next Sergey and Larry. And Obama owes a big debt to young people in America. They voted for him resoundingly in this election. So Obama is likely to support more grants to assist these youthful friends, to support bills that are geared to assisting small businesses, to support educational and financial assistance for not only college bound students, but those young people who are involved in a trade as well.

As a community organizer, Obama is sure to know the power of transforming neighborhoods, and revitalizing towns by bringing new businesses to these areas. New businesses can mean jobs for the young, and the elderly too. New businesses can simply restore a sense of community to areas that are hit by the recession. An Obama administration is likely to do all in its power to support these community initiatives.

There are more ways in which an Obama Administration will impact small businesses. Overall, I would say he will be a net gain for small businesses in America.

Globalization

Whether you run a textile mill in rural China, or an organic juice factory in the South of France, a hedge fund in Mumbai, a winery in Southhampton, or a IT outfit in Silicon Valley, you would have to literally be living under a rock not to realize that business has gone global.

The internet has shattered barriers and ceilings and have opened up all nature of commerce to global consumption. It is imperative that small businesses, just like large businesses, learn to think globally even though they may be local actors.

That is going to mean getting technologically literate. At the bare minimum, you need to invest in a website. That is your primary point of sale (POS). With a website, while you are acting locally, people around the globe can find your business and you may be surprised that you can generate customers that way. Of course, the key will be optimizing your website, using the kind of key words that Google would pick up in a search done around the globe. That is not easy or inexpensive but small businesses need to keep these issues in mind as they develop their strategy and chart their goals. And this is just for starters. There is so much more to think about in this shifting global economy.

Just because you are a small business in New York city, for example, and your services are strictly confined to New Yorkers, doesn't mean that over time you could not or should not expand to other markets. You can bet that your competitors are keenly aware of this phenomenon called Globalization, and they are constantly thinking of ways to exploit these global markets - as should you.

If you are interested in even more sophisticated and proven ways to get the job done, check out this blog.