| Jan 13 |
3 Ways to Start a Business Without Quitting Job
1. Use Your Salary as FundingGregory Moore financed his big idea one paycheck at a time. The opportunity was obvious: Gregory Moore wanted to create a company that would securely transmit patient and payment data between hospitals, doctors, clinics, and insurers. In 2000 he took the proposal to software maker TeraHealth, which then hired him to make it a reality. But TeraHealth didn’t pursue the effort, so Moore began building the business on the side. He used his salary to hire a coder and spent nights and weekends filing incorporation papers and creating sales brochures. He even set up a basic office. The Monday after he left TeraHealth in March 2001, his new company, Harbor Healthcare, was open for business. Moore booked his first revenue about a month later. TeraHealth grumbled, but Moore had records proving that he’d hatched his idea long before he joined the company. The key, he says, is “to use your salary to invest in the startup as much as possible before jumping ship.” After five years and several rounds of angel funding, he still owns a majority of the firm’s equity.
2. Turn Common Complaints Into a Business PlanJeff Gallino and Cliff LaCoursiere decided to give customers what they really wanted. You know that feature your customers are always asking for? If your employer won’t deliver it, maybe you should. That’s what Jeff Gallino and Cliff LaCoursiere did. Back in 2001 the two worked for ThinkEngine Networks, a Boston-based telecom equipment company. Gallino handled relationships with software partners, while LaCoursiere ran sales. The two kept hearing customers ask for a way to digitally sift through recorded calls and analyze them. Gallino and LaCoursiere brought the idea to their employer, but they received a halfhearted response. So the duo wrote a business plan during off-duty hours and left ThinkEngine Networks in 2002. They funded their new firm, CallMiner, for a year with money saved from their salaries. Gallino wrote the first version of their software, which builds an overall picture of what’s being said through speech recognition, pattern mining, and signal analysis. The product attracted angel investment and a venture round, including cash from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund. Today, CallMiner’s applications are used by airline, energy, and cable companies to categorize call-center calls, while government agencies are evaluating the technology’s ability to automate intelligence gathering. 3. Convert Your Employer Into a Business PartnerJeff Hilbert spun a doomed division into a successful startup. In 2002, when Jeff Hilbert was managing the design services division of Coventor, a chip-design software company in North Carolina, his unit was slated for the chopping block. However, Hilbert noticed that he had recently been winning a lot of business from wireless chip companies, so he asked Coventor to let him spin off the unit as a stand-alone company. The board went for it and gave the startup (now it is called WiSpry) $6 million worth of patents and other intellectual property, seven employees, several hundred thousand dollars, and an office in Irvine, Calif., all in exchange for shares in the company. Today, Hilbert is CEO of WiSpry, which is developing a special chip for cell phones that could improve battery life by 20 to 40 percent. His advice: Don’t rely too much on a parent company. Sooner or later, all startups must be able to fend for themselves. The present research focuses upon new businesses which are started from scratch. The theories of reasoned action and planned behavior are used to formulate hypotheses concerning self-employment intentions and subsequent entry into self-employment. The findings strongly support the theory of reasoned action, but provide no support for the extension of the theory represented by the theory of planned behavior. According to Business 2.0 Magazine Similar posts:
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