No matter how well your startup company does, sooner or later you're going to be faced with the fact that someone has to go.  It may be a disgruntled co-founder or it may be the intern that looked great on paper but turned into a disaster when they walked into the office.

While parting company is a tough thing to do, there are definitely better and worse ways to go about it.  There's an art to ending a corporate romance on a positive note, and it starts with looking past the moment of departure and into the future.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Unlike the big corporate machine where everyone is expected to fit in, a startup company is a perpetually chaotic, anxiety-inducing roller coaster of emotion that fits very few people real well.  Chances are the person you are sitting across from is just not a fit for any startup company, let alone yours.

A great way to set the stage is to explain how well you understand the incredible challenges of being in a startup company and that it’s very difficult for anyone to maintain their footing in this environment.  This isn’t about you patronizing your co-workers – it’s about recognizing the fact that there are often very good reasons the fit just isn’t right and using those reasons as a platform for departure.

In many cases the person you’re sitting across from has had to endure a lot of sacrifices just to be able to contribute at all.  Even if they didn’t work out as an employee, it’s a good idea to recognize and appreciate the sacrifices they have made up until this point.  Those sacrifices were part of their contribution.

Leave the Door Open

Although today you may feel like you can’t possibly get this person out of the door fast enough, always be sure to leave that door open for them to return.  This may sound ridiculous, since the last thing on your mind right now is ever seeing this person in your office again.

Yet your corporate life is very long, and it extends down many roads.  The gal that just walked out of your office today may be the key customer that hires you a few years from now.  It may be the person that was a bad fit in the formative stages of your company but is exactly who you need three years from now.  It never pays to be short-sighted when winding up any relationship, no matter how tenuous at the time.

Leaving the door open also shows a gesture of good faith.  If people know that they might have to deal with each other again in the future they’re a lot less likely to spew fire and brimstone today.  You may find that a few years from now, after you’ve both forgotten a about what brought you to this departure, that there’s a much better opportunity to re-connect.

Send People off with Dignity

There’s a big difference between just terminating someone and terminating someone with dignity.  No matter what the situation is, everyone deserves to be shown the door without being crucified in front of their peers.

Aside from the fundamental respect of another human being, you’re also setting an example for how you will treat the rest of the organization.  If all of your employees watch a person get humiliated in front of their peers the first thing that you’ve instilled in everyone else is that they will be treated the same way.  That kind of fear is incredibly unhealthy in any organization.  (Unless you are a pirate, in which case you’ll probably be just fine.)

Instead, go out of your way to make sure that this person’s departure ends on a positive and supportive note.  Even if the rest of the organization dreaded their existence, it’s important for you to be the bigger person and show that everyone will come and go with dignity at your company.

Think About the Ripple Effect

A departure affects more than just one employee.  It creates a ripple effect through the entire organization that’s impossible to ignore.  If you think that an employee walking out the door takes their drama with them, you’re dead wrong.

The gory details of what you’ve said, how the employee responded, and every moment thereafter will be repeated in infinite detail inside and outside of your organization.  Think of the termination event like a video clip on YouTube that is about to get re-broadcast endlessly. 

A simple, positive parting isn’t worth gossiping about.  There’s no story.  But an ugly and bitter battle is something that will keep lots of people talking for a long time, all at your expense.  When it comes to parting, creating as little drama as possible is absolutely critical.

Look at the Big Picture

Every time you let someone go you’re changing the face of the company and setting the tone by which it treats its people.  If you can use this opportunity to show that you’re supportive and respectful of the people leaving your company, you’ll make both the people that work there now and the people that will work for you in the future far more comfortable with living in your world.

After you listen to about a hundred startup company pitches you start to notice that they all sink or swim on just a few basic points.  Given enough time, you don’t even need to know what the product is. Instead you just start asking whether or not the entrepreneur has the right answer to a handful of questions that validate just about any startup idea.  

This isn’t about having a sixth sense about the success or failure of a potential business idea.  No one has that, not even the investors sitting across from you pretending like they do.  This is about boiling your startup idea down to the few principles that make all the difference in the world.  So here they are, in order of importance.

The Problem / Solution Issue

Every great business idea comes down to a solution to a problem.  As entrepreneurial visionaries, we sometimes get enamored with our solution at the expense of having a real problem to solve.  If you’ve ever wondered what a solution looks like without a problem, just take a look at anything being sold in a Sharper Image catalogue.  

The value of a good product idea is proportionate to the size of the problem it solves.  For example, if I tell you I have the cure to cancer I don’t even have to tell you what the product is.  You inherently know what a massive problem cancer is, so certainly any solution I have must be somewhat interesting.

When you can communicate the severity of the problem to investors, and they nod their head and say “yeah, that’s a huge problem, I get it” then you’ve got an interesting business idea.  

When you can communicate that same problem and back up it up with a solution that consumers respond to with “here’s my check” then you’ve actually got a business!

The Sales and Marketing Strategy

Although you may have the solution/problem thing licked, it means nothing without knowing how to bring a customer in the door.  Anyone telling you that a product will sell itself should try walking into a grocery store after it’s closed.  I guarantee when you don’t bring people through the door, the products don’t sell themselves!

That’s why a powerful sales and marketing plan can be even more critical to your business than an initial revenue model.  Don’t get me wrong, you can’t sustain your business forever without revenue.  But I’m 100% sure that without any customers you’ll never have to worry about your revenue model.

You don’t have to have a ten year plan for every type of media you will buy and sales pitch you will perform.  You just need to have a basic explanation for how you can cost effectively find customers over the next year or two.  Your plan might stink, but not having one is a huge red flag.

Revenue Model

There are many conflicting schools of thought on what it means to have a revenue model for your business.  Some people will say that with enough customers you can eventually make the numbers work.  Others will say that if you grow quickly enough you can get acquired long before you ever have to worry about making money.  

Both schools are rarely right, and the exceptions only prove that there are exceptions.  “We’re going to sell to Google” isn’t a revenue model any more than “I’m going to win the Powerball Lottery” is a full-time career  move.

Your revenue model should be simple – someone is willing to pay for what you offer.  Whether they pay for it indirectly through advertising or directly through a purchase, there has to be a sustainable and readily identifiable revenue model.  

More importantly, it has to be a profit model.  I can sell dollar bills for 99 cents and generate tons of revenue, but will certainly guarantee that the company will go bankrupt.  The only companies allowed to exist without a profit model are charities and major airlines.

If you Figure all that out, Let’s Take a Look at the Product

The last order of business, which may sound bizarre, is the Product Plan itself.  That’s because if the product doesn’t solve a customer’s problem that you can make money on, it just doesn’t matter what the product is.  

In many cases you can test the market for your product against the three previous points by simply doing some basic research.  Long before you actually build a product, you can ask customers if they’d buy it.  You can start to figure out how difficult and costly it might be to acquire more of them.  You can also get a sense for what you could sell your product for and get a basic understanding of whether you could do it profitably.

When you’ve got answers to all of these questions, then, and only then, it’s time to go build a company.  Until, then, keeping asking questions.

Here at Go BIG, we read a ton of blogs. Every once and a while you need a blog that breaks the typical news and advice clutter. BrassTacks @ BusinessPlan.com is a new blog that does just that by providing a real and raw view of business planning and business building issues.

The BrassTacks main blogger, Brittany Schaeffer, continually provides fun and edgy articles that helps digest industry news and events. Stories like “Web 2.0 Doesn’t Make Money. VC’s Keep Funding”, looks at the continual funding of valley startups that don’t have revenue models. Very true.
BusinessPlan.com also provides a startup resources tab with sources for business planning, funding and incorporation services. Because you have to get work done eventually.

BrassTacks hosts a quarterly executive summary competition for entrepreneurs. The best summary will win $10,000 in start-up capital. All they want to see is the executive summary, no need to wade through the whole plan.

Dump that Web Site and Just Build a Blog!

What’s the fastest way to get your Web startup launched without having to raise capital, hire programmers and spend countless hours developing a Web site?

Do it yourself with a blog.

Why a Blog?

When most people think about blogging, they conjure an image of someone’s personal Web diary or a site bubbling with celebrity gossip.  

But blog software has much greater potential,from selling a product to building an entire community.  Sure, you could use a blog to give a long-winded report on your last vacation, but you can just as easily (and more effectively) harness its power to keep customers updated on your offerings.

A Web site is most valuable when you can to get it up and running quickly and edit the content on the fly.  A blog facilitates this for you by having all of the design templates, content editing, and publishing features built-in.  

Simple tools like Blogger.com or TypePad.com will allow you to setup a basic site with a good looking template, and even your own unique URL, for less than $10 per month.  They take the site design, programming and hosting issues right off the table in one swoop.

Learn to Fail Faster

Launching a blog quickly also allows your idea to fail a lot faster.  You see, your Web business isn't going to fail because you didn't raise enough capital or you didn't design a sweet enough set of buttons.  It's going to fail because you don't know how to get customers to show up to your site or because your product just isn’t that amazing.

The inherent speed of launching a blog brings you closer to the point of potential failure, and that’s a good thing.  

You want to quickly find out whether your idea is getting traction.  The sooner you are in-market and getting customer response, the sooner you can either bet the farm on growth or pack it up and move on to the next idea.

You may find that your initial approach to the market was flawed, which is often the case.  Creating a blog allows you to quickly evolve your concept so that when you do go to build a full Web site, you’ve got a better idea of how to spend your time and capital.

Master Web Marketing

After you get your product on the Web, mastering the art of attracting traffic is extremely important.  There’s very little difference between marketing a blog and marketing a full blown Web site.  Frankly if you can’t figure out how to get traffic to a simple blog, your Web company will have much bigger problems!  

The Web is a big place these days with over a billion people on-line.  It used to be the case that you could simply make a mark by being the one company in your industry that had a Web site.  Now a website is compulsory and marketing them competitively is the greatest challenge.

Removing the build phase of your Web site by focusing on your blog will free your time to learn how to optimize your content for search engines, build effective cost per click campaigns, and leverage the various social networks to get your word out there.  You’ll need every waking moment to figure this stuff out and orchestrate your campaigns. Having a hassle free site will be a huge blessing.

Total Content Control

Which brings us to the next point – easily editing your own content.  

Your Web site isn’t a single static document that you build once and forget about.  You’ll need to change your offers and messaging constantly to hook new customers and respond to existing ones.  It would be nearly impossible to write effective copy for an entire site on your first attempt and never have to change it again.

This is where the beauty of blog publishing shines through.  A blog is ultimately a word processor with a few extra features, so editing content and making site changes are easy.   If you need to create three different versions of a product sale page to test different messages, no problem.  You can and should take advantage of easy changes to adjust your product strategy as your learn about your customer.

An Ongoing Pilot Program

The days of front-end investment in a product that never changes are over.

The Web enables, and requires, that innovation is iterated for a demanding, changing and hopefully growing audience of consumers. Eventually your brilliant idea will probably outgrow your modest little blog and explode into the next Amazon or YouTube.  

If you can come to terms with the fact that your idea isn’t a business until you’ve tested it in front of enough customers to prove the business case, then the concept of using a flexible tool to build from should make a lot of sense.  

 Wil has written a new article in Forbes that explains how to lower your legal bills when starting a new company.

"The most common legal expenses start-ups incur are associated with the process of incorporation. In the past, this often required either navigating a bunch of state or federal forms--or hiring an attorney to do it for you. These days, the entire process can be done online in less than an hour, for an average of $200 (before filing fees)."

Read the Full article - How To Lower Your Legal Bills