Marina Larroudé stared glumly at all the crossings out on the proposed boots order for the autumn collection. Her husband Ricardo wanted to cut her suggestions by nearly half - in models, colours and quantities. Their fledgling shoe business had begun to a promising buzz a few months ago, but last month's sales had dwindled to a trickle. Ricardo feared that Marina's bold order would leave them stranded with unsold inventory. She sipped her coffee and wondered if he was right to be cautious. Had their initial reception been a fad? Was this opportunity as attractive as they had assumed a few short months ago? Should she push back or accept her husband's cuts?

It was a crisp autumn day in London in 2012. Brynne Kennedy and Steve Black, the co-founders of MOVE Guides, were huddling with their lead software developer, Peter Almasi, and their lead angel investor, Kevin Eyres. Their fledgling business had come a long way since its July launch, with pilot programmes underway at Amazon, Tesco and Oliver Wyman. With limited resources in terms of cash and people, they were wrestling with a crucial decision about how best to proceed with their dream of taking the hassle out of the process of corporate moves - hassle that was acutely felt not only by those moving, but also by the HR professionals tasked with administering the moves.

It was August 2014. The MOVE Guides team had successfully converted two of their initial pilot clients into paying customers whose employees were delighted with the company's support of their moves. Brynne Kennedy and her team were successfully closing a couple of additional lump-sum clients regularly. But customers old and new were asking MOVE Guides to offer managed moves, too. Was such a strategy scalable? What sort of business model would be sustainable long term? Could MOVE Guides take on the established competitors in the managed-moves segment? Her team, including her investors and her closest and most trusted advisor, was divided. Was this the right thing to do?

Having decided to go where her customers wanted to take her, CEO Brynne Kennedy had led MOVE Guides into the managed-moves market segment, in addition to the lump-sum moves segment that had given her company its start. By any measure, the company had grown: in top-line revenue, in head count, and (to her dismay) in the amount of cash it was now burning!

The case analyses the scenario facing Paddy McGiness, the sole founder of Breathe coffee shop in Hays, Kansas, as he seeks to launch his new business without seeking any external financing. The case explores the various mindsets that characterise many entrepreneurs and uses Mullins' texts 'The Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs' and 'Use Customer Cash to Fund Your Startup' to examine customer-funded business models.

It was a cold, blustery February morning in 2019. Pass the Keys co-founders Alex Lyakhotskiy and Zoe Vu were reflecting with their team on the three and a half years that their fast-growing company had been in business. "We're now managing 480 properties in nine cities across the UK. Most of our owner-hosts love what we do," said Lyakhotskiy. "But I'm worried, Zoe. We still have too many service quality issues - a maid that doesn't show up, a key that's missing from its key-box, and many more. And, for all our growth, only two of our cities are running profitably. Are we on the right path? Or should we be considering a pivot to another strategy that would serve us better

The past year, 2019, had been an exhilarating one for Alex Lyakhotskiy and his team. Buoyed by a new franchise model that was working well for opening new cities, alongside better execution in some of the company's existing cities, Pass the Keys' growth had accelerated. Happily, it was looking like 2020 would be an even better year. Unfortunately, in early 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic that had originated in China came to Europe, first in Italy, followed quickly thereafter across the continent and in the UK. Travel bans and quarantines were under discussion and appeared imminent. What that meant for Pass the Keys was abundantly clear: no one was going to be booking any Airbnb properties any time soon. Lyakhotskiy, a first-time entrepreneur, had been through no shortage of challenges in his company's nearly five years in business. But he'd never yet faced the prospect of demand falling to zero. "What steps should I take now?" he asked himself. "And how quickly must I act?"

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case LBS296

For Sid Worley, it was decision time. He had spent the last two years courting the management and the family owners of his largest competitor, and finally (and unexpectedly) they had indicated that they would be receptive to "a serious offer" to buy the company. Worley was excited and determined to buy the company, but now he faced the reality of having to come up with an offer that would work.

In good times like those most businesses have enjoyed for the past decade, business owners have typically watched their income statements with pleasure, as year-to-year performance gains have fattened their dividend payouts and increased the valuation of the companies they own and run. All too often in such times, scant attention is paid to what's between the top line and the bottom line of the income statement. Worse, most business owners, in my experience, give little more than a cursory nod to the balance sheet. Why does this matter? When a recession lands on their doorstep with a sudden thud, as it apparently just has, many of these same people will find themselves having sailed too close to the wind, with cash running out and a dearth of tools to help them weather the storm and understand what has gone wrong. But it need not be so, for there are four simple tools to help any business owner answer these four important questions: (1) Where is cash going in my business, and where is it coming from? (2) To what extent are my profit margins improving or declining, and why? (3) To what extent am I effectively managing the cash-flow relationships with my customers and my suppliers? (4) What, if anything, can I do to better manage the cash that flows into and out of my business? If your business is threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, here are some tools to help it survive.

Erick Mueller was thrilled! The fledging company that he and two friends had started a few months earlier had been the widely acknowledged 'hit' of the 2007 IAAPA Attractions Expo, a trade show in Orlando, Florida that brought together more than 1,100 exhibitors and nearly 20,000 buyers from most of the world's amusement industry, from companies large and small. From Disney to Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not to Madame Tussauds, a who's-who of the industry had blessed Mueller and his small team with more than 100 leads. "That's the good news," thought Mueller, "but where should I start?"

Tonya Lanthier tucked her twin 13-year-old girls Teagan and Ramsey into bed and gave each of them a big hug. She considered herself blessed to have two happy children and a fast-growing business that enabled dentists to find well-matched auxiliary staff, and for dentists, dental assistants, hygienists and front-office staff to find jobs they loved. Her company, DentalPost, was by all accounts thriving. Earlier in the week, however, she'd attended a workshop on product and service innovation and a couple of her fellow participants had suggested ways that what they had learned could be put to use in Tonya's business. "We've got the most comprehensive solution in our industry," she thought to herself, "and we've been making it even better - one step at a time - for more than a decade. There's always been an opportunity for us to innovate and that's probably still true, even now. So, I wonder what our next innovation should be?"

These days, it seems, nearly everyone aspires to be an entrepreneur. But many entrepreneurs think and act differently than the way in which most other businesspeople do and the way much of today's business education encourages them to think and act. My in-depth examination of dozens of entrepreneurs I've come to know well over the past 2 decades tells me that their unconventional-or, dare I say, counter-conventional-mindsets and behaviors are marked by six common patterns: (1) 'Yes, we can;' (2) beg, borrow, or steal; (3) think narrow, not broad; (4) problem-first, not product-first logic; (5) 'No' is something waiting to be turned into 'Yes'; and (6) ask for the cash and ride the float. Thankfully, we now know that entrepreneurs are made, not born. These six patterns of entrepreneurial thought and action are eminently learnable. If you want to someday be an entrepreneur, or if you want the people in your company to become more entrepreneurial, then developing-or encouraging and incentivizing your people to develop-such a mindset might constitute a suitable first step toward preparing you to follow a more entrepreneurial path or to foster a more entrepreneurial culture in your company.

Alex and Mimi Ikonn were heading out to dinner in Toronto to celebrate their first real day in business. While their preparations had taken several months of their time, tomorrow was the day when their website would go live. Was all their hard work worth it? They were about to find out.

If you want to create a really successful business, you have to do more than win your share of customers or control costs--you have to break the rules and overturn the received wisdom about how things work in your industry. For example, high-priced landing fees are just a cost of business in the airline industry, aren't they? Ryanair didn't think so, and it turned Europe's unused World War II landing strips into very low-cost airports. To be a cell phone service provider, you need to invest in towers, networks, billing systems, and more, right? India's Airtel said no and leased virtually everything it needed from others. In sharply lowering its costs and improving its working capital model, Airtel was able to offer India's impoverished consumers cell phone service at a dramatically reduced price. How can companies figure out which rules to break in their industries? By focusing on big structural problems endemic to their industries--not just problems they alone face. There are five common types of industry bottlenecks: (1) an outdated purchase or usage experience, (2) a superfluous major expense category, (3) high financial risks for customers, (4) disengaged employees, and (5) detrimental side effects of the product or service. This article lays out strategies used by real companies for busting those bottlenecks. In doing so, companies stand to significantly reduce their costs--or even eliminate entire cost categories--boost demand levels, and sometimes both.

More and more tech-oriented start-ups are using "negative working capital"--cash received from customers in advance--to finance their businesses, freeing founders to focus on strategy instead of hustling for early investors. Five customer-funded business models that can work for any business in any industry.

Julie Brighton had done some secondary research to determine the market size for her new charcoal starter, a product she hoped would be the basis for starting a small company with her friend Jim Henly. First, however, she needed to forecast how many charcoal starters she could sell in California in her first year.