It is all about the function of CSR. It has been originally meant to be a process of taking responsibility towards all corporate stakeholders including the environment. Nowadays, however, I have the feeling that CSR has partially turned into a marketing tool, thus losing a fraction of its credibility. Time constrained campaigns, such as bringing clean water to Africa, are beneficial but not sustainable in the long-term.

CSR has made an invaluable contribution to society – the socially responsible corporate practices have come to raise the society’s awareness of how important and urgent it is to consider sustainability in general when doing business. This is how I see it – CSR is a short-term solution to our problems. Incorporating sustainability deeper into business models is what we have to do so that we can ensure the generations ahead will have a place to live in.

This notion is not new. The need for a holistic approach to dealing with the deep societal problems has given rise to concepts like conscious business, impact investing, social enterprise, and social entrepreneurship. And this is how it should be. The future belongs to those who consider sustainability an intrinsic part of their business.

CSR is not a sustainable solution because it rarely resolves long-term problems. CSR is more of a tool oriented towards covering some short-term needs. Therefore, it can be considered to have already done its job. This stage of the evolution process is soon to be over; and the question is not “if”, but “when”. Deciding upon being an early mover or a late adopter is a personal choice.

I have not written this article to say CSR is useless. I suppose it brings a lot of value to those who need it. All I am doing is arguing why I think CSR is a reactive approach to resolving society’s problems. Instead, I suggest embracing sustainability. The future belongs to those entrepreneurs who manage to incorporate the resolution of social problems into their business models.

by Plamena Todorova, Community manager at Akasha Ventures

Why is this important? Because in our times, when everything is so overwhelmingly global, we need to acknowledge the fact that entrepreneurship is no longer a local movement. Businesses are no longer built to serve only locally.  Just like people, they are citizens of the world. Think about it. Investors and customers interested in your business could come from all over the globe. One locally created company can conquer the entire world in no time. Just think of Google or Facebook for that matter. Does this mean that only tech-driven businesses have the ability to go international and viral? The answer is simple: No. Any business has now the opportunity to be worldwide. The tools and resources currently at our disposal (the internet, social media, online communities and tribes, etc.) are extremely powerful and they can transform a startup into a global company. This is an extraordinary, thrilling time to start a business because more stakeholders can be reached in less amount of time as ever before.

Having these in mind, I would say you need to start preparing your global movement taking baby steps. Since this will not happen overnight, at least not in most cases, the internationalization of your business should start from you, the founder. You should get the chance to learn about new cultures, engage in building international relationships, read foreign press, and understand what is happening out there in the world. In this way, when the time is right, you will be almost 100% ready to have a global business.

by Denise Iordache, Strategic communication associate at Akasha Ventures

Martin Zwilling writes in his article something most of the entrepreneurs today are already aware of. That is, ‘all startup leaders are besieged with requests for their time, attention, talent, money, or influence, and sometimes even good requests won’t fit into the time and energy you have available.’ Well, not many understand that in order to be able to balance these kinds of situations out, they need to be able to say ‘no’; and do it with a smile on their faces. Here we are not referring to ‘no’ as in a rejection. Saying ‘no’ is more of an acknowledgement that not everything can be done. There is simply not enough time.

So, here comes the question: how do you say ‘no’ without affecting your business? You should start answering this question by understanding the implications of declining a request. Not all requests can be answered with a ‘no’. Balancing your answers and learning when and how you should say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ requires certain skills and not to mention thinking and practice. I think the best starting point is by being authentic and true to your beliefs and overall goals. If you are not sure what you should consider before answering to a request, the above mentioned article gives you a few, very valuable tips that everyone should know and use; at least in my personal opinion.

As an entrepreneur, you have already dedicated your life to your business and in order to maintain your focus, you need to assess which requests should be performed and which should be declined gracefully. Saying ‘no’ should not be seen as a sign of weakness, but as strength. Allowing yourself to choose the answers to the questions you are flooded with every day, shows you are tightly connected to your goals and the overall company strategy. It helps you to be perceived as a good leader and it brings you the validation of fellow entrepreneurs. The one thing that you need to focus here is the way you deliver your message. Just like salespeople are trained to transform a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’, you need to train yourself to decline a request in such a positive way that no one will hold it against you.

by Denise Iordache, Strategic communication associate at Akasha Ventures

This morning I read an article by Allyson Kapin which discussed if tech companies can keep innovating without so many women around. This article made me think about the eternal topic men vs. women from another perspective. Instead of thinking who’s better, I concentrated my thoughts on how male and female strengths can be utilized so that optimum results are achieved. Such a summary can be particularly useful for startups because of their explicit lack of resources.

It is in women’s nature to be good connectors. They tend to create stronger networks which they utilize, thus suffering less dramatic failures. Women are better than men at multitasking. They tend to build long-term businesses which bring value to various stakeholders. Women are said to believe success is preceded by hard work. They tend to take fewer risks than men do, and second guessing is something that accompanies important decisions. Females are likely to be less persistent in the negotiation process, because they understand the concept of “value” more broadly, i.e. value is not purely a financial term. Women are claimed to need a substantial work-life balance in order to be productive at work. Actually, the better the balance, the higher their productivity.

These arguments may not be applicable to all women, but it is worth knowing what strengths females have from a psychological perspective. Being aware of these strengths facilitates the understanding how hiring a person with a number of these soft skills can contribute to the team (even if that is not a woman).

The arguments I’ve just used are inspired by this article. I needed a stable foundation to build my point upon. My point is that things may need to change even if the numbers are good. Besides, one may sense the direction is wrong even before the ship hits a riff and sinks. Building the skill set of your company is a strategic choice. Simple decisions, such as bringing some of the above mentioned competencies in the team, may be the solution of multiple problems. More importantly, it may prevent problems. Entrepreneurs reach incredible heights because they trust their guts. So when your intuition whispers something’s wrong, take a moment and look into it. It may save your ass.

by Plamena Todorova, Community manager at Akasha Ventures

We, here in the Akasha Ventures office, read these steps described by Deeb and we agreed to share them with our community of entrepreneurs. In order to make them easy to understand and read, I followed the same pattern described in Jonathan Greechan’s article while writing this post.

The steps you need to follow when building your startup budget can be described as below:

1.       Sales and Marketing

You might ask: should the entire budgeting process start with an emphasis on the sales and marketing expenses? Deeb believes it should, since these areas will be the key drivers of revenues for your startup and they can assess whether your business will last or not. However, your startup will either be sales or marketing-driven and you need to have this understanding very clear in your mind before you go ahead and plan the budget.

On the one hand, most sales-driven companies are people driven and they focus on B2B activities, hence the importance of assessing your sale force and its ability of calling on new clients to drive revenue. Here you have to plan the period of time your sales people will need in order to get very productive (including the training) and need to make realistic expectations.

On the other hand, most marketing-driven companies are media driven and they focus on B2C activities. These companies can involve both online and offline marketing activities, but for the startup environment, the online media seems to be suited better, mostly due to the higher costs the offline media seems to require.  Viral marketing through social media is going to be the cheapest cost of marketing, followed by other online marketing activities (like search marketing, email marketing and mobile marketing).

Before building your final budget, make sure you have tested a couple of your primary marketing initiatives, to determine how much it will cost to acquire your customer.

2.       Expenses

Expenses are totally in your control; hence it will be easier to forecast them. You decide how many people you need to employ, what technology you will use and need to buy, what office you will have, etc.

In addition to the sales and marketing expenses discussed before, the expenses you need to plan should include:

• payroll (including taxes and employee benefits)
• technology (development, design, support, hosting, etc)
• office (rent, utilities, phones, etc)
• insurance
• professional services (accountants, lawyers, etc)
• other administrative expensive (travel, meals, etc)

Keep in mind that, depending on the nature of the asset, depreciation expenses will run over a 3 to 10 year life from your income statement.

3.       Interest

This is among of the simplest calculations. Basically, if you have a debt, you need to consider the interest expenses.

4.       Taxes

If you are running a profitable company, you will also have to budget for the annual corporate income taxes that vary based on your local authority’s policy.

5.       Validation with history or industry numbers

If there is no history from within your business that could you use, you must turn to looking into the numbers of fellow companies within your industry. This will help you appreciate better your budget. In this way, you will have a relevant industry benchmark to reference to help validate your assumptions.

6.       Sanity check

This step helps you assess whether or not your expectations are reasonable. To be certain that you have built a realistic forecast, just make sure your forecast is credible in light of your sales/ marketing budget and industry size.

7.       Build cushion

Startups should always build a cushion into their forecast, as things are most definitely not going to go 100% as planned.  Therefore you need to plan ahead in expecting the unexpected.

“Once you have taken into account all of the above, you should be in a good position to finish your budget and forecast the cash needs of your business.  So, make sure you raise enough capital to cover at least 12-18 months of your going forward operations.  Otherwise, you will constantly be in fund-raising mode, and not focused on building out your business”, concludes George Deeb.

 by Denise Iordache, Strategic communication associate at Akasha Ventures

In order to have a realistic version of the career goals, one should focus on discovering or re-discovering a life of harmonious passion. I gained these insights reading an amazing article, written by Elizabeth Saunders. She argues that everyone should be able to achieve their goals by first setting them correctly and furthermore working towards achieving those, thinking helpful harmonious thoughts. This will lead to helpful harmonious passion and will bring us closer to happiness. But, one may ask how, how could we achieve all this? And the answer seems to be easy: replace harmful thought patterns with helpful ones. Replace hard-core planning and controlling with constructive thoughts that focus on achieving the goal. In the article mentioned above, this replacing process actually has some examples. In case you were wondering how you can find out whether or not you got trapped into the trap of obsessive passion, just ask yourself: Do I agree with any of the harmful thought patterns mentioned amongst the examples?

I did ask myself this question and actually addressed it to all the other members of my work team. The answers were different, but they all concluded that having harmful thoughts is in our human nature. There will always be a potential harmful thought passing through our mind. The key step is to transform it in a helpful one. This puts things into perspective in my opinion. If we think of our life and road to reaching our goals as a puzzle, then the most important step to solving it would be keeping our approach as simple as possible. We already have to deal with the complicated setting of this puzzle; we don’t have to overcomplicate the solution by thinking poorly about our skills, worth, relations, or anything for that matter. If our mind thinks happy thoughts, than our actions will lead to happiness!

 by Denise Iordache, Strategic Communication Associate at Akasha Ventures 

The author notes that words like “pivot”, “iterate” and the like have been used around the Silicon Valley for some time now. However, after the recent mind blowing success of Instagram, which seems to serve as a deep breath of fresh air for the industry, the meaning of “pivoting” has slightly changed. The old meaning of the word is oriented towards the past and sounds like: “generally to describe failing gracefully”.

After the Instagram era, the attitude is more like: “You pivot as many times as you can, as fast as you can,’ says one entrepreneur”. Now pivoting is all about the future; it’s all about conquering success as fast as possible. I see the twist of the meaning of pivoting as actually beneficial. It enables entrepreneurs to shift their attention from failure and focus on their learning points. Grab that knowledge and move on to the next challenge.

If the concept of pivoting is viewed upon from another perspective, it could be easy to spot why it is so well received by users and appreciated by entrepreneurs. The era of co-creation and the high influence consumers have on the products is totally in line with the concept of pivoting. Even product development is a two-way process nowadays! A product is launched, consumers try it and their reaction pronounces its sentence – will it go further than the demo version or not?

Entrepreneurs enjoy pivoting because it enables them to create and launch products much faster than it used to be 10 years ago. You create something, you try it out. Then you see what works better, you pick up that one. It’s so easy to employ this trial and, hopefully less, error approach. Pivoting refers to doing business on the internet. It enables entrepreneurs to work in a cost and time efficient manner. Try out, learn, adjust, re-launch. The process seems to be endless. Until you succeed or give up.

 by Plamena Todorova, Community Manager at Akasha Ventures

Don’t get me wrong, you first need to earn your manager’s trust, just like in common relationship building! Once you do it, if you are lucky enough, you will be receiving more attributes within the company and more responsibility of course. I have added the ‘luck’ notion here because not every time a good employee gets the chance to experience full freedom and responsibility, or even pure delegation for that matter. As Cushard also points out in his article, not all managers are willing to delegate. Some of them want to attribute more responsibility to their employees, but they will control every step of the way, not leaving any room for freedom.  Some might not even consider empowerment to be worth for their businesses. But I don’t want to focus on what managers do nor don’t, I want to emphasize what delegation means to the regular employee.

I need to point out that feeling empowered means more than receiving a money incentive, at least in my opinion it does. Employees receiving responsibilities and freedom to perform these activities are going to feel more motivated at work, more loyal, and most importantly, their needs will be fulfilled. Remember Maslow’s pyramid of needs?! All the above feelings empowered employees experience, allows them to fulfill the needs of self-actualization and esteem, the highest needs in Maslow’s pyramid. What does this mean for your business? Well, let’s put it this way, your employee will have a higher degree of productivity and quality of work, will engage more in customer service and will reach satisfaction.

We have to remember that at the end of the day all employees are humans and they need to be appreciated in any way. Therefore, I believe in empowering them, allowing them to shine in a specific field, because this will not only benefit the employee and the manager involved, but the overall business.

by Denise Iordache,  Strategic Communication Associate at Akasha Ventures

The above mentioned article teaches us, adults, that kids are once more our source of inspiration being genuine and true to themselves. The Network of Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) decided to award these top 33 enterprising teens from all over the world in a ceremony in New York a few days ago. There they emphasized once more the importance of having such young individuals showcase in front of the great leaders of our world.

Why is this important? Because the experiences of these young men not only prove that one can be involved into making the world a better place at a very young age, but also pulls the brake on our line of thought and encourages us to think beyond being profitable and managing a powerful business. Events like this one reach us on a personal level and make us wonder. Would we feel fulfilled if we will follow our hearts completely and do exactly what makes us happy from within ourselves? This philosophy focuses on personal development, gain and motivation first and foremost. It preaches starting a new business in-line with your inner desires, motivation, mission and vision will only get you to happiness, and profits will follow soon afterwards.

You might ask yourself, is this me? Would I just go ahead and start my own business tomorrow just like these young entrepreneurs did? I believe the answer is for everyone to find within themselves, but I am sure that we can all do what we love. It doesn’t necessary have to mean starting up a company, it could be as simple as getting involved within a community and do volunteering for a cause we truly believe in, or change jobs in order to get the chance to work for a company that makes everyone’s life better and whose mission appeals to us on a personal level. Life is too short to make compromises; it is time to do what we love and what makes us happy, because this definitely will have a great impact on the world as we know it.

by Denise Iordache,  Strategic Communication Associate at Akasha Ventures

We all know that but when it comes to deciding if we quit our job and try to make a living out of a hobby, the decision can be hard an painful. A trade-off is rarely a good thing if you are not convinced the sacrifice you make will be worthy.

The Quantum philosophy can be something which can help you look upon doing business from another perspective. A Quantum company also originates from happiness. A Quantum company boils down to what you enjoy doing and how you can make money out of it. Jakob Algreen-Ussing is the person who has created the Quantum philosophy. He has based it upon his personal experience as an entrepreneur and his experience with what really works and matters in business.

The Quantum philosophy is founded upon the notion that every company is an energetic entity. There are six powers which underpin a Quantum company. More importantly, the entrepreneur aligns such a company with their soul mission, personal beliefs and values. As a result of this approach a Quantum company emerges from the entrepreneur’s passion. You can read more about the Quantum philosophy here.

So should you do what you love or keep doing what helps you keep your standard high? This is a dilemma which forces you to choose between long term happiness and short term salary. It’s always hard to take such a decision. Especially if you are short on money. We all know this. But when we take a look around us, what do we see? Are our friends doing what they like? Or are they doing what they do to earn more money?