[PBO]

L to Z...

L is for lateral thinking. Joe had great success with lateral thinking, but it had a painful side effect-- walking into door jams.

L is for limited partnership. Limited partnerships limit the risk of the partners. This is the form of partnership wherein partners are limited to settling their differences to with fists and teeth. This limits the risk of the partners to charges of assault and battery rather than attempted murder.

L is for Loop, if you are always well informed about matters necessary for the performance of your job you are "in the loop," otherwise you are a human being. Taxes have loopholes, so do nooses.

L is for Liquidity. You know you have achieved liquidity if all your assets can be poured down the toilet.

L is for Lost Opportunity Costs, another term for alimony.

M is for Mom. An entrepreneur can have no greater asset than an Angel mother.

M is for Makeover. Say you have a nice company, making steady money designing and producing widgets, and yet for some reason you are getting no respect from the stock market. Companies that have never made a cent are shooting to the stratosphere while your well-run company is left doing swirlies in the porcelain hydrosphere.

What you need is a makeover. Widgets were hot stuff in the 30's, but now they are boring. Hire yourself a new CEO with experience in makeovers. He will call a press conference announcing that the company is launching out into new fields, dropping a couple of buzz words like nanocommunications and biotribology.

Your stock value shoots up, and everybody is jazzed, except your management team who just saw the corporate ladder move to a new wall, the sales department who have built careers around selling widgets, your engineering department who perceive that their already meager R&D budgets are going to be cut completely, and your manufacturing line who get the message that their specialized skill no longer figure in the company's future.

So as your stock value soars as your morale, productivity and sales plummet. As soon as the stock value triggers the new CEO's bonus he heads for greener pastures, having another success on his resume. Did the remaining management team tank the company after he left? Well, he can hardly be blamed for that!

M is for Marketing. This is the section of the business plan where you show how to get the entire management team to Mazatlan without their spouses.

M is for Marketing research. This is what the dart board in the conference room is expensed as.

N is for Napkin--use it to write your business plan over breakfast. and hope it is big enough to clean up the orange juice spewed out by the venture capitalist sitting across the table from you. See "Spit-take."

N is for Negotiate. You can negotiate with a terrorist, you can negotiate with the bank, you can even negotiate with a judge, but you can't negotiate with a screaming two year old.

N is for Net, this is a prefix used with terms like net asset value, net book value, net cash balance, net worth, and net income. In the modern world this prefix has been replaced with the more useful prefix "not."

O is for organizational behavior. This is the class in business school where you learn why it is more fun to be a professor than a student.

O is for OWC, or "owner will carry." This indicates a last-ditch effort of an entrepreneur to sell his business. The normal response to this is to buy the company with nothing down, change its name, sell off the assets and then let him repossess. This is also known as a "turn around."

O is for Outsourcing. In order to avoid the pain of actually doing something you can pay someone else to do it for you. I am just about to close a deal to outsource accountability, responsibility, and blame.

O is for Over-the-Counter. This term applies to either drugs that are stocked at the market or stocks that are a drug on the market.

P is for Payroll. Most people look forward to payday, but if just the thought of payday sends you into a panic, you are probably an entrepreneur.

P is for Paper profits. These are profits that you can't spend, but you have to work like crazy if you want to avoid paying taxes on.

P is for Paradigm. You take the first dollar your company earned and mount it on the wall. When you have to take it down to pay a postage-due of eighty cents, what you have left is a paradigms.

Q is for Quarterly Report. This makes sure your venture investors have a stick to beat you up with every three months.

Q is for Quick Ratio. This ratio is calculated by dividing the amount of stock options a manager has vested by of time it takes him to flee.

R is for RSP, or reverse stock split. A stock split happens when the per-share price is so high no one can afford it. A reverse stock split happens when the stock exchange picks up a sword and offers to apply the wisdom of Solomon unless you do something about your low stock price.

R is for Rocket Science. Everybody knows that rocket science is hard. What they don't know is that as hard as it is to build a successful rocket, it is much harder to raise the money to build the rocket. So rocket scientists do always make the best entrepreneurs.

R is for Roll Up. When you spend so much time at your desk trying to grow your business that your fat moves to the middle, you have a roll up.

R is for ROI or Return on Investment. When you get a letter back marked "undeliverable," and it contains an invoice, and the postoffice didn't charge you for sending it back, that is called a return on investment.

S is for silicon. And also for silicone. Silicon is the stuff computer chips are made of. Silicone is the stuff breast implants are made of. The news media have never been able to keep this straight. This means that thousands of female journalists are still looking on the map for Silicone Valley, when it could have been right under their noses the whole time.

S is for Sole Proprietorship. A partnership where you have to fight with yourself.

S is for Supply Chain. Everybody uses suppliers. And those suppliers use suppliers, just like the poem "bigger fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite'em. And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum." The wonder of the modern world is how anyone gets paid. Each supplier in the supply chain gets paid in 30 days if every other supplier in the chain gets paid in 30 days, which is why there are such horrible curses called down on anyone who would break the chain.

S is for Solutions. This is a word that used to have a meaning. If a company calls itself a solutions company what does this mean? Chemical companies make solutions, but they call their solutions by a real name like "window washing fluid" which lets the customer know exactly what it does.

The other kind of solution is the answer to a problem. But that doesn't usually fit either. For example, I get calls offering me "enterprise solutions."

I run an enterprise, and I have problems, a lot of problems. So I say "Great, I need enterprise solutions. My secretary is out sick, can you come and answer the phone?"

"No, you misunderstand we are in information technology."

"OK, I have a big problem with my engineering team who spend so much time staring at the screen they don't have time to do any research and development."

"No you misunderstand , we sell sales solutions."

"OK, now we are talking. My sales manager is sobbing in the toilet and won't come out."

"On the other hand, maybe we don't have any solutions for you--click."

The moral to the story is to tell people what you do, after all, every company ever founded from the beginning of the world until now could describe itself as a solutions company, but they usually came up with something more descriptive.

T is for TLA. This is a three letter acronym meaning "three letter acronym." There are 17,576 possible three letter acronyms in English, every one of which has an already registered domain name, so I am sorry, but from now on you will have to be more creative when you name your company!

T is for tough. An entrepreneur needs to be tough, but tough cuts both ways. Remember when "Chainsaw" Al Dunlop took over Sunbeam? Wow, was he tough! When the smoke cleared Chainsaw Al had to pay a $500,000 fine and promise that he would never again work for a public company. That's tough!

U is for Utah Angels. A thirteen year old girl is a wonderful human being. A gaggle of ten thirteen year old girls is a powerful destructive force, sparing nothing in its path. The Utah Angels have taken this principle and applied it to angel capital.

V is for view. As in the Escalante National Monument, which brings up the question, how many million dollar views will you give in exchange for $300,000,000,000 worth of coal?

W is for WWW, a term invented by Al Gore during the Clinton administration. Short for Who's With Willie?

X is for Xtreme Sports Camp. Like a basketball camp but with real blood, usually sponsored by emergency rooms and health clinics during the slow season.

Y is for Yam Shakes. This is a medical condition first observed the first time Zuka Juice executives entered a Jamba Juice shop.

Z is for Zero. This is a nice round number which characterizes a lot of entrepreneurial concepts, for example spare cash, free time, and patience with deadbeat customers. I tell my kids "I started out with nothing and I still have most of it left