Articles about management by Matthew Stibbe
Articles about entrepreneurship - starting and running your own business - based on 30+ years' of experience as a serial entrepreneur.
There is no law that says small firms can only do business with other small firms. If you can get your foot in the door, it can be very rewarding to work with big companies.
This article is about one small company – my own business, Articulate Marketing – and how we have found ways to turn our size into a competitive advantage. We work with big clients: Microsoft, HP, Symantec, Dell, Tech Data. This is what we have learned.
[Read more…] about Bambi vs. Godzilla: How to work with big companiesOne of the biggest myths in business is the ‘overnight success’. What you find, when you look more closely, is a business that took five or ten years to get somewhere. Or a business where the hype exceeds the reality.
[Read more…] about The myth of overnight successI have spent a lot of my life in software development, first at Intelligent Games and then, while at Articulate, designing and launching Turbine. If there’s one thing I know about software development it’s this: it’s hard to finish projects on time.
[Read more…] about The 90 percent solution: how to finish projects on time for less moneyThis article is about the hard reality of starting and running a computer games company. I started Intelligent Games (IG) in 1988 because I have always loved computer games and I hired my first employee and moved into real offices in 1993. I sold the company and left in 2000. In that time we released sixteen titles, which together sold over two million copies. The company grew to more than sixty-five people and worked with some of the biggest publishers in the business: EA Sports, Westwood Studios, LEGO and Hasbro. We got there without debt and without external investment. It is from this experience that I am writing this article – as they say in America: ‘your mileage may differ’.
[Read more…] about How to Start a Computer Games CompanyIt used to be a question for the biggest businesses: what do we outsource? Time has levelled the playing field and, today, even small businesses and solopreneurs can outsource virtually anything. Indeed, for ambitious businesses, outsourcing could be a competitive advantage.
[Read more…] about The A-Z of Small Business Outsourcing
[Read more…] about More is more, says research‘Consumers are irresistibly drawn to product specifications.’ – The Atlantic , drawing on findings published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
