John Dimmer is a friend of Andrew, and also one of
the original founders of Free Range Media. John started his talks with his
background in finance (although he at first wanted to be a professional golfer),
which was something he feels as being his best skill. He had experience working
for a bank and finance person at businesses that he was part of. Despite his strong background in finance,
John also dealt with operations at Free Range Media. One of the two main
advices that John gave for entrepreneurs was: learn basics of accounting and
financing—work well when dealing with money especially in contracts and
agreements. John mentioned the importance of hiring legal counsel so that you
wouldn’t need to panic over legal matters. The other main advice that John gave
was to choose investors wisely. He laid out the order of investors that a new
startup business should go through: self-funding, family an friends, Angels,
Venture Capital. The most memorable
thing that I could remember from his visit was that every time your business
raises capital, you essentially are losing equity. To think about it, I think
it is very reasonable as investors look to gain profit from their investments,
hence the more you try to raise capital, the more investors you’ll have taking
away your equity. This further reenact the importance of finding the right
investors as well as working partners. Another takeaway that I’d definitely keep
in mind was John’s advise to file new startup companies as LLC. He recommended
against S-corporation and C-corporation as those’d often be taxed more as well
as requiring a bigger and more structured business. I think his presentation was incredibly informative, giving somewhat of a "be realistic" side of running a business (especially with finances) and technical terms that new entrepreneurs should be aware of.
Being a service-based business, there aren’t that many things that are considered intellectual property that need to be protected. The only thing that I can come up as being closest to needing intellectual property is the copyrights to the business’s website code. The code is used to create the business’s property and is part of the company’s property. Although not directly belonging to the intellectual property zone, securing a domain name that closely resembles the business name is also a must we are trying to run our service orders through online website. As far as the business model goes, it is a market full of similar service, hence similar business models. Getting a copyright to a business model that everyone knows about is not very beneficial. However, I think the business will have a good number of trade secrets including distribution methods, customer profiles, and advertising methods. As the business aims to gain reputation through advertising agreements with local stores
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