Outsourcing: Ed Cross, Executive Director – Procurement & HRO at Xchanging (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I have followed those phases. There is Starbucks doing contract life-cycle management. Then, we have had pretty sizable companies being built in the procurement management systems base like E-vines that now sits inside SAP and several other vertical-focused offerings on procurement exchanges. How do you see that trend evolving? Ed Cross: I wouldn’t want to specifically

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New Book – Bootstrapping Using Services

Over 99% of entrepreneurs who seek financing get rejected. The seed capital gap leaves many entrepreneurs struggling to get their businesses off the ground. Bootstrapping, a tried and true method to self-fund a business, is a must to bridge this gap in seed funding. And offering a service is one of the best ways to

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How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 2)

Sramana: You had the intuition to react to something that a retail salesperson was giving you. What did you do next? How did you go about setting up your business? Amber Schaub: My first step was to go back to Mark and share my idea. I also had to get the trademark, which cost $400. I

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The one thing that I haven’t heard you talk about in this whole picture is the incentives for the employees to create this kind of knowledge. That must be part of the system, right? Sameer Patel: That’s a really good point. In the last few weeks, we met some pretty big investments in

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Outsourcing: Ed Cross, Executive Director – Procurement & HRO at Xchanging (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It’s stuff like office supplies that you are outsourcing. It’s more of a cost consideration. Whereas, a more strategic procurement issue would be dealing with parts and technology, and that’s where it becomes more complicated. Ed Cross: Let me be more direct. To outsource indirect stationery, for example, can be a fairly simple

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Thursday, Jan. 23 – 202nd 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 202nd FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, January 23, 2014, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 1)

RuffleButts is a perfect story on how to bootstrap with a paycheck. Amber Schaub started RuffleButts, a children’s apparel company, in March of 2007, backed by her husband’s full-time job. He later joined in 2010 as the COO after the company had gained traction. Sramana: Let’s start at the very beginning of each of your

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the example that you gave us about training, you talked about crowd sourcing through videos of enterprise tips and knowledge. That’s essentially the use skills that you described. It sounds like the real power of the system that you are trying to develop is both providing the employees and the enterprise the

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