To understand how to position your business, you first should research your competition. This may seem like common sense, however, you may not be seeing the full picture.

We've put together a free downloadable template for identifying your competition. You are welcome to download it and get started right away if you are ready.

If you'd like a bit more information, consider the following: Read more…

Are you looking to grow your team? If you aren't quite there yet, hopefully you will be soon. Growing your team is vital to scaling up your business. There will come a time that doing it all yourself won't be realistic. If you've never hired someone before, perhaps you are feeling overwhelmed by the idea. Keeping a few key things in mind can make all the difference to helping you overcome this feeling.

You are the expert on your business, so think about what makes your business unique.

• What values are important to your company?
• What tasks or roles would you rather not do yourself?
• How are you sharing your company's story?
• Do you understand what type of employee to hire to accelerate your business?

When pitching your venture, it is vital that you properly assess your surroundings. Hopefully prior to presenting your venture you've also done advance preparation.

Imagine yourself as a baseball pitcher on the mound and your audience as the batter. This is where we diverge from the baseball comparison (at least of a regular game). You need to think about pitching for a home run derby because you want your audience to connect with your pitch.

What does this mean in terms of how you present? It means you need to be aware of your audience and the cues you are picking up from their eye contact and body language. If you don't pick up on the signals, your pitch may miss connecting with your audience.

How do you avoid missing connections with your audience? You must create a variety of pitches you can pull from at will. Having a variety of pitches will allow you to adjust your presentation based a number of cues:

We are quickly approaching our two year anniversary. We have you, our community, to thank. We have learned much from you and look forward to doubling down on our efforts to keep learning from you and providing value back in return.

We believe that learning is a journey and that one must stay curious and open-minded at all times. In the spirit of continued learning we launching Informant. Informant is the place for you to share your knowledge or get feedback from our entire community.

We encourage all of you to participate and look forward to what you share. As always your feedback is welcome and appreciated.

I recently discovered "Teamstory". It is an app that is really a social network specifically for startups and entrepreneurs. The app is intuitive and the group that has put it together is still working hard on building out more features and functionality.

What makes this a functional and useful social network? First, Teamstory listens, they have and are making improvements made by their community members. Their customer service is great and timely at that. Second, the startups and entrepreneurs within the network are engaging and helpful.

Some what does this social network offer? You can most a "thought", a "moment" or a "link". Yep three simple things. A thought is really just a question, a quote or what's on your mind. A moment is a picture with a caption and a link, you guessed it, is a way to post links with a caption as well. It's really quite simple and elegant. You share the story of your startup with other startups.

Teamstory is still in its early stage but it is growing. I'd advise you jump on a…