The connection between leadership and art has been made many times over, usually as a way to single out certain properties of the arts that carry over to leadership, such as a jazz musician’s ability to create through improvisation. These analogies can be compelling, but my point is more ambitious: leadership is an actual art, not metaphorically an art.

We Create Beautiful Websites

Creating beautiful, best-in-class websites starts at the core of your business. We are good at what we do not because we create best-in-class websites, but because we are students of every one of our clients. We focus on learning what they are passionate about as well as what their vision is for their company and its offerings. After all, a website is nothing more than a reflection of the leaders behind it.

Often times as we are learning about our clients’ passions, we are also learning about their struggles and challenges. Who are we if we are not able to help resolve our client’s obstacles and create breakthrough strategies to help them achieve their goals?

We tread a fine line as we are not consultants, though we do consult. We are not mentors, though we do provide insight based on the wisdom we have gained from learning much from our 500+ clients in an array of industries. We simply love creating amazing websites that improve our client’s companies, so that’s what we focus on.

We Love to Help Our Clients

Last week I was listening to one of our existing clients as they were confiding in me some of the challenges they were facing. More questions lead to more insight about their weaknesses, or “opportunities for improvement,” as I like to call them. I began to understand the scope of the challenges he was dealing with and offered some high level guidance to help mentor him through the growing pains his company was experiencing. As I often see, he is a founder of a company that had grown to a point where it had become bigger than himself. The daunting task of building a team around him while ensuring that the company held tight to its principles and ideals was before him. It is a common challenge experienced by successful entrepreneurs, and it is a delicate and crucial step in growing a healthy and successful organization.

The majority of my guidance was focused on the mantra of being a great leader for his company. Finally, he posed the question to me, “What do you think makes a great leader?”

I had recently read an article (also the name of the book) in the Harvard Business Review, titled Every Leader is an Artist  by Michael O’Malley (who also wrote the book The Wisdom of Bees). I suggested that this client read it and call me back to discuss how he might be able to apply those twelve principles to the leadership of his company.

Being a Leader Is a Form of Art

I have worked with many different types of leaders, and there is no one way to effectively navigate a team through the challenges that they will no doubt face. Adversity is natural, and in fact it is a sign of growth. Being a leader IS a form of art. It requires balance, focus, skill, passion, and commitment. With that said, I have never seen the attributes of a leader as well defined as O’Malley and strongly suggest that you not only read his Harvard Business Review blog posting but both of his books, for reading is the key to knowledge.

The follow up conversation with this client was much more focused on the core competencies of a leader and his excitement about applying the principles in this article to his company and its needs. I reminded him that while great artists do often have natural talent, they, like leaders, must work to always be better and push themselves to greatness.

Are you a leader? What are some of the skills you have learned along your path, and can you relate any of them to those of an artist? We would love to hear from you.

Crowd Funding, also known as Crowd Financing, is the latest evolution of the Crowd Sourcing concept. Crowd Sourcing in its purest form is leveraging the collective efforts of many collaborating volunteers, usually in the form of a forum, to collectively solve a problem. The concept being that if enough people participate, the correct answer will rise to the top, just as we have seen with the Wiki concept.

The Essence of Crowd Funding

Crowd Funding, in short, leverages this model to help organizations source the required funding they need in order to meet their project’s required capital needs. Instead of people volunteering information, now they offer relatively small monetary contributions to projects that they feel are interesting or worthwhile. This pooling of many contributions adds up and the power of the crowd takes effect. This model has been successfully leveraged by disaster relief organizations like Red Cross, political campaigns, scientific research, and even open source software development.

Kickstarter, The King Kong of Crowd Funding

Well, it wasn’t long until entrepreneurs started to realize the power of the Crowd Funding and platforms started to appear online that were positioned to help startups and creative minds source the funding they needed to get their project off the ground. The most notable example being www.kickstarter.com, which has had many success stories including the Pebble Smart Watch, who was looking for $100,000 and ended up raising over $10,000,000. OUYA Video Game Console was initially seeking $950,000 and ended up raising over $8,500,000. These are of course some of the most funded projects, but there are many others that have found success is raising growth capital via Crowd Funding.

Investment Without Equity

The common theme with these platforms is that organizations or individuals offer something in trade for the money they receive, but not equity… not in the United States anyway. It was not until April 5, 2012 that President Obama signed the JOBS Act, with legislation that allows for a wider pool of small investors with fewer restrictions than currently allowed. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was, at that time, given approximately 270 days to set forth specific rules and guidelines that enact this legislation, while also ensuring the protection of investors.This means that on January 1, 2013, there will be some major shifts in our country’s investment landscape. The significance and impact of these are not totally comprehensible at this point in time, but I believe that the two most affected groups by this will be Non-Accredited Investors and Venture Capital / Angel Investment Companies and here’s how:

Non-Accredited Investors

Ever since the passage of the Securities Act of 1933, the SEC has maintained that if a company offers to sell equity to the public in a private transaction, those individuals who purchase equity must be an ‘Accredited Investor’. This basically means that you would either have to have a net worth of $1 Million or who be making over $200,000 per year in order to participate in such offerings. The fact that investors considering an investment in a privately placed venture are required to be accredited investors limits the universe of potential investors. Until the rules and regulations set forth by the SEC for this new Act are announced, it is hard speak to how exactly this is going to change, but one thing is nearly guaranteed is that such investment opportunities will be available to more people than ever before, and that is exciting.

Venture Capital / Angel Investment Companies

There is industry chatter as to whether or not these changes will affect the VC companies. I say that change is inevitable and the only question is how it will change the VC landscape? I believe there will be three notable shifts;

1. There will of course be a rush to market for new online Crowd Funding websites that structure themselves to allow for investors to get equity instead of the promise of discounts on future products or services. There are already a handful of ‘placeholder’ websites that are already launched and undergoing SEO strategies to be in poll position by the time the clock starts. There are also serious players across the pond like www.seedrs.com who are establishing themselves now so they can be in a position to move into the US if and when the laws allow for it.
2. Likewise, established Crowd Funding sites like www.kickstarter.com and others that have, up to this point, only been able to facilitate goods and service offerings to investors. These platforms will need to evaluate the pros and cons of staying focused on their present model or adapting to equity investment offerings. After all there will still be demand for the current trend because it’s no secret that a new company would much rather fund itself on pre-sales than it would in shelling out equity, if it can.  But at the end of the day no serious investor would want to have ‘kickstarted’ Facebook.
3. Lastly, I foresee some forward thinking VC firms adapting to this new trend. Evolving to a hybrid model would allow for a firm to endorse certain ventures and allow for more of a ‘public’ placement in any or all of their funding rounds. Because they are established and they do bring executive clout to the table, a VC firm could quickly rally an investment community around the companies they endorse. The gap here will be that crowd funding may be better suited for seed funding than VC funding, but that is an unproven assumption. Also, there are many industries such as manufacturing or B2B technologies for example that may struggle in immediately having investors embrace their business models as they lack the consumer appeal that successful crowed funding campaigns have demonstrated thus far.

In either case, Crowd Funding in exchange for equity brings up the point of valuation. Now that the person investing is purchasing equity, the question of how much they get for how much they invest is front and center. This introduces the subjective theory of value and will it will be difficult to establish or even standardize these valuations, especially for young or start-up ventures.

I for one am looking forward to watching the development of this evolving industry and its effect on our investment landscape. Our current economic conditions are such that more and more entrepreneurial ventures need money and our country’s banks sure aren’t making it available. With this creative new concept and forthcoming legislation, I feel that it will provide a much needed breath of fresh air into our economy and help keep alive the entrepreneurial spirit on which this country thrives. The timing couldn’t be better to once more illustrate how technology and the internet continue to level the playing field and create more opportunity for growing businesses to thrive.