The Slicing Pie Model of Funding Your Company

Cashflow Diary™

Mike Moyer is the author of the bestselling books Slicing Pie: Fund Your Company Without Funds, and the new book Bird's Eye Business: A Primer on How Companies Work. He is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Moyer is an entrepreneur who has started a number of companies including Bananagraphics, a product development and merchandising company, Moondog, an outdoor clothing manufacturing company; Vicarious Communication, Inc, a marketing technology company for the medical industry; Cappex.com, a site that helps students find the right college; College Peas, LLC which provides publications and consulting on college admissions; and Trade Show Samurai, LLC a company that teaches trade show exhibitors how to capture lots and lots of leads.

In addition to his experience as an entrepreneur he has held a number of senior-level marketing positions with companies that sell everything from vacuum cleaners to financial data services to motor home chassis to luxury wine. He has taught entrepreneurship at both Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Podcast Highlights

• Who is Mike Moyer?

Mike got the entrepreneurship bug in high school, he wanted to be a veterinarian and was keeping and healing animals in his backyard. One day he found himself as the owner of 24 baby rabbits and had to do something with them, so he took them down to the state fair. His aunt suggested that he sell them for $25 each and he sold them all in a matter of hours. That put him on the path to starting his own clothing manufacturing company in college and a number of other companies since then.

Mike pivoted from the veterinarian career path due to poor grades and his parents subsequently refusing to pay for his schooling. Instead of finding a job Mike started a clothing company to pay for his education and he ended up selling the business after he graduated.

Mike values both education and practical experience. Education saves you a lot of time doing your own work and Mike spent much of his time split between startup companies and established companies. A combination of all three has been very useful in building Mike’s later businesses.

• Real Jobs, Real Companies, and Startups

At a real job you’re getting paid for your work and that’s pretty much it. With a startup you are basically betting on the future of the company, and until that company starts generating revenue and profit it doesn’t qualify as an asset.

With a bootstrap company the way you get started in the early days is by not paying the bills. What this means is that for an employee who would normally be paid $100,000 a year they are basically betting that salary on the success of the company. For those employees, their share of the equity in the company should be proportional to the size of their bet, the challenge is that it's very hard to know the value of the entrepreneur’s idea.

In the grand scheme of things, a person capable of execution is comparatively rare to the accessibility of capital in the beginning stages of a business.

An idea is simply an intention to do something. Without the actual value created through production, the intention isn’t worth anythi