Yesterday I received an email from India asking advice for the establishing an IT consultancy business. I'll share my answer as most of it applies to all types of businesses. The email from India asked: How do I start my company, which persons do I contact, and what resources should I acquire. My reply and advice is set out below.

The best time to invest, always, is when everything looks gloomiest. That's when the bargains are to be had. - Special Collection: Business Valuation, Sale or Purchase (ip/special-collection-business-valuation-sale-or-purchase.html)

A few years ago I wrote a personal vision of what it takes for a client to benefit from innovation. At the time I was seeking to integrate several models or typologies for the commercialisation (ip/defining-commercialisation-2.html) of intellectual property (ip/intellectual-property-defined-2.html). I titled my statement RAPS Conversion Model . It was like a manifesto. This post ends with a list of the 7 principles discussed in the RAPS statement. I made up the RAPS acronym from Requirements, Assets, Perspectives and Systems. My focus was on how to convert intellectual property into value, hence the terms Conversion Model . While I was not thinking of it at the time, RAPS harked back to the time of Leonardo da Vinci. You could be a painter and arty at the same time as gain respect as a scientist and technologist. All areas continue to be fueled by imagination and creativity. Maybe we are returning to that age. I'll return to this theme later.

Is your business seeking to collaborate with others but is unsure how to go about it? Are you unsure of the options, legal jargon and financial terms of engagement? Here's the classic process to unblocking this log jam. Business relationships involve deals, deal making, business models and contracts. How do these concepts differ? How do you select the best option for a particular situation? This post illustrates our specialisation in helping clients define their business relationships. It's part of doing business and more broadly, business structuring and enterprise structuring.

A new report by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) highlights six trends in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) sector. The report suffers from a fixation on technology. Its comfort zone is bits, bytes and gizmos. Equal space should have been given to use made of IT and communications by business and consumers and the wide-ranging implications of changing patterns of use. The 18 page report is titled Top six trends in communications and media technologies, applications and services: possible implications (http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310658/top_six_trends.pdf) (PDF file).

Naked ladies dancing on the tongue. This is how I responded on first tasting Art Series Chardonnay (http://www.leeuwinestate.com.au/index.php?page=84) at the cellar door of Leeuwin Estate in 2004. Hearing my uncensored appreciation, the man serving me at the cellar door, Mr D. Moore, told me a story. He told me about the wine's background. It is arguably Australia's greatest Chardonnay. It's almost A$100 a bottle.

Speed pays. You already know that customers pay more if you can deliver fast with no reduction in quality. Speed wins. Speed is a critical pre-requisite to be competitive in markets. Speed in innovation pays and wins. In a commercialisation venture it is helpful to measure speed. Get a measure of the speed of change of intellectual property and the agility of the management team, business processes, methodologies and technology.

Sydney Olympics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Olympics) presented Nikki Webster in the Australian experience of going swimming. (*) More than water skills will be needed beyond the Beijing Olympics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Olympics) for Australian online businesses to survive and thrive against the next internet wave. From 1995 the web encouraged water sports. Today the internet has moved beyond surfing. The question here is how should Australian online businesses compete in the years ahead to serve local, international or global markets.

When did social media or online social networking start? Was it a few years ago off the back of MySpace, Facebook and Web 2.0? No. It was thriving in San Francisco and the Bay Area before Mark Zuckerberg, twenty-something CEO and founder of Facebook, was born.

What is the secret of enduring greatness for a company? Jim Collins has an answer. Collins is a prominent writer on business management (http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/18/news/companies/enduring_greatness.fortune/index.htm) and author of business books which are among the all time best sellers. He wrote Good to Great (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8 s=books qid=1209605202 sr=8-1) and co-authored Built to Last (http://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Companies/dp/0060566108/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8 s=books qid=1209605202 sr=8-3). An excellent overview of Good to Great is the one here (http://www.ndarala.com/index.cfm?id=996) by Jim Belshaw. In his recent article in Fortune magazine, The secret of enduring greatness, Collins revisits his familiar theme of business survival and endurance. His data includes who's in and out of the Fortune 500 list. And this is what he concludes is the secret of enduring greatness for a company: Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, whether you make it onto the Fortune 500, and whether you stay there, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.