When Anna and Nathan Bond got married in 2008,  Anna, a graphic designer , illustrated the wedding invitations with her quirky drawings. They were such a hit that she and her husband launched  Rifle Paper  a year later. What started as an online store with a few dozen stationery products now sells iPhone covers, wallpaper, and, beginning next spring, clothing and bags, to more than 4,000 stores globally. “We got started in stationery, but we've always viewed Rifle as a lifestyle  brand ,” Nathan explains. That's a tall order. But the Bonds' solid feel for Rifle's visual identity, their rigorous focus on margins, and their global strategy have contributed to the company's dramatic growth.

Brand before you expand

Anna's bold, colorful illustrations are at the center of Rifle Paper's business. “I love purposeful imperfection,” Anna says, describing the look that has become Rifle's signature style. The Bonds always knew these whimsical designs could work well beyond paper. But rather than...

When you're an entrepreneur, you're busy working every day to find your way, build your product or services, grow your company and achieve your goals. Unless you're a financial whiz, it's not always easy to also work out your financial plan and pin down precise numbers; sometimes important financial details can fall by the wayside. Even if you are a financial whiz, creating a financial plan and managing your finances can be challenging. But it is essential that you understand the importance of accurate financials — both for your own stability and ability to plan, and to convince and assure potential investors of the validity of your business.

As an entrepreneur, you can make many financial mistakes. However, once you know the potential missteps, you can take simple steps to avoid them. Here are the top five financial mistakes startups make and how to steer clear:

Miscalculating (or not calculating) your cash burn

Your burn rate is the amount of capital you go through every month to...

Tom Kuczmarski, co-founder of the Chicago Innovation Awards, tells you to ask what you want innovation to do for your organization or company.

It's depressingly, persistently difficult to  raise money while female . A recent study found that only 2.7 percent of the small businesses that received venture funding between 2011 and 2013 were run by women. But the rise of crowdfunding has started to open some new financing doors for  women entrepreneurs , in part because platforms like Kickstarter tend to attract women as investors too. Alicia Robb, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, explains why that can help — on multiple fronts.

Why is crowdfunding so important for women?

Women make up 44 percent of investors on Kickstarter, according to research by Kauffman and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That's a better balance than the VC or angel investor community can lay claim to. It also demonstrates a ready audience for products made by women, a number of which are specifically targeted at women. For example, Willa founder Christy Prunier raised $1 million on CircleUp in 2012 to fund her natural skincare...

When we started Enplug in 2012, we didn't think that businesses would pay for our software over our competitors' free solutions. Our initial business model was to make 100 percent of our revenue from advertising, which caused plenty of sleepless nights. Now, it's 5 percent advertising and 95 percent software subscriptions.

Our product is a plug-and-play mini device that turns digital displays into a marketing tool for high foot-traffic venues, with an App Market that lets businesses show live social media streams, news feeds and more on their displays. And six months since product launch, we now receive about 60,000 new posts each day across our network.

But it was a trip to get here. If you find yourself in a similar place when beginning your company, here are a few things to try.

Take a guess at what customers want

From your market research and your customer surveys, what recurring themes did you see? You can dwell for months on what that solution might be, but the quickest path to...

Some of Nick Horween’s earliest memories of his family’s leather tannery are of taking the train from Barrington, the northern Chicago suburb where he grew up, into the city to visit his father and grandfather at work. The smell of leather would hit him the instant he walked through the front door at Horween Leather Co. When his father returned home, Nick would hug him and breathe in the same scent, which lingered on his father’s jacket.

The smell of leather has followed five generations of Horweens. Nick’s father, Arnold “Skip” Horween III, runs the tannery that Nick’s great-great-grandfather, a Ukrainian immigrant named Isidore Horween, founded in 1905. At that time, Chicago’s railways, water sources and world-famous stockyards provided an ideal location for leather makers and other businesses, like shoe polish and brush manufacturers, that used the meatpacking industry’s byproducts as their raw materials. Today, as the only tannery left in Chicago, Horween’s origins in this...