entrepreneurship(48/0)
The church must learn new forms
The American Church is not growing. The new people in the pews are almost exclusively either transplants from another church or people returning after a period of separation. When churches close their doors in your neighborhood, it’s too late. Closures are the inevitable result of our failure to add any unchurched people to our community for many years, not just the past one or two. As with business, danger signals are outside customer base.…
Relativity inspirational talk
(This was a paper written as an example of a speech meant to inspire action) I propose we make available our core product, Relativity, as a resource to obtain justice, not only to those who can afford our software, but to those who will never afford it. Before we look at my proposal, let’s spend a couple minutes reviewing current pro bono work and its relation to electronic discovery so we can grasp the weight of this opportunity.…
All communication benefits from eloquence
Although the title suggests sales pitches are the only target, McGowan’s book “Pitch Perfect” applies to a wide range of communication types. Presentations and interviews are listed, but so are speeches, business meetings, one-on-one conversations, and Q&A sessions. His seven principles of eloquence shape both impromptu speeches and carefully executed announcements (Mcgowan). Due to the universal need for eloquence, each principle may be honed any number of ways. From tomorrow’s morning stand-up to an answer to your wife’s “How was your day?…
Customer knowledge affects sales strategy
One of the chief suspicions aroused in a customer when he’s sold to is, “What do they know that I don’t?” If the item is a bargain, it must have a defect. If it’s more costly, the seller’s trying to rip him off. With greater complexity and a higher cost comes higher suspicion. A car sale is more suspicious than a rummage sale. Companies have adopted ways to encourage customers to take the risk by offering money-back guarantees, warranties, and test drives, and.…
Not every sales prospect deserves equal time
Not every prospect deserves equal time. Not every prospective customer deserves equal time. Some, despite their apparent interest and enthusiasm are destined to be thorns in your side for hours before finally leaving you empty-handed. Sambucci calls two common types “Vampires” and “Gatekeepers” (Sambucci, pg. 68). Vampires are intent to draw value (blood) from your time and business (veins). Generally they have a low view of your time and a high view of their own, they don’t have the authority to authorize payment for your services, and the truly Draculean know what internal buttons to press in order to cajole or demand further free service.…
Pitch script example
Pitch Script Senior citizens in Arkansas must move to Colorado, before it’s too late. Arkansas' senior citizens want to grow old in their homes, to remain an active part of society and stay interconnected with their community. None desire to languish in a nursing home. Yet only one in nine state tax dollars are invested in home and community support. The remaining eight sustain nursing homes, where every fifth resident could have stayed at home with some assistance.…
Prepare pitches or pay the price
If you don’t prepare what you mean to say, you’ll say what you don’t mean. No actor steps onto the stage without memorizing his lines. Entrepreneurs fare no better than an ad-lib actor when they fail to prepare for critical communications. As Bill McGowan says, “Spontaneity is another word for regret (Mcgowan, pg. 174).” Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech at the 2013 Golden Globe awards began well. She’d prepared her presentation, rehearsed it, and executed it before thousands.…
Sales calls trump email
Direct phone calls trump responsive email. Every sales representative gets buried under floods of email. The effort to decipher what customer’s mean, what they need, what their angle is, etc. can easily take one’s entire day. What appears a simple request can lead into a rabbit trail of well-meaning but unanswered questions, misunderstandings, and rising discontent. To mitigate this, Sambucci’s constant rule is to “PICK UP THE PHONE (Sambucci, pg. 17).…
Neither charisma nor experience replaces practice
Neither skill nor experience can ever replace practice. Barack Obama’s personality is warm and engaging. But when faced with his first debate of the 2012 presidential campaign, he trusted his personality, not deliberate practice, to win the night. The week prior to the debate, Obama’s chief advisor expressed concern that the presidential candidate wasn’t putting his best effort into preparation. Instead of careful hours of practice and review to hone his message and anticipate his opponent’s moves, Obama decided to go sightseeing and gave a lackadaisical effort in rehearsal.…
Attunement, buoyancy, and clarity are crucial sales skills
Those who sell must be emotionally aware, able to rebound, and clear in their goals, presentation, and next steps. If you’re in sales–Pink would argue almost everyone–you’ll need to develop three skills: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity (Pink, pg. 66). Attunement simply means awareness. A salesman must be ‘in tune’ with those he sells to; to see the world from the customer’s perspective. The better a salesman is able to understand the customer in front of him, the better he can find their problems and, if he has a solution, offer them what they didn’t know they were looking for.…
Foster innovation
During the Industrial Revolution, business execution was the defining quality of successful large businesses. Frederick Taylor’s scientific methods summarize the time’s emphasis on efficiency and output as the key ingredients for a growing business to maintain its competitive edge. When efficient mass-production had become commonplace, a resurgence of efficiency with an emphasis on quality control was sparked in Japan under the influence of W. Edwards Deming. In our current Information Age, while execution and quality remain non-negotiables, the defining characteristic of successful large businesses is innovation.…
Value proposition alternative
Value Proposition Alternatives The Construction Site makes technical business interactions between U.S. and Omani companies successful by framing the business representative’s visit with on-site cultural mentorship and preventative health measures. The local community is reinforced with short-term trauma assistance and employment opportunities for part-time local business owners. Ad-Lib #1: Our preventative health packages helps U.S.-based business representatives who’ve traveled to Oman for stays longer than two weeks who want to remain mentally, spiritually, and emotionally healthy by smoothing the effects of culture shock and clarifying communication between them and their sending company.…
Companies with bold views stand out
A company with no stance doesn’t stand out. There’s a fear in marketing that if the brand messaging doesn’t allow for everyone’s opinion, the customer portion who disagree will be alienated by the company’s stance. There’s some truth to this; any company whose brand stance maintains that white people are superior to black people will lose customers in Chicago. However, many of the ways a company’s values stand out would generate dialogue, not distress (Miller).…
Minimum viable product example
Business Description A business book written by budding entrepreneurs with insight into the integration of open Christian faith and daily business. Published for Kindle first and, if the buyers back it up, printed in bulk. Step 1: Determine Your Target Customer A young (20-40’s) entrepreneur or business leader with a spiritual desire to effect lasting and sustainable change among their peers and in their community through a holistic spiritual lifestyle. He’s read a number of business and leadership books already but hasn’t found a book which deals honestly in the area he considers most important - spiritual openness.…
Most customers are not ready to buy today
A fraction of the total market is ready to purchase, but the rest may be primed. No matter how desirable a company’s product is, only a tiny percentage of the market will take notice of it at any given time. About three percent in fact. Only another seven percent are even looking for a solution, of which your company may be but one in many available options. Though you blast the remaining 90% with marketing ads, sales pitches, and free samples, they are simply not in the market.…
New presentation new insight
The way common data is presented changes the way it’s understood and applied. Tim Brown introduces his book with two ways to approach the information within. For the traditional, he maintains a regular table of contents, a sequential order of the chapters that provides a broad overview of its linear structure. For readers who desire to see the connections between his ideas, he also provides a mind map (Brown, loc 171).…
Sticky branding plan
##Principle 1: Simple Clarity The Construction Site makes technical business interactions between U.S. and Omani companies successful by framing the traveler’s visit with culturally sound supports. Cultural roadblocks are identified and detoured with short and powerful consultations from local business people. Readable signs guide on-site negotiators from their introduction to the parting handshake. Bridges are built across the table, the ocean, and the world. ##Principle 2: Tilt The Odds The Construction Site offers a custom-built experience for U.…
Focus on one fruitful channel
To gain the initial growth necessary for sustainable business, an entrepreneur is best served by mastering a single, fruitful channel. To gain the critical number of customers to break even and to receive the customer feedback, a company needs to iterate on a single channel. This is because entering a channel is like drilling a hole into the bottom of a bucket full of beads where the number of beads in the bucket represents the number of customers who will be reached by this channel in the market.…
Fruitful channels may surprise
The most effective channel for a business to begin may not be the obvious one. Although there are at least nineteen different channels a startup can discover customers through, a few often get priority because of the number of potential viewers or the ease of use. Online methods, in particular, are easy to get started (at least for the tech generations) and have billions of potential viewers. Even so, exploring all of the channel opportunities may reveal others that would yield more customers at this stage in your businesses growth.…
Innovate by model combination
The number of business models are limitless, and can be implemented as brand new offerings, existing offerings with limited innovations, or combinations of both. There is no end to the combinations of business models that could be created. One may refocus an existing model to differentiate one’s self in a new market like Nintendo accomplished with it’s low-cost, widely accessible Wii console (Osterwalder, pg. 83). Another may the ‘unbundle’ three common models in the same company to clarify each bundles' value proposition (Osterwalder, pg.…
Models make complex ideas sharable
Business models encapsulate complex ideas into simple and sharable patterns. In software design there is a concept called design patterns. Design patterns are commonly defined as “a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context” (Wikipedia). Software developers who apply these patterns in their appropriate circumstances benefit from proven solutions to problems others have experienced in the software space. This also gives developers a common vocabulary to explore designs for large systems without the precise details of implementation.…
Model validation can be part time
Validating a business model can be part-time work. It doesn’t take seventy hours a week to validate a business model. In Maurya’s example from the writing of his book Running Lean, he tests and confirms the book could produce value in the spare time he had while running another business. It took him seventeen months of scaled effort to validate and create the book his blog readers were asking for. In the process he tested several assumptions that, if proven false, would have saved him countless hours of work writing a book no one would read.…
Startups produce models over solutions
The product of a startup is a business model, not a solution. It is common to think in terms of problem and solution when dreaming up a startup idea. If one can find a problem and solve it, one reasons, then one has a viable business. This over-simplification hides crucial assumptions that must be answered in order to build a viable business. The business modeling tool Maurya illustrates includes only one small box for the solution (Maurya, pg.…
Greed undermines a business
💬 You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. The LORD ends his Decalogue with a command against envious desire of another person’s possessions, material or immaterial. In my own words it would read: Do not enviously desire the name and legacy of another.…
Vanity metrics obscure true performance
‘Vanity metrics’ are any statistic that makes the business sound successful but do not inform stakeholders about actual performance or give insight into areas of growth (Ries, pg 143). Sold 3,000 widgets last month alone! That’s a 112% increase over last month! Over 4 million users! Up 1 million since 2010! In six countries on two continents! Our global presence is expanding! Excessive exclamation aside, these are examples of metrics which may be effective for the marketing team but give little insight into business operations.…
Business discovery is uncomfortable
It’s more comfortable to scale to big business than stay in the customer discovery cycle until there’s a repeatable, scalable business model. The majority of the world’s business people know how to operate an established business. Everyone can give a summary of departmental structure (Marketing, Sales, Product Development). The language is the same, the tasks are similar. Now take a startup. Depending on the market it’s attempting to reach, the structure of the company may be entirely different.…
Every venture needs a strong leader
Though any venture requires sets of skills not usually found in one person, if one person does not have leadership ability there will be no team. There are many business functions necessary to a successful business startup. There’s the development of ideas, the testing of those ideas, the execution, the refinement. It’s rare for one person to possess the skills necessary to do all functions well. Therefore a team of people with diverse strengths can increase the likelihood a venture will manage itself well.…
Lean startups fit uncertain markets
Build - Measure - Learn is a model and mindset valuable for businesses in uncertain circumstances. The core process in Ries' lean startup is Build-Measure-Learn. This cycle is reversed when planning: first one determines the hypothesis (what to learn), then selects the metrics that will validate that hypothesis (what to measure), and finally creates the minimum viable product (MVP) to complete the experiment. The speed at which a company is able to iterate over these steps correlates to the speed they’re able to innovate.…
Lean startups live by the agile manifesto
Lean startups may take the Agile Manifesto principles for their own. The Agile Manifesto principles ((Tycho Press, pg. 93-97)) are as follows: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan With a slight modification to the second bullet to match industries other than software, these principles match the needs of a lean startup.…
Apostles and entrepreneurs share characteristics
The description of an entrepreneur shares many of the characteristics of the apostolic gift (Eph 4:11). Blank describes entrepreneurs as “comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap” (Blank, pg. 13). Sinclair describes apostles as “[used] in a variety of ministries… the kind who tend to make things happen. Oftentimes they are good at making something out of nothing, ministry-wise, successfully starting new works from scratch…they thrive on doing things that are challenging and risky” (Sinclair, pg.…
Leadership growth requires vulnerability
A leader must withhold no area from growth, no matter how they wished it didn’t exist or wouldn’t be exposed, if they are to raise the ‘lid’ of their leadership. A leader who reads Maxwell’s admission that he is below average in some leadership laws with any degree of humility must conclude there’s work to be done to become a better leader. To ‘raise the lid’ as Maxwell puts it (Laws).…
Societal views on business are cyclical
Prior to the 1970s, the American spot-light was on the successful, stable company and the loyal managers who supervised them. To work as a manager at Sears or General Motors was the dream job. You were the grease which made the machine go, and without which the engine would grind to a halt. There was meaning, stability, and certainty you’d retire well off as a long-standing employee of one of these stable firms (Micklethwait).…
Teams excel the best entrepreneur
Teamwork is more efficient than gaining all the skills an entrepreneur needs. Today is my company’s yearly user conference, where over 1,800 people from every law background come to hear the future direction of our software, interact with your team, and party till 3:00 a.m. I attended an event where the outside developers that build software on top of ours were given a roadmap of how kCura would work with them to build even better software moving forward.…
Danger signals are outside customer base
When a corporation starts, its members rush to find customers, to meet their needs, to iterate, to create, to re-invent. As the business grows, they search for more customers with the problem their product/service solves. As their customer base expands, they tailor their solution to their customers needs. If their customers' needs change, they modify their product to match. One might think this cycle would continue forever. The slow, business-killing changes happen, not among one’s own customer base, but with those who are not even customers - the ‘noncustomer’ (Drucker, referenced by Krames, pg.…
Compelling vision unites employees
There’s an image that’s regularly referenced at my work. It is a large, hollow arrow with many smaller arrows inside. The arrows all point in different directions. Some are large, some thin; others are filled in; other colors, etc. This represents a business where the direction is unclear, and everyone pursues the direction they think is important. The large arrow isn’t likely to move far with all those internal directions pressing in disparate directions.…
Vision leads to profit
Owners that pursue vision beyond profit may find themselves profitable anyways. There’s a quote on our refrigerator about happiness. “Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you seek it, the more it flies away. But if you are still, if you seek something else, happiness may just rest upon your shoulder.” There’s a principle there that applies to business. The “Profit Paradox” (Williams, pg. 109) is an example. When companies pursue goals beyond profitablility, they often outperform other companies that placed all their vision in making money for their shareholders.…
Convergence is a startup opportunity
Convergence is the first opportunity a cross-cultural entrepreneur is likely to spot. Ramen Noodles-who hasn’t enjoyed them? Jokingly referred to as the student’s staple diet, they are a fantastic example of entrepreneurial convergence. Invented in 1958 in Japan, the noodle aquired it’s name from the Chinese, Within a decade it had expanded to many of its neighboring countries, to include: China, Korea, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. There’s some diversity represented there, don’t you agree?…
Owners must listen to help the poor
Several approaches have been taken to alleviate poverty. Medical backgrounds say if there was affordable healthcare the poor would be healthy enough to improve their standard of living. Psychology backgrounds say if there was access to mental health treatment the poor would overcome their debilitating fears, anxieties and depressions that hinder them from advancing beyond sustenance. Yet Polak and Warwick have a good point; are we assuming we know what the poor need, or are we actually asking them?…
Profitable business serves the poor
In 2012 the World Bank estimated There are approximately 2.7 billion people below the poverty line (World Bank, referenced by Polak, pg. 36). This number is not equitably distributed across the earth, but is concentrated in certain areas of the earth: Africa, the Caucasus, and India. Neither is poverty a one-time problem that, once solved, need never come back. War, disease and natural disasters can all impact poverty across entire regions.…
Non profits can easily explore new markets
Non-profit organizations may be an underestimated entrepreneurial incubator. Building off my first entrepreneurial insight, the first two of Elkington and Hartigan’s models serves another niche in society - the creation of new markets. New markets are described as ‘emerging,’ which generates the image of an animal hiding in a dark hole. One may guess the size or type of the creature from the characteristics of the hole and surroundings, but certainty only comes after it has ‘emerged.…
Non profits have unique markets
There are some markets only non-profits can reach. In my quest to discover ways to build a for-profit business with a quadruple bottom line, it can be easy to disdain the influence of non-profit organizations. Why would anyone run a non-profit organization when they might accomplish as much with a for-profit company, and retain more flexible control? To me, a non-profit organization is like a for-profit except that it has more financial restrictions and only a two or three point bottom line, i.…
Perceived motivation affects social programs
Due to the concentration of capital, experience and expertise in the corporation, it is uniquely suited to effect positive change among the people it serves. And so a broad-hearted owner may choose to funnel some of his company’s wealth into the common good. The British-owned Cadbury enriched the town where its factory was built with the construction of parks and the allotment of a garden to every employee (Micklethwait, loc 1407).…
Globalization demands leadership integrity
The complexity of global economics emphasizes the need for business leaders of character. The world of business is rapidly becoming too complex to manage. The history of nation-states influence the rise and fall of economies in ways never before connected. Cabrera and Unruh mention the effect on the European Union’s (EU) currency by one of the EU’s smallest members ({cabrera-global}, loc. 279). Might global effects also be surmised from the chaos within Libya or the Syrian civil war?…
Entrepreneurship happens in existing companies too
An entrepreneur finds opportunity and captures what value he can, even if he’s working for an employer. The entrepreneur must take advantage of his present situation, looking for opportunities and capturing value as he can in the circumstances he finds himself. If he waits for the perfect opportunity, for a time when his time is entirely free for the task, he will wait forever. Stories of people who drop everything to pursue a million-to-one chance are a favorite of Americans.…
Ventures need committed partners
Any venture that will capture value must have motivated, committed partners. When an entrepreneur spots an opportunity and has a burning motivation to implement a solution, that would seem to be all he would need. This is not so, for no one can be a one-man solution. At some point, all ventures need partners. What he does with this requirement may define his company for years to come. Choose investors who have money but lack your vision, and you may find them powerful resisters to the direction you want to go.…
Corporation definition
Corporation: a collection of individuals dedicated to a common profitable goal. The profitable corporation is relatively new in human history. The first, East India Company, was notorious both as a new invention and as a powerful entity distinct from the nation state. With the combined capital and influence of a quarter million people at its peak, it had the political power of a wealthy country. Its existence started and was maintained by one goal - to profit from controlled trade between India and Europe (The New Internationalist).…
Entrepreneurial ability is more than creativity
Entrepreneurial success cannot be predicted on the basis of the entrepreneur’s creativity. Inventiveness is not a certain indication of entrepreneurial ability. Many of the well-known inventors: Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, were able to see what no one else could. They designed machines or proposed ideas ahead of their time, ideas that would later become billion dollar enterprises. Yet they would not be the ones to create value for their communities from the ideas they generated, neither would they capture any of the benefit for themselves.…
Felt needs are startup opportunities
For a venture to be entrepreneurial, it must meet a felt need within a population. Many start-up companies are congratulated for their entrepreneurial spirit, and yet the majority of them never supply a good or service that meets a felt need. Sometimes this is because they have an idea that few if any feel is necessary; other times it’s due to a failure to execute the delivery of the idea to the people who need it.…