We are definitely living in difficult economic times. According to the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from January 2009 through May 2009, we have lost a total of 3.4 million jobs; a staggering average of over 680,000 per month. Why that is like the entire population of Memphis, Tennessee losing their jobs… for 6 months straight. And appropriately we focus on the people behind the job losses. The personal stress, the family concerns, health insurance, retirements, downsizing, mortgages, college funding. All important concepts.
I am not an economic prognosticator, but I don’t believe that we have seen the end of job losses. Heck, GM, Chrysler and the Boston Globe haven’t figured out if they are going to be in business a month from now.
But one area that we really haven’t focused a lot of attention on are those people who are still working. Now what our large corporations have done is cut jobs – that is clear from the BLS statistics. My guess is that they did what they always do and cut way deep. Now, I learned the lesson from a mentor back in my corporate days, that you want to cut deep and cut once to keep morale of the remaining staff as positive as possible. You don’t want your staff to be continually wondering when the other shoe is going to drop and the next round of layoffs is announced. I am not sure that our current corporate leaders learned from the great John McCarron.
Generally speaking, the team that has remained is stressed because they don’t know if their job is next. They feel resentful because they now have to do their work plus that of workers that have left. They feel ashamed to be feeling resentful because they have a job and a paycheck and health insurance. All of this mental stress is not helping our corporations get what they need, which is to start selling, delivering, servicing, writing, producing again.
I have stated it before – someone in Big Corporate America needs to stand up and say that we won’t lay anyone off this year. In fact, we are going to start a limited hiring campaign to ensure that we can still deliver the best products to the marketplace. Now is the time for some American Executive to make his mark. Will it be someone you know?
Several months ago, I discussed the concept of the Kereitsu Experiment. To recap, I invited 15 of my entrepreneurial friends to get together to see if we could develop a group that worked in concert to increase sales of our combined businesses by 20%. The goal was to get each person to set and attend 3 meetings per quarter with other members to determine how best they could help each other.
During our first meeting, we had serious dialogue about the ways that this collaboration could help. Each of the members were enthusiastic and some interesting conversations about potential relationships were started. What we were experimenting with was the creation of a community that would be focused on growing businesses.
Fast forward to this month. The results are in and while there have been some victories, the amount of interaction between the members has not really grown into the expectations that we had agreed upon during our first meeting.
There has been one member who is doing a paid project for another member. There have been a small number of documented meetings and networking sessions. But overall the project has not accomplished what we had hoped in the first quarter.
One facet of an entrepreneur’s experience that doesn’t get talked a lot about (we always look for the positive side of things) is knowing when a certain project has failed and to end it gracefully (and quickly). It doesn’t mean that I don’t care for the members of the experiment; I always have and will continue to do whatever I can to help support their goals and aspirations. What I have realized is that the grassroots nature or design of this organization was not conducive to keeping the member’s interest. It is much harder to build and sustain a community that works than is usually imagined.
I would urge each of the members to continue to use the keiretsu network individually to gain more advantages for your business. But it doesn’t make sense for us to meet as a group to try to increase our businesses.
Entrepreneurs in our world are venerated for their risk-taking and innovation skills. It is always a great story to tell when an entrepreneur is successful. But we must be careful to ensure that we recognize and applaud the skills that got the entrepreneur to the success and understand that most entrepreneurs cannot do it on their own.
Let’s take a few examples. Steve Jobs is rightly considered an entrepreneur. When he and Steve Wozniak developed the Apple I computer, they came up with a radical new approach to delivering personal computers. Steve Wozniak developed the hardware and software and Steve Jobs sold the vision. Over time, Steve Jobs became the design guru and leads Apple in the development of unique products. But this grand picture wouldn’t have happened without a man named Mike Markkula. Mike was the initial angel investor in Apple and served as the first president. It was his leadership that gave both Steves the ability to do their best and allowed Apple to grow.
Another famous entrepreneur is Oprah Winfrey. She is famous for her TV show, movies, magazine, XM Radio channel, Oprah.com and her tremendous philanthropy work. She is the master of her domain, keeping on top of all of the vehicles that bear her name. But if it wasn’t for Jeff Jacobs, an entertainment lawyer, CEO and 10% owner of Harpo, Inc. (Oprah’s master organization) who runs the businesses, she would not be able to “be Oprah”.
Bill Gates is another entrepreneur who was fantastic at some details, but didn’t have a particularly strong business background. Bill was able to understand the state of technology and envision a world where every desk would have a computer running Microsoft products on them. True innovation, absolutely. But it required Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s first business manager to bring the company to the heights to which it ultimately reached.
Too many entrepreneurs have watched Oprah Winfrey (or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates) and thought that they needed to do everything themselves. Some people chicken out because they know they don’t have all the skills and discount the ones they do have. Others continue through this phase expecting somehow to become Superman (or Superwoman) and manage all aspects of running a business by themselves. Neither of these solutions is optimum.
Entrepreneurs need to be open to get a helping hand in developing their business. Sometimes they can get free advice to help them along. But more often, they need to understand that they will need to pay to get the highest level of support. Sometimes it is cash and other times equity. In all cases, it is better to have 50% of a million dollar idea than 100% of a failure.
The real test of the entrepreneur is how much they are willing to sacrifice to see their idea become a success. Find those folks who have skills where you are lacking. Sell them on your vision and get them to help you deliver. You will be the richer for it.
As you know, I love baseball. Baseball is a sport that is managed by the numbers. The cool thing is that the numbers are available to everyone. For example, if you tried, you could find out that in a game on April 30, 1977, Carlton Fisk of the Boston Red Sox batted 3 for 4 with a double and a stolen base (he stole home!), scored 3 runs and the Red Sox (Luis Tiant) beat the Oakland A’s (Mike Norris) 8-4 in an afternoon game on a 72 degree day.
Some baseball players, like Alfonso Soriano go for the fences every time they go to the plate. Sometimes they are successful, other times, not so much, but overall they are recognized for the ability to go long ball. Not the first guy you would pick to move a guy from first to second in a close game. Good to have on the team for power, an expert in a certain discipline.
Other players, like Barry Bonds or Manny Ramirez go outside the rules of the game to get the extra oomph to make their careers. Their numbers are great, but they will always have that thorny asterisk besides their name signifying that their accomplishments might not be on a level playing field. Think of the bankers who changed the rules of the game to make more money.
Then there are the less remembered players, like the shortstop for the Red Sox in that game, Rick Burleson. Rick played 13 years in the majors, hit .273, fielded .972, got into a couple of All Star games, was honored with a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger award. The unusual fact about Rick was that he once hit an inside the park home run. He was methodical and steady. Not a Hall of Fame candidate, but a good solid player that you would want on your team.
We know these facts because they are measured. The great advantage is that everyone has access to the numbers. When the managers of the teams build a plan for a game, they use these statistics to choose strategies to win. Does it always work? No, of course not. That is the fun of the game. But it can tip the balance in your favor.
What if your whole business life, every decision, every program, every customer interaction was available to everyone for viewing? How would that change the way that you operate?
The entrepreneurial world is always talking about innovation. If you just offer the same thing or a minor tweak on the same thing as others are providing, you are taking the biggest risk of all. It is very hard to break into a field with a me-too product in an area that others have already staked out.
What is most interesting is to see this play out with the big boys.
In the technological world, we have had three major announcements in the last week or so. The first was Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram took the idea of search and really turned it on its head. It is not a Google killer, as was first surmised, but an entirely new paradigm. While Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, Wolfram wants to take formatted, vetted data and make it available in useful formats. Wolfram Alpha takes on hard questions like “What was the top wind speed for Hurricane Dolores in 1966? “, “What is the life expectancy for a female living in Ghana compared with the US?” and even “Where do babies come from?“. It provides answers in easy to understand tables, maps and graphs. It even tells you where it got the answers to your questions, so that you can make a determination if the source is solid.
The second announcement was Google Wave. (Disclaimer: Google Wave has not been delivered yet. What we have seen has been demoware. But it presented to a group of 4000 developers, so chances of it getting to live status is pretty good.) Here Google asked the question “If we were designing communications like e-mail today, what would it look like?” Total innovation. Here they did not use the same metaphors that people have been using like inboxes, subject lines and chain letters. Remember that email was developed over 40 years ago. Instant messaging is no better. It was designed to automate telephone conversations – one to one, wait for one person to stop talking before responding. Don’t get me wrong. Email and IM are both great tools, but they are based on old thinking. Google took a new look at how we communicate and developed a program that leverages the technology of today to provide a totally new experience that has the potential to dramatically change how we work (and play). The entrepreneurial play here is that Wave was developed in the Sydney office with a team that maxed out at 50 engineers. In addition, the product will be offered as open source, which means that anyone can take it, enhance it, install it on their systems, interoperate with others and benefit from the open source community.
The third announcement was from Microsoft, announcing Bing. Bing is the latest incarnation of Live Search. They are trying to solve a problem that Google has already solved. But, they have a cute new name (Bing!, your search is done) and will use a reported $100 Million advertising campaign to try to woo users to use it instead of Google. Hello! Microsoft has 8% of the search market, even with the dominant browser and Google has 62%. How much market share can Microsoft really steal with a me-too product?
Kudos to Wolfram and Google for developing innovative products that change the way that we can use the internet. Brickbats to Microsoft for spending $100M (on advertising alone, not to mention development costs) on a problem that has mostly been solved. My guess is that $100M would pay for the engineering teams of both Wolfram Alpha and Google Wave for a couple of years, which would likely create new, useful products.
Normally, this blog wouldn’t be the first place to go for sales advice. But, Jeff Leitner wrote this a while back and I have been thinking about it recently as I work with one of my consulting companies. It is a classic.
Step 1 in sales, determine the prospect’s stomach for change.
No matter what he says, there’s a significant cost to changing.
Even if what he’s changing is no product/service.
Figure out what the financial cost, the psychic cost, the emotional cost of change.
And only then do you turn your attention to step 2.
Step 2 is to change the game.
If you’re competing against an existing product/service, there’s little chance he’s changing vendors.
Instead, you have to craft and then sell something very different than the incumbent sells.
You can’t sell better or more or enhanced or even cheaper (commodities aside).
You have to sell something substantively different, that solves a qualitatively different problem than the incumbent is solving.
Men don’t leave their wives for prettier girls.
Men leave their wives for substantively different, qualitatively different things that they can’t get from their wives.
Prospects are the same.
If you can’t put together a substantively different offer, you can’t win.
Even if you’re competing against no product/service.
Or an ugly wife.
Jeff Leitner writes about the questions that you should be asking when you start your business. They include: What is the pain that you are trying to relieve? and What one thing are you trying to sell?. Both of these are great questions, but I would like to add another to your list. It is, at once more basic and for some of us, it is a no brainer. But be careful, the answers might surprise you.
The question is Who is your customer? Yes, who are you trying to make your products or services for. The reason it is important is that if you truly know who your customer is, you can design the company’s products and processes to support that customer to the best extent. Let’s take a look at some examples to see where this could go.
Pharmaceutical companies – The customer is the patient who needs the medication, right? Well, if that is the case then why do they sell to the doctors, who do not buy the product, but authorize (through prescriptions) others to purchase the drugs. I’d have to say that the doctors are the customers. They pharmaceutical companies do everything they can to influence the doctors and dabble in consumer education, hoping that the patient will be able to demand a certain drug from the doctor. But the doctor is still the customer, because the buying power remains with them.
Physicians – While we are on the topic of medicine, who are your typical physician’s customers? It seems you have two choices, either the patient or the insurance companies. Based upon the way that most doctor’s offices are run, it is obvious that the insurance companies are their main customer. Everything that the physicians do is designed to make sure that the insurance company gets what it needs. The patient is the one who allows the doctor to get paid, but the gatekeeper is the insurance company. Concierge care (I love that description) has started to catch on in wealthy areas. Basically, the doctor does not take insurance and charges an annual membership fee to his or her patient base. Does this exclude people who must use insurance to cover their health needs? Yes, of course. But it allows the doctor to change the customer relationship from the insurance carriers to the patient.
Google – Who is Google’s customer? Good question. Google sold over $22 Billion worth of services in the last 12 months. Most of that came from advertising. So, of course, Google’s customer would be the advertisers who pay for the services. Not so fast. I would venture that the users, not the advertisers are Google’s customers. Most of the new things that Google rolls out are enhancements to the user experience and they are focused on making the world’s information available to everyone. If they added an additional advertising service, they might increase revenues a little, but if they stopped providing excellent search (and other) services, the advertising would dry up very quickly.
This is all critical as you are building your business. If you design your business around the wrong customer, you will never see the full benefits that you could be getting. Think through this question (and Jeff’s above) as you start to build your business plan. There are significant benefits for not taking the easy road and just picking the customer that everyone expects. You may be able to garner a much more substantial or lucrative (see physicians above) customer base from a group of folks who are not supported by other organizations.
I would love to hear about more cases where you believe that the customer is not exactly the end user. Contribute in the comments.
Go Big or Go Home. In entrepreneurial circles you hear that statement a lot. It means that in order to get noticed you need to be extravagant. Don’t lie, cheat or steal, but find a way to make the most of your assets. It may mean that you have to increase your assets in order to be able to sell them in a big way.
Recently, I have had the opportunity to see this in action in a couple of venues. I wrote last week about the DePaul e-Motion event. One of the new ideas that the Coleman Center staff cooked up this year was an opportunity for some of the fledgling companies that they mentor to have a table to showcase their company to the guests. These guests, presumably had an interest in supporting entrepreneurial ventures and had an opportunity to vote using play money on the best presentations. There were about 15 companies in the exhibition area. Each had an earnest young pitch person behind the table ready to talk about their venture.
It was obvious which teams came prepared to Go Big. One had her entire table covered with pictures of the events that she produced, in full color. She was dressed in business attire and handled questions from the audience like a pro. Another had various samples of her products on the tables for people to touch and examine. She was able to easily describe her company and the benefits she was able to bring to both her customers as well as her vendors. A third had a sample of his product on his table and could clearly talk about his customer, their drivers and how his service differed from the competition. These folks came prepared to do business and make a splash to an audience that was already predisposed to hear the message. The best presenters received significantly more play “venture capital” than the less prepared companies.
Others looked like they had not planned for this event or worse, had spent the previous night pulling an all-nighter to get the minimum amount done. Most did not have materials to hand out or samples or even table decorations. This is basic blocking and tackling. Entrepreneurs need to be able to understand how to display impressively at these types of events in order to be successful.
It is not only the entrepreneurs who need this lesson. This week I was able to go to the National Restaurant Association Show. I like going to this show. It is not just the samples (although there sure were a lot of them). It is an opportunity to see what is important to companies in the restaurant industry — both to the companies who display at these types of trade shows and the restaurant owners who attend.
A couple of lessons from this show.
There were several times that we took samples from food vendors and the food was awful. Not just ok, but truly awful, face crunching awful. It might have been due to sitting out for a while or lack of proper attention from cooking in a non-traditional setting. It actually doesn’t matter. OK food at this show was table stakes — the price of being at the show. You at least had to have ok food. The best purveyors had taken the time to show off their best and they were able to get customers to pay attention. They went big. The others just showed up and spent a ton of money just to say that they were there. The result was marketing dollars poorly spent.
The big guys are not immune, either. You can’t get bigger than Coke and Pepsi. It was amazing to see the difference in their booths. Coke’s booth was huge, colorful, full of product and showing off new dispensing systems and flavors. People were carrying around large shopping bags with Coke on them. Pepsi’s booth was about the same size. There were few people around. They had a small dispenser station for the carbonated beverages. Their iced tea was on a small uncovered table in two stainless steel dispensers. A very different vision for the visitor.
Pepsi probably spent 80% of what Coke spent. They both had to have staff there, both had to have product shipped in, both had to deal with the unions in Chicago, both had to rent space. The difference in the spending of the additional 20% was huge. Given the sizes of Coke and Pepsi, the 20% is a rounding error, even in these difficult financial times.
Moral: If you are not going to go in with your A game, it probably is better not even to show up. There are 3 potential outcomes. First, you don’t show up. Nobody knows about you, but then nobody has made a value judgment about you. Second, you go all out and bring your best. Everybody knows about you and hopefully talks about you. Third, you limp in. People know about you and don’t like what they know. You spend the money and people come away not liking what they now know. There is even a good case to be made that if you aren’t going to Go Big, then don’t go at all. At least people don’t know anything about you and may be willing to take a chance on you and your product or service.
The name of the game is customer retention. Growing a business is much harder if you are constantly having to replace customers you’ve lost. Which would you prefer, after all — making fifty sales in a year and having a 100 percent customer retention rate, or making 100 sales a year and having a 50 percent retention rate? I’ll take the former any day of the week. Yes, you’ll have more sales during the year and you’ll wind up with the same number of customers at the end, but, if you lose one account for every two you land, you’ll spend twice as much time, energy and money to get them as you would if you made half as many sales but were able to hold on to all the customers you signed up.
Real Life Example
It is always amazing to me that companies will offer huge discounts to people to get them to change to their service. I’m talking to you, cell phone companies and cable companies. In most cases, they are just cannibalizing their base by offering these discounts. Why? Most of the consumers who change, do so from a competing product. They are not just new to the marketplace. By offering these discounts to new users only, they encourage the churn in customer base. I know that when my introductory rate with Company X expires, I will look to change my service, since my rates will go up and Competitor Y will offer me a better deal. It is a short term fix that does nothing to encourage customer loyalty. Shouldn’t Company X look for ways to keep me on their books, since they “spent” a significant amount of money to acquire me as a customer? Yes, but since I joined up on the basis of a deal, others will too. Over the long haul, you will certainly not engender the type of customer relationship that you really want because your customers do not view you as a trusted partner. And in our connected world, being able to be trusted is one thing that will take your company to the next level.
Way back in the good old days (circa 1984), when I was just a young whippersnapper, my wife and I started our business. Well, actually to be correct, she started it and I joined in after about a year. We were a small (4 person) company focused on developing solutions for IBM minicomputers. We had an expertise in an ERP product on that platform and we were looking to grow. An opportunity came along from IBM to join a Marketing Assistance (or Partner) Program. We joined up and dutifully went to the first few meetings. We had the requisite skill set on their hardware and operating systems. The IBM partner coordinators asked us, what is your specialty? How can we determine who to send to you? Being the smart marketers that some of you know us to be (NOT!), we said “We can work with any customer. We know the programming language and the operating system.” Of course, for the next 6 months, the only sound not coming from our office was the ringing of the phone from our partners at IBM. There was, however, wailing and crying and asking “What is wrong with us?”, mostly from me.
We went back to our IBM partner advocates and told them about our prowess with Distribution Systems, including a product that they sold. We talked about our technological expertise and then about some success stories helping customers solve distribution issues. From that point on, we finally got some leads from IBM. Over the course of the next 13 years, I would venture that this distinction allowed us to book over $3M of revenue.
We had a common problem. Our problem was not that we weren’t good at what we did. We were and we had revenue paying clients to prove it. Our problem was that we had to get over the fact that we couldn’t be all things to all people. We needed to put a line in the sand and proclaim to all that solving distribution software problems for companies were what we were best at. Once people (clients, partners, recommenders) have a hook, they can then help you get to the next step.
Most young companies don’t want to skinny down the possibilities, afraid of closing doors. My recommendation is not to worry about closed doors. Worry instead about making your open doors a clear priority, with an easy to understand differentiator and a clear value proposition. Oh, yeah, it helps if you are really good at that niche. But to paraphrase Seth Godin, Be Remarkable. You can’t be remarkable if you say you can do everything for everybody.
by Norm Brodsky. I keep going back to it to find different takes on small business. Here is another lesson by Norm and some ways that current companies just don’t get it.