How To Build Startup Credibility Before Your Brand

With the estimated 510 million live websites at last year-end, and 280,000 new ones being added every day, the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur is to get found, and get some credibility for a new startup. I can attest from experience that publishing a regular blog to properly showcase your brand value, even before you have it, is a most cost effective approach in time and money.

The biggest excuse most startup founders mention is too much to do building a product, mapping strategy, investors, etc. For blogging to work, you need to do it consistently and frequently, at least once a week, or the value evaporates. I know that finding time is hard, and good writing is simply not what most people do. But here are some key reasons for giving it a priority early:

1. You can validate the need and your solution before spending money. Too many entrepreneurs spend big money on development, only to find out that the solution isn’t quite right. Feedback from your blog will tell you quickly whether anyone agrees with your assessment, and whether you have a customer base waiting.

2. Find potential partners. Most of the people you would want as co-founders are now cruising the relevant blogs for ideas and partners. It’s a great way to find like-minded people, and get a dialog going. From a networking standpoint, it’s a lot more efficient than going to seminars and other industry events.

3. Populate your team. Smart potential employees are also reading blogs to stay up-to-date in their field, and find the new leaders. More and more, employees work for people they respect, rather than companies. Take the initiative to put yourself out there. Of course, ultimately you want employees who can blog for you and your company as well.

4. Cultivate early customers. It’s never too early to start a dialog with customers, as long as you don’t mislead them about where you are in the cycle. Build your brand and get leads today. There’s also the opportunity to do some consulting with interested customers to provide needed revenue while the product is still under development.

5. Build your credibility with investors. A blog is an excellent vehicle to meet investors, before you are ready to ask them for money. You will also learn about competitors, who can’t resist responding to a well-written blog. Once you gain real traction as an expert in your space through the blog, investors will put you at the top of their funding list.

6. Hone your communication skills. Writing a blog is all about communication, and that’s your number one job as founder of a new startup. Trying to write something down for someone else to understand quickly, will tell you if you really understand it yourself. Even if you use a ghost writer for your blog, the briefing process will enhance your skills.

7. Your Google ranking will go up dramatically. Whereas Google and other search engines may take two or three weeks to list your new website in search results, new blog sites and new blog entries are indexed every day. From comments, you will accumulate external links both into and out of your site, and get additional ranking from Google.

Since a startup by definition is not a recognized brand, you are the brand, based on the social media culture of today. People assume your startup is real, if they see real people, and they will attribute credibility to your startup, based on your own credentials and the quality of information you offer through your blog. No person and no blog puts your startup at the bottom of a long list.

The best part is that all this is not a revenue drain. The major blog platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad are free, and can be linked directly into an existing domain name to consolidate your overall SEO impact. In fact, many people are now using WordPress as their base website, as well as their blog. This eliminates even the standard site hosting fees.

Business blogging, or value-blogging, is all about helping others and helping yourself at the same time. I wonder how many of the high percentage of startups that fail in the first five years don’t have a blog? What’s holding you back?

Marty Zwilling

How True Entrepreneurs Make Themselves Accountable

Everyone seems to like the aspect of being an entrepreneur that goes with “being your own boss” and “able to do things my way.” But sometimes they forget that this kind of freedom comes with a price of personal accountability. Accountability means “the buck stops here,” and “all the failures are mine.”

Too many people seem to do whatever it takes to avoid accountability, both before and after the fact. I suspect that this is largely caused by a fear of the unknown, and a lack of confidence in their own abilities. People with confidence problems and fear problems should avoid the entrepreneur role, since success without accountability is rare.

I’m sure you can think of better examples, but here are some comments that we have all heard from people who are trying to avoid accountability before the fact, who are setting themselves up for failure:

• “I’d love to start a new company, but nobody will invest in me.”
• “I’ll do the best I can, but the economy is totally unpredictable right now.”
• “Investors always seem to put such unreasonable restrictions of me.”
• “I can’t seem to find employees who are committed to my business.”
• “Customer expectations these days can be unreasonable.”
• “Every time I try outsourcing manufacturing, I get quality problems.”
• “If there were just more hours in a day, I could get the job done right.”
• “Investors want five-year projections, which is ridiculous considering all the unknowns.”
• “My family expects me to always be there at a moment’s notice.”
• “My biggest challenge is make sure everyone is carrying their weight.”

If you as the entrepreneur are willing to embrace accountability, here is how these same statements should come out:

• “My idea is so big, I will bootstrap the business myself if I have to.”
• “Even in a down economy, there are some things that everyone needs.”
• “I really appreciate the real-world guidelines I get from my investors.”
• “I couldn’t do this job without the full support of my team.”
• “Exceeding customer expectations is my competitive advantage.”
• “I select vendors carefully, and manage them well, to keep my costs down.”
• “With limited time, I’ve learned to focus only on key issues, and delegate the rest.”
• “I recognize that financial projections are commitments, so I don’t take them lightly.”
• “With the support of my family, I can walk that fine line between family and business.”
• “I trust my team, and I’m convinced that the total is more than the sum of the parts.”

If you are not yet ready to commit, you should consider getting more experience in your relevant business domain, or taking on a partner who has run a small business. Don’t assume that your perspective as an employee gives you a real view of the founder’s role. Also you shouldn’t assume that your experience in a large public company is applicable to running a startup.

Some entrepreneurs feel they can control other people by “holding them accountable.” This doesn’t work in the negative, because only personal accountability counts. It can work in the positive if you work in partnership with the team to get the outcomes you both seek, making you jointly accountable.

Entrepreneurship is all about assuming a risk for a reward, and accountability is core to generating the desired results. To make it work, you must trust yourself, your partners, and your startup. You should find there is a thrill and satisfaction to making decisions and standing behind them.

The next step is employee accountability. That’s the win-win combination that almost always leads to startup success. Are you there yet?

Marty Zwilling

High Performing Virtual Teams Have 8 Key Attributes

Almost every startup is a virtual team these days, since most don’t start out with dedicated office space, and some or all members of the team work part-time or out of their own home. It’s a small world, so these team members may not even be in the same town, or the same country. Outsourcing is just another extension of the virtual team concept to people you don’t even know.

Working effectively with a virtual team of any sort has many challenges. How do entrepreneurs establish and maintain rapport with people they rarely see, and team members who have never met? How do they keep track of what everyone is doing and assure effective communication between all team members?

Experts on this subject, including Yael Zofi, in her book, “A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams,” has identified eight key characteristics of high-performing virtual teams that I have observed, and every startup founder should understand and enable:

1. Members exhibit a global mindset – they look outward, not inward. Effective virtual leaders widen their focus from the local to the global, which implicitly creates an environment of respect. Respect engenders buy-in, without which members can’t take ownership of work product and work toward a common goal.

2. Members share responsibility for achieving the mission. High performing teams have a sense of purpose where members internalize their piece of the mission, thereby transcending the isolation that defines working in a virtual environment. Team members develop an understanding about their mutual dependence to achieve objectives.

3. A culture of openness facilitates trust and authenticity. Effective founders work to create and maintain an environment of team trust to defuse miscommunications. They focus on behaviors, not on personalities, because they know this engenders trust. Then they “say what they mean and mean what they say” to model authenticity.

4. Members engage in meaningful communication with each other. High-performing virtual teams establish and maintain standards on frequency and modes of communication, and hold members accountable for acting accordingly. They also regularly use synchronous communication at critical points to speak with each other.

5. An easy flow of information exists using various forms of technology. Everyone must have access to appropriate technology to enable reliable, current exchanges of information. The amount of “pushed” information (unfiltered e-mails and phone calls) to team members is lower than “pulled” data (e-bulletin boards and intranets).

6. A conflict management mechanism. Conflicts are inevitable, and when even simple miscommunications don’t get acknowledged and fixed, trust gets eroded. The founder or leader must actively engage team members early, and follow up to ensure appropriate resolution. When this happens, lengthy energy-draining confrontations are avoided.

7. Work systems produce deliverables within defined constraints. When team members are geographically dispersed, a rigorous effort is required by all team members to coordinate and align components of critical work systems to meet deadlines within time and budgetary constraints.

8. Members have a positive “can do” attitude that spans time and distance. They must all assume their efforts will lead to success. When conflicts and tensions arise, as they inevitably do, members hold these situations within the context of the larger picture and look to quickly find solutions, rather than assign blame.

Technology has made virtual teams an everyday reality for entrepreneurs. Your challenge is to reduce the “virtual distance” between team members to zero, using personal communication, appropriate technology, and clear goals to maintain member satisfaction, collaboration, and innovation. Have you measured the virtual distance to your team members lately?

Marty Zwilling

How To Turn Friction Into Value In Your Startup

Entrepreneurship is not a job for the Lone Ranger. Every startup requires building and maintaining effective relationships with people, including partners, team members, customers, and investors. That means giving and asking for feedback, and learning from it, especially negative feedback.

“Friction” is feedback mixed with emotion or drama, making it all the more difficult to sort out the value. There should be no immediate assumption that one side is right, and the other is wrong. It may be an indication that one party isn’t giving the feedback well, or the other isn’t taking it well, or both. Both of these modes are wrong, and non-productive.

Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs I talk to confess that they put off giving feedback because they are uncomfortable. Others tell me they can’t deal with friction or negative feedback, so they don’t listen. If feedback is so important, why is it often ignored? Let’s look at what causes friction, and how to prevent it, resulting in productive feedback:

• Make your feedback “information”, not a judgment or evaluation. Words such as “good” or “bad” telegraph evaluation, on the quality of work or rightness of behavior. Label words, such as “careless” or “disloyal”, signal judgment about a person’s character. Most people don’t like judgments, so they respond with friction, rather than listening.

• Descriptions in neutral language lead to recognition. People tend to keep listening and consider changing when they recognize themselves in non-confrontational descriptions of an actual event. When they can’t relate to the data, you will have friction or tune out. Stick to what you know and what you observed.

• Secondhand feedback poisons the process. Too many entrepreneurs create friction by highlighting comments from other people. This stems from two problems. First, this he-said-she-said doesn’t include concrete examples and clarifications. Secondly, people become defensive when feedback is not first-hand.

• Pick an appropriate time and place for feedback. Getting feedback in front of your peers, or when you are rushing to meet a deadline, is embarrassing and prone to friction. If you are trying to give feedback with privacy, and the person never has time to listen, that’s a different problem.

• Feedback given at work should be only about work. Don’t mix observations about commitment and loyalty on work issues with observations about private relationship actions seen at a party or elsewhere. Again, stick to the facts you know, your personal observations, and avoid absolutes such as “always” and “never.”

• Minimize the perceived power difference to facilitate listening. Feedback to top executives is more readily received from outside experts and mentors, rather than less experienced team members. Inversely, feedback to newer employees should be given by their direct manager, or even peers, rather than a top executive.

Not all feedback should be about things that need improvement. Everyone needs positive reinforcement on items and actions done well, and it opens their mind to any feedback without friction. In fact, most psychologists agree that people advance more rapidly by positive reinforcement, rather than negative reinforcement.

We never see ourselves as other people see us. We see friction, and we react to friction, based on our standards, what we consider important, what we value, and what makes us uncomfortable. Understanding that, and understanding the triggers to friction outlined above, you as an entrepreneur need be able to deal with friction as the most important feedback of all.

Marty Zwilling

Small Business Success Doesn’t Come Without Travel

Sponsored by VISA Business

With all the new technology available today for video conferencing, interactive social media, and webinars, you may think that travel is no longer a requirement for starting a small business. You would be wrong. According to a recent industry report on travel spending, small businesses buy 37% more airline tickets than big business travelers, and spend 24% more when on the road.

Yet I still see business plans and funding plans for startups that have minimal or no allocation for travel. A baseline of $3,000 per quarter per potential traveler is the place to start, based on industry averages. Remember that small businesses don’t usually get favorable rate agreements with hotel chains and rental cars, and thus may spend more on the road than big companies.

While the Internet makes the world seem like a small place, it still costs money to travel, and there are still many valid business requirements to hit the road. Here are my top ten reasons why you should plan for significant travel expense in building your small business:

1. Your business is small but the geography is large. Small businesses today may be highly specialized, but not highly localized. Through the Internet, it costs no more to deliver your message around the world, versus your local geography. Yet if your service is consulting, for example, real travel is required to deliver the product.

2. Sharing your passion for the business live. It’s always valuable to meet new prospect clients face to face, rather than just by phone or email. Nothing beats looking them in the eye, so they can see your passion for your business. The same is true for important vendors, possible strategic partners, and potential investors.

3. Speaking gigs help establish your expertise. I’m not talking here about getting on the national speaker circuit, and collecting big fees. I’m talking about volunteering to be on industry panels for visibility, participating in startup weekends for education, and talking to groups of distributors or potential customers on technology trends.

4. Startup market research and focus groups. Market research should start in the library, but it better extend into meetings with potential customers in the various geographies and cultures that are part of your market segment. It’s amazing how much more you can learn face-to-face, compared to an analysis of aging statistics alone.

5. Trade show and conference participation. Most young businesses with a new product plan to attend as many as ten shows or conferences per year across the country or around the world. Your presence in a booth to meet customers and vendors, and availability as a sponsor, will often keep you a step ahead of your competitors.

6. Brand building requires travel time. With all the ads vying to get your customers’ attention, it’s hard to stand out. As an entrepreneur, you are the brand, so your visibility is as important as your product or service. Travel to key groups and participation in worthy causes, such as Habitats For Humanity, are an important marketing investment.

7. Business development and strategic partners. Closing a deal with large customers, such as Walmart or Home Depot, will always require travel to negotiate terms and establish your credibility. Equally important to your growth will be new strategic partner relationships with resellers or white label opportunities. Face-to-face time is key.

8. Mentoring and shared advisory board opportunities. We all need help from time to time, and some fresh inspiration. For some entrepreneurs, that comes from meetings with a respected mentor, and for others it comes from sharing what you have learned with newer startups and non-profits to help them and build your legacy.

9. Networking events with other entrepreneurs. You can learn more from peers about how to run a business than you can from books, and they are much more likely to help you if they know you in person, versus emails and text messages. Every region has its own culture (Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin), so travel is well worth the cost and time.

10. Your business team may be small but distributed. It is not uncommon today to see two founders located in two different cities, as well as key employees. Yet, travel is still a better answer than texting when it’s time to resolve a strategic issue. Even in today’s culture, executives need to meet personally with each employee a few times a year.

In addition to all these business reasons for travel, most people find it to be just plain fun (up to a point). It’s still part of the social fabric of our society, so it behooves all of us to find ways of combining business with pleasure whenever possible. You and your team will all be more productive if you recognize the requirements for travel, budget for them, and enjoy the destination.

Marty Zwilling

Disclosure: This blog entry sponsored by Visa Business and I received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa's. Visit http://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business.

The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently.

Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner's success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa's small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz and visit http://visa.com/business.

10 Ways To Kill A Growing Business With Bad Hires

Every startup with any traction quickly reaches a point where they need to hire employees to grow the business. Unfortunately, this always happens when pressures are the highest, and business processes are ill-defined. At this point you need superstars and versatile future executives, yet your in-house hiring processes and focus are at their weakest.

The result is a host of hiring mistakes that sink many young companies, or take years to fix. The solution is to never forget that hiring is a top priority task for the CEO, which should never be delegated, and which often has to supersede the urgent crises of the day.

A key success element is to start by avoiding the known list of interviewing and hiring mistakes that have been documented many times by human resources professionals. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek summary of ten big ones to jog your recollection:

1. “I’m not quite sure what we need, but this guy sounds like a miracle worker.” The message here is that if you don’t know exactly what help you need, you probably won’t get it. Do your homework on a proper job description, and make sure the applicant credentials on the resume are a fit before you proceed to interview.

2. “He’s not quite what I’m looking for, but I think he is trainable.” This is the inverse of the first problem – you know what you want, but you are trying to force fit the candidate into the position. Maybe you are desperate to fill the position, or he’s related to the boss.

3. “I’m confident this candidate can learn a lot from me.” This is the arrogant position that you know more than anyone you could hire, so all you need is a helper, not help. Helpers are expensive, since it often takes longer to jointly do a job than it would take one qualified person to do it alone.

4. “I didn’t have time to read the resume, but he has great answers.” Some people talk a good story, but can’t produce results. Resumes won’t give you the positive conclusion, but they can highlight negatives, like job gaps, bad writing, and minimal experience.

5. “He couldn’t keep up with me on results, but we have to start somewhere.” It’s always a mistake to judge a candidate by using yourself as the bar. You should assume that you are looking for someone who has skills you don’t have.

6. “This one is such a good fit that I don’t need to waste time on a second interview.” No matter how good you are, we can all miss things the first time around. Never hire someone without a second interview, and without having a second interviewer verify your assessment. Everyone you hire has to fit effectively with many others on the team.

7. “After my sales pitch, he was so excited I knew he could do the job.” Some hiring managers spend the interview selling the company under some mistaken impression that the level of candidate excitement they can generate is indicative of future performance.

8. “He’s not perfect, but our only alternative is to let the work stack up even more.” This is pure desperation, guaranteed to have bad results. If you hire someone who can’t do the job, the work backs up more, and your work doubles to get them replaced.

9. “His experience is light, but he seems like a good guy.” Avoid evaluating just personality in lieu of job skills. All the statistical research shows that there is very little correlation between a good personality and any specific job. Look for job knowledge first.

10. “Based on the glowing terms I heard from my friend, I’ll just skip the reference check.” There are lots of factors that can’t be assessed in an interview, or by listening only to an advocate. In this litigious society, reference checks are more productive if you also listen to what is not said.

Another element is admitting that there are things you don’t know, and identifying what they are. Too many executives let their ego stand in the way, either in admitting that there might be things they don’t do well, or in identifying and communicating specific job requirements.

Take a lesson from an old Business Week article by entrepreneur Andy Dunn, aptly named “To Recruit the Best, Admit Weaknesses” where he admitted to the best applicants “I am not good at what you do, I need your help.” In my view, if every CEO and hiring manager followed this advice, as well as good hiring practices, their business would scale a lot faster with a lot less headaches.

Marty Zwilling