Business 2015 - Optimism, But Upgrade Your Strategy

Even though it has been a long haul since the recession, it’s nice to see more optimism as we close out this year and head into a new one. A November 2014 report by Kiplinger asserts that economic momentum is back on track. Growth is projected to continue at a 3 percent rate, consumer confidence is gaining strongly, hiring is on the rise, and job openings are at a near record level.

According to earlier studies from Forbes Insights, many entrepreneurs and small businesses not only feel the lessons learned during the past few years have helped them survive, but the recession also exposed flaws in their business strategies that they were able to fix. Here are some recommended strategic planning initiatives, culled from multiple studies, that you can apply to your business in the New Year:

• Better Cash-Flow Controls: Obviously, falling income over the past years put additional pressure on small business cash flow. Some companies turned to cutbacks over boosting financial reserves; others focused on reducing overhead and expenses. But you need a balanced strategy, along with new lines of credit and financing.

• More Focus on Strategic Planning: Small business owners now recognize the importance of planning amid the new economic environment and want to spend more time doing it. Less than half indicated they had a strategy in place during the recession, or to guide growth during the coming recovery period. This should be core for you.

• Fight for More Government and Policy Support: Small businesses now believe they have played a key role in the U.S. economic recovery, but in spite of, rather than assisted by, support from the federal government. You can join the fight for action, particularly for even higher Small Business Administration (SBA) loan limits.

• Continue to Increase Operating Efficiencies: A majority of small business leaders intend to be more aggressive going forward by implementing a range of actions to advance their businesses. Many cited a greater focus on cost cutting and efficiency as the number two step to achieving growth, with increasing sales still number one. See where you can maximize this type of profit.

• Add New Revenue Streams and More Aggressive Marketing: At the same time, most small businesses plan to spend more on digital marketing in the year ahead, and pursuing new revenue streams is seen as a top priority for transforming bottom line profits. This approach will help you diversify and broaden your business’s product lines and services.

• Grab Market Share from Competitors: A large majority of respondents to these studies acknowledged that the old way of doing business no longer works and that they need to find new ways to take advantage of market opportunities. Many are planning to be more aggressive in grabbing market share from competitors, and you should, too.

If small businesses tackle these initiatives, we will be supporting economists’ forecast and moving the U.S. economy toward a self-sustaining and continuing economic expansion. A healthy manufacturing sector, likely to gain even more strength in 2015, is creating an impetus to invest. Recent drops in gas prices are now extending to diesel and even home heating oil.

The National Federation of Independent Business’s Small Business Optimism Index is now up to 96.1, and is working its way back to pre-recession levels. This was led by a modest increase in the net percent of owners who plan to increase capital spending and more who expect higher sales in the next few months. But overall, small business owners are still looking for more clear direction to drive their optimism.

My take on all this is that entrepreneurs are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, and the light is no longer a freight train heading straight at them. We always learn more when times are tough, and we should come away with more strength and determination, as well as real results. It’s time to soak up the optimism, do some real financial planning, and push the limits on all business fronts.

Marty Zwilling

The Discipline Of Execution Defines An Entrepreneur

When entrepreneurs come to me with that “million dollar idea,” I have to tell them that an idea alone is really worth nothing. It’s all about the execution, and investors invest in the people who can execute, or even better, have a history of successful execution. Execution is making things happen, and for startups it usually means making change happen, which is even more difficult.

For most people, execution is one of those things that seems obvious after the fact when done correctly, but is hard to specify for those trying to learn to do it better. I found a book on this subject, “The 4 Disciplines of Execution,” by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, which seems to talk well to startups as well as the corporate world it was written for.

These authors argue effectively that the hard part of executing most strategies is changing human behavior – first the people on your team, then partners, vendors, and most importantly, customers. No startup founder or leader can just order these changes to happen, because it isn’t that easy to get other people to change their ways. Changing yourself is tough enough.

Here are four key disciplines that I believe the best entrepreneurs follow to expedite the change and forward progress implicit in the successful execution of a million dollar idea:

1. Focus always on one or two top priority goals. We all live with the stark reality that the more we try to do, the less well we do on any of the elements. Thus focus is a natural principle. Narrow you and your team’s focus to one or two wildly important goals, and don’t let these get lost in the whirlwind of daily urgent tasks and communications.

2. Identify and act on leading measures first. Some actions have more impact than others when reaching for a goal. Hold the lagging measures for later (results available after the fact), and focus on lead measures first (predictive of achieving a goal). For example, more customer leads are predictive of more sales revenue later.

3. Define a compelling scoreboard. People on your team play differently when someone is keeping score, and even better when they are keeping score, and even better when they have defined how their score is measured. This is the discipline of engagement. If the scoreboard isn’t clear, play will be abandoned in the whirlwind of other activities.

4. Create a frequent forum for accountability. Unless we feel accountability, and see accountability on a regular cadence, it also disintegrates in the daily whirlwind. It’s even better if team members create their own commitments, which become promises to the team, rather than simply job performance. People want to make a contribution and win.

These four disciplines must be implemented as a process, not as an event. That means your team needs to see them as a normal and continuous focus, not a one-time push which fades in the rush of other daily priorities. The team needs to see the process practiced by the startup founder, as well as preached regularly.

Startup founders also need to realize that building and managing a company is quite different from learning to search for and solidify an idea that can grow into a company. Every entrepreneur has to navigate that personal change from thinking to doing to managing.

It’s not only the change from thinking to managing, but also the change and learning from constant iterations. Major changes, called pivots, are terrifying to a team that has put months of constant focus into executing what they thought was a great idea. If you don’t have an execution process, you have chaos.

Overall, every entrepreneur should be concerned if they don’t regularly feel stretched beyond their comfort zone, meaning mastering the art of execution if you are mainly creative, or developing creativity if you are mainly process driven. Don’t forget that the fun and challenge is in the learning, so enjoy the ride. The entrepreneur lifestyle is not meant to be comfortable.

Marty Zwilling

7 Ways to Feed The Growth Beast In Every Business

“If you build it, they will come.” It's a line from an old movie "Field of Dreams" which is still leading to the demise of too many startups, led by entrepreneurs who really started their business to build an exciting new product or service. Most struggle with the idea and practice of marketing and sales, and see these as a necessary evil, if even required.

Of course, for a price, there are many marketing organizations and gurus willing to come to your aid. But marketing is not “rocket science,” so I’m a big proponent of self-help and practicing the pragmatics in-house first. A great resource for all is a recent book by Drew Williams and Jonathan Verney, “Feed the Startup Beast: A 7-Step Guide to Big, Hairy, Outrageous Sales Growth.”

This book correctly characterizes every startup as a beast that has to be well fed to grow. The ingredients for growth are well known: patience, persistence, and a plan. The first two p’s are up to you, but I agree with the authors that an effective plan and execution in this new Internet world needs to be built around a minimum of the following seven steps:

1. Ask the single most important question. The only question you need to ask is “How likely are you to recommend my [product/service/company] to a colleague or business associate?” In every constituency, there are fans, fence-sitters, and critics. Fans contribute 2.6 times more revenue than “somewhat satisfied,” and critics kill revenue at twice the rate that fans increase it. Too many critics and not enough fans spell disaster.

2. Listen to targeted prospects through real engagement. Engage first, sell later. The laws of engagement require targeting the best prospects first, offering a real value proposition, and making an offer which is valuable, timely, and relevant. Continue building the relationship to nurture them into paying customers.

3. Focus your resources to convert prospects to customers. Build a plan with automation to manage the volume, but every customer has to feel like you are reaching out to them personally. Fine-tune the marketing and sales conversion engine to narrow the funnel, and build a sales team to close every sales-ready lead.

4. Attract and get found by the right prospects. The planning is done, and now it’s time to execute. Make your startup valuable and visible, with great content that can not be missed by online search, influencers, and offline events. Use social media in concert with a web site and offline media. In all venues, 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the results.

5. Pursue and intrigue prospects who respond. Put your best efforts into helping prospects break through the clutter, engage them, and intrigue them. Your goal is to get them to think different, like Apple, or be surprised and delighted with the experience. Be sure to track the engagement rate, and be quick to pivot if the breakthrough rate is low.

6. Nurture customers and influencers into real fans. Turning your customers into real fans is the best leverage you have. Fans have a triple impact: they are more profitable, stay longer, and bring in others. Effective fan-nurture programs include an advisory panel, a “constant contact” program, referral program, and a one-question survey.

7. Grow and measure the conversion rate. Here are four essential conversion rates you need to track: prospects to engaged prospects (target 38%), engaged prospects to sales-ready leads (20%), sales-ready prospects to customers (35%), and customers to fans (60%). This kind of conversion can easily result in 100% year-over-year revenue growth.

If you want success in selling your product, you need to put the same focus, intensity, and innovation into marketing and sales, as you have put into building the product. It won’t happen magically, but it doesn’t require an army of experts or a huge budget. Really, it’s all about having great information, great tools, and the determination to learn what customers really value.

Completing each of the above steps allows your startup beast to pick up momentum, fueling a breakthrough in growth, and ultimately making it unbeatable in the marketplace. The modern day field of dreams mantra has pivoted to “If you market it, they will come.” Are your customers coming fast enough?

Marty Zwilling

10 Incentives For Entrepreneurs To Bootstrap Their Startup

I’ve always wondered who started the urban myth that the best way to start a company is to come up with a great idea, and then find some professional investors to give you a pot of money to build a company. In my experience, that’s actually the worst way to start, for reasons I will outline here, and also the least common way, according to an authoritative survey of new startups.

Based on the Startup Environment Index from the Kauffman Foundation and LegalZoom a while back, personal money, or bootstrapping, continues to be the primary startup funding source. Eighty percent of new entrepreneurs use this approach, with only six percent using investor funding. The remaining entrepreneurs borrow from family and friends, or acquire a loan.

So before you become obsessed with landing investors to fund your idea and minimize your risk, consider the following:

1. Finding investors takes work, time, and money you can ill afford. Entrepreneurs who plan to complete a business plan the first month, find an investor the second, and roll out a product the third month are just kidding themselves. Count on several months of effort and costly assistance to court investors, with less than a 10% success rate.

2. Anyone who gives you money is likely to be a tough boss. If you chose the entrepreneur lifestyle to be your own boss, don’t accept money from anyone. Every person who gives you money will want to have “input,” if not formal approval on every move. Be prepared to live with communication, negotiation, and milestones every day.

3. Don’t give up a chunk of your company and control before you start. Even a small investor in the early days will take a large equity percentage, due to that pesky valuation challenge. At least wait until later, when you ready to scale, and have some “leverage” based on a proven business model, some real customers, and real revenue.

4. You will squeeze harder on your own dollars than investor dollars. It’s just human nature that we remember the pain of earning our own dollars, versus those “donated” by someone else. Focusing on the burn rate and prioritizing every possible expense will keep overhead down, help you stay lean, and achieve a higher profit earlier.

5. Sometimes survival requires staying under the radar. People who give you money like to talk about their great investment, and competitors see you coming. Sometimes creative efforts need more time before launch, or your efforts to run the company need tuning. Investors like to replace Founders who don’t seem to be moving fast enough.

6. Managing investors is a distraction from your core business. Fundraising and investor governance are never-ending tasks, which will take real focus away from building the right product and finding real customers. Having more money to spend, but spending it on the wrong things, certainly doesn’t pave the road to success.

7. Entrepreneurs need to start small and pivot quickly. Start with a minimum viable product (MVP), as well as a minimum viable team. Investors like a well-rounded team, working in a highly parallel fashion. That takes more money and time to set up, and more people to re-train and re-educate when forced to redirect your strategy.

8. The best partners are ones who share costs and risks. With no investors, you will work harder to find vendors who will absorb costs and associated risks for a potentially bigger return later. Since they now have real skin in the game, they will also work harder to show quality and value, which is a win-win-win for you, them, and your customers.

9. You will be happier and under less pressure. You should choose to be an entrepreneur to be able to do what you love. Yet we all apply pressure to ourselves to do these things to our own satisfaction. Investor money brings so many additional pressures, that personal happiness and satisfaction can be completely jeopardized.

10. Show you are committed to your startup, not just involved. When you put your own financing on the line, your partners, your team, and eventually your customers will know that you are committed to solving their problem. That increases their motivation and conviction, which are the keys to their success as well as yours.

Of course, some of you will say, I don’t have a dollar and my big idea can’t wait. Unfortunately, outside investors are not an answer to this problem. To investors, having no money indicates that you may not have the discipline to manage their money, and manage a tough business process as well.

In these cases, I would suggest you work in another similar startup for a while, to learn the business, save your pennies, and test your startup concept on the side. A startup idea executed hastily and poorly will be killed more completely than any timing delay. Are you sure the money you seek is really your key to changing the world?

Marty Zwilling

7 Elements Of Inspiration From The Steve Jobs Model

Steve Jobs was one of those entrepreneurs who seemed universally either loved or hated, but not many will argue with his ability to innovate in the technology product arena over the years. He was instrumental in creating Apple, which has pioneered a dazzling array of new products, and even surpassed Microsoft, to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

Carmine Gallo, in one of his books a while back on secrets, “The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs,” outlines Jobs “insanely different principles for breakthrough success.” I’m not convinced that Jobs’ world was that simple, but Carmine has boiled it down to seven principles, which I suggest every entrepreneur can learn from even today, as follows:

1. Do what you love. Think differently about your career. Steve Jobs followed his heart his entire life and that, he said, made all the difference. Innovation cannot occur in the absence of passion and, without it, you have little hope of creating breakthrough ideas.

2. Put a dent in the Universe. Think differently about your vision. Jobs attracted like-minded people who shared his vision and who helped turn his ideas into world-changing innovations. Passion fueled Apple’s rocket and Jobs’ vision created the destination.

3. Kick start your brain. Think differently about how you think. Innovation does not exist without creativity, and for Steve Jobs, creativity was the act of connecting things. Jobs believed that a broad set of experiences broadened the understanding of the human experience.

4. Sell dreams, not products. Think differently about your customers. To Jobs, people who bought Apple products were never “consumers.” They were people with dreams, hopes, and ambitions. Jobs built products to help them fulfill their dreams.

5. Say no to 1,000 things. Think differently about design. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, according to Jobs. From the designs of the iPod to the iPhone, from the packaging of the Apple’s products to the functionality of the Apple Web site, innovation means eliminating the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

6. Create insanely great experiences. Think differently about your brand experience. Jobs made Apple stores the gold standard in customer service. The Apple store has become the world’s best retailer by introducing simple innovations any business can adopt to make deep, lasting emotional connections with their customers.

7. Master the message. Think differently about your story. Jobs was a great corporate storyteller, turning product launches into an art form. You can have the most innovative idea in the world, but if you cannot get people excited about it, it doesn’t matter.

Carmine suggests and I agree that these principles for breakthrough innovation will only work if you see yourself as the brand. Whether you are an entrepreneur working out of your bedroom, or a small business owner looking for ideas to improve your business, you represent the most important brand of all – yourself.

How you talk, walk, and act reflects upon the brand. Most importantly, how you think about yourself and your business will have the greatest impact on the creation of new ideas that will grow your business and improve the lives of your customers.

Thus you need to look inward first and assess your basic potential. Then imagine what you could achieve in business with the real insight and inspiration. Imagine what you could accomplish if you had Steve Jobs guiding your decisions. What would Steve Jobs do? Follow the principles above and you can do it too.

Marty Zwilling