5 Strategies For Business Growth Many People Forget

In this age of constant market evolution and new technology, there is no such thing as a static business that is self-sustaining. The traditional approach of implementing stable and repeatable processes, so that your business can run itself, no longer works. Just ask former big brand companies, like Blockbuster, Kodak, Lehman Brothers, and Sears, what happened to them.

As a small business advisor, I always recommend that being “self-sustaining” requires taking frequent and aggressive measures to step out ahead of the pack, including yourself, before you start feeling the pain of change and new competitors around you. Specific measures that go beyond the traditional linear thinking include the following:

1. Develop new products for your existing segment. Rather than enhancing the offering you have, develop and offer new products that capitalize on the customers that you already know well. Competitors tend to focus on price and other variations to existing offerings. Too many businesses only think of new products when in crisis mode.

   For example, Facebook added WhatsApp as a cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) service to enhance the self-sustaining growth their social media platform before any downturn. WhatsApp alone now has a user base of over one and a half billion users.

2. Introduce disruptive technologies to this domain. Rather than rely only on linear thinking, the best entrepreneurs are always looking to offer in parallel a more dramatic new alternative. Since these usually require a large investment, and more time, including customer education, they need to be started while your current business is still healthy.

   Apple did this with the introduction of the smartphone, which altered the value chain for computers, video, and software, which were already staples that they knew well. Richard Branson is doing it with Virgin Galactic space rides, without impacting his Virgin Airlines.

3. Populating new domains to sustain your market. If your product is already unique, then new domains would include adding online to enhance store fronts, and alternatives for business to complement consumer offerings. These allow you to get new growth without fighting existing competitors. Defining new domains is even more powerful.

   Elon Musk is doing both of these, first by expanding his Tesla electric vehicle initiatives beyond cars, into self-driving taxis and trucks, and secondly by entering new domains of transportation with SpaceX and Hyperloop. He entertains no sense of a static business.

4. Redefine your product to reach a new category. This strategy, often called breakaway positioning, has the intent of expanding your product opportunity into a previously unreachable category. It also has the advantage over competitors of retaining existing customers, while at the same time attracting new customers from another category.

   For example, Swatch was able through marketing to define their watches as fashion accessories, as well as timepieces, greatly expanding their segment. Uber added UberLUX, with stylish high-end cars, to declare access to the limousine category.

5. Implement a plan of regular strategic acquisitions. Unlike a total reliance on internal innovation and organic growth, growth through acquisition or merger is generally faster and can be self-sustaining as a process. Further, acquisition offers other advantages such as easier financing, instant economies of scale, and new market penetration.

   For example, even the giant Amazon acquired Whole Foods as a growth entryway into the competitive grocery and food industry. Apple acquired Shazam to quickly boost Apple Music by letting users identify songs, movies, and commercials from short audio clips.

The reality is that you can never stop changing your business, and still be self-sustaining. The strategies outlined here may seem intuitively obvious, but they require real effort and discipline to implement, perhaps why so few companies consistently outperform the market. Change is the only constant in business, so now is the time for making your plan for regular change a priority.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 12/18/2018 ***

10 Questions To Test Your Aptitude As An Entrepreneur

Currently there is no professional certification, or standardized testing, as there is for accountants and lawyers, to see if you are ready to tackle the rigors of starting a new business. In fact, some pundits argue that the best entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, actually dropped out of school early to start their businesses, implying a negative relationship to training.

Based on my own experience in working with many entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, I’m convinced that the requirements for success may indeed be not so much academic, but more a mindset of confidence, commitment, perseverance, and constant learning. In fact, these mindset elements are best gauged by your own honest self-assessment against the following questions:

1. How strong is your drive and ambition? If you are contemplating starting a business as a way to get rich quick, or as a way to work less, you should try another road. On the other hand, if you are passionate that you can solve a compelling need better than anyone else, I’m convinced that I and everyone else will line up behind you to help.

2. Are you happy to make your own decisions? This isn’t about not having a boss. All entrepreneurs have multiple masters to serve, including customers, investors, and your own team. The key is a willingness and a conviction that you know what has to be done, are willing to communicate and charge down your path, even when others are in doubt.

3. Do you enjoy working and learning from others? Building a new business is not a solo exercise. Every good business is a positive collaboration between many people with different skills and objectives, with an effective leader to bring their efforts together. You need to enjoy working and learning from all the people around you, including customers.

4. Can you accept the fact that the buck stops with you? The responsibility of a business is much the same as raising your children. It hovers over your head 24 hours a day, 7 days every week. There are no excuses when the economy or the market changes. The success or failure of your business will impact your family and your future.

5. Do you have a baseline of relevant skills and experience? Starting a new business in an industry you know nothing about is fraught with risk. Experience managing projects, people, and finances is as important as deep technical product development skills. Working as an executive in a big company does not prepare you to run a startup.

6. Have you built relationships with people who can help? The right connections in business can make all the difference – in finding advisors, investors, experts, vendors, and even customers. As the business matures, your relationships need to change and expand, so you need to enjoy the process as well as the learning from each.

7. How do you feel about the value of money in business? Some social entrepreneurs I know are so passionate about their cause that they don’t even want to think about money or profit, and they often fail. I would assert from experience that it takes money to do the right thing, and you can’t help anyone for very long without a sustainable business model.

8. Do you have a positive and stable personality? Every new business is a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, which are accentuated by your own highs and lows. In addition, you must be the role model for your team and your customers in selling your vision, and the value of your offering. People expect their leader to be strong and above reproach.

9. Have you really analyzed the market and competitors? Too many aspiring entrepreneurs I know are so enamored with their new idea, and they charge ahead, without first doing the homework on the size of the opportunity, market restraints, and competitor alternatives. Passion is necessary, but not sufficient, to drive a business.

10. Can you deal with the need for change and innovation? The market and customer needs change quickly and regularly these days. You need to be able to innovate quickly as the initial dream no longer satisfies the market. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, so you always need to be thinking and planning for the next generation

If you can answer most of these questions with a resounding yes, then I encourage you to pursue that dream of starting and running your own business. Otherwise, you may be smart to work for a startup or other company for a while to validate your mindset and build your confidence. Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, and that is a good thing.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on CayenneConsulting on 12/07/2018 ***

Business Lessons Often Ignored In The Heat Of Passion

Most aspiring entrepreneurs are convinced that their idea and passion are so great that failure is not a possibility. They relate quickly to one of the big successes out there today, including Facebook, Airbnb, or Snap, and can give you a dozen reasons that they are in the same category. It’s a good way to get some inspiration, but not an accurate representation of reality.

As a startup advisor and angel investor, I tend to focus on the much longer list of ways your startup can fail, based on my own experience and inside knowledge from peers who you will never see highlighted on the Internet. I’m convinced that you can learn more from failure than success, so it pays to take these as lessons to improve your success odds before you start:

1. Creating a new technology doesn’t make a business. Based on my experience, creating a new business is at least as difficult as creating an innovative solution, and it takes a knowledge of finance, operations, customers and the marketplace. If you don’t have all these interests and skills, even your most “disruptive” products will likely fail.

   For example, the personal motorized scooter Segway was announced as disruptive technology way back in 2002, but is still not a successful business. Despite the technology, the fears of pedestrians and government regulations strangled the business.

2. If there is no competition, there is likely not a market. Every potentially successful product has competition, or an alternative, or customers with no interest in change. If you really believe your idea has no competition, perhaps you haven’t looked, or there is no real business. Competitors arrive rapidly these days, so make sure you look often.

   I often hear funding pitches on “nice to have” products, combining the features of several known winners, such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, there are no competitors for this combination, but people rarely pay real money or incur change for nice-to-have solutions.

3. Focus on doing one thing well rather than many things. Don’t try to be all things to all people. You will likely confuse your target customers, and do everything poorly, because of the limited resources of a startup. Later, as you scale the business, is the time to add products or service offerings that customers demand to make the business more robust.

   For example, Uber built their initial success by simply connecting people looking for intra-city car rides via a smartphone app. Only later did they expand this offering to multiple classes of cars, Uber for business use, package delivery, and even freight hauling.

4. Plan to and assemble the right team, including co-founders. Building and running a business is not a solo operation. You need skills in finance, operations, and marketing to supplement product development, and more hours of work than one person can manage. A team with the right skills, chemistry, and culture makes all the difference in business.

   I find that most investors invest in the team, more often then they invest in an idea. If you have the right team, you will be able to execute effectively, multiply the impact of your solution by an order of magnitude, and build relationships with customers quickly.

5. Calculate your projected costs, and double the amount. Both the business and your solution will take more time and money to develop than you expect. Entrepreneurs always assume everything will go right the first time, and it never happens. Count on at least one required pivot, and several crises that you could never anticipate.

   Can you believe that Facebook, for example, required an investment of nearly $350 million before turning cash-flow positive? Even the best entrepreneurs tend to underestimate their requirements, and finding emergency funding is very costly.

There are many more lessons to be learned by listening to advisors, and peers who have gone before you. Even if you fail on your first startup, you should wear it as a badge of courage and lesson learned, rather than be devastated. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs experienced early failures, but obviously never gave up. Your legacy will be how far you have traveled, rather than where you started.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 12/11/2018 ***

How To Stay Cool, Despite Team Members Who Annoy You

In my career in business, I’ve found that the people you work with make all the difference. If everyone works well together, you all feel a sense of job satisfaction. If some people on the team are irritating to you and others, the whole environment becomes toxic, killing your motivation and the productivity of the team. Everyone thinks this is a management or the other person’s problem.

Yet, as a business advisor, after investigating a few of these situations, I find that both sides see the situation differently. Thus you may be irritating or annoying other people without even realizing it. In any case, there are many things that you can do to minimize the impact on yourself, and on the productivity of your team, especially if you are not the manager:

1. Limit interactions with problem people to smaller doses. Total avoidance doesn’t get the work done, but strategically timed short encounters may not exceed your patience. Be proactive in timing your visits close to a natural exit, such as just prior to a meeting. Keep your vibes positive and unemotional, and you may uncover a new team member.

2. Adapt your approach to match the style of the other person. It’s all in the approach. Some people are invigorated by a confrontation style, while others consider it irritating. Some want to tell you all the details, when you are just interested in the bottom line. As in any relationship, both sides have to be empathetic, or positive results don’t flow.

3. Define and adhere to role and relationship boundaries. It’s easy to forget that all members of a team are peers, especially if you have been there longer, or an expert in your specialty. Treat all with respect, and remember that the manager has a different role. Find neutral time and ground to discuss boundaries that may have been crossed.

4. Declare constraints on your meeting times before starting. Many irritating interactions are the result of rushed or perceived incomplete discussions. If you have other commitments pending, such as a meeting about to start, or phone call scheduled, these constraints need to be communicated early to avoid negative reactions.

5. Be aware that body language speaks louder than you do. You can’t change the body language of others, but you can control your own. Present a posture of being open and supportive, speak unemotionally, and keep the dialog positive. Reports indicate that body language is fifty percent or more of every communication. Make yours work for you.

6. Treat all team members comparably and consistently. If any team members don’t know what random action to expect from you on the next interaction, you are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Productive relationships require some degree of predictability, and the ability to anticipate the needs and style of peers and management.

7. Avoid being a complainer or commiserating with downers. Perennially negative people are always perceived as irritating by the rest of the team and management. Even worse, however, downers drag down both you and your colleagues. It’s up to you to be proactive about fixing relationships rather than complaining to others about them.

8. Find a job or role, rather than a relationship, to motivate you. Highly annoying and ineffective people tend to look to others around them for motivation and direction, rather than accept that responsibility. An example is someone who essentially does nothing until someone tells them to. If you find the work you love, good people relationships will follow.

Your ability to work effectively with potentially annoying team members is a perfect indicator of your future ability to manage an organization, rise in your career, or build your own business as an entrepreneur. It’s not all that different than adapting to difficult non-work situations and relationships. Remember that you can’t change others, but you help them change themselves.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 12/06/2018 ***

Business Complexity Goes Up Dramatically As You Scale

Most of the entrepreneurs I advise today are ready to declare success when they get that first surge of traction with a real customer. This is a good sign, but they have no idea that the hard work of scaling the business is still ahead of them. It’s a bit like the heady first days after you’ve fallen in love, when you can’t imagine anything will ever kill that passion or commitment.

Scaling a business is fraught with risk and unknowns. You need to find investors for funding, vendors for volume manufacturing, processes for repeatable execution, as well as marketing and distribution to attract customers far beyond your pilot rollout. In fact, this is where your startup has to move from an initial project to a complex product business.

Based on my software career with IBM and several startups, I experienced the challenges and failures of scaling a software project to a business many times. I now realize that software has evolved to be key to the value of most products, including cars, airplanes, and appliances, as outlined in the new book, “Project to Product,” by Dr. Mik Kersten, currently CEO of Tasktop.

Dr. Kersten asserts, and I agree, that it doesn’t work today to manage software as a cost center inside a business – it is too integral to the value stream of the solution provided, most evident during scaling. He outlines five dimensions of scaling any business that introduce new levels of complexity, requiring tools with an overall view of business flows, processes, and value delivered:

1. Adding more features to support a broader customer set. More features means more complexity, more experts, and specialized tools to facilitate the integration, testing, and support. What may have looked like an incidental cost in your base product will now grow to be a major impact on profitability, customer responsiveness, and time-to-market.

   For example, new car infotainment system options alone are fundamentally more complex in terms of features than entire software products were a few years ago, requiring millions of lines of code from multiple vendors, multiple languages, and UIs.

2. Evolving from an initial solution to a product line for growth. As the number of products increase to attract a larger market share, the complexity increases exponentially to produce, distribute, and support the business. This means more suppliers, more interfaces, and more integration to manage, which is today the realm of software.

   BMW, for example, now has around 12,000 suppliers worldwide, for their many models, and each car now consists of over 30,000 parts. They produce a new car every seventy seconds, in the sequence of received customer orders. That’s a huge scaling challenge.

3. Adding partners, with their own tools and specialists. You can’t manage partners in the same fashion as you manage your own internal teams and processes, so scaling the business through partners adds additional complexity. Communication at the digital level has to be done through formal software interfaces (APIs) that you never anticipated.

4. Attracting new markets and market segments. Each market or market segment may require a new edition or configuration of the management system and software, again increasing complexity. The specialists to support these may speak different technical as well as communication languages, and be physically dispersed around the world.

   If a business sells to both business-to-consumer and business-to-business, it will need two separate support channels connected to multiple value streams. The opportunities for disconnects and disruptions go up again as the business scales to this level.

5. Moving information platforms to the Internet cloud. Expanding businesses today forces a full dependency on storing and moving data through the cloud, exposing it to additional risk from security breaches and data loss. The tools and expertise to manage this risk require new and additional resources that most companies do not anticipate.

   Many businesses believe they will free up staff time and money by moving applications and data to the cloud, but end up facing spiraling costs as they underestimate the scale of such projects. Here again, it’s important to measure value, rather than project cost.

Businesses that are the current masters of scaling, including Amazon and Alphabet, are making the challenges harder for the rest of us by redefining the software technology landscape around their platforms. It behooves us all to keep up with these changes, manage the transition to a more software-centric world, and thrive in that world from a bottom line business perspective.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 12/03/2018 ***

8 Ways To Prepare Yourself For Business Crises Ahead

Most entrepreneurs see their new venture as a fun adventure, until the pressures of a cash flow crisis, or a manufacturing quality problem, or a major customer satisfaction problem hits. Even with all my years of experience mentoring in business, I can’t predict how you will prepare for and react to pressure situations. I wish I could, since these often make or break your business future.

Over the years, I have found some key things that you can do to prepare yourself, how a proper mindset can mitigate the pain, and put you back in control. Here are the top approaches I recommend, and the entrepreneur mindsets that I see in survivors:

1. Evaluate new competitive threats as new opportunities. New competitors can steal your market, or they can open up new markets. Entrepreneurs who react with fear and anger are in major jeopardy of losing their health, since competitors are a constant in the startup world. Use them positively to tune your solution and expand your opportunities.

2. Use business model pressures as drivers for innovation. There is a natural human tendency to fight the need for change, and the pressure to change causes pain. True entrepreneurs love change – that’s why they are starting a new venture. They use pressures, like shrinking margins, as drivers for their next innovation in manufacturing.

3. Incorporate fun and humor into pressure relationships. If your team is feeling over-whelmed by the pressures of customer demands, it may be time for an off-site fun event to get them recharged and fully motivated. Fun and humor will also offset the tension in dealing with tough customer issues, resulting in higher satisfaction, loyalty, and referrals.

4. Take control of the situation by breaking task into chunks. When the challenge ahead looms large, it’s easy to let anxiety get the best of you, and you are afraid to start. Every big task can be broken into milestones, allowing you to enjoy small successes. That’s why I suggest a business plan before you start, with a timeline and deliverables.

5. Work from your strengths – don’t worry about weaknesses. Most entrepreneurs start with passion and confidence, but many succumb to their weaknesses when pressures set in. Lead with your strengths and in-depth skills, and don’t be afraid to ask for help from advisors or partners to fill in the gaps. Confidence alone will overcome many challenges.

6. Turn every failure into a positive learning opportunity. When pressures mount and things go wrong, don’t start looking for excuses, or someone else to blame. Make every failure a lesson learned, and project that mindset to your team. Thomas Edison counted many learning opportunities, bouncing back after 1000 failures on the light bulb alone.

7. Prepare for challenges rather than hope for the best. The best entrepreneurs always have a plan, with alternatives, and continually research their industry and competitors. Others strike out blindly, assume it will be an easy win, and quickly feel the stress and pressure, with minimal insight on how to respond. Be over-prepared, and enlist advisors.

8. Stay physically fit and balance work with play. Pressure situations will happen in every business, so stay at your best both physically and mentally to respond. Don’t let the “normal” workload wear you down – keep a balanced focus on work, and find other activities, including sleep and entertainment, to keep up your motivation and stamina.

Based on my own experience as a business executive and advising small business owners, I’m convinced that anyone can learn from these techniques to handle the pressures of a new venture or existing business, no matter what their background. It won’t happen by default, and it does take effort and initiative on your part.

You too can then thrive on the challenges and pressures of your business, rather than let these pressures destroy you. Most entrepreneurs I know can’t stand the boredom of “business as usual,” as that threatens their sense contribution and self-worth. Be one of the best, whose motto proudly is “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on CayenneConsulting on 11/27/2018 ***

Why Team Management By Fear Is Bad For Any Business

Despite the ease of communication through social media, new tools, the popularity of fearless independence and #MeToo, I still see many business organizations that are less than productive due to fear. Yet in my work as an advisor to senior executives, I find that many fail to see reality in their own organizations, and have no idea whether they are part of the problem or the solution.

I finally found some real guidance on this challenge in a new book, “The Fearless Organization,” by Amy C. Edmondson from the Harvard Business School. She presents a wealth of case studies on the pain and business losses from this type of leadership and culture, and provides some practical guidance on how to change it to a more psychologically safe and productive workplace.

If you are one of those leaders or team members who really wants to change things, here are some key indicators of the problems that I have seen, and some pragmatic guidance on how to get things moving in the right direction:

1. Team members fail to speak up for fear of retribution. Hearing too much silence in your organization is a dangerous sign. This reticence to speak up, for fear of being embarrassed, intimidated, or penalized, can lead to widespread frustration, anxiety, depression, or even physical harm to others. Team members just don’t feel protected.

   Changing this culture has to start from the top. You as a team leader or executive have to openly invite participation from every team member, and respond positively in tone and actions when people actually do speak up. Show humility and appreciation for all input.

2. People show excessive confidence in authority. In some organizations, especially medical and highly technical ones, authority and reverence are well understood and tightly linked to one’s place in a strict hierarchy. Deference to the leaders can become the default mode of operation, suppressing valuable input, to the detriment of everyone.

   The solution here is to hire and surround yourself with people who bring strong complementary skills to the table, as well as high confidence and self-esteem. In my experience, leaders who hire helpers rather than real help are breeding this problem.

3. A culture of silence where leaders fail to listen. Often employees learn to stay silent when they see that voicing concerns or ideas is futile. In fact, they usually give up not just their voice but also their entire psychological engagement with your company. Evidence of not listening includes interrupting feedback, being defensive, or no evident follow up.

   You can reverse this culture by asking for opinions or updates at the end of meetings – then pause and ask again, so they know you are sincere. Also, you must be available and approachable. Mingle with employees. Ask questions, listen to responses. Be conscious of your eye contact, facial expression and tone of voice.

4. Impossible stretch goals are never challenged. Performance goals set without team member input, and without support and feedback, are a sure sign of managing by fear. Most people feel that unattainable targets led to the serious problems at both Wells Fargo and Volkswagen a couple of years ago. Both are still struggling to change their culture.

   The solution is to communicate what you want - early and often - once is not enough for people to take you seriously. Then ask for input, listen to the evidence, and provide feedback based on what you hear. Be fair and consistent, with no excuses or emotion.

5. You only hear the good news from team members. How many times have you chopped people off at the knees for being the bearer of bad news? Team members learn quickly, and the message spreads, that problems must be buried, and people are berated or penalized for surfacing tough issues. It’s fair to ask for solutions, in a positive way.

   Actually, the best approach is to ask the hard questions to get to the heart of a problem in a non-threatening fashion. Hard discussions can be the most productive, as well as more satisfying to team members, if they feel they are being heard and can make a difference.

Psychological safety is a workplace state in which people feel confident expressing themselves and comfortable calling attention to problems without humiliation or retribution, where colleagues trust and respect one another. In today’s complex world of constant change, collaboration in a fearless organization is the only way to survive and thrive, and only you can build it.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 11/23/2018 ***

10 Business Constants Flourish In This Age Of Change

In this age of constant change, I usually find myself writing about what has changed. Yet I find that periodically it pays to reflect on what hasn’t changed in business, probably won’t change in the foreseeable future, and is still critical to our success in our professional career, as well as the success of our business. Here is my list of the basics that some people in business tend to forget:

1. Showing up consistently must still be priority one. I’m not talking about clocking in to work and physically putting in your time. I’m talking about being present mentally and engaged, with a full focus on the business work at hand, and contributing to the team. According to recent Gallup data, only 32 percent of employees are fully engaged today.

2. Customers and peers still expect follow-up and timeliness. I still expect people in every business I call to answer the phone, or at least return the call in a timely fashion. Today there are many more ways to make contact, including email, social media, and web site queries, yet a common complaint I still hear is that no one ever responds.

3. No one wants to hear that you are too busy for them. Every smart professional and business owner needs to reflect regularly on what they have really accomplished in a given day or week. Results of consequence should never include how many meetings you attended, or hours spent at work. Businesses grow based on customers served.

4. Number and quality of relationships is still critical. Business connections and networking are still the source of major new clients, new job opportunities, and most promotions. Relationship building does not happen without effort, and the right people won’t find you automatically. It takes initiative on your part, just like it always has.

5. It’s good for your business to find a work-life balance. Successful business people find a way to escape the pressures of work on a regular basis – through family, a hobby, sports, or other recreation. Every human body needs time to rejuvenate, for maximum productivity and creativity at work. Take some time to get totally away from the grind.

6. Your job in business goes well beyond any job description. There is no simple formula for delighting customers, and anticipating the next business challenge. Your ability to satisfy the needs of customers and peers in any role can never be fully defined by a job description. Yet declaring that something is not your job will not impress anyone.

7. It’s not how many things you start, it’s how many you finish. Crossing the finish line ahead of competitors is what gets you paid, and the only way your business will thrive. Investors in new businesses look for traction and results, not ideas. People who proclaim to be thinkers, rather than doers, rarely get funded, and rarely succeed in business.

8. Customers and peers want to follow leaders, not processes. Even very detailed business processes can’t cover all the important cases. The best businesses people have always been the ones who are skilled and empowered to push the limits, and manage tough situations without excuses. These will lead your business to success.

9. Managing cash flow is still a major key to business operation. According to financial experts, 80% of small business failures today are caused by poor cash flow, and that hasn’t changed for a long time. Cash is king when it comes to the financial management of a growing company. Entrepreneurs need to manage cash flow daily and personally.

10. Honesty and integrity in business still pay big dividends. A couple of the most important factors in any business and career continue to be honesty and integrity, which breed trust. It is very difficult to have long-term success if your customers and your peers don’t trust you or don’t think you’re honest. I don’t believe that will ever change.

Thus it’s still critical to spend as much time at work focusing on the things that don’t change, as you do on the things that must change. More importantly, these things that don’t change can be your anchor for stability and enjoyment, leading to real satisfaction as well as success. What more could anyone want from work?

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on CayenneConsulting on 11/19/2018 ***

Interpersonal Skills Are Still Key to Team Engagement

Over my career in large businesses as well as small ones, it seems that more and more people are feeling unhappy and unfulfilled in their job. I’m convinced that technology is making this problem worse, rather than better, since it often causes to a sense of isolation working remotely, or even in the same office. Isolation leads to a lack of relationship or connection with others.

For example, while social media exchanges are now quick and simple, they miss all the body language and emotion that many believe constitute more than fifty percent of human relations and communication. The result is that even highly engaged workers can get results without a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction. This leads to a spiral downhill in productivity and happiness.

Your challenge as an entrepreneur and business leader is to discover ways to improve the fulfillment of your team, without turning back the clock on technology. I found these issues outlined well in a new book, “Back to Human,” by Dan Schawbel. I like his research and experience on what it takes to improve connection and fulfillment in this age of isolation at work.

Here are some key actions for improved fulfillment that we both believe every leader and executive needs to adopt:

1. Build stronger team connections to make work fun. Lack of connection makes work feel like a chore and creates the silos that minimize creativity and innovation. The first step to fulfillment is insuring that you have face-to-face conversations and joint social activities, so that you get to know one another better outside of social media and email.

   The more you and other team members understand others’ unique situations, life goals, passions, fears, and obstacles, the more you can help everyone feel more fulfilled, and the more they will help your business.

2. Show how your work contributes to shared values. Make it evident that values from you and your team drive your business goals, rather than goals driving values. Fulfillment is a function of doing the right thing. Define and enforce a high bar for ethical behavior, product quality, employee communication, social responsibilities and customer service.

   You have to engage the hearts and minds of your team members. To foster team fulfillment, breed optimism, promote resilience, and renew faith and confidence, real leaders look opportunities to reward adherence to values as well as results.

3. Define and foster a higher purpose for the business. In my experience, both you and your team will have the most satisfaction and fulfillment if you can combine a strong sense of purpose with a quantifiable business opportunity. In other words, profit and a focus on repeatable processes need to be offset by social and environmental benefits.

   In every business, the first higher purpose should be a focus on your customer needs, rather than internal challenges. Without customers, there is no business, and no higher purpose can be satisfied. Beyond that, seek active team participation in outside efforts.

4. Create and support a culture of trust in your team. Be open to sharing personal information and summaries of conversations you’ve had with senior executives. Provide the opportunity and encouragement for all team members to do the same. This will demonstrate team member authenticity and help build trust. Be the openness role model.

   Listen to what your team members are saying, without interrupting. This shows respect and will help you better give them the feedback they need for fulfillment and trust. It also demonstrates that you are willing to engage with their ideas, thoughts, and feelings.

5. Focus on accomplishments rather than time at work. To improve team members’ sense of fulfillment, you have to make sure things get finished, and results are measured. Set goals and make sure they are attainable. Smaller goals can lead to bigger ones, which will give you different levels of achievement at different times.

   Your job is to remove obstacles that get in the way of employees’ fulfillment. One often-overlooked obstacle to a team’s success is having a teammate who isn’t performing well or has a bad attitude. Don’t keep them around and let them poison the rest of the team.

Sometimes tech devices trick you into thinking that they are helping you and your team to stay better connected. But technically connected and unhappy or unfulfilled team members won’t lead to success for you or them. We are all still humans, so personal relationships and the interpersonal skills of the team are still essential. Don’t forget that critical side of your business.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 11/19/2018 ***

How To Improve Your Competence And Win People Over

One of the biggest challenges I have as an advisor to tech entrepreneurs is to convince you that marketing is required for your product, no matter how great it is, just to get it found with today’s information overload. A comparable problem is to get entrepreneurs to market themselves, for the same reason. Your abilities will be lost in the crowd, because competence doesn’t speak for itself.

We have all heard the saying that first impressions count big, but in fact, you judge other people continually by your impressions of their competence, unless and until they provide you credible evidence of something better – through smart impression management or marketing of their experience, skills, and results. It is this perceived competence that gives you a competitive edge.

The challenge is to communicate competence without appearing to be self-centered or bragging. In the new book, “Convinced!: How to Prove Your Competence & Win People Over,” by Jack Nasher, a Stanford professor and negotiation expert, I finally found some guidance on specific approaches, with some pragmatic recommendations to make them work.

1. Raise people’s expectations of what you bring to the table. I can tell you from my experience as an investor, after hearing hundreds of pitches, that my expectations start very low. It’s up to you to inspire me (and you) that you can do what you say is possible. In any business role, your manager only sees a fraction of what you know and do.

   In fact, you can raise a low bar of expectations of results by demonstrating confidence regarding your abilities and the task at hand. You need to reduce anxiety by eliminating anything that speaks against you, and highlighting past successes and experience.

2. Highlight all good news around you, and reframe bad news. Associating with good news, even if not yours, strengthens your competence. Without excuses, position any bad news in a positive light, and focus on what you learned. Always start with the good news, then the bad news, and conclude with the second-best news to end on a high.

3. Frame your competence perception to reduce qualms. First of all, emphasize up front any unfavorable circumstances that will make your job more difficult. Then highlight the role that your competence plays by pointing out how earlier successes, training, and education show you were born for this job, having survived from bigger challenges.

   For example, the legendary Steve Jobs and other captains of industry were quick to talk about their tough beginnings, overcoming great obstacles, and highlighting successes, to raise and reconfirm their perception of competence in the eye of peers and executives.

4. Learn to get heard as an expert through power talking. Steve Jobs also practiced incessantly to become a masterful speaker, by speaking with confidence, pairing the right, impactful words with strategic use of vocal range, emphasis, and pauses. In all cases, avoid speaking too softly, often repeating points, or cutting others off.

5. Communicate your competence through body language. Positive body language, including eye contact, smiling, location while standing, and posture while sitting, all strengthen the perception of your competence. Show enthusiasm during presentations by moving around and using large gestures. Position yourself near the front in meetings.

6. Boost competency perception by increasing likeability. Creating an overall positive impression is of decisive importance, starting with always being friendly, polite, attentive, and educated. The evidence still shows that this extends to attractiveness and popularity as well. It always pays to look your best, and build relationships with key people.

According to the latest data, attractiveness in men is more about their faces and clothes than body figures, while with women figures are more important than their faces. Popularity builds with respect and interest in others, as well as goodwill building.

While some of these techniques take practice to master, none require sacrificing your values or faking skills you don’t have. The goal is to display and market your full expertise and competence, with authenticity and confidence, without waiting for someone to figure it out. The business world is moving faster and faster these days, so don’t fall behind by simply waiting to be found.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 11/16/2018 ***

5 Business Warning Signs That Signal Ethical Exposure

Based on my years of experience working with entrepreneurs, I strongly believe that most of you start your business with the highest of ideals, but have no idea how many situations you will face that don’t have clear-cut answers, or raise ethical dilemmas. For example, how should you handle a cash flow crisis, where you have to choose between paying a creditor and your employees?

Every time I see an example of another company apparently having succumbed to integrity or ethical problems, such as the recent demise of Theranos, I wonder how an early advisor might have coached them to a different outcome. Theranos was a multi-billion dollar startup that was going to revolutionize blood tests with a single prick, but now has been shut down for fraud.

In my view, every entrepreneur and new business owner needs to start by reaffirming his or her own personal values, and then watching diligently for the warning signs that test your integrity and that of your team, or show that cracks are already appearing in your armor. Here are some key warning signs that I see most often, with guidance on how to respond:

1. You sense a team switch to survival versus growth mode. When customers or funding fail to materialize, and cash runs short, everyone on the team starts to resort to more desperate measures to keep their job. It suddenly seems easy to cut corners on quality and service, or make commitments to customers with no real hope of delivering.

   To keep your team on the right track, they need visibility and straight talk from you and other internal leaders that they respect and trust. Don’t fall for the temptation to withhold the bad news, or sugarcoat the situation. Provide specifics on what is required, and how you expect them to act. In my experience the team will surprise you with their results.

2. Conflicts of interest with outside investors and stakeholders. It’s not uncommon for investors to push strong personal agendas, or major stock holders to focus on short-term goals in lieu of your high-level ones. For the team, these pressures can cause tensions to run high, overriding their normal checks and balances on integrity and ethics.

   The best solution is real due diligence up front, before signing investors, to make sure they have the same values and objectives that you do, and agree to your key milestones. Then communicate regularly with all stakeholders, so they don’t get surprised, or feel that you have changed direction to their detriment. They have to understand and trust you.

3. See efforts to minimize or cover up product or customer issues. Even with the best laid plans, and dedicated teams, things can and do go astray. The reality is that following your conscience can often have unfavorable consequences for your business. Thus the temptation is always great to hide the problem, or fudge results, as with Theranos.

   Entrepreneurs must make sure they take a visible leadership role in communicating and resolving key issues which can impact the business. Don’t forget your first and final obligation to the customer, and don’t delegate the final decision on such issues to your team. Team members should be rewarded, rather than penalized, for surfacing problems.

4. High team culture impacted by elements of negativity. Without constant attention to hiring and coaching, every team can be poisoned by people who become disillusioned or negative about the current leadership or direction. Negative vibes and team members are a virus that can kill your culture, and cause others to take integrity or ethical shortcuts.

   Smart entrepreneurs stay fully engaged with their team, pick up on negative messages and team members early, and deal with them quickly. Complainers and low producers need to be moved out of the organization, before others are dragged down to that level.

5. Multiple teams evolving into isolated silos. Cross-team communication and trust becomes more difficult for every company as it grows. Teams can become more and more focusing on their own priorities, at the expense of others, and even your customers. For example, sales challenges can always be argued as marketing or product problems.

   Your challenge as a leader is to keep all elements of your organization integrated and pulling together, by communicating common goals and objectives, setting priorities consistently, and rotating people across organizations for development and creativity.

In all cases, integrity and ethical behavior must be demonstrated from the top of the organization. Commitment and transparency are the catalysts that every team needs from their leaders to maintain a healthy and strong values. Have you checked for slippage in your own performance lately, or team warning signs anywhere that you can fix before they become a disaster?

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 11/12/2018 ***

5 Inertia Traps To Avoid In Your Business Leadership

While the willingness and ability to change is recognized and espoused by every business owner or founder I am asked to advise, far too many of you seem to be stuck in a rut, or very slow to actually decide what changes are necessary to survive and thrive. You may not be blind to the changing market and technology, but being blind to internal traps that can be just as devastating.

I saw this challenge of inertia described very well in a new book, “Transforming the Clunky Organization,” by Samuel B. Bacharach. From his leadership consulting with a host of companies, clunky and innovative, he explains why owners and executives fall into traps of inertia and he details the critical pragmatic leadership skills needed to regain the required momentum.

Here is our joint list of some common traps that you and your company leaders must avoid at all costs:

1. Too satisfied with how things are going, or status quo. The status quo trap is set when things have gone well for a while, and you are too busy to look ahead to see what’s around the corner, or commit time and resources into developing the next generation of innovative ideas. Then when market demand slows, you are not able to react in time.

   For example, Blockbuster was so busy expanding its hugely profitable video rental business, adding stores at a breakneck rate, that it failed to really take notice of new entrants like Netflix with no late fees, Redbox automated kiosks, and video on demand. The result was a major change in the industry, and Blockbuster disappeared.

2. Throw money into a sinking project, hoping to save it. This bailing-too-late trap is when you make a big investment in a venture that doesn’t take off, but you refuse to abandon it or pivot because of sunk costs, with the hope of success just over the horizon. The result is a business damaged past the point of recovery, instead of just dented.

   I see this often as an angel investor, approached by desperate entrepreneurs who have spent all their resources over a period of years on a failing solution, but are still convinced that one more cash infusion will turn the curve from down to up. At this stage, investors won’t believe that more money for sales and marketing will turn the tide, so we all lose.

3. Tackle a new market or technology you don’t know. When you propose to enter a new market or technology without the requisite resources or skills to compete, you may be triggering the overreaching trap. Although paradigm shifts and disruptive technologies imply huge new opportunities, they may require more time and risk than you can tolerate.

   The Pebble smart watch is an example of overreaching, especially for a startup with limited resources. Even though the original Pebble became the most-funded Kickstarter product of all time, tech giants Apple and Samsung quickly overran them, and they were forced to disappear into Fitbit.

4. Focus on short-term gains, ignoring long-term risks. Short-term wins are great, but if you pursue them at the expense of long-term success, then it’s a trap. Companies caught by the short-term trap often miss new bigger opportunities. Thinking short-term requires satisfying customer change with more already existing products, skills, and resources.

   Kodak is famous for falling prey to the short-term trap. At one time Kodak was a leading innovative company centered around film photography. Their short-term focus did not allow them to see the long-term benefits of digital photography, cost them their leadership position, and ultimately resulted in their filing for Chapter 11.

5. Let your company be a victim of analysis paralysis. If you lead your business on endless journeys of analyzing, discussing, researching, and testing new ideas without getting anything off the ground, you are a part of the overthinking trap. You are guilty of wasting precious time and money, and throwing away the opportunity of real innovation.

The result of any of these traps is an inertia that prevents recognition of the need to change, and a sluggishness in implementing the necessary change actions before it is too late. If you sense these symptoms in your domain, or hear them highlighted by your advisors, the time to take action is now. I advise initiating a change in your leadership style, before the market moves on without you.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 11/08/2018 ***

How To Network For Career And Business Advancement

It pays big dividends to network with peers and others if you want to succeed in business. You need to get guidance before you start a new venture, connections to investors as you seek funding to scale the business, and expansion and exit insights as the business matures. Just as importantly, your business network can actually make a sometimes lonely role enjoyable.

Yet networking effectively does take valuable time, and for some of us who are introverts, it’s not so easy at first. In working with many entrepreneurs and career professionals over the years, I have collected my own strategies which I offer to all of you as a place to start, and a focus on getting real value for your efforts:

1. You make the first move – don’t wait for someone to pick you. If you wait for the right people to find you, it takes too long, or it may never happen. Take the initiative to find the ones you need, and do your research on how they can help you, how you can help them, what they like, and what you might have in common. Everyone loves initiative.

2. Seek common interests and shared values beyond business. Chemistry and shared values lead to trust and lasting relationships, rather than shallow friendships. Examples would include sports interests, academic connections, and family activities. Whether the business topics are investing or mentoring, networking is personal as well as business.

3. Be prepared to exchange business cards and follow up. Make the initial exchange of connection info a simple process, and don’t wait for the other person to initiate a personalized follow up within a few days. Let the relationship build slowly, rather than immediately launching into a marketing for investment pitch.

4. Suggest a non-work meeting to cement the relationship. While the ultimate purpose of networking is a business benefit for all concerned, you will have more fun and better results if you learn to drop the assumption that networking is only a part of your work. Take advantage of those common interests that brought good chemistry initially.

5. Have a mindset of giving more than you expect to get. In my experience as an investor, I loved the opportunity to hear about new technologies, but I was put off by entrepreneurs who immediately started asking me for money. Offer to share what you learned from some tough challenges, or provide some personal business insights.

6. Keep all network interactions upbeat and positive. You won’t be successful with your networking by exuding negativity. You have to be the role model for the people you want to meet, and I’m sure you appreciate the value of can-do interactions and influencers, versus people who only want to commiserate or get you to solve their problems.

7. Never use your senior position to control the networking. Some people have more senior titles, or substantial wealth, but they still have challenges and failures, just like the rest of us. I’m sure that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have acknowledged a mentoring relationship after meeting via networking, never compared titles or net worth.

8. Leverage existing networking relationships for new ones. The best way to meet the right new people is to get connected through good current connections. Hopefully, your existing connections know what you have to offer, as well as what you need, and recognize the benefit all around of being a connector. You should do the same for them.

In this age of rapid change, you need to be in constant learn mode to keep up, or potentially get ahead of the crowd. There is no better way to learn than to leverage the experience and knowledge of others.

Simply attending lots of conferences and events, and handing out hundreds of business cards, won’t facilitate that learning. Be strategic, proactive, and selective in your networking efforts, as suggested here, and you too will soon see the dividends.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on CayenneConsulting on 11/08/2018 ***

5 Barriers To Wise Delegation In Business Leadership

I often wonder how many more startups would succeed if their founders could master the art and science of delegation. It seems inherent in the mind of most first-time entrepreneurs that it was their idea, and they must do all the work themselves to make it happen. In my role as mentor and advisor to many founders, I consistently fail in convincing them of the power in wise delegation.

I saw this challenge highlighted well in a new book, “Leadership Skills that Inspire Incredible Results,” by Fred Halstead. He has spent many years coaching and consulting with over 200 organizations, and he has helped me articulate the benefits of delegation, and better understand some of the key barriers. Here is my list of barriers to effective delegation, with tips on improving:

1. Thinking only you can implement your dream idea. The reality is that starting a business is much more than building a solution, and requires a range of skills beyond the limits of most mere humans. Even if you can learn and do everything, time is a killer in this rapidly evolving world of business and technology. You need to divide and conquer.

   For example, even though the technologist Bill Gates ultimately proved that he could run all aspects of a business, his early delegation of the marketing issues to Steve Ballmer, trained at Procter and Gamble, proved to be a powerful partnership that kept Microsoft ahead of many strong competitors in the early days of the personal computer revolution.

2. Unwilling to take the time to explain and delegate needs. It’s a mistake to think that team members share the same insights that you see, and will automatically take on the role required for results. Even your most loyal and dedicated employees need guidance and direction, and will wait for you to delegate and explain. You can’t afford the delay.

   I find that it takes less time to explain what you need, and specifically delegate results, than to manage the chaos that occurs when many several well-intentioned people are all trying to guess what you need and do the right thing. Delegation also actually helps you to clarify and organize the requirements in your own mind.

3. Not trusting key team members to get required results. Of course, full trust must be earned, but it is critical to do some due diligence before hiring new team members, or establishing partnerships. Yet too many new entrepreneurs are paranoid, assuming that everyone has some other agenda, or may steal their idea.

   After due diligence, the best approach is for you to be vigilant, but explicitly communicate your trust and confidence in their abilities. This will reinforce their commitment to your cause, and will relieve you of the constant extra effort of looking over their shoulder.

4. Lack of your own clarity about what it takes to succeed. Some entrepreneurs won’t delegate because they lack confidence in their own understanding of the road ahead, and don’t want to embarrass themselves. Others simply find it hard to communicate the “why” and the “how,” or they are easily frustrated by team members who are struggling.

   The solution here is to use probing questions with peers, other team members, and advisors, and then listen carefully to all input. This dialog with clarify your own understanding of the requirements, as well as theirs. It will also help you decide who is the right person for delegation, and improve your own communication to all constituents.

5. Afraid that delegating means losing control. The job of an entrepreneur is a big one, so you can’t afford to be a “control freak” or a “micro-manager.” Delegation is not about giving up the ultimate authority and responsibility for the business, as you will always be the founder and final decision maker. Use wise delegation to multiply your success odds.

Above all, always remember the golden rule of delegation – focus on results, not tasks. In other words, you need to tell the delegate what needs to be achieved, rather than exactly how to get it done. Only then can you leverage their expertise and efforts, hold them accountable for outcomes, and have the time to enjoy the fruits of your joint success.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 11/05/2018 ***

5 Tips For Making Your Whole Team A Marketing Machine

As the rate of change continues to increase in business and technology, the more I’m convinced that marketing is the primary key to success for a new venture. Yet I find that many technical founders don’t feel they need it at all, or at best point to one person on the team who is marketing. I believe the real challenge is make your whole team a marketing machine.

That doesn’t mean that everyone needs to participate in creating the typical marketing hype, or needs to face the press on a regular basis. It does mean that everyone on the team, from you the founder to your most introverted developer, needs to really understand and believe in the product and strategy, and when asked, doesn’t hesitate to be an advocate for you and the business.

For example, as a member of an angel investment group, I sometimes do some “due diligence” on promising startups looking for funding. A common part of this process is to visit with members of the team to check team dynamics, skill level, and commitment. Unfortunately, I often find team members who are not believers, or have a different view of the customer. The result is no deal.

Thus you need to understand how quickly anyone on your team can be the key to attracting a new set of customers, or the reason that critical partners, vendors, investors, or customers walk away. Fortunately, I’ve found that it isn’t really that hard to make every member of your team a marketer for your new venture, by focusing on the following priorities every day:

1. Build a culture of trust, confidence, and pride in your business. This has to start with selecting the right partners, and hiring people who believe in you and your business. Too many founders, strapped for cash or time, make poor team selections, assuming they can fix the problem later. Your team is your business, and you can’t sell without them.

   Team members who feel they have a voice and a strategic role are happy and proud to be advocates for your business. You need them not only to close business, but also to keep internal productivity and motivation high, and to use their own social media and friends to spread the word. It helps to celebrate small wins, together and often.

2. Encourage and require outside engagement and feedback. You set the tone when you schedule and hold regular “all-hands meetings” to provide updates on progress and recognize participation of others in outside events. It helps to provide everyone with business cards, a current copy of investor presentations, and strategy details.

   I find that startups who do this are much more likely to stay ahead of the game, by proactive innovation, keeping up with customer trends, and being viewed as a leader in their community. In this days of pervasive communication, this is powerful marketing.

3. Facilitate participation in industry conferences and networking. Team members need your support in keeping up with peers outside the company, and related industry developments. Their relationships with industry experts and even competitors can be a key marketing boost to your brand and business, or a disaster if not done positively.

   Thus, when you participate in trade shows and conferences, staff the booth from development and other organizations, as well as marketing. Make sure all team members are included or considered for standards organizations and customer briefings, so they know what is going on and have opportunities for relationships with real customers.

4. Provide cross-functional mentoring and coaching. I have found that even the most dedicated developer can benefit from a formal opportunity to talk to your key marketing guru, and vice versa. Everyone learns from these sessions, and your business will benefit from the input. Another approach is putting people on temporary assignments for growth.

   These sessions also facilitate career advancement, with a better understanding of the skills and experience required to move into marketing or finance. Everyone loves a no-risk approach to testing their ability to advance into new areas of the business.

5. Recognize and reward “marketing” efforts and results. Team members who see others outside the marketing staff rewarded for their efforts will be motivated to participate. Opportunities include anyone bringing in a new customer, sharing the load in a social media campaign, or representing the company for a good social cause.

   All this doesn’t require a large increase in the marketing budget, since peer and public recognition by you is often more important than money. In addition, the opportunity to work on social and environmental causes of personal interest generates great loyalty.

The most effective teams are the ones who feel a common responsibility for the success of the business, and are willing to reach out and contribute to all elements of the business. This develops leaders at all levels, and these emergent leaders are not hesitant to take ownership when they see business growth opportunities, thus multiplying your impact and marketing.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on CayenneConsulting on 11/05/2018 ***

5 Strategy Realities For Running Your Small Business

As an advisor and mentor for many startups and small business founders, following my initial career in big business, I realize that the key strategies to achieve success in small businesses are often different from those that make larger businesses successful. The primary difference is the amount of time you have to spend working in the business versus on the business.

Small business owners have to do both, and split their time carefully between the two. Big business executives have the luxury of spending all their time working on the business, while delegating the operational tasks to other people and processes already in place to handle these. Continuing to micromanage both as your business grows is the downfall of many entrepreneurs.

I found this challenge and others outlined well in a new book, “Running Your Small Business Like a Pro,” by Andrew Frazier, who also brings many years of working with big and small companies. He recommends some key techniques, learned by both of us the hard way, that every small business owner can and must deploy to achieve long-term sustainability and growth:

1. Must be more creative and flexible to compete effectively. With a tiny organization, small businesses can make decisions quickly, allowing them to respond quickly to customer input and changes. Sharing the same space also facilitates creativity. Big companies become divided up into silos, and often fail to collaborate or communicate.

   For example, in the sales silo of my former organization, it was common to point to marketing or development as the source of a sales issue, but communication across to these organizations took forever, and agreeing on a common solution was difficult.

2. Must learn to grow beyond initial traction and survival. As a small business owner and entrepreneur, you may relish the flexibility and the challenge of getting that first traction and customer recognition. But continued growth requires a focus on staffing, more collaboration, and formalizing processes to meet the rising transaction volume.

   I was recently an advisor to a very smart entrepreneur who insisted on getting personally involved in closing every sale, as well as every new feature development. The result was a growth plateau, as well as entrepreneur health and family balance challenges. He refused to begin working primarily on the business, rather than primarily in it.

3. Small businesses need to create automated processes. A successful business has many components, including sales, marketing, finance, and operations, and these need automated interaction rules and leaders, so that you don’t have to the glue. If you find yourself getting calls at all hours on the same issues, the business is running you.

   One solution here is to hire help rather than helpers. Helpers do only what you tell them, whereas true help comes from people who know more than you in their specific area, such as sales or finance. You can delegate to them, and you learn from them over time.

4. Find a coach who has a holistic view of all elements. Big companies are in a position to benefit from experts or consultants who focus on a given function. Small businesses, on the other hand, more often need advisors on the overall strategy, funding, and the integration of individual components. The solution here is more likely peers than experts.

   For example, there are several entrepreneur community networks, like EO and TiE, which offer education, mentorship, and peer networking for new business owners in the early growth stage of their business. Match your advisors with your business stage.

5. Surround yourself with people with complementary skills. As a small business owner, you have a broad range of responsibilities, and none of us can be experts in all. Therefore, it important to find people who can fill in the gaps we have, perhaps in finance or marketing. In big business, you can use multiple people with more skill depth.

   Too many entrepreneurs I know tend to hire people like themselves, to provide the positive feedback they crave, but can’t help them fill in skill gaps. Of course, all of us need to continually be in learn mode, as the business world in changing around us.

Going forward, the economy and competition will continue to become more challenging for small business owners, and hopefully your small company will grow into the ranks of the larger successful ones. Thus the more you learn about and use the right strategies at every level, the better prepared you will be to rise above the crowd now, and in the future.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 10/29/2018 ***

8 Keys To Market Delivery Of Innovative Technologies

Since I am a techie at heart, I always get excited when founders pitch their new innovation as “disruptive,” meaning that it is so unique that it will create a new market and disrupt the existing value network, displacing established products and markets. Unfortunately, I have learned that investors and customers are wary that big changes will take a long time, and cost more money.

Therefore I always recommend to entrepreneurs that they use the term cautiously, but I never discourage their focus on disruptive innovation. In fact, in the greater scheme of things, it’s the best way to gain a real competitive advantage, and maximize economic value. Linear thinking is a good way get started as an entrepreneur, but paradigm shifts are the route to a big legacy.

As examples, everyone should be able to relate to Steve Jobs with the iPhone, Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, and Elon Musk with Tesla. These didn’t happen by following the conventional paths of entrepreneurism. In my experience, you need to follow some best-of-breed guidelines that will keep you ahead of the crowd, and improve your odds of success in making the big step:

1. Focus first on solving a real customer problem. Business success always relates to how effectively you satisfy customer needs. Big technology breakthroughs don’t always correlate directly to the mind of customers, so your challenge is the translation. Investors and customers want to see how these become a positive value proposition for all parties.

2. Take advantage of big data and modern design tools. Passion is a good start, but there is no substitute these days for real data and powerful tools to confirm the value and quality of specific features and customer trends. Your goal is to minimize the delivery cycle, and reduce the number of pivots required to find the sweet spot of your market.

3. Find a way to highlight elements of social responsibility. New markets are often found as a result of culture changes, new economic realities, and emerging geographies. People want to help build a sustainable environment, and improve the well-being of others. Make that a way to bridge a big technology change to customers and employees.

4. Assemble a team willing to think and act outside the box. A new technology usually needs a business model that is also a paradigm shift. Make sure your whole team is willing to take risks and explore new options on pricing, marketing, and manufacturing. Your challenge is to provide the visionary leadership to stay ahead of the pack.

5. Exploit disruptive opportunities all along the value chain. Key elements of the value chain include distribution, suppliers, sales channels, and reliance on coopetition. New technologies often allow innovative marketplace entrants to eliminate whole stages of the value chain, for example dramatically reducing capital and infrastructure costs.

6. Continually expand your team competency into new areas. Nokia had a deep competency in cell phone technology, and owned a major share of the market, but they were slow to expand into the software and accessories of smartphones. As a result, Apple was able to leapfrog their lead, and Nokia was never able to recover.

7. Plan on disrupting yourself before competitors do. Cash cows can be your downfall in this rapidly changing world. You need to constantly attack your own existing business model, and plan to replace it before customers start looking at better alternatives, and competitors leapfrog your solutions. It’s hard to recover from a hemorrhaging business.

8. Look around the corner for the next real breakthrough. A single disruptive technology is not enough to assure your long-term success. You need visionary leadership, as well as a culture and process for finding the next big step, recruiting the people, incenting them, and training them to make it happen.

Linear non-disruptive thinking may be the way to get started as an entrepreneur, but it won’t get you the big success or the legacy that you crave. Your challenge is to think big, communicate effectively to avoid scaring customers and investors, and follow the best of breed guidelines to deliver on a timely and ongoing basis. It’s a lot more fun than a random walk based on a dream.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on CayenneConsulting on 10/25/2018 ***

5 Market Obstacles That Kill Even Compelling Products

Even when your new product or solution fills a real customer need, and has a positive value proposition, many new venture founders are surprised and frustrated to find that excited customers are hard to find and growth is slow.

Thus, as an advisor to many startups, without being negative, I often spend hours with them brainstorming on all the possible barriers that may slow adoption rates, and how to plan or modify the business model to work around these obstacles.

For example, the software-as-a-service (SAAS) subscription model was created many years ago to offset the high one-time purchase cost obstacle that killed many early software products. Since then, the monthly subscription model has become the norm for a wide range of products and services, from web applications, to hardware, and services of all types.

Other obstacles to product adoption are equally onerous, but not so obvious, and in some cases, there are no easy solutions. Still it’s better to be forewarned than to be caught off guard, with no Plan B or resources to pivot. Here is my prioritized list of the top challenges I see today, with some recommendations on how to offset them:

1. Customers don’t know your product exists. In today’s crush of over 140,000 new websites per day worldwide, it’s easy to be overlooked, no matter how compelling your offering. My answer is that innovative marketing is always required, to stand out above the crowd. Word-of-mouth is great, but I look for a real marketing budget and action plan.

   As a starting point, I would expect to see a marketing budget in the first year of 15 to 30 percent of projected revenues. The plan better include some specifics on how this will be spread across multiple digital and traditional marketing channels, and metrics to measure which are providing the best return on investment.

2. They know you exist, but any change is painful. Your challenge here is first to convince potential customers that your solution alleviates a higher level of existing pain, via quantified cost reduction, improved productivity, or other value. Fuzzy marketing terms like “easier to use,” “nice to have,” and “less expensive” won’t help your case.

   I recommend realistic examples of cost savings and return-on-investment testimonials from early users. In my experience, single digit cost reductions are usually not enough to incent users to change tools or vendors. In all cases, make the change simple and fun.

3. Product is “disruptive technology” or a “paradigm shift.” These are terms often used by technical entrepreneurs to convince investors and customers that their solution is so innovative that it will disrupt the market or define a new category. My advice is to use these terms very sparingly, since they invoke more fear than value to normal people.

   The best strategy with real customers is to focus on the simplicity and value of your offerings, rather than the technical complexities. Steve Jobs was a master at this, and was able to establish a whole new market for smartphones by keeping his focus on positive human factors.

4. Requires infrastructure or regulatory changes. Your product may have tremendous customer value, but the market may be stymied by forces that move slowly, and are somewhat outside your control. For example, the move to self-driving vehicles raises many issues about liability, new laws required, and infrastructure changes.

   Here, you first have to face the fact that more time and money will likely be required, for exhaustive public education and demonstrations, lobbying for regulatory changes, and incenting infrastructure growth. Identify interim growth steps to mitigate the cost and risk.

5. Customer buying decision process is multi-level or complex. Selling products to education organizations, or the government, is never simple. Decisions are impacted by budget cycles, multiple approvals required, and political issues, no matter how strong the value proposition. Here I look for a plan that shows marketing at all the required levels.

   Sometimes the solution is to change the target customer. For example, several education product providers I know have switched to selling to parents, rather than school boards. Others, selling scheduled home maintenance, have shifted away from less-caring homeowners to insurance companies, who see the savings in reduced claims.

Based on my experience, inadequate attention to acceptance obstacles and the realities of customer motivation are the primary reasons that startups fail, even with a great idea and a great product. Innovative solutions alone won’t make a business. You have to find and convince the right customers – they won’t automatically find you just because you have a great solution.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 10/24/2018 ***

Apply Hospitality-Driven Thinking to Your New Venture

I just finished a new book by Stephen J. Cloobeck, “Checking In: Hospitality-Driven Thinking, Business, and You”. As a self-made entrepreneur and former chairman of Diamond Resorts International, he asserts that the five biggest companies by market value today, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, aren’t really tech, but hospitality companies.

Tech may be the tool, but hospitality – making life a little easier, more comfortable, and more enjoyable for your customer, is the winning focus.

Unfortunately, too many of the technical entrepreneurs I mentor and advise are focused on their technology, and assume that the value will be self-evident to customers. They don’t do the translation from technology to customer comfort in their marketing, and they don’t constantly check to make sure that every interaction results in a memorable customer experience.

The keys to doing this well, for tech and non-tech businesses, are highlighted in his book, and he offers the following five lessons from hospitality to all entrepreneurs:

1. Priority at every business stage on the customer. Rather than leave your customer focus at the delivery stage, and technology in the front, customer needs and expectations must be the beginning of your journey via requirements, and remembered all along the way in times of crisis and confusion, competition, growth, failure, and success.

   For example, as a potential investor, I regularly see business plans that lead with pages on the technology, and only abstractly relate to customer value and improving the total customer experience. Voice recognition and artificial intelligence are great technologies, but very few customers today can tell you how these make their life more enjoyable.

2. Commit to continuous improvement. Customer needs and expectations are changing faster than ever these days. If you can’t anticipate and pivot to match these changes, to the extent of obsoleting your own offerings, competitors will step in and customers will leave, never to return. Improve the whole customer experience, as well as the product.

   Back in 1999, Amazon patented a feature and changed their own process and on-line commerce forever: One-click purchasing, versus re-entering name, address, and credit card information for every transaction. Who knows how many real impulse buys were committed and new customers were attracted thanks to this innovation?

3. Focus on reputation over brand. Prioritizing reputation over brand means you care more about what others think of you than what you have to say about yourself. It forces you to prioritize the health of your organization from the inside out. It means you are listening to, and learning from, your customers, stakeholders, and what critics say.

   United Airlines, with a great brand name, found this out the hard way a few years ago when the airlines smashed a songwriter’s guitar and refused to reimburse him. He got even by going viral, so easy to do these days, costing shareholders perhaps $180 million.

4. Ensure total alignment of all elements of your business. With every venture now worldwide, in terms of customer base, service delivery, and supply chain, the challenge is to maintain the same customer experience, while adapting to different people, places, and events. All team members must share the same mission, vision or core values.

   This requires that you recruit the best talent, train to your best, and motivate so team members all perform at their best. Break traditional management hierarchies, and build a level of trust and responsibility at all levels.

5. Do well by doing good for others as well as yourself. Be a role model for your team in helping customers and others, to demonstrate the kind of person you want everyone to be, and create the kind of world you want to live in. Add a social value giveback, or highlight your positive impact on the environment, to increase customer delight.

Apple, for example, recently reported the use of 100% renewable energy in powering its global facilities – the first major technology company to declare and fulfill such a commitment. Google places such a premium of employee happiness, with perks and benefits, that it is regularly recognized as one of the best places to work in America.

Although these principles were derived from executive experience and success in the hospitality industry, I have easily expanded their scope to technology, and I believe these apply to every new venture. Thus I agree that in the focus on customers and employees, every entrepreneur can and should take lessons from the hospitality business.

Marty Zwilling

*** First published on Inc.com on 10/22/2018 ***