The American way is the creative and entrepreneurial spirit that remains strong even in the face of a terrible economy, bad news and a lot of reasons for people to be depressed.

I was fortunate enough to participate in the Kansas City Startup Weekend this past weekend and I came away with a new level of respect for innovation, creativity and  the ability for inspired, committed people to get stuff done.  A big thanks to Dan Melton at nptLabs for organizing the event!

If you don’t know, Startup Weekend is a celebration of the startup process – but the coolest part is that the attendees aren’t guests, but active participants that are on their own to make things happen.

How does Startup Weekend Work?

Here’s a quick overview of what happened:

1. Pull together 80 – 90 people into the Enterprise Center of Johnson County (people from Kansas City and several other locations around the country).  Most were somehow associated with technology in some way, but it’s not a requirement.
2. Serve beer and pizzas to get people loosened up a bit.
3. Pitch Startup ideas – participants literally get 60 seconds in front of the entire group to share their idea, what it is, why it would be worthwhile and the type of help they think they’ll need to get it launched.  The Kansas City group started out with 43 different (sometimes wildly different) ideas.
4. Vote to narrow the ideas down to the top 8.
5. Assign each idea / team lead to a room and have everyone decide what team they’d like to work on.
6. Start working, with a goal to present a full fledged business ‘Pitch’ and a live demo (if possible) on Sunday night – 50+ hours later.
7. Do 10 minute presentations on Sunday night and vote on the various teams, with the winning teams getting a bit of money, some recognition and potential opportunities to move their business forward with exposure to some ‘Money’ in the crowd.

Not all of the original 8 ideas survived the first couple of hours and at least 1 idea ended up being a complete new entry after the fact, but the general direction of most things held up fairly well to the initial pitches.

What were the Startups?

Here’s my quick recap on the different teams – you can see lots of additional information at Kansas City Startup Weekend site.

TopChirp.com

I was fortunate enough to work on the TopChirp.com team, headed up by Simon Kuo.  The concept for TopChirp.com is that while twitter is growing immensely and there are lots of powerful things you can do with it, twitter is focused on ‘What’s Going On Now!’ with very limited practical ways to find historical posts or share them with the world.

TopChirp is like Digg for Twitter – you submit a Twitter post to TopChirp.com and other TopChirp users can vote on whether they agree with your submission or not. 

Ultimately the idea is to make the most important twitter posts more meaningful by keeping them in front of people and allow other users to weigh in on them.  Additionally, this becomes a way to mine the twitter data in a way that’s not currently possible.

My Take:  Although we didn’t win, the ability to start with absolutely nothing and deliver a working application was pretty amazing.  The tech team did a fantastic job making things happen.  I got pulled away from the team for some family obligations for part of the time, but overall it was a great experience and I really enjoyed working with the team.  TopChirp as an idea is worthwhile and the team is interested in continuing to support it to see what might happen.

RareBrew.com

RareBrew.com was a late entry, but that certainly didn’t hold them back.  Click the link to check out the site, but it’s a full fledged online community devoted to the pleasures of unusual and rare teas from around the world.  The idea is to support a focused and passionate community and offer Tea and Tea related products as a revenue generator.

My Take:  RareBrew also didn’t win, but they did create what seems to be a fully realized community site that I think can be really popular within it’s niche (which is a great place to be).

Annotify.com

Annotify was built around the idea that the internet is based around documents and people like to share their annotated documents for work or with their friends.  The technology would be to take a copy of a webpage and annotate it to your heart’s content and then share that with the world.  It’s a tough technical concept to pull off, but they did get a demo up that mostly worked.

My Take:  Annotify took 3rd in the voting – the demo was rough, but you couldn’t miss the energy and enthusiasm that the team put into it.  It’s a cool technical idea, but probably difficult to monetize even if you can solve all of the technical problems.

Eussi.com

Eussi is a really interesting idea centered around making old issues of print magazines available online (eussi is issue backwards…back issues…very clever!).  The idea is to replace the old print ads with new digitized ads as the primary means for monetizing the business. 

My Take:  I think there would be a lot of interest in this idea assuming that you can get the publishers to play along.  It’s an uphill climb from a legal perspective, but it has possibilities.

Treadex.com

Treadex is an interesting idea, born out of the observation that there are a lot of out of work bike riders that hang out at the Broadway cafe that could be put to work as couriers if there was only an easy way to hook them up with potential clients.  Treadex would act as an online clearinghouse – hooking up would be bikers with people needing stuff delivered.

My Take:  Initially I thought this idea was dead on arrival, but the team did a great job laying out how the service could work (and get around the legal issues).  Bike couriers are huge business in other cities – Kansas City probably would benefit from something like this, I hope they can make it work.

CovalentBonding.net

CovalentBonding.net is an idea that the team lead, Josh has had for a while, but didn’t necessarily know how to move forward.  Essentially Covalent Bonding addresses the fact that scientists don’t have an easy way to collaborate with other researchers that they aren’t already working closely with.  Especially during the discovery phases of research, it can take years for results on work to get published – work that might immediately benefit someone else’s efforts to find a cure or solve an important problem.

My Take:  This was clearly the most important and different idea of the weekend.  The ability to use Social Media technology to connect disparate people and efforts and bridge the gap on critical issues like medical research is a fantastic idea – and not that hard to imagine.  The team and Josh did a great job explaining the need and how the solution could work.  Covalent Bonding came in 2nd overall by the narrowest of margins!

MyConcerts.fm

Myconcerts.fm rocks!  It’s a simple, but great idea that has a lot of possibilities and you can use it RIGHT NOW!  The idea is to use twitter to notify you when one of  your favorite bands is coming to town – and you can buy the tickets from their site.  It’s easy to use and they were able to get it fully functioning in a great interface over the course of a couple of days.

My Take:  The MyConcerts team did a great job solving a problem they were passionate about – it was clear that this was something they were really into and that really translated into a cool product with possibilities.

Stashmate.com

Stashmate.com was another great example of a straightforward idea that solves a real problem in a new way.  Stashmate answers the question “How do I keep track of all my stuff when it’s packed in a bunch of boxes?”.  Anyone that’s been in a move, knows the frustration of finding your stuff later – this is a slick application to solve that problem.

My Take:  Stashmate is very focused, but I can see a lot of useful ways to use the functionality, including sharing storage space at work.  It’s not likely to be a huge money maker, but it could be a handy and valuable tool.  Great job on the design.

Activism2Go

Activism2Go (Activism2go.com) was the winning entry for the weekend.  Put simply it’s a smartphone application that replaces the functionality of fundraising / polling phone banks.  However it taps into a much bigger trend that people want to help and volunteer for causes they believe in, but they want to do it on their own terms (and when it’s convenient).  This app would allow you to make a few fundraising calls when you had some time without requiring the volunteers to go into a call center.  The concept is fairly simple, but it’s a brilliant way to change the way people do things.

My Take:  CovalentBonding maybe the most important of the ideas overall, but Activism2Go may be the idea that can make the biggest impact in the next couple of years.  It’s a brilliant realization on how to fundamentally change a limiting mindset – and they got the app up and running by Sunday night.  Very well done!

Overall

Although all of the products are potentially viable businesses, it doesn’t really matter if they succeed in the long run or not, the important part was keeping the energy and innovation alive – great contacts were made, fun was had and it’s even possible that the world might be a better place for it – not bad for a weekend!

Share your thoughts in the comments below, I’d love to hear what others thought!

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business CoachSimilar Posts:

• Can we go back to the good old days of business?
• Twitter frenzy – what's it all about?
• Jump into Entrepreneurship this week

Do you have a desktop computer at your house and a laptop for work (or multiple work or home computers)?

Do you ever have a situation where you need to transfers files from one computer to another?

How about sharing files with other people that you’re working with, or making files available for a download to a group?

Have you ever worried about losing your files because of  a hard drive failure or a corrupt file of some sort?

Then you need to check out Dropbox!  Dropbox is a new online App that acts as storage for files, easy transfer between computers, backup and even saves revisions of working files for you.

There are lots of other ways to do what Dropbox does – network sharing, flash drives, emailing files, even other internet applications can duplicate some of what Dropbox does, but I haven’t seen anything that’s as easy to use and works this cleanly and quickly.

The application is free for less than 2 Gigabytes of storage so there’s really no reason not to check it out.

In fact, if you use this link Dropbox Signup, then both of us will qualify for extra space.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below!

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

Similar Posts:

• Discover 2 Cloud tools that will rock your Biz!
• What do you do when Old Reliable goes up in smoke?
• How do you remember all of your stuff?

One of the benefits / curses for what I do is always looking for new things to learn.  I sign up for newsletters, I subscribe to blogs, I check Twitter and LinkedIn for what people are finding and talking about.  In the last week, I ran across two very different articles that had a very similar message.

Coincidentally – a variation of this topic is coming up in discussions with clients, especially in my Peer Group advisory boards.  The topic?  What does it take to succeed?  Or put more practically, what is the 1 thing everyone could put into practice today and instantly be successful?

Three little words?

The first article was from a weekly newsletter by Troy Harrison, owner of SalesForce Solutions, a sales training and consulting company here in Kansas City.  You should sign up for the Hotsheet – Troy has a lot of good tips. 

Troy’s Hotsheet topic was: “The Three Most Important Words” – here’s a quick excerpt:

Sometimes, all it takes is three little words.  I’m serious.  Sometimes, three little words – the saying, the adoption, the believing – can make all the difference in the world.  I’m not talking about the classic “I love you,” or any variations thereof; nor am I speaking of anything that begins with “go” and ends with “yourself.”  Although I must admit that all those phrases have their time and place.

No, I’m talking about business, and the three words I’m referring to are:  sense of urgency.

He goes on to make a strong case that a business or an individual with a sense of urgency is the difference between winning and losing in the game of business.

Get Off Your Ass…

Naomi Dunford is the owner of Itty Biz, a refreshing small business (Itty Biz) blog that has a lot of great advice and ideas for business owners.  I love her approach and her advice, but I do feel obligated to put a warning with that recommendation – Naomi tends to swear like a truck driver, which doesn’t bother me, but I can see where it might put some people off.

Anyway, one of her recent posts was titled “Get Off Your Ass“, which pretty clearly cuts to the advice that even if you’re feeling overwhelmed, even if you’re scared that things aren’t going to go well, the best thing you can do is Take Action!  Here’s a quick excerpt:

Here’s a bit of secret advice from the compiled entrepreneurial wisdom of me, my mom, my dad, both my grandfathers, both of their fathers, and a few hundred clients. It’s not just for SpeakEasy people, it’s for everybody.

Here’s the secret:

It doesn’t matter what you do. Just get off your ass and do it.

Her point – made in very clear and direct language that I love, is that people that are consistently taking action, what ever it is, are headed towards success.

Yeah but…I’m already doing a lot…

So here’s my take on this – if you are finding yourself metaphorically curled up into the fetal position, curled up on your couch and rocking back and forth because you are overwhelmed with too many choices, or you’re down because of the never ending negative spin on the economy.  Then I wholeheartedly agree that you need to find a Sense of Urgency and Get Off Your Ass (GOYA) and take action!

However if you’re like a lot of people I know or that I’m working with, you have a sense of urgency and you are taking action, then I would like to complicate this rule just a bit:

Have a sense of urgency, GOYA and take action – but consistently focus on actions that will benefit your business the most.

The trap I see people falling into is doing too many different things and floundering around.  They are extremely busy, maybe they are even effective at what ever they’re doing, but they haven’t identified the high value activities versus the low value activities and they are spending an equal amount of time and energy on everything.

The 80/20 rule says that 80% of your outcome will come from 20% of your activities.  So keep the Sense of Urgency, continue to GOYA, but figure out your high value activities if you really want to accelerate your results!

What are your top 3 high value activities for growing your business?  Share 1 of them here, I’d love to get some ideas.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Similar Posts:

• Ready, Aim, Fire, or Ready, Fire, Aim?
• What are the 5 steps to the Big Picture?
• Are you confusing Activity with Productivity?

I hate car shopping – it’s not quite as bad as a root canal or re-grouting tile, but I certainly wouldn’t call it fun. For starters, you’re looking at buying a hugely expensive piece of equipment that loses 25% of it’s value as soon as you drive it off the lot. On top of that, you generally have to run the gauntlet of stereotypically bad sales techniques (and salespeople).

However at some point you’re going to need a different vehicle, so we decided to bit the bullet.  The car industry is in bad shape right now, so you would think that they would be pulling out all the stops to make a sale.  I was interested to see if the buying process had improved since the last time I had been car shopping.

We set out to visit 3 car dealers for test drives and found 3 very different situations:  Read on to see what happened last weekend! (how’s that for a tease?)

The Car Shopping Process

The car we’re looking to buy is a smaller size cross-over SUV. We’ve done the homework, researched what was out there on the internet and narrowed it down to 3 choices. The next step was to actually drive the choices, get some more information and see if any of the options would work for us.

We had a fairly short window to test drive our 3 choices before baseball practice on Saturday afternoon, so we loaded up the car and headed out.

Stop #1

Our first stop was a fairly new dealership that wasn’t very crowded – which was why the sales team was hovering outside, waiting to pounce on anyone that drove up.

We explained the situation and with surprisingly little discussion, we were setup with a test drive. The vehicle was good quality, the kids loved it and overall it got good marks. From a sales perspective, our salesman was very low key (which was what we wanted) and the only thing that struck me as a potential miss was a lack of any questions on what we were looking for.

We got in, took a test drive and got out in less than a ½ hour. We did end up ‘meeting’ the sales manager, but it was also fairly low key and mostly an opportunity to let us know that they would do what ever they could to earn our business.

Overall it was a pretty good sales experience.

Stop #2

The second stop went down hill pretty quickly. It was also fairly quiet at the dealership and once we explained what we wanted to do, the salesman promptly went into full on sales mode. He made sure that he explained every feature, in great detail, whether we were interested or not. To top it off, their policy was to have the salesman ride in the car – allowing him to continue the feature review during the entire test drive.  The kids were less than thrilled to share the backseat and they had a hard time separating the car from the salesman.  We had to explain that we were interested in the car and that the salesman didn’t come as part of the package!

During a 25 minute discussion, he didn’t ask any questions on what might be important to us, what we were looking for and he clearly didn’t recognize that he was digging a hole that was going to be difficult to get out of.

We also met the manager here, but he clearly wasn’t interested in us and was checking a box to say that we had met.  Despite the ongoing sales pitch, the whole thing moved fairly quickly and we were out in 45 minutes or so.

Overall the experience was okay – unfortunately it’s about what we expected when we started out for the day, reinforcing the idea that we wanted to talk as little as possible to the salesman going forward.

Stop #3

The last stop started out alright – the salesman came off as friendly and a little scatter brained, but happy to help us out. It took him quite a while to figure out where the keys and tags for the vehicle we wanted to drive were, and during this time he offered to do a ‘quick’ 5 minute appraisal of our car (that we’ll be trading in) so that we’d have an idea what it might be worth. That made sense, so we left him our key and went on the test drive (he asked if we wanted him to ride along, but didn’t push it when we said we were okay).

We finished the test drive and a bit to our surprise, our car was gone from where we had parked and there was no sign of our salesman…! We waited for several minutes and he finally came in from the back, explaining that they would really like to keep our car overnight so they could do a full appraisal on it – of course we were welcome to keep the car we had driven through the weekend so we could really appreciate what a great deal it was.

Clearly we had fallen for a classic sales trick (note- don’t give up your keys until they’ve purchased your car!). What was really surprising was that he didn’t want to take no for an answer – it took another 5 minutes of discussion before he gave us our keys back, then he had to walk us back to the farthest part of their lot before we could get our car back!

By that point, we were running late for baseball practice and it wouldn’t have mattered if we liked that car, we wouldn’t have been buying from that dealership.

Conclusion:

Car sales are a tough gig – there’s a lot of competition and through decades of bad experiences, car buyers have been trained to watch out for all manner of selling tricks, which makes them very difficult to legitimately engage.

However, on the positive side, if someone shows up at your car lot on  a nice afternoon with their kids in tow, they are interested in your product and all you need to do is figure out how to help them complete the purchase (i.e not sell them).

Think about this for most business owners (especially business to business sales) – your target customer comes to your office, tells you what they’re interested and self selects as someone that wants your kind of product or service.  For most business owners, that would be a dream come true – your marketing worked, you have an interested prospect and all you have to do is provide the sales experience the visitors are looking for.

In our case, we’ve bought several cars before, we clearly had done research and knew what we wanted to see and we didn’t need or want any additional ‘help’! 

People like to buy, but they hate to be sold (and they hate it even more when you attempt to hijack their car under false pretenses).  Why is it that so few car dealerships understand this simple idea?

What’s your car buying experience lately?  Share your thoughts here, I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade – Kansas City Business Coach

Similar Posts:

• Adventures in Car Buying – A positive story!
• Can you sell like Rumpelstiltskin?
• Whose system are you using when you sell?

You’d like to make more money, you’d like to have more time in the day, you’d really just like things to run better.  However the system you have is perfectly designed for the results that you’re getting.  In other words, if you want a different outcome, then you’re going to need to make some changes.

Change – that’s a tricky thing.  A few months ago I wrote about the Formula for Change that explains the different components it takes to overcome the resistance to change.  In large organizations, that resistance can take on many forms, but for business owners, most of the time the resistance can be found between your ears!

While it’s important to figure out the technical side of what you want to change (i.e. new process, system or whatever) it’s more important to get a handle on what your resistance is and where it’s coming from.

I’m scared to death!

These days a very common form of resistance to change…or head trash comes from fear.  A dose of the evening news can generate a lot of fear – as can talking to negative friends, co-workers or just people on the street, unfortunately there are a lot of ways to generate fear.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

From Dune – Author Frank Herbert

There are also lots of kinds of fear: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of public speaking, fear of being judged, fear of change, fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth (Arachibutyrophobia – apparently that’s a bigger deal than I would have thought).

The point is that it’s possible there are elements of fear that are keeping you from making changes to how you do business.  What are they?

Other sticking points for change

It may not be fear, there are other things that might be leading to a high resistance to change. 

Maybe you have a culture that values tradition and maintaining the status quo.  I’m sure you’ve worked with people that are stuck in the mode of “that’s how we’ve always done it”.  With the pace of change in the world today, this kind of environment isn’t going to survive for long.

In some cases, there might be a culture of challenging everything, just for the sake of challenging.  I’m pretty sure my kids are falling into this trap – they just like to argue about certain things, just to argue.  Although annoying, this is easier to deal with than some other potential road blocks.

Finally – I think it’s safe to say that some people are just stubborn and unwilling to change just on principle.  Whatever the cause, as long as the resistance to change is really high, it’s going to be very difficult to implement new ways of doing things.

What can you do?

There aren’t any easy answers – I had a great conversation yesterday with Joyce Layman, an associate with Pacific Accord.  They specialize in helping people and organizations identify resistance and head trash and figure out how to work through it.  She’s doing a lot of really cool things, including some work with non-profits and high risk children (and adults).

If you think you might be stuck, especially if you think it’s more of a company culture type of thing, then I would definitely suggest giving Joyce a call.

Alternatively, when you recognize that you need to change but can’t seem to get things moving, take some time and try to identify where your resistance is coming from.  A lot of times, if you can recognize it and bring it out in the light of day, it will lose some of it’s power – maybe enough to let you move forward.

Where does your resistance to change come from?  Share your thoughts or experiences here, I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Similar Posts:

• How to scientifically make change happen!
• Thoughts on Tribes
• The Science of Change