From the Kauffman Foundation’s Sketchbook – Three Things!

This week we are celebrating the 3rd annual Global Entrepreneurship Week, started by our hometown Kauffman Foundation.  With all the focus on generating great ideas and starting up businesses, I wanted to pass along some great advice from business owners and entrepreneurs who made their jump in the last few years.

Making that jump to start your own business takes a lot of guts and the more you can learn from those who have done it, the better off you’ll be. To that end, I did an informal interview with a few of my Peer Group Advisory Boards and asked them simply:

“What’s the best advice you would give someone who’s planning to start a business now?”

Here’s the summary of their responses in no particular order.

1. Enjoy the upside to owning your own business – you’re in charge and you get the freedom and control to do what you want to do. Additionally you have the opportunity to build something that’s all yours.
2. Building a business is complex and you aren’t going to be an expert in everything – don’t be afraid to ask for help along the way.
3. Find a mentor. Someone you can bounce ideas off of, who can help you get perspective and hold you accountable.
4. You’ve got to be flexible…the market will change and your understanding of the market and your business will change as well. Be prepared to adjust your course.
5. Do what you can to find multiple revenue streams, more ways to generate money. If you only have one product or service, it’s likely you’ll get stuck and it’s good to have something to fall back on.
6. Even though you’re in a hurry to get started, take the time up front to really plan things out. Your upfront costs and decisions can make or break you.  Take the time to make sure it’s money well spent.
7. Understand your financials and get accounting and payroll help as soon as you can afford it.
8. Have patience, things will take longer and cost more than you think
9. Make sure you have enough financial runway so you’re not panicked or have to shut down if things take longer than you expect to get off the ground.
10. Whatever business you’re in, you’re in the business of marketing first – if you can’t position and market your product / service effectively not much else matters.
11. Make it your focus to add value with every contact you have (clients, networking contacts, pretty much everyone).
12. Be clear on what you’re getting into when you start a business:  Long hours, challenges outside of your comfort zone and a lonely path. It’s a tough challenge (but worth it when you succeed).
13. Get comfortable with risk and uncertainty.  It will be a while before you can count on a regular paycheck (like possibly 12 to 18 months).
14. Make sure you’ve got family support and they’re excited about what you’re doing.
15. Build connections (real relationships) – networking and building the right win-win relationships is crucial to long term success.
16. Give yourself a clear go / no-go date to help you manage the bumps in the road. If you have a bad month early on, you still have time to recover because you haven’t hit your date yet.
17. Be clear on why you want to create your business…if you’re not excited about what you’re doing, no one else will be either.
18. Make sure you create and work off of a written business plan (can be as simple as a couple of pages, but a plan that covers where the money comes from and where it’s going).
19. Starting something isn’t easy and it isn’t quick – it takes hard work to succeed.
20. Have faith in yourself, when things get tough you have to push through.
21. Your business has a gestational age…despite your full commitment few will take you seriously until you’ve been around at least 9 months…sometimes much longer.
22. Read the E-Myth and be aware of your mix between Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician (and understand what that means).
23. Setup an advisory board for your business – people you trust who will tell you hard truths and encourage you.
24. Figure out if you have the disposition to be an entrepreneur. Look for clues in your past – if you’ve never taken ownership and pushed to make money independently it will be tough to succeed in your own business.
25. Passion trumps perfection, you can’t wait for it to be just right  you have to get out there and start making things happen.

There’s nothing as challenging or as rewarding as creating your own business. And a big part of that challenge is getting your new business off the ground. It’s not for the faint of heart, but the above advice can help you succeed in the critical first year.

What advice above resonates with you?  What’s the best advice you’ve heard for entrepreneurs?  (Or business owners in general?)  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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photo by Tub Gurnard 

I came across three different blog entries today that loosely (alright…very loosely) fell under a convenient category of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD – which according to Wikipedia here was first coined by Gene Amdahl after leaving IBM to describe the Big Blue sales approach.)

Anyway, as someone that’s observed a lot of Fear, Uncertainty or Doubt in the last 6 months (both from myself and from clients and other small business owners) it’s a topic that’s never far from my mind.

What, me worry?

This first link is from Adam Sonnhalter – a fellow PBCA Business Coach from Cleveland that has a great post today titled “What Are You Worried About?“  Adam always does a great job getting to the heart of a topic in a very clear and straightforward way.

The focus of the post is on the natural tendency of many people to worry about things – often things that they have little to no control over.

Imagine if we were able to bottle up all that negative energy spent on worrying and put it to some good use. Heck, what if we could bottle up only 10% of it? How much better off would we be?

I think you’ll be amazed how much more you can get done when you focus your time and energy on things you can impact.

As Adam points out, one of the big benefits of working with someone like a business coach is the opportunity to get some perspective on what’s keeping you up at night.

Chunk to thrive?

I’ve never met Tim Brownson, but I like him a lot!  He’s a really funny guy that happens to be a life coach in Orlando Florida and he writes a must-read blog called the Discomfort Zone. 

His post today – Chunky Monkey builds a Plane, does a great job of painting a picture of how most of us feel overwhelmed.

The double whammy with feeling overwhelmed is that it can often lead to paralysis and inaction at exactly the time we need to do be getting stuff done. Which in turn leads to more crushing feelings because work just keeps piling up.

I sometimes think that overwhelming feeling is the price you pay for having an imagination and the ability to see the big picture.  However as Tim points out, a great strategy for dealing with that feeling is to chunk the work up into manageable pieces.

That’s all chunking down is. Taking a large task and breaking it down to smaller tasks and making sure your focus remains on the individual task at hand. Nobody get’s overwhelmed at having to order some rivets, but the thought of such a huge undertaking as building a plane, is an altogether different matter.

It’s not rocket science, but it’s always nice to have a reminder that you don’t have to do everything in one fell swoop (everyone should use ‘fell swoop’ in conversation at least once a day…!).

Fear of…appearing to be a Salesman?

Lastly, I read another interesting and entertaining post from my friend Rich Delaney from 2020 Marketing (Rich – you need to get a link from your blog to your website….) who recently attended a seminar from a professional that didn’t want to be pushy (or appear to be selling).

In his post:  I don’t want to be pushy about selling, Rich was surprised by the woman’s reluctance to ‘push’ her product / service.

I asked her why she doesn’t put them into her presentation to increase the understanding of the profitability payoff. “Oh no, that would come across as too pushy. If they want to see the testimonials they can go to my website and read them.” I slowly lifted my chin off of the floor and moved on.

Rich correctly points out that this is potentially costing sales or at least prospects, but on the flip side, I have to say I have a lot of empathy for the professional that doesn’t want to be viewed as ‘the salesperson’.  It’s a fear that I’ve dealt with for a long time and I’m just now starting to come to grips that you can sell and not be ‘That Guy’.

The key (for me at least) was recognizing that I’m offering a service that’s a huge benefit to people and I owe it to them to get myself out there and make them aware of my business.

Overcoming FUD…

It’s easier said than done, but talk to people, get a business coach (    ), plan your work and work your plan, keep things in perspective and recognize that you are valuable and adding value.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.  ~Mark Twain

What fears are keeping you up at night?  Share them here – I bet we could help you.

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

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photo by Amnemona

There are a lot of great ways to market your business, but a lot of really effective, inexpensive marketing ideas are related to networking.

In the book Endless Referrals by Bob Burg, Networking is defined as follows:

The cultivating of mutually beneficial, give and take, win-win relationships.

The first couple of steps is to establish a network of relationships that meet the definition above.  Although it’s not easy and it is an ongoing effort that takes time, there are a several good books on how to do that, including Endless Referrals and The Little Black Book of Connections by Jeffrey Gitomer.

But once you have a network in place, how can you fast track those relationships, in a win-win fashion to build your business?

Help me Help You!

One great way to leverage your network is to start doing some cross-promotions.

A cross promotion is when two or more businesses partner together and offer customers a value-added benefit from the partnering businesses.  The end result, if it’s well conceived, is an increase in business for everyone concerned.  A true win-win-win situation, because the customer ultimately benefits as well.

The Pizza and Movie example

Let’s take a look at a classic example of a cross-promotion:  Rental movies and pizza delivery.  The owner of the pizza shop knows that people renting movies, are going to be staying at home and are a perfect audience for pizza delivery.  So the pizza shop owner approaches the movie rental shop owner with a ‘special’ offer of $2.00 off a delivered pizza for movie rental customers only.

The movie rental shop gets to advertise and generate good will (at no cost) by offering a $2.00 value for a $7.00 movie rental.

The pizza shop gets a very targeted advertisement into the hands of an ideal customer, most likely when they’ll be thinking about food, at virtually no cost other than the discount itself.

The customer, who’s renting movies anyway, gets the opportunity for a cheaper pizza then they would have otherwise had.

Win-Win-WIn!!!

How do you get started?

The first step is to have a detailed picture of what your customers look like. 

A lot of times this is described as your target market.  The writers over at Gateway Blogging have written up an idea that takes this a 1/2 step further related to developing personas to describe your ideal customer.  It’s a great article – Greg does a nice job fleshing out the idea.

Either approach will work, but it’s important you know who you’re targeting and more importantly, beyond your product or service, what are other things they like?

The second step is to take a creative look at who you might be able to cross-promote with.

This is where your existing network comes into play.  Who do you know, like and trust that has a similar set of customers and a complimentary product to yours?

• If your clients are stay at home Soccer moms with teenage kids, perhaps you know the owner of a fitness center or a spa?
• If your clients are affluent parents of grade school kids, perhaps you know the owner of local ice cream / custard shop?
• If you clients are small business owners perhaps you know a business coach you could collaborate with.    Give me a call!

The real key here is the creativity.  If you don’t know the right partner, then this might be a great opportunity to meet someone new.  You’re approaching them with a win-win opportunity and a desire to help them grow their business, that’s pretty hard to turn down.

The third step is to come up with the promotion details and get it started!

A lot of times, once you’ve selected the partner, the actual promotion might be fairly straightforward, but this is another opportunity to be creative.

• You could do joint promotions of your products
• You could offer your customers discounts on someone else’s services
• You could create a valuable ‘giveaway’ that your partner gives to their customers.  An online example could be something like an e-book or white paper.

The biggest step for success is to take action!  Brainstorm with your network, identify others to collaborate with and get it out there.

I’d love to hear other examples of cross-promotions that you’ve heard of or that you’ve tried.  Share them here or contact me if you’ve got some ideas that you’d like to talk about with me.

Shawn Kinkade   www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

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Photo by Hamed Saber

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a workshop that I’m pulling together that will help small business owners build on their success.  As you know, running a small business is really complicated.

There are a lot of hats involved.  Marketing, Sales, Finance, Leadership – and that’s just the stuff you focus on in the morning!

So as I was working on the workshop idea, I found myself drifting all over the place in terms of the most important content and decided to pull together a summary of the key points.

1.  Have a vision and goals.

What is it that you want to do?  You have to be specific, you have to be descriptive – the vision should be inspiring (at a minimum inspiring to you, hopefully to your employees as well), the goals should be measurable and realistic.

Vision and goals supply the why and the what.  Do you remember having do things when you were a kid  and the reason was because your mom “said so”?  If you were like most people – that probably didn’t result in your best efforts. 

Compared that to being inspired – and the effort you get from that feeling.

2.  Have a plan.

“A vision without a plan is just a dream. A plan without a vision is just drudgery. But a vision with a plan can change the world.”
~ An Old Proverb

The reality is that you need a lot of plans.  You need a marketing plan that covers a year at a time.  You need a financial plan that you can compare your progress to at least monthly.  You need documented plans for how you’re going to deliver your product or service, how you’re going to respond to your customers, your prospects, people trying to sell you things.

Without plans, you’re winging it and that’s a scary place to be.

3.  Be straightforward.

Keep things as simple as you can, both for your benefit and your customers.  Not only will you get a better response overall, but your prospects will be able to self-select if they clearly understand what you’re offering.

Existing customers will appreciate an honest answer and a genuine effort to help them out.  People like to do business with someone they know, like and Trust.

4.  Deliver value!

This one is pretty obvious.  If your customer isn’t getting the value they expected, then nothing else really matters.  Delivering the end product or service that really benefits the customer (in the way they expect) has to be the focus.

However you should also be delivering value with everything you do. 

If you’re networking with someone, help them out, go the extra mile to make an introduction, give a referral, help solve a problem.  In the long run, you will get back much more than what you give.

On your website offer visitors valuable information or tools – you’re not giving away the store, you’re establishing credibility, you’re demonstrating character, you’re making a positive impact.

5.  Track results.

You’ve got measurable goals and once you’re up and running you’ve got results that you should be tracking.  It’s the only way to evaluate how your strategies are working.

Was that $1000 investment in the phone book worthwhile?  How many calls or visits did you get?  What was the cost per prospect?  How does that cost compare to the cost per prospect for Google Ad words?

Figure out the top 3 – 5 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that really let you track the health of your business.  There are financial metrics, operational metrics, sales metrics – the hard part sometimes is trimming it down to a manageable number.

6.  Have fun.

If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing – at least at a high level, you shouldn’t be doing it.  Life is too short to suffer through something as time consuming as a business that you don’t like.

On top of that, Fun is contagious.  People (employees, customers, people that might be customers) like to be around people that are having fun.

I walked into a Fudge Shop this summer while I was on vacation to get something to drink.  While I was there the staff kept up a continuous performance of different songs.  Some of them were silly spoofs, some of them were obviously inside jokes about their co-workers and some of them were just songs they enjoyed singing.  I ended up hanging out there almost 1/2 an hour – just because they were having fun.

7.  Exceed expectations.

Say what you do and then do what you say, and then some! 

If you tell me you have ‘Great Customer Service’, then you and your employees need to go the extra mile.  Nothing will lose you a customer more quickly than not living up to your promises – and they will tell a lot of people they know what a bad experience it was. 

Studies have shown that it can cost almost 6 times more to get a new customer than keep an existing one.

On the flip side, if you exceed expectations – if you surprise people in a ‘wow’ kind of way, you will get great word of mouth support.  Look at the power Oprah has with the products she likes.  People love to talk about the great new product / service / store that they found – and it really generates business.

8.  Take a Break.

Finally – it’s all too easy to get caught up in the day to day firestorm that is your business.  You’ve got to find a workable balance that allows you to decompress and get away on a regular basis.  Your attitude, your creativity, your relationships and your health will all suffer if you can’t take a break.

Your business is a tool to get what you want out of life.  If it has become an all consuming thing, then something is broken and you will hit a wall sooner rather than later.  Take an extended walk.  Plan a weekend away (and don’t bring your computer).  Start making it a priority to carve out time for yourself.

——–

There are a lot of things you can work on to be more successful, but if you do a good job on this list, then you’re likely well on your way to business success.

What keys to success do you have?  Share them here.

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

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However, the catch-22 is that if you approach networking with a me first attitude, you will fail (and a lot of people won’t like you very much in the process).

In fact, networking as a small business owner has several things about it that make it very difficult:

1. Putting yourself out there.  You’ve got to interact with people you don’t know, you have to be friendly, and to be successful at it you need to at least appear to enjoy it.
2. Learning and applying the rules:  Of course there aren’t really rules, but there are a lot of generally accepted best practices on how to network.  Things like not selling at a networking function, listening 2x more than speaking, being engaging but not monopolizing – a lot of great things, but often easier said than done.
3. Delivering a succinct, yet interesting description of what you do:  The infamous 60 second, 30 second or elevator speech that is intended to pique interest, be memorable but not overly contrived in less than 2 or 3 sentences.  There’s a reason that people on Madison Avenue make a lot of money for making commercials – and obviously not even the professionals always get it right.
4. Put others first – even though your priority is building your business!  This is the conundrum and it really involves a bit of a leap of faith.  You have to believe and appreciate that you will, eventually, generate positive responses and referrals from others but that will be much more likely and stronger if you help other people out first!  As Dr. Ivan Misner of BNI says “Givers Gain”.
5. Accept that it will take a long time for people to be comfortable enough to refer you.  In this case, a long time probably means at least 4 to 6 months, and that’s with people you see fairly often.  Part of that time is due to building up credibility, part of it is that people need to Know, Like and Trust you before they’ll do anything and part of it is that it may take them a while to really understand what you do – especially if you haven’t perfected your pitch.

My single best suggestion for getting past all of these issues?

Participate!  Just get out there.  It takes repetition, practice, involvement and time, but you will get better – especially as you gravitate towards groups that you enjoy.  Even though it’s a really challenging thing to do well, it can be a lot of fun – and eventually it will be, and it will help you grow your business.

What are your suggestions for networking?  Share them here.

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.com

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