Paying Your Dues

If you're under 30, you no doubt have heard this a few times in your career. I did as a young paleontologist and I bristled every time I heard it. At 54, I have to admit that there is a lo to be said for experience. But I try never to use that damned expression. And for all you young whipper snappers out there, I'd like to say, "YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY YOUR DUES!" Not if you lower the testosterone level, cut the caffeine consumption and simply ask the older workers around you what they think. They paid the dues for you, if you're smart enough to tap into that. They've made the journey, know the paths and where the mines are laid.

For you older guys and gals out there, listen to the younger guys. Don't be intimidated by the new information or technology they bring to the table. They came to you for a reason. Let your long hard time in the industry help channel those young high energy efforts. Support them, don't pound them into the pavement to cover your fear of having to learn a new tool. After all, you may not have to learn anything. You just have to supplement what's new with your hard earned experience. Lean on each other.

What's critical is that young energy armed with new technology and seasoned older workers recognize the talents of each and connect. Folks, old and young, who can do that are a rare subset. Work hard to find each other.

Communications Revolution is About to Happen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:
Alexander_Graham_Telephone_in_Newyork.jpg

The communications device market is about to enter a revolutionary stage. Samsung is singing the blues and Apple is falling flat on their latest devices.

Not that each doesn't make really cool little devices, they just happen to be in a more mature phase of the product life cycle. Too much competition will slow sales and lower profit margins. There's no way around it.

For Apple, this was an opportunity. But post Jobs, is there a "next best thing" in the labs? The good news is that a couple of kids in a garage are working on the next big thing. And it won't be an incremental enhancement that ships form that garage. It will be amazing, a device that most of us haven't thought of or couldn't. Alternately, those kids might have access to a university lab and are implanting chips in unfortunate rats or clipping on earrings that talk to their brains. Or maybe a little of both is going on from here to Romania. Maybe Samsung or Apple will notice and make an acquisition. Either way, we all win and the economy restarts... until the tax man stalls it again.

10 tips for Making Small Talk and Networking

Your business, especially if it's a consulting business, is totally dependent on your personal skills. If you're a likable person, you're way ahead of the game. Unfortunately, even the nicest and most interesting folks in the game are terrible at socializing in business events. Here are some rules I've developed over my 30 years of consulting.

1. Don't sell anything unless asked to. You're there to socialize and sell folks on how nice, clean, well-mannered and interesting you are. If you pass this test, you'll be asked what you do and maybe, later, asked for a more formal pitch. So save the elevator pitch until after you've impressed them with swell-ness and are asked for it.

2. For heaven's sake, don't play the totally cool thing and show up in shorts and a t-shirt. That may go very well with some, but for others, it's a deal breaker. Don't risk it. No one ever said they'd rather not call the well-dressed, manicured and neat guy or gal.

3. Turn off the cell phone and put the damned thing away. You're not in middle school, you're there to socialize. Picking up a cell phone and texting or reading a text pretty much tells the person you're talking to that what you have in your palm is more important than they are.

4. Do ask everyone what they do, where they live or anything else that can create a connection or some common ground upon which conversation can be built. Compliment a watch or tie. It might have a story attached.

5. Be honest and humble. If you're there alone and see someone else standing alone, march right over and introduce yourself. Start with something like, "I saw you standing alone, as I was, and thought I should introduce myself." If you're nervous in that kind of setting, tell them. They'll warm right up.

6. Make it easy to be found. Have plenty of business cards to hand out.

7. Dress in business attire - See items #2 and #7. Check a mirror before leaving the house/office and every time you hit the restroom.

8. Offer to help anyone you can with no expectations of returns. They will come.

Revenue Projection

When developing a pro forma, revenue projections are critical. Investors will look here first to determine if the business has merit and if the entrepreneur knows the market. After all, this is why they invest, to get that revenue. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs I've met believe this figure is mostly guess work and many simply use industry growth rates for their projections. As a specialty of mine, I'd like to offer some pointers using an example.

1. Never rely solely on market performance. This number is an industry average and doesn't reflect those lean, hard, and almost always unprofitable first few years of many individual companies within that average.

 2. Do use performance records from individual companies that are most like yours. If you're selling a new soft drink, don't use coca-coal as a comparable. Look for a startup like yours and justify how your business is like that one based on location, market segment, marketing and business strategy.

 3. Get that information. If the business has gone public, their financial performance is public record. But chances are it won't be. Your closest competitor is probably a privately run company with performance records safely stored in hidden cabinets locked in hidden rooms on uncharted Islands. Here's where it gets fun. Pull out your spy glass and go full Sherlock on these guys. Here's an example for one I pulled:

A company that paces interns with companies became a media darling recently, partly because it is run by two very smart, young, and attractive females. And as such they were interviewed regularly on business and non-business related network programs. The founders, of course, took full advantage of the spotlight to highlight their business success. I read and viewed every interview they gave and was able to plot several dates at which the founders claimed they had doubled their revenue. A final interview revealed revenue in hard numbers for a specific date. I was able to use the doubling dates to work backwards from the hard number to create a revenue profile for their full three years of business. The figures worked forward and backwards indicating they were telling the truth. I was able to use this profile to estimate revenue growth in terms of percentage for a client in a similar business.

Industry analysis is important to understand. How your competitors fared is even more important for projecting revenue.

Strategic Learning Tool from Chris Fox

Discovered this really cool strategy development tool from UK based Strategy Business Consultant Chris Fox. It's a nifty little plug in the data and the tool generates the proper graphics. His blog has a lot of articles about what to do with the data you've generated.

 It's a great tool to have handy when moving through the Entrepreneurial Sequence chart.

Chris and I are both part of the Strategy Consultants Community on google+. If you're a business or marketing strategy consultant, join us there for discussion.

Is Your Consultant Working For You Or The Real Customer?

Source: Wikipedia*

A client described an issue he had with a consultant recently. The consultant was hired by the state of Connecticut to handle applications for a state-funded program. The application required the applicant send in transcripts which my client did from two different universities, Receipt of the transcripts was to be posted to a page created by the applicant. Four months after the transcripts were sent the transcripts still didn't appear on the web site. My client telephoned the state agency and was connected with the consultant in question who insisted the transcripts were never sent. The client checked with both universities and received receipts from each showing the transcripts were sent four months earlier. He contacted the consultant again and emailed the replies from each university. The consultant said they might have arrived on a weekend when no one was in the office and, if a signature was required, were probably sent back to the post office. This is nonsense as the post office will try several times before returning the letter to the sender. But the client played nice and asked when they might check the post office for the transcripts and similar pieces that arrived on weekends. The consultant replied that her office didn't do that. The client persisted until the consultant offered to accept a scanned and emailed copy. The transcripts eventually were posted to the clients application web site.

Granted, this was a government run institution. Not a lot of accountability there. But this experience has implication for the real world. Consultants are a tremendous asset to many ventures. They bring specialized experience and spread the cost of doing business in their specific fileds. But hiring one doesn't mean you've handed off that part of the job. Like any employee, they have to be monitored and trained to represent your business. They may consider you the customer and your customer a nuisance. NEVER allow any outside firm to act as a wall between you and the customer. They should instead act a cog in your business's customer centric machine. It would serve you, the founder, well to act as a customer and test your employees AND your consultants. Call your call center or tech support line and visit your retail establishment. I'm pretty sure Ray Kroc bought a burger or two at McDonald's.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_view_Pantigo_Windmill_East_Hampton_Suffolk_County_New_York.jpg

Six Years Now Makes A Generation

This video is essential when considering marketing and strategy for next few decades. Very much worth a look.

Honest Revenue Projections

In entrepreneurial ventures, it's almost always the entrepreneur/founder who creates revenue and expense projections for the pro forma. Talk about a conflict of interests. It's especially dangerous when you as founder develop the expenses first. It's only natural to look for revenues that rise to these expenses after that. Classic inductive versus deductive reasoning.

The short post: develop revenue projections first. make them solid numbers that draw on similar operations. Go full Sherlock Holmes on finding comparables, using their publicly posted revenues  and estimating revenues for private corporations. Contrary to general belief, most private companies do publish their revenues in interviews and public promotional material. You just have spend time finding this scattered and incomplete data. Gathering what you can and interpolating the rest is difficult but possible and will generate a basis for reliable revenue estimates. Use multiple sources.

When you're confident you have a reasonably good estimate for revenue over the next three years, only then should you tackle expenses. If these estimates are less than revenues, lucky you. If not, you have to take a harder look at expense and consider bootstrapping measures to bring them into alignment with revenue projections.

Finally, before revising revenue and making UNreasonable adjustments, have a trusted colleague take a look. And then have them consider any adjustments you make. If unreasonable, the project may be a no-go.

Walking Away From A Seemingly Great Product

Had a client demo a great product for me recently. I was really impressed with his passion and the utility of the device. But the product lacked a key feature that will prevent it from being a success and I passed.

Consider the issues:

The founder claimed to possess a great deal of experience in business as co-owner of two technology related firms. He also claimed participation in a business with a similar product to the one he was now promoting. Unfortunately, he couldn't provide proof or either.

In addition, he was asking for really large and rounded figures to start the business but failed to deliver a detailed list of anticipated expenditures. Not a single pro forma or estimate on company letterhead could be produced.

Revenue, likewise, was estimated using generally available figures for sales of other products in the same industry. But no basis for his product's anticipated stellar performance was available.

Worse of all, he was adamant that none of this was necessary. His pitch was that this was obviously a great product in a great industry and anyone with half a brain and the balls to go after it would. The "academic stuff" was a waste of time in his mind. He even suggested anyone not sold on this was a wimp and just p;lain stupid.

Lesson here is that a very critical component of the product is the entrepreneur. Had he asked for help assembling the requested data and provided what he had. I might have helped. Had he an entrepreneurial "stop at nothing" personality, he'd find comparables for revenue projections. I tried coaching and encouragement, but you can only lead a horse to water.

I have no doubt a similar product owned by a more rational entrepreneurial spirit will prevail.

I passed.

Steampunk Revolution - Marketers Beware!

Getting in early on a trend is every marketer's dream. Predicting one, unfortunately, isn't so easy.

As a technology commercialization consultant, I love business development and watching how all the pieces fit together and blend with the environment. I'm also a fan of the Steampunk aesthetic. So when IBM released a report predicting Steampunk is a trend that will become mainstream hip as early as 2013, I took notice.

For the uninitiated, steampunk according to wikipedia is:

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery,^[1] especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century. Therefore, steampunk works are often set in an alternate history of the 19th century's British Victorian era or American "Wild West", in a post-apocalyptic future during which steam power has regained mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. 

... and so much more. 

The genre has attracted the imagination and contributions of many talented people in music, literature, fashion and art. When Gary Oldman and William Defoe start showing up at fashion shows wearing steampunk inspired designs, as a marketer you might want to take notice. We have at Kronicity and are including lots of cool steampunk features that can ride this trend. And I've created this Steampunk Pinterest Board for a taste of the style.

"Prada Goes Steampunk" on Community BuzzFeed site:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/steampunk/prada-goes-steampunk-for-fall-3n9d

Want more evidence? Consider unknown music artists like Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer, Professor Elemental, and Abney Park can get 100,000 views, there might be money to be made. Check out their embedded videos below and the stunning video short here: