Archive for October, 2007
October 30th, 2007
Getting feedback after engaging with a client or even after an introductory meeting with a prospect is important. A couple of survey tools that we use are iContact and Survey Monkey. They are easy to use and low cost. Survey Monkey has some nice templates. The survey tools are useful when you want to ask the same fixed set of questions of several dozen to several hundred folks at once.
Here are our basic feedback survey questions:
To help us calibrate and improve our engagement model and the quality of our advice, please take a few minutes and answer three questions for us. Looking back on our conversation and e-mail exchange could you outline briefly (can be just one phrase or sentence)
- The three most useful concepts or suggestions that you took away from our conversation or subsequent e-mail
- The three least useful (or even worthless or counter-productive) concepts or suggestions that you heard in the interaction.
- Up to three specific changes that you have made in your strategy or engagement process as a result of our interaction (again can just be a phrase or one sentence).
If we don’t get an answer we will typically have someone who had little or no involvement in the project call and follow up to ask the questions over the phone. Because they had little involvement in the project it’s unlikely that client will be dissatisfied with them personally and more likely to share feedback. In general the combination of a personal e-mail and a personal phone call will get you the most information.
October 29th, 2007
e-News for Small Businesses is a free electronic mail service designed to provide tax information for small business owners and self-employed individuals. Subscribers receive information about important upcoming tax dates for SB/SE customers, what’s new for small businesses on the IRS Web site, reminders and tips to assist small businesses and self-employed taxpayers with tax compliance issues, IRS News Releases and special IRS announcements that pertain to SB/SE customers.
If you haven’t found an accountant for your business taxes now is the time to get your files in order and interview a few based on other business owner recommendations. If you are based in Silicon Valley and are interested in our advice, talk to Ogden Lilly at Boitano Sargent and Lilly.
October 26th, 2007
While at the ANZA Technology Network – 2007 Gateway to the US Summit, I attended the Marketing Business Forum panel discussion. This was a question and answer session on how emerging technology companies can gain traction using innovative marketing tools and tactics.
The moderator: Chris Shipley, Co-Founder & Editorial Director, Guidewire Group
The panel speakers:
The two hot topics of the hour were “Social Media” and “Blogging.”
Mike’s thoughts on social media:
Traditional, yet still highly influential, social media mediums include message boards, user groups, and forums. However, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and wikis are becoming the more popular social mediums of today. If done correctly, social media can be an effective marketing strategy to reach larger audiences. Mike believes that the various mixes of social mediums is developing a new brand of influencers, enabling companies to pinpoint smaller niche audiences.
Buzz shared a story on how blogging helped him enhance his relationship with customers:
Buzz believes you cannot afford not to blog. While working with his technical team, he realized they were the only ones using a certain type of terminology. Through blogging he was able to have conversations with customers and learn that his messaging was wrong. Additionally, he was able to find someone who became their biggest evangelist. Blogging allowed him to obtain feedback from prospects and incorporate features into the product roadmap.
Sean and Ann Marcus have written an article on How Do Blogs and Wiki Help Me Collaborate With My Customers that has some tips that are relevant to this topic, three key ones:
- Plan Ahead: schedule your level of effort and some publication targets and stick with them.
- Focus for Effect: pick a few topic areas that are relevant to your prospects and explore them.
- Cite References: so many new bloggers write as if they were distributing hard copy; link to your sources.
October 25th, 2007
Here is one question I get asked all the time:
Is Blogging worthwhile way to promote your business or just a big, newfangled time suck?
Our short answer is that you need a website for your business: one of the easiest ways to manage it and keep it up to date is to use a blogging platform to manage your site. Instead of a “What’s New” page just say “Blog.” Once it’s set up you should have a simple editor available to edit any page on your website or add new pages.
October 24th, 2007
My father died suddenly of a heart attack at home in St. Louis last night with my Mother and brother present. He had been to see his internist that morning and gotten a clean bill of health. He would have been 82 in a week. He lived a full and independent life to the end: “You can always tell an Irishman, but you can’t tell him much.” i spoke with him almost every week by phone: Sunday night he called full of energy and in good spirits, we talked for perhaps 75 minutes and he had a chance to speak to each of my boys for a while as well.
His best advice to me was that “to not make a decision is to make a decision.”
They say that the words you regret are the ones you never say, and in that regard I am fortunate. He had a stroke in 1994 that he made a full recovery from. But the early diagnosis was so severe that his cardiologist advised me that I needed to fly to St. Louis immediately and “help my family get its affairs in order.” Pop made a complete recovery but the episode reset our relationship and gave us a chance to talk. Still, David Gates’ words in “Everything I Own” are good advice for all of us wrapped up in our startups:
Is there someone you know,
you’re loving them so,
but taking them all for granted.
You may lose them one day,
someone takes them away,
and they don’t hear the words you long to say
I would give anything I own,
Give up me life, my heart, my home.
I would give everything I own
Just to have you back again
October 23rd, 2007
Dharmesh Shah wrote a great post on his On Startups blog where he outlined 17 pithy suggestions for software startup co-founders. While I have picked what I think are the best half-dozen, preserving his original numbers. I would encourage you to read the full article.
1. Seek transparency and understanding with your partners early. Issues get harder as time passes
Here are some good rules of thumb I have picked up over the years on transparency:
- Don’t have one person both write and sign a check. Always have one founder sign any check that represents a payment to another founder (never pay yourself company funds without having written authorization from another founder).
- Use something simple like Quickbooks or Quickbooks on-line, take at least 30 minutes once a month to review financials.
- One founder has to be CEO, agreement is always preferable to fiat, but deadlock never succeeds.
- Never do a 50-50 split (remember that Packard had 60% and Hewlett 40%), if you want an even split select a tie-breaker board member and do 49-49-2 split so that any two represent a majority. Pick someone you both trust and respect. With three or more founders take care to arrange the equity distribution to avoid the possibility for deadlock, add a tie-breaker if needed.
4. If you’re changing direction often, worry a little. If you’re changing people often, worry a lot.
Charles Caleb Colton observed that “A windmill is eternally at work to accomplish one end, although it shifts with every variation of the weathercock, and assumes ten different positions in a day.” If you are changing direction tactically that’s probably inevitable. But if you are changing some fundamental assumptions about your core competencies or the marketplace then you should be very explicit with yourself and the team that you’ve learned something. If you can’t build or retain a core team you may have a problem with your mission, your traction, or your ability to lead.
8. Until you are profitable, time is working against you. Once you are profitable, time is on your side.
Focus as much on the spend side–your “burn rate“–as you do on generating revenue. Expense growth should lag revenue growth. Revenue is important but bona fide references precede any significant revenue growth, and your early customers end up paying less for a product that almost works for a variety of reasons. It’s more important to have them pay something and turn them into a long term satisfied reference, than to focus purely on the revenue side.
11. Force yourself to write, as it will force you to think.
At different times I’ve kept a journal, an in-house blog, and written status reports to an informal set of advisors (or “kitchen cabinet“). For SKMurphy work, I find that my common development paths for written content is to answer someone in a e-mail, because it’s easiest for me to write with a specific audience in mind, and then re-purpose that into a blog entry if I find myself going back a second time and using it. If I send the URL for the post more than once or twice I think about either expanding the post into an article or aggregating a couple of posts into an article.
16. You choose your destiny, because you choose your team.
Hiring (and firing) decisions are the most difficult. In a small firm everyone is steering so be careful who else you select to sit in the pilot house. Your team aggregates social capital, intellectual capital, and normally a small amount of financial capital if you are bootstrapping. Collective focus and effective collective action translates this capital into results: put another way, if the results of teamwork are less than the sum of the individual efforts you are either not focused and pulling in the same direction or one or more of your team is doing negative work.
17. Be who you are. Do what you love. Join people you like.
This should be #1 on his list. It applies to whatever path you find yourself on.
October 22nd, 2007
Today is the kick off to the 2007 Gateway to the US Summit, hosted by the ANZA Technology Network at Plug and Play. The three day conference is the beginning of a three month program designed for Australian and New Zealand companies who are considering the possibility of doing business in the US market. I caught up with Viki Forrest, CEO of ANZA, last week for a short interview.
Q: What are the top three concerns Australian and New Zealand firms have when they try to enter the US market?
- The cost of doing business in the US (relative to Australia it is extremely high)
- Determining the best market entry strategy (there are so many options!)
- Identifying the best partners/channels to market (without a trusted personal network to rely on, this can be extremely daunting)
Q: What were some of the biggest surprises for the companies who visited Silicon Valley last year at the Anzatech Forum?
After a brief visit to Silicon Valley there is enormous excitement about the size of the opportunity and how BIG everyone’s thinking is in the Valley. After a couple of months of working with ANZA most CEOs realize (1st surprise) they will need 2-3 times more money than originally thought, (2nd surprise) their business plans/market entry strategy has been completely re-written and (3rd surprise) they are truly shocked by the cost (cash and options) of employees.
Q: What specific benefits does your organization offer as a part of their service?
Our programs are built around providing seasoned executives who mentor the companies. This delivers benefits at a very personal level to the executives participating in the program. At the end of the day they are far better prepared to do business in the US. Secondly, our mentors and our members provide personal introductions to their trusted networks of executives. The benefit here is that the executive is not starting from scratch in developing a network, this results in huge benefits in terms of speed to market: 80% (at least) of business in the US is conducted through personal/business relationships and networks. Arriving in the US from a foreign country-–without a network-–can be an insurmountable obstacle to doing business. There are exceptions but they are rare. Our programs have been designed to specifically address this obstacle by connecting CEOs in a trusted environment.
Q: How do you think your companies measure or assess the quality of the service you provide?
We track the performance of our clients on 3 dimensions: investments secured, US revenues, and US strategic alliances/relationships. These results form the basis of our program exit interviews with our clients.
Q: Wednesday is full of great business sessions, who within Silicon Valley would you like to attend these sessions?
Our business forums are designed for the Australian and New Zealand executives who generally have not done business in the US before. Any foreign executive new to the US would get a great deal out of attending, as would any young entrepreneur starting their first venture.
October 19th, 2007
- Please Come Back Soon accompanied by a promise of more information shortly. If you do, don’t put a date next to it because when that date is three months old prospects get a “lost dial tone” sensation, they are not sure your firm is still active. Variations that are equally annoying:
- Please check back soon
- Please keep checking for changes
- This Page is Under Construction enough has been written about this one it’s still surprising to find it.
- Confidential – Do Not Distribute useful when competitors do this, less humorous as an “own goal.”
October 18th, 2007
Don was Theresa’s boss at 3Com for a while. He had earned a PhD but the process hadn’t stamped out his practicality and creativity as it can in some. An electrical engineer by training, a manager by title, he carried a small toolkit with him in case something needed fixing. And it’s a funny thing, but if you carry a pocket knife you find a lot of things need cutting; if you carry a toolkit a lot of things need some fixing.
One day his badge didn’t work in the card reader and he couldn’t get in the building. It was early and he didn’t feel like waiting. Since he couldn’t fix his badge he summoned his inner Harry Tuttle (who was, to be completely honest, never that far from the surface) and dis-assembled the card reader mechanism (those small tools come in handy), shorted out the interlock, got the door to open and more or less re-assembled the reader mechanism (apparently a few wires and small parts had multiplied as they are wont to do when turned loose). The door stayed unlocked until a freaked out security guard got someone from the cardkey firm to come out and repair the mechanism.
As I said, he had some long entrepreneurial stretches in his life. Those of you founding startups know you wouldn’t let a small thing like the cardkey reader not working prevent you from getting into the building (and no, you wouldn’t be calling security so you could answer a dozen questions, produce various documents, and submit to a hairy eyeball inspection or two).
I had left Cisco in the mid 90’s to make a small fortune in the dot com meltdown and Theresa suggested I sit down with Don and get the benefit of his perspective on how entrepreneurs who knew what they were doing made deals.
We had a long talk that covered a number of topics related to starting a company and making deals. He mentioned that in his youth people would talk of “men, money, and machines” as the key ingredients for a successful business. In Silicon Valley that had become “team, technology, and traction.” He made three points about making deals that I wrote down and still follow:
- Spend 1% of the value of a deal on lawyers. Before you sign a final contract (but not before you get to a meeting of the minds), have an attorney review it to advise you of the risks. Be prepared to spend 1% of the value of the deal on legal fees to manage/minimize the risks.
- Before you accept money figure out two ways to repay it. Don had started several ventures by borrowing other folks retirement money and he had been careful to repay it. I meet many entrepreneurs who can explain how they plan to spend investors money, but very few who pay attention to how they can repay it, preferably with some return, and what their contingency plan is if the first approach doesn’t work.
- Before you get into a deal figure out what it will cost to get out. Many deals look like a marriage, which is characterized by low barriers to entry but high barriers to exit: they are easy to initiate but difficult or expensive to end. As Mark Twain once observed “It’s easier to stay out than get out,” negotiate how you can end the deal at the beginning when everyone is still talking and optimistic about the future.
October 17th, 2007
Here are the social networks I participate in. I find them a good source for practical advice for running my business.
Check me out, my screen name is tshafer.
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