Posts filed under 'Consulting Business'
March 11th, 2010
I met Matt Perez in 2003 just as I was starting SKMurphy. It was the tail end of nuclear winter in Silicon Valley and folks were trying to figure out what was next. We kept running into one another at various networking events and as we got to know one another realized that we both had a passion for technology and innovation.
After I facilitated the Conversation Central roundtables on “Global Teams” at the 2009 Design Automation Conference I decided that a significant shift was underway where not only were teams in larger firms more often global but startups and small technology firms were going global much earlier in their life cycle than had been the case in the 1990’s. One of the enablers for this is a host of low cost collaboration tools. Some that are synchronous like Skype and real time dashboards, and others that are “quasi-synchronous” like wikis, distributed source code management and Yammer. These tools enable faster decision making because the team is able to maintain a “shared situational awareness.”
After a lunch with Matt in December where we had discussed this trend he agreed to share some of the ways that his firm, Nearsoft, was using Yammer and other collaboration tools to enable them to keep distributed teams providing development services and ongoing support in sync.
Q: Can talk you a little bit about what your firm does? I understand that your focused is on outsourced product development.
Nearsoft is a software product development firm with operations in Mexico. We work best as innovation partner to ISVs, SaaS companies and consumer-facing sites. These businesses understand that software is at the core of their business and they demand to work with people who are as dedicated and serious as they are about building great software.
We specifically avoid working with businesses that treat their software as a “backroom” operation or, worse, as a necessary evil.
Q: How do you work with clients?
We work in long-term relationships with our clients. We create teams around each client, with the right skills in the appropriate technologies. As the new team learns about the client’s business, they can contribute to all aspects of it, not just the raw coding.
Short-term, project-based engagements don’t work for us and I don’t believe they work for clients, either. It may work for doing something of the side, some throw-away code. But for the core product, you want to have a stable team of people that work well together.
We invest heavily in hiring the best and brightest and have created an environment that helps attract and retain that level of talent. A big part of that is because of the opportunity to work with leading-edge companies in the Valley as part of their core team. If we had people work on little projects here and there, we would not get the good ones; or, if we got them, they would not stick around for long.
Q: What collaboration tools do you use internally and with clients to support your methodology and your engagement model?
A: The first that comes to mind is Yammer, a Twitter-like system but for private use. Our folks are used to Twitter, so using Yammer was a natural. It works great for geographically distributed teams because it helps maintain a team presence.
In the situation where everybody in a team works out of the same office, team presence is a function of being physically in the office at the same time. Without consciously checking, you know when people are “there” and when they’re not. Yammer serves a similar function in that even if I am not reading each posting individually, I get a sense of people being “there” as the stream flows through.
It’s also a casual environment where people can jump in and out without much protocol. If I am looking for somebody, I can just ask “anybody seen Joe?” and one or more people will respond. Also, if people are joking around a particular event, you can also jump in and do the water cooler thing that’s part of social cohesion of effective groups.
Besides Yammer, we use Skype a lot. For example, a group of us keep a Skype “group chat” open all the time that we use a lot like Yammer. The reason we do it on Skype is that it’s easier to switch to voice conferencing when the text chats get too convoluted.
One of our client teams uses video all the time. They use both Skype and Adobe Connect.
Of course, we also use a number of tools to keep track of open issues, source code control, etc.
Q: What has been the impact of Yammer on your ability to deliver results?
Yammer and Skype and the rest of these real-time tools give us and our clients the benefit of being in touch constantly. Little problems and misunderstanding remain “little,” they don’t snowball into big, hairy messes. One person may say, “I am going to implement X using Y” and immediately another will jump in with “No, you shouldn’t use Y for reason Z.” They may go back and forth in the text stream, clarifying things. Then switch to voice or video. Misunderstanding is cleared before any major work is wasted building the wrong solution.
Without something as immediate as Yammer or IM tools, the question may sit in somebody’s email for a day before anybody looks at it. By then, the wrong solution may be finished only to be thrown away.
BTW, that is true for the folks working physically in the same office. In many ways, it is more convenient to casually ask a question or make a comment using one of the tools than in person. You can ask your question without “imposing” on the other people to drop what they’re doing to answer your question. The other people can choose when to respond. If they glance at it and see a “Google It” question, then they can just ignore it. If it looks important, then they can direct their attention to it at their convenience.
Q: What, if anything would you do differently?
When I started the company I tried several models before settling on the way we operate today. It would have been nice if somehow I could have gone through that part of it a bit more quickly.
We’ve had a couple of startup clients that didn’t make through the crisis in 2009. I thought they were dynamite businesses and wished they could have been able to stay in business. We helped all we could but in the end they didn’t make it.
Q: What else have you learned from working internally and with customers in this fashion?
The most salient thing for me is that cultural alignment is key. Effective communications include a ton of stuff that’s never said; it literally goes without saying. There’s a lot of “y’know what I mean?” in there and it would be too costly, emotionally and in time, to explain every little subtlety that goes on in a conversation. Likewise, it can very expensive when people miss out any of those subtleties. To deal with this you need to make sure that everybody in the team is aligned with the goals of the business and that they “know” what it takes to get there.
One example I can think of is when a developer is asked when he can get something “done.” If we both don’t have the same understanding of what “done” means, then we are going to end up in hot water.
Q: Thanks for your time
For some outstanding examples of how to blend humor into an explanation of a complex service I would encourage you to take a look at two of Nearsoft’s videos:
I really appreciate Matt’s willingness to talk about some of the practical challenges in working in a geographically distributed organization. If you would like to talk about lessons learned from your startup or innovative business practices that you would be willing to talk candidly about, please contact me and we can explore an interview that would be of interest to bootstrapping entrepreneurs.
January 4th, 2010
SKMurphy was interviewed and selected as one of a dozen case studies on Document Management Solutions for Consulting Groups by Central Desktop. Read about our innovative approach at “Document Management Solution helps SKMurphy Consulting Group Increase Productivity.”
We make some strong claims in the case study:
- Increased productivity – approximately 5 to 10 times more productive
- Significantly sped up decision making time on projects
- Eliminated version control issues for faster review cycles
The baseline is E-Mailing documents and phone tag. We rely on the edit lock that Central Desktop show to prevent you from editing the same file at the same time as someone else (this happens more than you might think as you get close to a deadline) and find that setting update notification for two hours encourages other members of the team to contribute.
We use Central Desktop to work with all of our clients and have found that it allows us to respond with drafts much more quickly and to achieve a working consensus in a few hours to a day or two. We use it to rapidly prototype the content for key E-Mails, presentation outlines, datasheets, backgrounders, and other content or documents that are used in the sales or customer engagement process by our clients. Each of our clients has their own password protected workspace, as well as any attendee at a workshop who wants one. We also use them for projects with our partners.
We think this approach offers them the following benefits:
- The workspaces are searchable and both the wiki pages and attached files are under version control so they good visibility and control over our joint work product, whether it is in planning stages, in process, or had been delivered.
- Meetings and conference calls are more productive. We use the same wiki page can be used the agenda, notes in process during the meeting, and for minutes and action items afterward. There is one place to look for anything about a meeting and it can have hyperlinks to other content that was discussed. This is an order of magnitude more productive than reconciling a stream of E-Mails for agenda and minutes.
- The workspace is the first place to look and it’s more easily organized than anyone’s inbox. It’s not uncommon for us to run a Skype text chat session for conference calls and append that to the meeting page as well. This is a lightweight approach to making meetings more productive and because things get documented immediately you have more of a complete archive as you add folks to the team or want to look back in two or three months to see what was decided.
- We normally include the cost of Central Desktop in our engagement fees but have turned over the workspace to clients at the end of an assignment. One client we worked with in 2006 through 2008 had more than 550 pages and attached files in the workspace.
We have been working in wikis since we started in 2003. We chose Central Desktop in 2006 and phased other wiki platforms out except where a customer is already using one. We have more than a hundred distinct workspaces (some are archived) that have been used with clients, workshop attendees, partner projects, and internal projects.
We are happy to have a phone conversation if you are interested in trying to incorporate them into your business: Sean has given a number of talks on them as well if you would like a briefing or presentation for your group or event. We do not resell Central Desktop and we were not compensated by them for the case study: we agreed to talk about it because we have been satisfied customers for more than three years.
Related blog posts on wikis:
October 6th, 2009
I continue to run into folks who find themselves encouraged to launching a consulting career by their former employer and what is proving to be a very deep recession. Here are three books I recommend to them to help get some perspective on the career they now find themselves in.
I have a related blog post from October of last year on “Customer Development for a Consulting Practice in a Downturn” and another one from July of 2007 on “Networking in Silicon Valley” that is still accurate.
April 21st, 2009
Layoffs continue to encourage old friends and co-workers to reconnect and many to consider–somewhat involuntarily–an entrepreneurial phase for their next career move. I spoke to three people today who had been laid off in the last month or so. Here is the summary of some key suggestions the three conversations:
- If you are considering joining or forming a startup, check out a Bootstrappers Breakfast that’s convenient. We are up to four a month in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas.
- Probably the best South Bay group for professionals seeking employment is the eight year old CSIX, they meet every Tuesday in Cupertino and every Thursday in Saratoga.
- If you are considering a career in consulting consider joining/attending
- If you are feeling inventive check out the Inventor’s Alliance and TechShop.
- We see a decidedly mixed economic environment with some clients prospering and others not so much. It’s definitely not as bad as the dotcom meltdown for technical folks in Silicon Valley but it’s not good and it doesn’t look like it will turn around this year.
- There is a lot of opportunity, especially if you are able to take advantage of some technical and business innovations whose full effects are yet to be felt:
- Skype, and VoIP in general make global conversations, both personal and teleconferences much less expensive.
- Cloud computing, in particular Amazon’s EC2, make launching a new web business cheap and easy to scale.
- Wikis and real-time document collaboration services are fundamentally altering consulting service delivery.
- More generally, software-enabled services that blend human expertise with automation are creating a number of new kinds of businesses.
I am always happy to hear from old friends and former co-workers and happy to try and connect you with other folks or firms where there may be some synergies.
February 18th, 2009
- Good questions sell.
- Listening sells.
- Networking is helping other people: carry more than your own card and connect folks who will benefit from talking to each other.
Ford Harding’s Rainmaking (now with 2nd Edition, see not below) has been a source of inspiration and insight for me, his focus is professional service firms but a lot of it is also applicable to any complex sale that involves orchestration and ongoing service and support. He has a good blog as well.
Related blog posts
- “Customer Development for a Consulting Practice in a Downturn” from October 2008 where I also suggested that
“One good book on consulting is Gerald Weinberg’s “Secrets of Consulting” (he also blogs at http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/ ). He advises that in a week you spend two days doing work, two days marketing yourself, and one day getting better at what you do. If you are working on a product to complement your consulting you might modify that to three days doing work, 1 day marketing yourself, and one day developing your product. As work slacks off divide your time between additional marketing efforts and working on your product.”
- Networking and Referrals from August 2008 offers definitions for both
- Networking is the act of putting yourself in an environment to meet and interact with others.
- Referrals are what happens when someone introduces you to a third party who might benefit from what you have to offer.
- “Networking in Silicon Valley” from July of 2007 where I observed:
“One of the secrets to navigating Silicon Valley, is that it’s actually a very small place with many connections: some that can take a while to discover are nonetheless quite potent. That being said the single most important thing to avoid is wasting people’s time. Time is more scarce than capital, technology, or knowledge.”
- “Continuing Education in Entrepreneurship” from October 2006 suggests networking offers “knowledge that isn’t written down” (and not to be found in Mr. Google’s basement):
“I had this epiphany that I had spent the last dozen years or so, since I started attending Software Entrepreneur Forum (now SDForum) and Churchill Club meetings, in this ad hoc program in continuing entrepreneurial education. Books are valuable, and not enough entrepreneurs do enough reading, but there is also a category of knowledge that hasn’t been written down yet. And you can gain wisdom from listening to someone whose has played the game–even if it’s just their mistakes–that you would otherwise have to gain from your mistakes experience.”
Malcolm Gladwell offers a perspective on networking in “Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” about the true nature of excellent networkers.
“…people like Lois aren’t bound by the same categories and partitions that defeat the rest of us. This is what the power of the people who know everyone comes down to in the end. It is not — as much as we would like to believe otherwise — something rich and complex, some potent mixture of ambition and energy and smarts and vision and insecurity. It’s much simpler than that. It’s the same lesson they teach in Sunday school. Lois knows lots of people because she likes lots of people. And all those people Lois knows and likes invariably like her, too, because there is nothing more irresistible to a human being than to be unqualifiedly liked by another.”
Update February 19: Ford Harding E-mailed me a reminder to link to his second addition of Rainmaking, called “Rainmaking Attracting New Clients No Matter What Your Field” which has 40% new material in preference to his older addition of “Rainmaking.”
November 13th, 2008
JL Gray left a short but thought provoking comment on yesterday’s post “Negotiate the Level of Reference in Parallel with Price and Others Terms and Conditions.”
Asking for references is something I’ve never felt especially comfortable with (gasp – what if they say no!) but can be crucial in getting your foot in the door with a new client. You’ve done a good job categorizing the types of references and describing how one might go about including the possibility of a reference in an initial contract. It seems like most of the above would work for product companies, but would be more difficult for service companies. Any thoughts on that?
Thanks Sean, JL
I wouldn’t start by asking for a reference, I would ask for feedback on the quality of your services and the business results that you enabled. If it’s positive you then have the basis for asking for a reference. If it’s negative then you have a chance to remedy and ask after they are satisfied.
We do most of our work with early stage software firms. They often have to wrap their technology in a thick protective blanket of services to protect their customers from jagged cuts by the rough edges of tomorrow. So to their early customers a young software firm can look as much like a consulting company as a technology company.
One of the key concerns that early customers have about a new company’s offering is not whether it works–they know “nothing new ever works” from Secrets of Consulting
The first line of defense is accepting that the new system will fail, possibly in several ways. When I find myself thinking, “I must have this change because I can’t afford failures,” then I’m in big trouble. If I can’t afford some failures, a new system won’t help. And neither will an old one.
Nothing new ever works, but there’s always hope that this time will be different.
What’s harder for them to assess is the level of commitment to persevere through the normal challenges of new technology introduction so that they don’t get a dent in their career. One of the ways that they make that assessment is your past performance and the best way to substantiate that is through customer references and testimonials.
I think that the suggestions I made yesterday would be appropriate for consulting to a large firm or a public firm. It’s very reasonable to address up front how you can talk about the engagement and ask them up front for an honest quote, endorsement, testimonial, or joint technical paper as an outcome. Certainly asking for a LinkedIn endorsement after a long engagement is very reasonable.
One other thing to consider is to have another member of your firm do a periodic ‘quality check’ on how the engagement is progressing, certainly at key milestones or deliverables. One reason to use someone else is that sometimes a customer may be more candid with a third party than they will with you directly (it’s also more credible when another member of your firm has a discussion about what is going well and less well as it implies a corporate commitment to customer satisfaction even if there are aspect of your performance that they are not happy with).
We will also do these “customer view” exercises when we are helping a new client build or verify a positioning. We not only interview customers but as many “near misses” or prospects that proceeded some way forward in the sales process and then dropped out as we can. We have uncovered examples of “reference customers” who were unhappy (and shouldn’t have been used as a reference until their issues had been addressed) as well as novel uses for a product, different perspectives on how to talk about a product and what the true benefits were.
I wrote about some aspects of this about a year ago in “Best Feedback From Early Customers is a Story” and built on Peter Cohan’s formulation of four categories of customer success story (with the applicability to consulting engagements in parentheses).
- Vision: what were their reasons when they gave you the purchase order (or statement of work).
- Initial Implementation (perhaps first or second milestone in a consulting engagement) what are the initial benefits and problems they observed.
- Consumed: what actually got used (what is the impact of your work on the overall project as it progresses)
- Evolved: how did they ultimately use the solution (when they look back in a final project after action or they start the planning or kickoff for the next project, how do they plan to use your services).
When you consider the introduction of a new methodology or a new project that is early in your support of a new technology, the reference that a customer can give you is often what will tip the balance for future work: both with that same customer and with other prospects with similar challenges.
An internal project plan that addresses not only how to manage the delivery of quality consulting services but their substantiation by your customer is therefore an important component of your long term business success.
The current economic downturn will only exacerbate technology firms’ risk aversion. This will increase the need for references to complement your credentials and technical competence as demonstrated by technical papers and professional presentations.
November 3rd, 2008
I met Scott Sambucci when I spoke at TVC in July of 2007 in Menlo Park as a part of their “Entering the Entrepreneurial World” seminar. He was kind enough to blog about his take away from the talk in “Definition: Entrepreneurship” where he concluded that even though it was a noun it should be defined as a verb:
“Leveraging resources to get things done” & “Prudent risk-taking.”
We had several conversations and came away very impressed with his business savvy. We retained him to help us with a planning session for our business later in 2007 and profited from his suggestions. He recently blogged about a business he was bootstrapping that he shut down in “An Entrepreneur’s Lessons Learned.” It’s candid, insightful, and makes for good reading for bootstrapping entrepreneurs. His key take aways:
- Start a blog not a website, you can publish immediately and anytime you need to without a webmaster.
- To leverage Google Adwords or any other search marketing vehicle you have to know how your prospects will describe their needs as search terms.
- Find something small to sell early.
- Maintain accounting records from the start.
- Know when to quit.
On that least point he has some excellent thoughts (emphasis added not in original)
Usually, you’ll hear from successful entrepreneurs that the mistakes were the most beneficial to their long term growth. That’s sort of true. It’s not the mistakes that offer the opportunity for growth, but the acknowledgement and deconstruction of mistakes.
There’s a difference between believing in something, and knowing it…Being blind to the obvious signs that your venture isn’t working is downright foolish.
I believe in myself, and that’s why I decided to close the shop. Good entrepreneurs know that there’s more than one good idea. Let the failures work for you, not against you.
Go ahead and read the whole thing, it’s candid and insightful.
I’ve written about knowing when to quit a few times, here are a couple of blog posts that are related:
The Dip does have “Three Questions to Ask Before Quitting (on pages 66-71) that are worth answering now if you haven’t already.
- Am I Panicking? Decide in advance when you are going to quit.
- Who Am I Trying to Influence? A person or a market? Markets value persistence far more than an individual.
- What Sort of Measurable Progress am I Making?
November 2nd, 2008
The last six weeks or so I have encountered a number of folks who have decided to use the downturn to launch their consulting career. Typically they have been encouraged in this by their former employer who has given them a large check a lot of free time. But some have chafed at cubicle life and left without monetary encouragement.
Most are “consulting until they find a full time job.” Or consulting to make a little money until they get their next job. Or they wanted to take it easy for a while because they have been working hard and just consult.
My approach is to be helpful but not encouraging until they have shed a few key but crippling illusions.
- It’s easy to move between consulting and a full time job
- It’s easy to establish a practice
- It’s quickly lucrative
Unless a job is “temp to perm” it’s normally not a useful interview strategy to inquire if you can become full time if you do a good job. If you want a full time job you are better served to focus on finding a job and associating with other job seekers, who have a fundamentally mindset from consulting associations.
It’s a lot of work to establish a new practice. Some consultants are lured into believing that it’s easier than it really is because a friend or former co-worker gives them an opportunity very quickly. This ultimately causes them several problems. They stop prospecting and marketing their services because they are approaching their consulting career in the same way that they approached regular employment. When their assignment ends, unless they convert to perm–and let’s face it if your friend was going to hire you full time they would do that initially instead of hiring you as a consultant, they are back at ground zero.
If you’ve been laid off and believe that you want to consult here are six things you can do that will stand you in good stead.
- Cut your personal spending to the bare minimum right away. The vagaries of private practice are such that you will always want a cushion for lean times and you will need to invest in marketing and other practice building activities.
- Assume it will take between two and five years to get established. If you are not entrepreneurial (and at least a little crazy) then look for full time work. In a downturn take a job that’s “beneath you” and continue to look for a full time job that you want.
- If you do get hired as a consultant don’t the assignment full time unless it’s just two to three weeks and requires full time. Always take a least fours hours a week to look for more clients and continue to observe rule #1 (keep personal spending to a bare minimum). Work assignments at one third or half time so you can find another client and work both in parallel.
- Whenever you ask someone else for help, be clear on how you can help them. Go beyond quid pro quo to help folks when you can, even if the immediate payback to you is not clear. But never just take.
- Don’t confuse a professional consulting organization with a job search group. Folks in a job search group expect to be a member for perhaps three to six months. Professional consultants expect to be at it for a long time.
- Put your free time to good use. Too many folks think because they aren’t getting paid they shouldn’t work at something. Volunteer or offer to help someone else at little or no cost. Make commitments and honor them even if you get busy. Idleness and a loss of structure are extremely corrosive to work habits and a sense of self-worth.
Some related posts:
November 1st, 2008
Many start-up founders believe that the sales process should be this straightforward:
- Get the phone to ring (or e-mail inbox or skype or web contact form)
- Tell your prospect about your offering
- Take the order
Alas it is normally not this simple, especially if you are selling to businesses. We do encounter some startups that are looking for “smarter prospects” who will buy after they explain their offering but the typical business customer has a more complex buying process. At a minimum the prospect needs to understand your offer, to believe you can deliver the benefits that you promise, and to act based on an important if not critical business need.
It will normally take multiple interactions with a prospect to turn them into a customer. For business customers this may take weeks to months. This means that you will need to keep track of more than one prospect and more than one contact with each of them. Even for those readers blessed with a powerful memory this will require a system and a systematic approach. There are number of software tools available to track contacts/prospects:
Any of these are acceptable provided that you enter a minimum amount of information for every prospect and every contact with them. To be able to determine if a particular lead generation approach is working you will need to track the source of each prospect’s call and whether or not you ultimately won their business. This allows you to reinforce methods that are working with more time and budget, and to adjust or discontinue methods that fail generate calls that lead to revenue.
We believe that you need to be tracking the following:
- Opportunity (Contact Name, Company, E-Mail, and Phone): If you are selling to a business you may need to group several different contact names under one company or opportunity name.
- Source (e.g. Person, Event, Ad, URL): Be sure to track the path that each prospect followed to find you. Ask if it was a referral (if so from whom), a search engine query, an advertisement, a paper or blog post, or a speaking engagement.
- Status in sales process (e.g. Initial Contact, Percolate, Pitch/Demo, In Evaluation or Benchmark, Quoted/Proposal)
- Next Action Date: Always get clarity with a prospect on when you will contact them next, even if they plan to contact you (e.g. “If I don’t hear from you by Wednesday I will call you Monday of the following week). This should be less than six weeks and is normally one or two weeks for an active prospect.
- Quoted – Proposal Expiration Date. Never put a quote or proposal in front of a prospect without an expiration date. This sets up two natural follow up points: before it’s due and after it’s expired. This also allows you to have a discussion about their decision time frame (e.g. “How long would you like the quote good for?”).
- Win/Loss: Always follow through and determine if they ultimately selected another vendor and if they did buy, why did they buy.
Startup founders with an engineering background tend to focus much more on the tool, and selecting a tool, and less on the daily follow through need to track essential information for each contact with every prospect. For most of the firms that we work with, until they are really scaling up, Excel or an on-line spreadsheet will work just fine. If you have less than 100 leads–not suspects but firms that have actually contacted you and demonstrated interest and a business need–just use Excel and bake the update process into your daily practice.
October 28th, 2008
A couple of thoughts on focus. Rizwan Virk, the Zen Entrepreneur, wrote about the Bootstrapper’s Dilemma early last year:
The question of focus is an important one for any entrepreneur. [...] But in a bootstrapped company without outside financing, this becomes a particularly tough issue: the question is where to focus and for how long? And what to do if the focus isn’t working? And is the current focus (the one you started with) blinding you to where the real opportunity is? Or is your real problem a lack of focus? [...]
1) you need enough cash and profits to keep the company going, and
2) you have very limited resources so it’s important not to spread yourself too thin.
In fact, these two demands are at the core of what I call the Bootstrapper’s Dilemma: If you have limited cash and need to keep company going you are likely to take any sales/revenue you can get, even if it’s not in the area of your focus. Furthermore, you may discover that the real opportunity is in a market/area that is adjacent to what your first guess was. But if you don’t focus, you are not likely to make much headway in any of the areas that you are attacking.
Shawn Hessinger acknowledged this dilemma and added his “Five Thoughts on Bootstrapper Focus” late last year
- In bootstrapping, reality determines your focus.
- There is no growth without survival.
- Cash flow always remains key.
- Concept is nice but execution is everything.
- Focus on the business not the idea.
Michael Gerber in the E-Myth Revisited identifies three key roles or functions in a company
- technician or expert who develops and refines a practice that constitutes a core competency of the business
- manager who manages and orchestrates the set of practices needed for the business to succeed
- entrepreneur who understands how to find opportunities for the business and scale it
So, put these together and what do you end up with. I think Rizwan Virk identifies a clear challenge for may bootstrapper: how do I keep the lights on but develop a focused set of problems and customers for my business. This is the entrepreneurial challenge: how to identify and pursue opportunities where you can create value for customers.
The management challenge is, given this set of problems and for a target group of customers, a niche market, how do we orchestrate the delivery of our product or service across the set of practices (e.g. development, testing, marketing, sales, support) that are necessary to create full value for the customer.
The technician or expert’s challenge is how do I engage in deliberate practice to improve skills and methods around a key process that will result in more value for the customer.
Since most bootstrappers start out as “technicians with an entrepreneurial spasm” to quote Gerber I think you end up with the following conceptual picture for a bootstrapping startup (or any small business that is relying on organic profit for growth for that matter).
- Technician must answer “What are we good at?”
- Manager must answer “How can we tell, how do we measure it?”
- Entrepreneur must answer “Who wants it, where can we create value, is this the most valuable problem we can solve?”
- All have to answer: How long should it take us to know? Do we have enough time/cash to get good enough to create differentiated value.
Another way to look at it:
- Do we have the right expertise or what are our core competencies?
- How do we orchestrate and measure results end to end for our customers?
- Are we pursuing the right opportunities?
- Do we have enough time and cash to run enough experiments?
- Do we have sufficient control of our internal practice to understand how to add new staff productively?
- Do are have realistic expectations for how long it will take to succeed and enough gumption and wherewithal to see things through together.
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