Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Required Reading on Business Owners Making Critical Mistakes

Business Mistakes, Business Stories,

For a good time take a look at the answers to this question on Quora: What are some classic examples of a founder letting his or her ego get in the way of making the right decision for a company? 

owner mistakes business mistakes

Now yes, that’s one stellar example of a loaded question. But — loaded or not — it’s attracted some very interesting answers. It makes for good business reading, for sure.  

One particularly-well-written answer (this one) narrates a painful story of a successful pivot turned to failure by a stubborn founder insisting on doing things the old way 

We tried this before … We failed. Miserably. … our sales staff, followed by myself, along with the other partner all advised against the move … Then, all of the sudden, two months later, he made some executive vote to change everything overnight.  … Our revenue streams dropped immediately. 
I stressed for months on end, … but he didn’t listen. 
He just made the move, and everyone eventually lost their jobs. 

That’s a small piece of a long answer, and I’ve clipped it significantly. It makes a good story and good reading. That answer goes on with some other examples too, which makes me wonder. Maybe its biased and just sour grapes. 

Another interesting quote from another answer:

The thing with egos is they cause a distortion of reality which means they’re either too fragile to accept the truth (self-esteem) or they’re so starved for attention that their bullying gets in the way of real progress (narcissism). … Jobs was so broken inside and so desperate for recognition that he worked his staff mercilessly hard and caused rifts between the Macintosh and Apple II (I think) teams. His narcissism caused him to bully and press on others. He damaged morale in the company and hurt sales.  

Maybe these are twisted answers from people bitter about things having gone wrong. Maybe they are exaggerated. But regardless of historical accuracy, every business owner should read through these. And I write that as a business owner.  

Body of Work is the Best Career Book Ever

Books, , ,

Pamela Slim Body of Work

Pam Slim’s new book Body of Work is out. You may already know of Pam as the author of the bestseller Escape From Cubicle Nation. This one takes a brilliant new tack on the whole idea of careers, refocusing your work life as a reflection of who you are, who you are becoming.

I’ve already bought two copies — for a daughter and a sister — even though Pam sent me an early copy for free. Both are in different inflection points related to what they do next, gathering in what they’ve done so far, and Pam’s way of looking at things is perfect for that.

I don’t give a lot of endorsements or recommendations on this blog, but I can’t recommend this book more highly. I bought copies, one for a daughter and one for a sister, both of them brilliant people looking at what comes next, professionally. Pam Slim is a brilliant writer, a natural empath, and the best source of thoughtful career advice I’ve ever known.

I can’t resist quoting from Bob Sutton, Stanford Prof author of The No-Asshole Rule and other great books, who said of Body of Work:

I was struck by how useful, engaging, and downright fun that Body of Work was to read.  For starters, Pam applies a compelling frame — as the title says — where she advises that each of us would be better off as thinking of our career as a body of work rather than climbing a ladder or taking the path to the top. I found that so simple and so powerful — both because I think it is a more accurate frame, and because it focuses attention on what gives each of us intrinsic joy, not just on the competitive nature of work and the money.

And here’s a quick video summary:

How — and how not — to Find a Mentor

Advice, Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business, ,

So you want a mentor to help you start or grow your business? 

mentor, mentoring, find a mentor

Never ask somebody to be your mentor.  Instead, ask a person who might be a mentor a specific question. Find a question an expert can answer quickly without having a lot of specific knowledge about your case in detail. Make it a question that’s interesting or even fun to answer. 

If you get an answer, follow quickly with thanks. And follow not so quickly with another question, ideally a follow-up to that first question.  After that, another question. Find a way to show thanks — testimonials are nice — and keep asking. But go slow.

The best mentoring I’ve seen happened without the formal label “mentoring.”  Nobody asked anybody to go steady, nobody gave anybody a ring. Thoughts were shared and advice given, and it was clearly helpful.  

And my apologies to the exceptions. I’m sure some formal mentorship programs work. Volunteer mentors always have good intentions. There are exceptions to every rule. Still, what I’ve seen in practice is this: 

Mentorship is far more likely when it isn’t formally packaged as mentorship

Do You Want Your Daughter to be a Successful Entrepreneur?

Advice, Business Education, Entrepreneurship, , ,

I stumbled on this question on Quora: How should I raise a 12-year-old girl to be a successful entrepreneur? I have four grown-up daughters. Some of them are “successful entrepreneurs,” all of them have tried, some are still trying. So I care a lot about this subject. 

Quora 12-year-old entrepreneurship

There are good answers already posted. The answer I like best, happily, is the one with the most votes.  It’s also posted by a friend, David Rose, founder of gust.com and head of a New York angel investor group. His highlight is:

By FAR the best thing you can do is be a great role model! Show your sister that girls CAN be entrepreneurs! That being an entrepreneur is cool! That entrepreneurs live larger lives, have a greater impact on society and basically have more fun, than anyone else on the planet!  Tell her stories of Mary Kay Ash and Anita Roddick, of Esther Dyson and Heidi Roizen, of Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey…and of yourself!

Although I completely agree with that, I really want to add more. This seems important to me, from my experience:

  1. Do everything you can, as a parent, to promote and encourage academic education in whatever your daughter likes. For every successful entrepreneur who dropped out of college there are thousands more, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, who didn’t drop out. Life and entrepreneurship are easier with a college degree. 
  2. Fight the stereotype: Don’t let your daughter swallow the stupid and obsolete idea that boys do math and science and technology and girls don’t. That unfortunately is a self-perpetuating myth. It’s dangerous.  
  3. Don’t, however — please — be that parent pushing the poor kid towards specific educational directions. Drop that agenda fast. The more you push for a specific path (business, entrepreneurship, high tech, for example) the less likely you are to really help your daughter. It’s her life, not yours. For the record, I know many more successful entrepreneurs with degrees in liberal arts than with degrees in business or entrepreneurship or computer science. 
  4. Give her as much technology as she wants. That means — within reason of course — the computer, the laptop, broadband, smart phone, etc. And of course you have to be careful, as a parent, because there are those well-known dangers. My daughters grew up with computers. I gave them domain names as birthday gifts when they were as young as 10 years old. All of them had laptops for school. One of them liked computer games, so I got her all the games she wanted.
  5. Don’t push your definition of success on her. Help her find her success. It’s her life, not yours. 

I have to add something related to point #5 here, and the qualifier “successful” entrepreneur. That’s a dangerous concept. What we want, as parents, is for them to end up happy, which usually means productive, economically self sufficient, and independent. Is it dangerous that we’re in the context of “successful” entrepreneur instead of entrepreneur? And is a successful entrepreneur happier than than an unsuccessful one, or a professional, or middle manager? Especially where your daughter is involved, always pause to question your assumptions. 

I think I’ll go add this to the question on Quora, but I wanted to put it here first. 

The Worst Business Pitch I’ve Seen in Years

Business Mistakes, ,

Yesterday I received one of those hilarious examples of selling tactics that exactly contradict the pitch. This one was somebody selling business coaching and online marketing, hoping to target business owners. He was using an annoying website comment bot with generic praise, and links to a very ugly website full of absurd promises in bright red large fonts spiced with all caps and exclamation points, with audio that just starts talking at you when you get there. 

really bad business pitch

I felt bad for the guy.  Maybe he’s a nice guy, the victim of schlocky marketing services himself. Maybe he doesn’t realize how bad his pitch is. And I don’t like to criticize strangers, even strangers who send me really obnoxious sleazy marketing. 

Besides, he has almost no web footprint. A google search yields almost nothing about him, and he’s barely present, hard to find, in social media. So he can’t know online marketing. 

So all I have to show for this, with this post, is the underlying irony of it — horrible marketing selling marketing services — and some simple, obvious advice:

  1. Flattery might work; you do get my attention citing something you’ve read that I wrote; but stupid generic praise is insulting, not flattering.  
  2. Don’t ever have a website that starts talking immediately. That’s rude and annoying. Have a click to start the talking. 
  3. Large brightly-colored fonts and all caps look so last century. Avoid the look of 1980s direct mail. 
  4. Big promises don’t work. They aren’t credible. Today is the age of transparency and authenticity. 
  5. Don’t advertise your ignorance. If you sell copy editing don’t have typos. If you sell design, don’t be ugly. If you sell websites, don’t have 404 errors. If you sell food, don’t give away foul-tasting samples. If you sell business coaching, or online marketing, do it right or not at all. 
  6. Oh, and if you don’t have a reasonably good web footprint, don’t try to sell online marketing expertise. You really have to show up well in standard searches, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing; and in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. It’s a brave new world, now, in that respect. You can’t fake an online past. 

Reality Check: Entrepreneurship is a Roller Coaster, Not a Cruise

Entrepreneurship,

I love this: So completely true. Vivek Wadhwa calls out the all-too-common talks by successful entrepreneurs who supposedly “sailed smoothly to success.” He corrects that in Entrepreneurship is a Roller Coaster, Not a Cruise, on the Wall Street Journal:

Vivek Wadhwa WSJ.com Entrepreneurship

Don’t be fooled. Entrepreneurship is never like that. You fail constantly, suffer setbacks at every turn, and live with the fear that you won’t be able to make payroll or that your product won’t work. You have to deal with disgruntled employees, unhappy customers and concerned investors. Even when you achieve success, you wake up the next morning and find that everything is falling apart—that even before you’ve gotten over the hangover you have another big headache.

This is an important reminder. It’s certainly my experience, and I’m glad to see Vivek taking this to the readers of the Wall Street Journal.

This should be obvious, but reminders are good.

Just Turned Down a Consulting Job and I’m Glad

Business Mistakes, Consulting

I just answered a social media consulting inquiry with this…

No, I’m sorry, that’s not what we really do well. We’re a business, so we’d have to charge you; and we wouldn’t be giving you your money’s worth.

… and I went on to recommend somebody else. The person I recommended as a consultant does do what my inquirer wanted. 

square peg round hole rosipaw flickr cc

I won’t bore you with details, but to me this transaction is a great example of the right attitude about sales. I don’t believe in selling as tricking somebody into buying something other than what they want. Selling is matching wants and needs, figuring out whether what you do is what that person needs or wants, and making a good match. 

Jumping on this kind of inquiry with a yes, making a pitch, while hoping to beef up your capabilities midstream, is tempting. But leads to a lot of problems. 

Ending up with “we don’t do that” is great for credibility, gives you a chance of future business, avoids the danger of a bad consulting engagement with unhappy clients, and keeps your self and your spirit whole. 

(photo credit: rosipaw via photopin cc)

True Story of Beating a Patent Troll

Intellectual Property, ,

The patent system as it relates to software and the web and mobile apps is broken. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t protect the right people and it’s being used by the wrong people for what amounts to extortion.

Oh, I’m sorry — you didn’t know that? Just my opinion, you say? Yes. My opinion. And I’m not an attorney, so what do I know. Ask me in person and I’ll tell you some stories of what I know. But not on this blog. 

And I don’t know diddly about patents and patent situations regarding real inventions, formulas, drugs, manufactured hard goods, or any of that. Do those people have trolls too? I don’t know. 

But I really liked this quick (5 minutes or so) true story that I found over the weekend, browsing TED.com

Note: if you don’t see the video here, then use this link. 

The Best-Ever One-Word Answer to A Critical Entrepreneurship Question

Current Affairs, Economics, Entrepreneurship, ,

In one of the best moments of our regional angel investment event last month, keynote speaker Diane Fraiman was asked to name the biggest obstacle to entrepreneurship in Oregon. Her answer (the first emphatically-delivered word of her answer):

Diane Fraiman, Voyager Capital

PERS

It’s been more than a month since and I didn’t take notes so the rest of this post is my opinion, not Diane’s. It wouldn’t be fair to pretend to be quoting. Diane is a partner at Voyager Capital in Portland. She has a great track record and the respect of every entrepreneur I know who knows her, or of her. And this is a sensitive subject because of politics, unions, and public priorities. So don’t blame her for anything except the first word of her eloquent answer. 

PERS is the public employee retirement system. I relate it to public schools, teachers’ unions, political power brokering, and, to my mind at least, chronic budget problems for public schools. Budget problems that are rooted in the so-called tax revolt of 20 years ago, politics of voting blocks, campaign financing, and talking points. For a couple generations, people on both sides of the public employee and teachers’  unions negotiations made compromises that postponed problems for the future. And the future they avoided, back then, has arrived. 

PERS relates to entrepreneurship in a community because it connects to the problem of declining quality of public education. When the quality of education suffers, entrepreneurs go elsewhere. And the entrepreneurs who might move in choose other places where their children and their future employees have better education in public schools.

It’s not a simple issue. In our community, teachers are getting laid off and schools closing, and the average number of kids per classroom is way up. But some say the teachers who aren’t getting laid off get better than market compensation. Others say the administrative costs have skyrocketed. Some people believe that restricting funding forces institutions to be more efficient. And I know employers who tried and failed to hire administrators from the local school district because they — the would-be administrators — were getting about 1.5 times market compensation. There’s no room here for knee-jerk reactions. 

I don’t claim to know much about this topic and I don’t want to engage in a political debate. But I do think people who let public education slide should be aware that declining quality of schools affects the entire community, not just kids and parents. It hurts job creation, startups, economic growth, housing values, crime, and all those other hard-to-quantify facts that make one town in the U.S. a better place to live than another. 

I wish more people would realize the far-reaching impact of communities failing to maintain the quality of public education. And I’m glad Diane Fraiman added that into a conversation around communities, startups, and angel investment. 

(Image: courtesy of Voyager Capital)