Category Archives: True Stories

Boomer Business Blogger Part 1: Two Year Anniversary

Baby Boomer, Blogs and blogging, Social media, True Stories, , , ,

Two years ago this month I started blogging. Just a couple weeks after naming Sabrina Parsons CEO of Palo Alto Software. I remained president, but switched my job to blogging, writing, speaking, and teaching. I guess I should have changed my title to CBO, for chief blogging officer.

I didn’t understand at first …

“I’m a business plan expert,” I said, naively. “I write how-to stuff. It doesn’t work on blogs. It’s static.”

Sabrina, however, insisted.

Set up your Google reader. Start reading Anita Campbell, John Jantsch, Guy Kawasaki, Pam Slim. You’ll figure it out.

What happened? On the day of that conversation I’d posted seven times on my one main blog Planning Startups Stories. As of today I’ve posted 700 posts on that one, plus 460 posts on Up and Running, my blog at Entrepreneur.com, plus 43 on Huffington Post, a couple dozen on Small Business Trends, about a dozen on USNews, and 140 on Planning Demystified. And come to think of it, I’m also posting on Business in General, Email Fail, and some others.

I read a lot of great blogs. Those four above, Steve King’s Small Business Labs, Seth Godin, Bob Sutton. Oh. I just checked. Several hundred links on my Google reader. Better stop listing. I owe thanks to so many others.

I think I get LinkedIn now. I’ve been answering questions in LinkedIn too … I’ve got a good ranking in the business plan category there. I’m connected with people I know and like.

Lately I’m loving Twitter. I’ve tweeted more than 1,200 times. I love keeping up with friends and favorite bloggers, the news in general, a few celebrities, and, my favorite benefit of Twitter, links to Web things that interested the people I follow. My Twitter friends keep me up to date. I love it. I don’t do Twitter clutter: no tweets about what’s for lunch, going home, ball games or weather; I do tweets about links, issues, articles, people, news.

I’m still struggling with Facebook, trying to figure out how to resolve the inherent conflict between use for business, keeping track with business-related contacts, and use for personal, photos from the kids and grandkids, keeping up with cousins and nieces and nephews. I’m a split personality in Facebook.

So for the record, they were right, I was wrong. I did have blogging in me. “And,” they added (flashing back to that conversation two years ago), “your blogging will be good for our company.” They were right about that, too.

I don’t think anybody (certainly not I) realized how much I’d enjoy writing again. Maybe it’s that 30-some years ago, before I got the MBA degree and got into business, I was a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. I was night editor for United Press International (UPI) there, then I was a McGraw-Hill World News (think Business Week) stringer there, and I freelanced a lot too.

Not that journalism is the same as writing. In my case, I also wrote fiction, got a short story published, wrote a novel that got some second looks, but never got published (no loss, it wasn’t that good). My BA degree was in literature, and I got an MA in journalism too, just before going to Mexico for years, and long before coming back to the U.S. to get the MBA degree.

So let me say that I love it. It’s been great for me. But it’s also been very good for business, too, which is really cool. But that’s another post, scheduled for tomorrow.

Ode to April 15th and the Schedule C Blues

True Stories, ,

Today I remember my literature classes, and my background as a one-person business, all at once, with the T.S. Eliot quote:

April is the cruelest month.

Especially April 15th.

In the old days, the first 15 years or so of my being in business on my own, the phrase “Schedule C” struck at my heart like a cold poison dagger.

Schedule C, and the April 15 deadline, was to me roughly equivalent to the what the gallows was to the old-time cattle rustler stuck in jail in the pioneer town waiting to be hung. I remember the growing panic as the day approached, trying to figure out how I would round up enough money to pay the government what I owed. The run-up to the deadline was like the construction of the gallows.

I’d put it off out of shear dread. It wasn’t just the paperwork, the cold hard finality of it; it was that you had to actually have the money. Like so many of us in entrepreneurship, I’d always known I was supposed to put away a substantial portion of my consulting billing to hold for taxes; but the kids needed shoes, the mortgage needed paying, so we’d spend and hope for some last-minute payment to help us out.

For those of you who don’t quake in horror at the mention of the word, Schedule C is the part of the 1040 IRS tax forms which the self-employed use to report their sales and expenses for the year, and add up the taxes owed.

I made a pretty good living as a business plan consultant. I billed a nice amount of money every year. The problem was keeping that reserve.

I would read the tax forms again, every year, hoping that the postponement to June 15 would give me a reprieve. No luck. You can put off the filing of the forms, but you have to send in the check.

I would always drive to the post office with my forms and my check after 11 p.m., and join the line with the other fools and procrastinators who waited until the last minute. Cheery post office employees would stand at the curb, in a festive mood, as the drivers passed by and dropped their envelopes.

Yes, I know, I was supposed to be doing estimated payments every quarter, but this was the olden days, there was never enough time or money.

So, to those of you still suffering that, my heart goes out to you. It sucks. I hope you end up like I am now, with somebody organized in the financial management of the company I own helping me make sure I’m all paid up in advance, and somebody else filling in the forms. What a relief.

True Story: The Student Bar Problem

Entrepreneurship, True Stories, , , , ,

Back sometime in the 1980s, one of the students at the Kelly School of Business at the University of Indiana was trying to keep his local student-oriented bar going. He’d been cited several times for underage drinking.

Jim Wolfe, who told this story last Friday at MERC 2009, the entrepreneurship conference at George Mason University, was concerned when he discovered that the student entrepreneur had listed him and his business professor mentor, William Haeberle, as advisors to the bar. Jim, now the Entrepreneur in Residence at GMU, was then a law student teaching in the business school under Haeberle’s supervision. He worried about he and his mentor being advisors to a bar that had been accused of catering to underage drinking.

Haeberle was not concerned, however. He told Jim he knew the student. “Don’t worry about Mark Cuban,” he said, “he’s going to make it. He’s a real entrepreneur.”

True Story: Ready-Fire-Aim Doesn’t Work

Business Mistakes, True Stories,

Where do your new business ideas come from? What steps do you take to convert the new idea into a new product?

I was caught off guard last Friday when I was asked that question at the MERC 2009 entrepreneurship conference last Friday at George Mason University.

I should be able to answer that question without hesitation — starting a business and business planning are, after all, what I teach and write about — but this was about me, specifically, and how I had done it.

I know very well that you should always push the idea through an “ideas vs. opportunities” filter. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and worth nothing; except when and idea is an opportunity. The filter is a matter of planning: is there a market, can I reach it, do I have the resources, will it be profitable, will the investment of resources have a reasonable return?

I’m used to ticking off some standard lists of idea generators. “Find a need and fill it,” for example. Or, Guy Kawasaki’s “make meaning,” a theme of his The Art of the Start book.

This time, however, I hesitated. I realized that my own instinct is to build things that I want to use. I’ve been impatient with the filter step of making sure the idea is actually an opportunity. Sometimes I’ve skipped this key planning step. And I may have lucked out here and there, but on the long run, it’s worked better to check the market first.

My instinct is classic “ready, fire, aim.” I’ve learned the hard way, though, that “ready, aim, fire” is better. Even though I need it and want it, that doesn’t mean others will.

Example: Forecaster, a little-known product that failed. Set up a business line graph, define the horizontal and vertical, then draw the line with the mouse. It generates the numbers. I built it because I wanted it, but I didn’t take the planning step, and I was wrong. There wasn’t a market. It failed. And I had spent a long time building the product, creating documentation, building the packaging, the whole launch thing that could have been avoided with better initial research into the market.

Another, happier example, was a product we didn’t produce in 2002. That time we studied the market first, and it just wasn’t there. I wanted to use what we were going to build, but I might have been the only one.

True Story: Good Idea, but Hard to Explain

Marketing, Productivity Software, True Stories, Web/Tech, , ,

Almost 20 Years ago I developed a software product called Forecaster. You start with an empty chart. Then you assign values to vertical and horizontal. Then you draw a line with your mouse, and Forecaster generates the numbers that correspond to the line.

It was built as something you could use in a business plan. Grab the chart as an illustration, put the numbers into your clipboard, and paste them into Excel (or Lotus 1-2-3, because this was 1989).

But: it took three sentences to explain Forecaster.  And that, I’m sure, was the problem.

Forecaster wasn’t successful in the market. It didn’t sell itself. On the contrary, it took me explaining to sell it. We didn’t have a marketing budget; in fact, we back then was just me and my wife, with no outside financing. Not even the reviewers understood what it did.

One comment that came up a lot: "but that’s cheating." As if getting the numbers from the line was morally wrong. You’re supposed to draw the line from the numbers, and vice-versa. Say, what? Why? 

The Moral of the Story

  1. It’s very hard, and expensive, to market something that you can’t explain in a simple sentence. It’s like rowing upstream.
  2. Competition can be good for you. It’s nice to have competition to help you explain what you’re doing.  Jeff Atwood had a good piece on that earlier this week, riffing on the idea of the arch enemy.
  3. With that next great new thing you want to build a business around, test yourself: can you explain it in a sentence? No? That’s a worry.

The Rest of the Story

  • I took it up to a small exhibition of Excel add-ons up in Redmond, WA. Microsoft product managers saw it and liked it. It was built into the next version of Excel. (And, lest you read this as an accusation, there was no violation of copyright, nothing illegal or immoral, they just liked the idea and added it in. It’s called progress.) And, as far as I can tell, nobody got it. Nobody used it. I never saw it commented in a review, or in some expert lesson.
  • Years later, we built Forecaster into Business Plan Pro. It’s still there, still as powerful as ever; and still hard to explain.

True Story: ‘A Reason Why Not’ Isn’t Good Enough

True Stories, ,

I can't say I liked my first boss. But I learned a lot from him. Some of it worth sharing.

He was bureau manager of United Press International in Mexico City in 1971. He was about 45 years old, just beginning to turn gray, an ex-Navy man with a butch haircut.

When he sent me out on my first reporting assignment, he first took me aside, and said:

"Look, one thing you have to understand. You come back with the story. Don't come back with a reason why you don't have it. If all you have is a reason why not, don't come back at all."

I didn't like that much that day, but I like it now. It was a good lesson to learn. How often do we think a reason why not is as good as the deliverable?

And Twinkles Just Gasped

True Stories

This is a true story.

The three couples were friends. They knew each other different ways: worked together, played tennis, crossed paths.

So they decided to get together once a month to go out to dinner in a group, six people. They decided to rotate who chose the restaurant, and that couple would also pay. Take turns. Have a nice night out. Get to know some new restaurants.

It worked fine the first two months. They met, had dinner, and enjoyed it.

It seemed to be going fine the third month too. They had a nice dinner, everybody liked the place, the conversation was fine … until the check came. This was the third time around, so it was this couple's first turn to choose the restaurant and pay the check.

The husband took the check and gasped. He turned to his wife, with a look of horror on his face, and showed it to her. "Oh my God," he said. She looked at it, and gasped. "That's incredible." They were both shocked.

Was it a mistake? Maybe a thousand-dollar wine bottle, an enormously expensive special dish? The other four at the table never knew. The two horrified check payers never showed the check to the others. In fact, they never addressed the others at all, as they paid the check, still clucking to each other about the amount, and got up from the table to leave. They did say goodbye and good night and all, but there was never another word about the horrible shocking check.

And, needless to say, the three couples never met for dinner again.

Dreamers and Doers Both, Not One or the Other

Reflections, True Stories

I posted yesterday about a New York Times story titled Dreamers and Doers, about Babson College. I had to hold myself back, because this subject is so tangential to that. It's about the title, which has very little to do with the content of the story. But I don't like the "dreams and doers" talk. It reminds me of some old discussions, old times, and old objections to the idea that one is a dreamer or a doer, but not both.

Hey world, don't you want to be both? Do you have to choose? Are you born as one or the other?

Can you get anything done without dreaming in between? What would the motivation be?

My wife and I were married very young — both of us were 22 — and we were pretty much constantly broke until Palo Alto Software finally made it, just a few years ago, when we were both in our 50s.  Raising five kids, building a business, and constantly broke, we used to dream together, out loud, walking and talking, fairly often. We'd dream about having the down payment to buy a house, or starting a company, or going back to school, or moving, and sometimes all of the above.

The dreaming was motivating. It kept us going.

I read, somewhere, that one common trait of entrepreneurs was dreaming about the rewards they'd get later, if they succeeded. In our case, I think we dreamt not of fabulous wealth but of financial survival. I can't speak for my wife on this one, but to me, money has always been a binary thing: enough, or not enough. We dreamt of enough. Aiming too low, I suppose, but it worked.

And the doing was constant. The dreaming didn't get in the way of it. On the contrary, it spurred and inspired us to keep going with the doing.  

Driving to the Airport

True Stories

Just a quick note. I had a conversation the other day about driving somebody — boss, customer, co-worker, ally — to the airport. Isn’t that an unproductive way to spend time?

Not necessarily.

I had a big win once by offering to drive the visiting CEO of the parent company from the San Jose office of Creative Strategies to the San Francisco airport, about an hour a way. Details are irrelevant, but what might be useful is the value of having somebody’s ear for an hour.

That’s something that worked for me once. 

Who Cares Whose Idea?

True Stories

This is a true story.

Really, I didn’t care that he tried to build a business based on my idea, without asking my help, without even telling me. What bugged me was that I liked the guy, before and after that incident, but he was never the same.

I wonder whether you’ve seen that same phenomenon in your business relationships … somebody slips up, does you wrong, and you’re okay with it, but they end up souring, avoiding you, never really getting straight again.

The case I’m talking about, the idea was developing a company to localize English language software into Spanish. This was in the 1980s, the market was young, I was younger, but I’d been involved in software and I’d lived for nine years in Mexico, I was fluent in Spanish.

What the other guy didn’t know was that I thought it was an interesting idea but I wasn’t really ready to go with it. I had other things — what eventually became Palo Alto Software — on my mind.

What he did know was that I’d talked to him about it after-hours, casually. I laid out why it might work, and how it would work. And when it came out, six months later, that he was actually doing it, I could see he was embarrassed. He avoided my eyes as long as he could. When he finally couldn’t avoid my eyes, I gave him a clear sign, indicating that it was okay, I didn’t intend to actually pursue the idea.

When we were alone, I told him explicitly: cool, it’s an interesting business, I didn’t really intend to do it, I’m glad you are.

But that didn’t work. Our business relationships drifted apart over the next few years. I don’t think he ever got over the feeling that he’d been embarrassed. I was fine with it, but he wasn’t.

Post script: nothing ever came of it.  He didn’t implement it well at all. And I could have done it myself, without any trouble, but I didn’t.

Who owns an idea, and how? I’ve also posted a video (narrated slide show) on this.