Tag Archives: VentureBeat

The Growth is Always Greener in Your Neighbor’s Lawn

Have you noticed this? Businesses that sell to small business want to sell to enterprises. Businesses that sell to enterprises want small business. I’ve seen it for 30 years now. 

bigstockphoto.com grass greener

On the one hand, it’s good business. Expand. Go from where you are to where there’s more market waiting. 

On the other hand, damn, I think there’s a DNA problem for most of us. I, for example, have always been comfortable with small business and startups. Companies I’ve started focused on small business and startups. And much as I’ve tried, repeatedly, I never really figured out how to sell to the big business, alias enterprise. 

I think these are different worlds. And they are borders that are hard to cross. I like the way Michael Driscoll puts it in this VentureBeat item: Startups are from Mars, enterprises are from Venus

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)

Are You an Entrepreneur? Do You Want to Be?

Are you an entrepreneur? Do you want to be? Are you living with one? This less-than-five-minute video is worth every second.

I subscribed to the GrowConference channel on YouTube as a result of watching this. Good stuff. And if you don’t see it here, click here for the YouTube original.

And thanks to VentureBeat for its post on this. I like that they called it: Anyone who has started, will start, or wants to start a startup should watch this video. I agree.

2011 As Good Times for Entrepreneurs?

So, on last day of the year, eve of a new year and (I think … correct me if I’m wrong) a new decade, Steve Blank posted his optimistic 2011 may mark the beginning of a golden era for entrepreneurs on VentureBeat.

He cites several reason, all of which make sense to me:

  • Compressing the product development cycle.
  • Startups Built For Thousands Rather than Millions of Dollars.
  • The New Structure of the Venture Capital industry.
  • Entrepreneurship as Its Own Management Science.
  • Consumer Internet Driving Innovation.

Interesting: thoughtful, and well reasoned. Let’s hope he’s right.

10 Tips for Saving Your Life From Your Business

Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:

Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.

That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.

Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.

Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.

First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:

  1. Develop and honor meal times with people you love. For me and my wife, as we built our business, it was about family meals, dinner time, once a day. We made the family dinner a priority. During crunch times, we’d stop, have dinner with our kids, and then go on later (see point 3, below). And you don’t need a marriage and children to make this rule important. Do it your way, not mine. It applies just as well to any relationship that’s important to you.
  2. Schedule vacations long in advance. If you like what you do in your business, you’re always going to have trouble getting away. There will always be a good business reason to not go on vacations. If you’re scheduled long in advance, then the vacation is on the calendar. As you talk to clients, schedule business events, and generally work on the business, your vacation shows up, and you naturally work around it.
  3. Get used to working at home. So you have a lot of work but you tear yourself away, take your dinner time, spend some time in real life, and then later on, when everybody else is watching dumbing and numbing television, you can get back on the computer and catch up with your obsession. That requires good Internet connection and related tools, like online productivity tools, GoToMyPC, and the like.
  4. Don’t obsess; plan. Don’t wander through the rest of life with business thoughts running through your head like a helicopter background noise in your dreams. Take a few deep breaths. To get the business-helicopter-mind out of your head keep the planning realistic. Planning gets a lot of things out of your head and into the plan. When you wake up at night obsessing, go to your planning. Write it down. Relax, and go back to sleep.
  5. Get regular exercise. I’ve been there: It’s so easy to put off exercise because you’re worried about the business. “I have too much to do, I don’t have time for exercise,” you tell yourself, and it becomes a rationalization to dive back into that project or those emails. But there’s a trick to exercise: you get more time back, in productivity, than what you put into the exercise. Seriously: put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and you’ll get back an hour of productive time for every half hour you spend. It has to do with sleep, stress, and mental health.

And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:

  1. Do something you can believe in. It’s not just finding the best business opportunity; it’s finding one you believe in. There’s quality of work as well as quantity, and high quality makes high quantity easier to live with. Make sure that when you take a step back from it, every so often, you can see how what you do made other lives better.
  2. Acknowledge risk. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose. Understand the risk you take. Talk about it with the other people in your life, so you don’t feel all alone with the risk. Think about the worst case. Learn to live with it.
  3. Don’t clam up. Share carefully. Be able to talk about business problems, safely, with at least one other person in your life. Get out of the let’s solve them mode, and into the let’s just talk about them so creative juices can percolate. People who care about you take silence as being something like walls and barriers. Secrets are stressful. Sharing relieves stress. But be careful, mind the framework and parameters of sharing, people have to know when you don’t want to be told the obvious feedback.
  4. Understand that you make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistakes, analyze them, and them package them up in your mind and store them somewhere out of site, somewhere where you can access them occasionally to help avoid making the same mistakes again, but, on the other hand, where they won’t just drive you crazy.
  5. Tell the truth. Then you don’t have to keep track of which lies you told to which people. It’s hard enough to manage stress without having to manage complex alternate realities.

None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.

(Image: Kenneth V. Pilon/Shutterstock)