This is a really good read on how to put together a story about your business or idea that sells.

There’s a ton of books and advice on writing business plans which are long and windy. This offers some sound and usable advice, you can digest in 10 minutes. The advice can also be applied to more than writing a business plan; it’s good for setting up internal projects and offers a check list for you if you’re having to evaluate a ‘pitch’ from someone else.

To read click here: How to Write a Great Business Plan

Start up stories for small businesses and entrepreneurs

I came across this BBC website called Start-Up Stories there’s some good material in here. I just listened to Max Levchin, the founder of Pay-Pal, talk about how he got started:

• Destiny plays it’s role – he bumped into his business partner because he was seeking an air conditioned room to get out of the heat. Lesson: he put himself in the environment to meet people.
• Change and adapt – the initial Pay-Pal business was designed for a mobile device. It changed to a web based payment system when an eBay vendor asked for their logo so he could use it as a payment mechanism on his eBay store. Lesson: create a product and get it out, no matter how basic. Then listen to customers
• Don’t do it alone – he would never build a business without a partner. Lesson: don’t be afraid to share the pie.

{sorry, the BBC website is archaic, it wont let you embed their video in your site.}

With the World Cup in full flight, this short film highlights a disturbing side to the sport that rarely gets much airtime over the glitz and razz of soccer’s celebrity roadshow:

“deadly Mediterranean crossings, broken promises, vanishing agents, brutal living conditions, and families torn apart. It’s estimated that 20,000 young African soccer players are now stranded in Europe. Many more never even make it that far and remain stuck in transit, in port towns across Africa”

You can get more back story on current.com.

You will be motivated

Is spanking employees effective? Probably not, if you apply the findings of a recent survey on the effects of spanking with children. A recent Time Magazine article reports that :

“  children’s short-term response to spanking may make them act out more in the long run. Of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were much more likely to be aggressive by age 5…The odds of a child being more aggressive increased by 50% if he had been spanked.” Read more

It’s pretty simple really, corporal punishment instills fear instead of understanding and repeated reinforcement leads to the following.

• Aggressive behavior becomes the answer to problems
• Spanking has a downward spiral; it becomes less effective the more it’s used
• It spreads to other children. Kids copy kids.

We see much the same logic when it comes to man’s best friend. Beating the hell out of your dog because it misbehaves is the worst thing to do if you want to train it: you create a downward spiral by relating good behavior to fear.

"I'm ok, you're the problem pal"

Cesar Millan the famous dog whisperer, is all about this – he focuses on training the owner, not the dog.

Much of this logic can be applied to life inside the office.

Ok, we don’t have literal spanking at work for the most part (there are exceptions of course and usually they prove to be costly – “Woman spanked at work sues for $1.2m“) but it does happen in the figurative sense pretty often. We all know about the Sergeant Major boss who thinks  yelling and belittling employees is the way to lead.

Here’s something to think about.

Does ruling by fear at work have a similar effect to spanking a child?

• Aggressive behavior becomes the answer to problems (child) ===> Communication & team work dies because nobody listens and everyone confronts (work)
• Spanking has a downward spiral (child) ===> Motivation is killed and employees eventually switch-off. A culture of “Tell-me-what to do” vs “hear what i think” ensues (work)
• It spreads to other children. Kids copy kids (child) ===> A company becomes what the boss does. The destructive culture spreads like a virus

What happened to the old school pig's bladder?

As the world’s largest sporting event nears its curtain raising game next week and 750 millions viewers get ready to draw up their chairs for the World Cup final on July 11th, a controversy builds around the most essential part to the world’s most popular game: the ball. An article in the New York Times on the subject caught my eye because it made me think, is this another example of a company not talking to it’s customer?

The newly designed ball, christened Jabulani {”to celebrate” in Zulu},  is ruffling the feathers of everyone who kicks it, particularly, goalkeepers. I wont repeat the entire story, you can read it on the NYT’s website.

“The ball was designed to be groovier than a Beach Boys album, made of molded polyurethane panels with a grippy feel, and engineered to provide the shooter maximum control. It has been tested in wind tunnels. Robots whacked at the ball to simulate free kicks and corner kicks. The party-hearty wives and girlfriends of England’s players took it out and got it drunk.”

So it seems that it was tested and researched in every way. Apart from one, that is – with those who are going to use it (the customer). Surely, they tried out this thing with players and asked them what they thought? Maybe not! Obviously, they didn’t take much notice if they did.

It served as a good reality check for me. Do the easy thing and talk to your customers, it’s not rocket science (some ideas). Maybe, i’m over sensitive about this since it’s currently a contentious topic of discussion at my own company, OpenStudy.com.

How great leaders inspire action

Building the right company culture and setting a mission everyone is behind is a prerequisite for success. Easy to say, much harder to do.

Simon Sinek, in his Ted lecture, articulates much of why this matters and how it can be done. There’s some good material in here and it can be useful for resetting the way you position your company or product. It’s a good piece to share with your own team, if nothing more than to get everyone thinking in a different way. Sinek uses a simple model for explaining why companies like Apple get it right and most other fall short – it might explain why Apple’s market cap has just over taken Microsoft’s .

Sinek, explains that your average everyday Joe would describe Apple’s business in the following:

• “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?”

Mr. Jobs, on the other hand, would describe it more like this:

• “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”

Herein lays the answer…

If you have another 15 minutes handy, a great lead-on from from the Sinek video is Steve Job’s Commencement Speech given at Stanford in 2005. Again, a good starting point if you are looking for a culture tweak or you want to build some clarity around your mission.

Do your homework?

Find out what their strategic technology road map is and build yourself into it
Find out where they are in their budget process – what small things can you do to get started. They have small hidden pockets of money you can make work for you.

Get found by a partner (how do they know you’re there)?

Be a match maker
Consultants and brokers e.g. NineSigma, YourEncore, VCs
Escouting e.g. Yet2.com, LinkedIN (link with your target group and send monthly “ping” of information, leverage introductions).

Take an approach that works?

Select a business unit to go after
Write an email to business unit head (P&L owner) & ccEmail to CTO and the licensing person of the business unit (hopefully one will bite)
Through linkedin find a thought leader in the business unit

TIP: Make sure the subject line of your email stands out, otherwise it will not be read.

Create a Board of advisors:

Find 2 retired “lifers” from the type of companies you want partner with. Retired Business Unit head is the best.

Invite your IP lawyer to your meetings. He/she will pick up on new ideas that can be patented.

Here’s an email i received from a friend today. It’s a pretty common question for a small business looking to grow and i get this one asked quite a lot.

“What do you know about raising capital or private equity?   We’re getting our “financial management” service offering down and we’ve partnered with another company that brings an element of Intellectual property and Monitoring capability.  do you have some time to chat over coffee/lunch/beer this week?”

There is so much useful educational content out but it’s just a case of knowing where to find it.  I thought i would post my reply. Here’s my email reply back to him {i choose food for payment}.

“I  dont know where your knowledge level starts but this might help. Here’s a lecture that you mind find useful. Download it to your ipod or listen online. This whole series of lectures are pretty good (and they’re British so they must be good). You’ll want to start with lecture #5 -

• “Raising Capital and doing deals” from Oxford University (53 minutes)

And this guy is good as well (you may just hear audio first. Wait and you’ll see him start drawing on the blackboard):

• Raising money for a start-up (10 minutes)

• Getting seed round from a VC (11 minutes)

A previous blog post of mine:

• 3 reasons why your small business will not be able to raise money

If you get a chance to look at this, let me know what you think. I can get more or less technical when we meet.

phil”

Grow your business: 4 ways to find free educational courses on line

Wanting to brush up on my financial skills i have been taking a free online course in finance from Yale (ECON 252: Financial Market. While i cant claim to rub shoulders with New Haven’s elite, i can get pretty close to what they are learning and all for free.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed. The majority of this course i’ve been able to follow on my ipod without needing to do the heavy course reading. I especially, like class #9, the guest lecture by David Swensen. Basically, it’s a course on “What Wall Street Does Not Want You Know”:

• David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer and manager of the University’s endowment, discusses the tactics and tools that Yale and other endowments use to create long-term, positive investment returns. He emphasizes the importance of asset allocation and diversification and the limited effects of market timing and security selection. Also, the extraordinary returns of hedge funds, one of the more recent phenomena of portfolio management, should be looked at closely, with an eye for survivorship and back-fill biases.

{click here to watch}

There are 2 main formats by which you can take the course, mp3 download or video. The transcripts of the lecture are also available if you really want to dig deep. Click here for the download page for the Yale finance course.

This has started me on a crusade to back fill my education with courses and content that have real relevance to me to day. I like being able to take a course and especially being able to apply it to my business.

Here’s a course on pricing from the Wharton School, liked:

How much should you charge? Why micro pricing pays off

The big challenge with the free online educational content is plowing through the vast volumes of content and finding what is of interest (believe me, there is something there for everyone and everything). One way to do this is to use some targeted search engines (see below). There are a bunch more tactics but that is a blog post in itself.

• ocwsearch.com – indexing OpenCourseWare material from MIT. More universities will be added soon.
• ocwfinder.org - OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares
• www.ocwconsortium – index currently contains 2,970 courses from 37 sources and 6 languages
• oedb.org – You’ll find digital archives, a variety of courses, Podcasts, videos and sometimes a mix of everything you can imagine.

Let me know if you want some specific recommendation for business, entrepreneurial or finance courses, I’ve  done a lot of digging around or if you would like more posts on this subject also let me know (make a post below).

Would you invest in these guys?

A friend of mine has just shown me some packaging designs for a new chocolate product she is developing: it’s actually healthy for you, the more you eat, the better you feel and the better it is for you. Sounds pretty cool (i haven’t had a sample yet!). She asked me “is this business invest-able?”. Well, the answer involves the usual suspects when it comes to this type of thing. It doesnt matter whether you’re talking chocolate or tennis balls, the same principles apply.

Here are the ten questions an investor will want answered:

• Do you have sales and distribution (e.g. orders in hand from a big retailer or predictable and scalable sales direct to consumers – like online)?
• Show me evidence that people love your chocolates and why?
• How am I going to make money out of the deal (sale of the company, return on investment etc)?
• What’s the competition like and what makes you different?
• What’s stops someone else copying you and killing your market?
• What’s the management team like – I’ll back the horse, not the jockey?
• How much money do you need now i.e. i want to make sure that my money is safe and you don’t run out of cash quickly so I lose my investment?
• How much money do you need to be profitable?
• (helps but not essential) = i’ve gotta love chocolate i.e. i just love your product personally?
• How many Umpa Lumpas do you have on staff?