Category Archives: General

You’ve Been Building Your Company. What About Your Grit?

This entry was posted in General, Startups and tagged business goals, business support, entrepreneur attitude, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, grit on May 13, 2016 by Shannon Winning.

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In my post, It’s Not Failing. It’s Discovery I said, “Many entrepreneurs are high achievers and really hate failure – that is why they keep going. They’ll keep working and trying …” I think this statement deserves some discussion. Why are entrepreneurs more given to keep working through problems? What makes them better suited them some to launch new ideas?

This got me thinking about grit.

Perhaps you have seen Angela Lee Duckworth’s TEDx Talk. It has over 8M views and suggest you have a look.

You can call it:

Stick-to- it-ness
Tenacity
Determination
Not giving up …

Regardless of the name – Grit it is an attribute you must have to be an entrepreneur. Actually, it’s useful in about any aspect of life. I believe in it.

Wondering what your level of grit is? Take this U Penn test.

My interest isn’t how much grit you currently possess. A better question is, Can you become more gritty? (Clearly some people have more of it naturally.) I do believe that you can develop your grit and I’m profoundly interested in learning techniques to develop more of it.

From my experience here are three steps you can take to build your grit:

Surround yourself with tenacious people. I don’t care if you are six or 60, peer pressure can be wonderful if you have the right peers. Gritty people can encourage you. They provide moral support when hard times come. I remember as a high schooler my father, brothers and I build a house in the Adirondacks. My father and brothers are accountants, not builders. I at 16 had the most skill just having made a book shelf in shop class. Later at a family dinner in this beautiful house we all build, I told the story of when my brothers and I seeing the pile of wood and cement blocks stacked up as far as the eye could see, said, “The old man really &^%$* up this time.” My father’s response, “I never thought we would fail. Thought it might take longer, cost more, but the house would get built”. That mental model – It may be a lot more difficult but you will ultimately prevail – is vital to increasing your grit. Not bad for a bunch of gritty accountants.

Be flexible and creative on how you get to the goal. Of course, I assume you have clear goals, but the path there is not linear. Flexibility allows you to change your mind and continue to learn. This helps you find innovative solutions to what seem like hard or impossible problems. I thought this blog had some great ideas on how to do this.

Keep very active to maintain high energy. I am not saying you need to run marathons. But gritty people are not couch potatoes. Grittiness takes energy. You need to have the physical stamina to work at a task for extended periods of time. That takes energy, both physical and mental, and lots of it. Keeping the right attitude helps you maintain that kind of energy level. Make a point to do things you are passionate about to keep your head right. More on that here.

Let’s review:

Surround yourself with moral and emotional support to:

Externalize your commitments to other
Focus your will
Apply healthy peer pressure

Be flexible and assume there are:

Multiple routes to the goal
Problems that will require creativity
Opportunities to experiment and discover

Fitness – Think mental, spiritual AND physical because grit takes:

Lots of energy
Endurance
Stress reductions

Lastly, a word on perspective. A point Alfie Kohn, makes in his critique of grit is worth keeping in mind. He says gritty people sometimes exhibit “nonproductive persistence” and there are occasions when it doesn’t make “sense to persist with a problem that resists solution”. Make sure you are making real progress.

Assessing your tendency for “nonproductivity” can be difficult. I talk more about how to surround yourself with people who can give you perspective on the problem you’re trying to solve in my previous post, Four Tests to Vet Potential Business Advisors. A good advisor can help you determine when to quit and when to push ahead. The best business advisors and mentors are the ones who’ve succeeded (and failed) at solving their own business problems, making them just the right amount of gritty to be your guide.

What about you? Do you have a story of grit in the making? Tell me what about the person you know who exhibits grit.

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It’s Not Failing. It’s Discovery.

This entry was posted in General, Startups and tagged business, discovery, entrepreneurs, failure, startups on February 1, 2016 by Shannon Winning.

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“Entrepreneurs think of learning the way most people think of failure.” Peter Sims

You’ve heard a lot about failure.

There must be at least one blog or article a day extolling the virtues of failure in an entrepreneurial business. Entrepreneurs saying they love failure.

Really? No one loves failure. What entrepreneurs love is experimenting, tinkering, tweaking – discovering. If you are an entrepreneur, discovery is at the core of who you are.

From the outside world, it probably seems that people like you and I love failure, or even high- risk ventures, that we don’t get discouraged at products that flop or companies that fold. You and I know that’s not true.

Many entrepreneurs are high achievers and really hate failure – that is why they keep going. They’ll keep working and trying and iterating until they know the product is right, and they keep working. Don’t forget it took Thomas Edison 9000 experiments to discover a working light bulb.

Entrepreneurial researchers have long debated whether entrepreneurs are different than others in the way they perceive and respond to risks.¹ I think entrepreneurs are just as risk adverse as the next person. Great entrepreneurs do reframe problems and challenge the status quo. It is this mental process that enables you to discover new solutions to problems, that is new opportunities. This is actually a risk reduction strategy. This is hard work, so entrepreneurs don’t confuse failure with quitting – that is the key difference.

In an August 6, 2011 op-ed piece in the NY Times Peter Sims author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries, points out the difference between failure and discovery with Howard Schultz the founder of Starbucks. He talks about how Schultz’ early shops turned off customers with non-stop opera and menus in Italian. If Schultz had run out of money then and folded up his operation, that would have been a failure. But what he did was continue to experiment – with employee uniforms, menus, music, chairs – until the formula became successful. (How would I find a cup of coffee and connect my laptop in Manhattan if he gave up!)

There is a curiosity in an entrepreneur that makes him want to try a new way. Let’s do a little more this. Let’s try from a new perspective. The problem, as Sims points out, is that this kind of experimentation isn’t encouraged in most workplaces. In fact, “mistakes” are usually punished. Who wants to try something new when the risk is punishment?

The workplace is as linear as the schools we grew up in, and yet the world, and the problems entrepreneurs want to solve are non-linear. From that linear point of view it looks like the startups of the world are foolish failure lovers instead of innovators.

Early in my career, I worked for AT&T and the company was critical to my professional success. The company had many product innovations. Nevertheless, the company often did not capitalize on those ideas. I recall suggesting a new business model for a new product without my boss’s approval. In my annual review, I got “smacked” for not being a team player. Got the message, don’t experiment with new business ideas. I left AT&T and went to work for Silicon Valley start-up, Ascend Communications.

Experimentation leads to discovery and need to be used on all aspects of an entrepreneurial business.

How do you use this perspective to be a better entrepreneur? Acknowledge no one actually likes failure.

Because failure is ego crushing we naturally want to avoid it, and this can keep us from pushing through a new idea. If you use the experiment and discovery model it helps you fake out your ego and keeps it out of the way freeing you up to discover the unmet need. That’s the first job of an entrepreneur.

You never have perfect information as an entrepreneur. I like how Simon et al put it in the scholarly article on risk perception. “Decision-making in entrepreneurial settings often leads to various degrees of error or misjudgments due to the simple fact that the information available is either incomplete or ambiguous.”

It’s then not a question of if a failure will occur, but when.

In fact, the act of failing can is a signal to take notice and adjust your approach. I learned this from Rita McGrath in her book The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty. “Seen in this light, failure is just a temporary phase in an ongoing entrepreneurial process, which can be used as a valuable source of learning and improved self-awareness.”^{^[1]}

The experiment and discovery model can help you not take failure personally.

Experiment and discovery reduces uncertainty and expands the search for new business opportunities. You can practice the model like this:

Continually test your goals and assumptions.

Look for inefficiencies and weaknesses in your product.

Continually incorporate negative discoveries into next steps

And tell yourself, this is one long experiment, the outcome of which will always lead to a discovery. And that is never a failure.

[1] “BEYOND RISK PROPENSITY – THE INFLUENCE OF EVALUATION PERIOD AND INFORMATION RELEVANCE ON RISK TAKING BEHAVIOR’ Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal 18.1 (2012: 1-19, Zheng, Prislin

[2] McGrath, R.G., & I. MacMillan. (2000) The Entrepreneurial Mindset. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

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Your Customer Called. She Said You Forget Her Point of View.

This entry was posted in General, Startups and tagged customers, entrepreneurs, startups on February 1, 2016 by Shannon Winning.

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You’ve been working on your idea for months, years even. You know every in and out of your product’s features. You know every nook and cranny of your problem. You two are in love, and there is no separating you. If your love for your idea is anything like the love you’ve felt for a new girlfriend or boyfriend, you know it’s myopic and exclusive. When you fall hard for your idea you can easily forget the person for whom you are actually solving a problem.

Besides teaching entrepreneurs and counseling tech startups, I also run the Business Development Center in Asbury Park, NJ where I counsel product makers and small business entrepreneurs looking to launch their beloved ideas. I find that as much as these makers need encouragement to get started, they also need a reality check on who their market is – much like tech entrepreneurs.

A while back a woman came in with a homemade yogurt she had developed. It was delicious and expensive. I asked her who she was making it for. Everybody, she said.

I said is it for people who are lactose intolerant? No.

Is it for people who eat Dannon at half the cost? No.

Is it for people who only eat organic? Yes.

Then it’s not for everybody, I said.

My point with the yogurt maker was that she needed to define her customer and her customer’s point of view so she could modify her solution to align with her buyers’ needs and desires.

The same is true for your product. Do you know exactly whose problem you are solving?

In today’s post, I’ll outline specifically how you can figure out who your customers REALLY are, and why they make the buying decisions they do.

To help us along I’ll use the familiar analogy of a chef.

As good chef, you want to create a meal that will be enjoyable for your guests. An enjoyable meal increases the likelihood that your guests will either return for more or spread the word about your cooking.

To ensure they’ll like your creation, you’ll need to find out a few things beforehand:

WHO are they?
WHAT do they like?
WHY do they like it?
HOW do they get it?

Likewise as entrepreneurs, we need to do some research. Don’t be intimated by what you’ve heard about expensive market research projects; for now, you simply need to get out there and talk to people. Study their habits. Understand their preferences. Use the below suggestions to help you find the answers those three critical questions

1) WHO are they?

Your first task is to identify your customer base. This depends on what you’re selling, but also depends on a number of additional characteristics.

How big is your potential customer base?

Study to the market to understand how many people you can reasonably expect to be interested in buying something from you.

What does your ideal customer look like?

Detail the type of person that will buy your product. Include age range, income level, where they live, where they work, where they shop, how they get around, and any other potentially applicable demographics that you can think of. The more specific you are, the greater the likelihood that you will be able to communicate your offering to them and that they will respond.

Are they one-time or potential repeat customers?

There are two different kinds of customers with respect to number of purchases, and they each need to be treated differently. Understand if your customers are coming in every week or if they are only using service once. For example, if you sell muffins, you’re going to rely on repeat customers. If, on the other hand, you sell wedding cakes, you’re going to see a customer once and only once. Or twice.

Who are the actual buyers?

Maybe your ideal user is not the purchaser. If you’re running a soccer camp, your users are the kids, while your purchaser will be the parents. You will undoubtedly want to create an outstanding experience for the kids, but ultimately, your marketing focus, will be on the folks who sign the check. You will need to “sell” to both of them, but it’s important to recognize the difference.

Why will they come to you in particular?

What makes your ideal customer unique to you? What conditions or limitations will make them interested in doing business with you? Try to determine the one or two most important reasons you should be selling to them. This will focus your marketing strategy and get you the most bang for your marketing buck!

2) WHAT do they like?

In order to create something enjoyable for your guests (customers), you need to know what appeals to them. As you will see when you review your competition, there are plenty of options for consumers to spend their money on. A true understanding of your customers will differentiate you from the competition.

Why will these people be interested in what you are offering?

Focus on specific guests. Walk in their shoes and think about why they’d be interested in your product.

What do your customers like in terms of style?

Dig into their personalities. Describe what they enjoy doing, eating, reading. Think about how your business could provide some value to their daily habits and general lifestyle.

What level of service do they enjoy? i.e. Do they seek high-quality services and basic products, or vice versa?

This is an important question. You won’t be able to reach every person, all the time. Narrow it down. Review your business model and think about what level service/quality you’re trying to achieve. Match that with the type of person who’d be willing to pay for it.

3) WHY do they like it?

You need to understand why people like what you are selling. It could be your convenient location, your superior quality, or your excellent service. It could be a variety of other reasons. But there has to be a reason they’re buying from you and not someone else. Figure out what that reason is and get good at explaining it.

4) HOW do they get it?

Understand the buying process so you can disrupt it or insert yourself in it.

How are they going to buy it? From a certain distributor, can you insert yourself in that process and disrupt it.

The yogurt maker didn’t like my line of questioning and she left before I could help her develop her ideal customer’s point of view. Had she stayed we would have talked about the ideal retailer for her, whether a gourmet grocery, a heath food store or an online shop. And that’s a shame because it was really good yogurt. It just needed the right market.

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4 Tests To Vet Potential Business Advisors

This entry was posted in General, Startups and tagged business advisors, entrepreneurs, startups on February 1, 2016 by Shannon Winning.

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Things at my company had taken a bad turn and I was alone at the helm with the bank on the phone. It wasn’t just my product or my reputation at stake anymore. There were people paying their mortgage with a company salary.

The terms the lender was trying force on the company were extremely onerous, even by venture debt standards, but I felt I had to accept those terms or the company would fold. The lender was advising me that this would be the best move for my company and my employees. Instead of agreeing immediately I called a guy I knew as knowledgeable about venture debt and what are called “workouts”. I didn’t know him well, but enough to know his advice would be solid, and enough to be intimidated by him.

This guy was hard to be around. The kind to say to you, “You’re being a stupid ass.”

I told them the terms and he said something like, “That’s totally outrageous. Why are you even considering a stupid offer like that?”

It was harsh but it worked. It gave me the confidence to go back to the lender, with some more of his advice, and negotiate a fair deal that would preserve the company and get the lender paid back, albeit under different terms.

I got very lucky that day that he picked up the phone because the worst time to look for a business advisor is during a crisis. You’ll be looking for any port in the storm and that could leave you open to receiving advice from someone who isn’t qualified and doesn’t have your best interest in mind. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to what could be business-ending advice in bad times.

Use these tests to vet potential business advisors before a crisis and find someone who can walk with you as your grow your company.

Look for an advisor who’s smart about your industry, not just smart

Just because s/he is smart does not make the person qualified on a particular topic. You know your doctor is smart, but would you take his advice on your stock portfolio? If his advice on a medical stock is based on a related medicine he’s using, then fine, but not because he’s got a higher degree than you. You need an expert in your industry or the particular subject matter under discussion. What is the background or experience of this person that makes him or her suitable? Always have a skeptic’s mind, that is, Is this person really qualified to opine on the topic in question?

Look for an advisor without a motive to manipulate

Have you ever received advice from someone and later found out that they benefited from you following through on it? That’s not advice in your best interest, that’s manipulation. Getting direction on your business is not supposed to be a consultative sales process. Fellow employees, co-founders, investors are not good candidates for advisors. Some disengagement gives perspective. A good test question, Does he or she profit by me taking this advice?

And what is this person’s motivation for helping me? Does this person need you to take their advice to satisfy their ego? That’s the worst kind of advisor.

Look for someone who isn’t a cheerleader (or a jerk)

You probably have enough people in your circle telling you how good your ideas are. The last thing you need is a validator. A true advisor can save you a bunch of money when you try to implement a poorly thought out plan. Someone who is always giving you good feedback is a warning sign. What you need is “reality adjustment therapy.” Not, Wow! Great idea! More useful feedback would be, That is the complete and total wrong market for this product. Did you research your customer? True advisors, like my guy on the phone, are not always pleasant to be around. They’re truth tellers. You want them to ask the questions you are trying to avoid, even though it’s uncomfortable. That will keep you out of the reality distortion syndrome. If he or she can attack the idea, without attacking you, than this person has the right mix of honesty and humanity. Steer clear of “brilliant” business people and entrepreneurs who are condescending and cutting.

Look for someone who is self-reflecting

You know you need someone who can tell you if you have a bad idea. But what about someone who gives you straight up, solid direction? Good right? Not good enough. True advisors, like teachers, are good at equipping you for future situations by helping you learn how to think. Look for an experienced person who is self-reflecting on their own actions. This person can reveal their thinking behind their own pivotal business decisions so you have some context for approaching your own. Simply copying your advisor’s business moves won’t make you successful long term. It’s reflection (not specific repeatable steps) that gets you to the right answer for you.

Lastly, look at yourself and your motivation

Why are seeking help? Before you ask for a potential advisor’s time, vet yourself. You may not be ready for them. Ask yourself this series of questions to reveal your motives:

Are you looking for approval?

Are you looking for someone to say, Good job, instead of, Do better? Then you want tea and sympathy, not advisement.

Can you be honest?

Do you spin the facts or sugar coat things when you go for advice? Or are you going to keep the truth from your advisor to make yourself look better? Then you’re not ready to be taught.

Do you have real commitment to use the advice?

Will you put into practice what you learn from your advisor? I once had an employee who regularly asked for feedback, because he thought that’s what he was supposed to say. But he had no intention in implementing it. It was a waste of time for both of us. If you seek advice it’s your obligation to accept it and not argue it. Later you can reflect and decide to implement the feedback or not.

Are you looking for a counselor?

Is it business advice you need or help with your personal issues? Take your baggage to a therapist. Advisors help you maximize your performance, not fix your personal problems. If you need counseling (and we all may at some point) go to the right professional and come to this advisor/advisee relationship healthy.

Strategic Mistake – Writing A Business Plan

This entry was posted in General, Uncategorized and tagged Alexander Osterwalder, business plan, business plans, common business startup mistakes, startup mistake on March 3, 2015 by rogerwboyce.

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I wrote this post last year about the first strategic mistake you can make, which is writing a business plan when starting a new business.

Have a look at Alexander Osterwalder’s argument here. He makes three points, and I’ve added my additional thoughts.

Wasting Time: And increasing your confirmation bias. You will begin to listen to data that only supports your written business plan, not gathering customer insight.
Locked In: And you spend a lot of time un-selling your stakeholders possibly causing them to question their confidence in you. Un-selling is time-consuming, internally focused and takes time away from customer development.
Premature Scaling: And if you are VC backed it may lead to dilution of founder ownership. Scaling too early is “eating your seed corn”, consuming cash, and then you will need to go back to your investors for more cash because you started to execute on your guesses, not facts.

Using the Osterwalder Canvas or the Ash Maurya Lean Canvas and associated methodologies is one way to avoid this strategic mistake.

Startup Culture: Think Less, Do More

This entry was posted in General, Startups and tagged company culture, startup culture, startups on December 9, 2014 by admin.

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I’ve seen many lists over the years about what makes a great company culture. This one, from one of the founders of HubSpot on company culture, is worth reading. I like the author’s very first point on action orientation – all his other points too. Wish I made the action orientation point in my previous post regarding “Experimentation and Early Competitive Advantage”.

I’ve only written one business plan in my life. It was while I was in business school, and it was required. Generally, I think business plans are pretty useless (but the planning process can be quite useful).

The problem with business plans is that things change so quickly in the startup world. Before the ink is even dry on that 100+ page business plan as it shoots out the printer, things have already changed and “the plan” is already outdated. Stuff happens: Good stuff, bad stuff — and every now and then, amazing stuff.

Very few startups I know – or companies I’ve invested in – resemble their original business plan. (And that’s a good thing, because it means they’re shaping their businesses to meet the needs of their customers.)

Great startup employees are the same way. They think a little and then do a lot. And then they adapt and modify.

The best companies often don’t start with a brilliant idea, they iterate into one.

It’s hard to learn from thinking. It’s much easier to learn from doing.

Read the rest of the post here.

Kickstarter – Not Just For Entrepreneurs

This entry was posted in Crowdfunding, General and tagged crowdfunding, entrepreneurs, kickstarter on December 3, 2014 by admin.

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Some savvy folks at Sony know product planning can be guesswork. They used a Japanese crowdfunding site to test a new product concept.

“We hid Sony’s name because we wanted to test the real value of the product, whether there will be demand for our concept,” said a member of the Sony team. The quote shows the company’s team understands that traditional market research has drawbacks, especially when it comes to innovation. Moreover by crowdfunding, the Sony team is avoiding a big pitfall of testing product ideas without also testing the true economic value or price a customer will pay. Using non-traditional approaches can be less costly and faster to implement. The following are two additional non-traditional ways to test product ideas.

Test Ad: Use Adwords to advertise a new product. You do not need to build the product to test in this way. Make your landing page a way to collect interested users. If you get a zero click-thru rate, that really tells you something about your ad description and the product idea.

Test Purchase: Use a purchase button on your landing page. If you get users to click thru that again tells you something. This will test your pricing as well. Inform these customers you will let them know when the product is ready.

Alternative approaches to discover what products may gain market traction are worth considering, regardless of your company size. Just be careful not to mislead your potential customers. You must be honest about where you are in your product development.

Before You Write a Business Plan For Your Product, Read This

This entry was posted in Business Incubation, General and tagged business incubation, business plan on April 21, 2014 by admin.

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If you desire is to create a thriving new business never start by writing a business plan.

In this post I’ll give you five critical questions every new entrepreneur should answer before he or she starts to build a business around a new product.

My motivation is to shift you from an internal focus (writing a business plan) and get you to understand unmet needs and who will buy your product, an external focus to building your business. Think and act first. Find out if your thinking is guesswork or factual[1]. I bet you’ve created a lot a mythology about your business idea and you’re making many assumptions about the market you intend to serve.

Here are a few questions to help you test yourself:

Is any of your thinking fiction?
Have you spoken to too few customers?
Have you confused users with customers?
Can you succinctly answer the following questions so anyone can understand?

Now let’s get specific on questions about your product and customer base.

What is your product? What will you provide to a potential customer so he or she will exchange money for your product or service? Can you define it clearly and simply?

Too often new entrepreneurs can’t clearly define their offering. As amazing as that sounds – potential customers must understand the offering. It is almost impossible to sell a product or service customers don’t clearly understand.

Why does someone need it? What problems do your product solve? To get your creativity going, think about: How does your product increase the buyer’s quality of life? How does it “right” a wrong? How does it prevent the end of something good?[2]

If the former questions don’t work think of a product you have purchased and define the “value” that motivated you to purchase it. Does your product or service have a similar value?

Who are your customers? Who are the potential customers that have the problem you solve? Who will buy your product?

Customers will drive your business. It pays to give a great deal of thought to who they are.

Where do they live? Does that affect their likelihood of seeking out your product? What are they like? How old are they? What financial category do they fall into? Oh, and make sure you are really speaking to the customer (he or she is the one that pays you).

How are you going to find these customers? Or how are they going to find you?

The cost and difficulty of finding your customers is a major factor that impacts your product pricing and, moreover, the success of your enterprise.

Must you travel to each customer’s location to make a sale? Do you already know them? Will you advertise? Find them online, through a website? Hope for word of mouth?

Once you find your customers, how will you keep them? Will they come back for the quality? The convenience? The excellent service you provide? Will you constantly strive to improve your product? Or work hard to maintain its already superior level of quality?

The first strategic mistake is starting with a business plan and getting stuck guessing with an internal focus. Move to an external focus. Get to work talking to prospects, sell a product or service to someone. Find out what will motivate him or her to part with hard earned dollars. Is there one customer or a million? Nail down these five questions first, and please do not start with a business plan. Once you really know the answers and you’re sure of what you learned, then you can write a short business plan to cement your ideas.

4 Components to a Memorable Elevator Pitch

This entry was posted in General and tagged elevator pitch on March 12, 2012 by admin.

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When I started coaching entrepreneurs I found that while all spent time obsessing about the design of their business cards, very few gave thought to their elevator pitch. In my experience, to explain the context and value of your business in an elevator ride’s time, is far and away more useful in winning customers and investors.

You will need your elevator pitch for investors, bankers, customers, prospects, cocktail parties and elevators. It needs to be short and engaging. The objective to this short engaging story is to pique interest and stimulate curiosity about your business. It is not to tell every single detail. To drive the point home: “assume a short building,” says Bill Joos of Garage.com, “ruthlessly cut away the unnecessary details.”

Today I’ll break down for you the four components of an effective and memorable elevator pitch. I’ll use an example of how I would sell the need for an elevator pitch, with an elevator pitch:

You have a business card; you must have an elevator pitch too!

Many elevator pitches are too long, generic, and unmemorable. A great elevator pitch will make your audience: 1) understand 2) be interested and 3) want more. Your audience will see you as organized and articulate. Our approach creates a pitch half the length of the 56 second average by 1) providing context 2) giving meaning 3) making it matter and 4) showing your difference.

Let’s break down this pitch for a pitch into the four parts.

Provide Context: Context will help your audience hone in on what you are about to describe.

For example, “You have a business card; you must have an elevator pitch too!”

Here I show how an elevator pitch fits into the context of how you represent your business.

Watch out for too much detail. You can provide the detail later or after the pitch if more time is available.

Give Meaning: It’s all about what needs you address or what problem you solve. Define the problem in one of three ways.

How it increases quality of life.
How it makes a wrong right.
How it prevents the end of something good.

For example: “Many elevator pitches are, too long, generic, and unmemorable. A great elevator pitch will make your audience 1) understand 2) be interested and 3) want more”.

Make it Matter: This is the so what question. What benefits does your audience or target customer receive?

For example: “Your audience will see you as organized and articulate”.

Another way to think about this point is to ask the following question. What will have changed for the better? In our oversimplified example, you will be regarded as organized. However, without a good pitch you may appear scattered.

Show You’re Different: Can only you and not the other guy tell your story? How unique is your story?

For example: “Our approach creates a pitch half the length of the 56 second average by 1) providing context 2) giving meaning 3) making it matter and 4) showing your difference”.

In this example, I am “selling” my elevator pitch methodology and seeking to make it unique and better than your other options.

How long should your elevator pitch be?

Your target word budget is 80 words in total. Plan on being able to speak 2 to 3 words a second. Ideally tell the story in 30 seconds. Time yourself.

Try reading mine aloud and time it.

You have a business card; you must have an elevator pitch too!

Many elevator pitches are too long, generic, and unmemorable. A great elevator pitch will make your audience: 1) understand 2) be interested and 3) want more. Your audience will see you as organized and articulate. Our approach creates a pitch half the length of the 56-second average by 1) providing context 2) giving meaning 3) making it matter and 4) showing your difference.

About 30 seconds, right? That was 79 words. Okay, now you give it a try for your business.

[1] http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/

[2] This concept comes from Guy Kawasaki, see it for yourself by searching youtube “the art of the start”.

[3] http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/careers/pitch/

How Your Unconscious Bias is Making Your a Bad Decision Maker

This entry was posted in General and tagged decision making, unconscious bias on November 18, 2011 by admin.

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We create mental models to put the external world in a framework we can understand. While useful in handling information, these models have real shortcomings, especially in business. Humans have an inherent tendency to favor a particular outcome. Like believing their product will sell because similar products have been a success in the past. Or believing a male engineer will be a better fit for the organization because all the engineers at your previous companies were men. Or listening to customer feedback in an unbalanced way giving more weight to praise and heavily discounting feedback that is negative.

It is critical to be aware of this tendency; otherwise it will lead to poor decision-making such as hiring or firing someone without cause or investing in an untested idea.

There are many types of mental models we rely on, usually unknowingly. This author can name 12, but today we’re going to focus on our tendency to select data to accept what supports our beliefs and then discount or totally ignore data that is counter to our belief system. This is called a confirmation bias.

Early Thinking

To protect yourself from confirmation bias in your start-up, try this exercise.

The ladder of inference is a helpful way to troubleshoot your thinking. Please accept the irony of using a mental model after condemning them. The ladder of inference helps spot your biases and examine your belief systems.

Following is a practical example of how it works with the potential for completely different outcomes.

Steps of the Ladder	Outcome 1	Outcome 2
1. Data Collection or Observation	Joe is late to my staff meeting.	Joe is late to my staff meeting.
2. Select Data	Joe knows I want my meetings to start on time.	Joe knows I want my meetings to start on time.
3. Add Meaning	Employees who are late to meetings are not serious about their jobs.	Joe would normally not be late without a good reason.
4. Make Assumptions	Employees who are not serious about their jobs should not be in my organization.	He must have been working on the important project I asked him to finish before the meeting.
5. Draw Conclusion	Joe is not a valuable member of the organization.	Joe is an awesome performer.
6. Beliefs	Not addressing poor performance makes me a weak leader.	Getting assignment completed move the organization forward.
7. Action	He needs to be fired.	He deserves a raise.