Roy's Blog: Business Success
January 5, 2012
Successful startups find ways to avoid these 6 deadly mistakes
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Successful startups find ways to avoid these 6 deadly mistakes.
Got an idea you think can make you lots of money? Good. Chalk one up to you for coming up an innovative thought.
But the real challenge you have is to figure out how to monetize it. If you can’t get people to buy it, your idea is wasted.
Here are 6 mistakes entrepreneurs absolutely must avoid:
1. Not determining how your idea is different from your competition
Ultimate success will be determined by staking a unique claim in the market. If your idea is the same as, or similar to something already out there, it will be invisible. It won’t attract attention and no one will buy it.
If you can’t come up with an idea that is different than someone else’s, STOP.
2. Not clearly identifying who the potential customers are for your new idea
Winning is all about targeting your idea to very specific groups of people and giving them a reason to buy from you. It’s not about flogging your idea to the masses and hoping it will stick to some of them.
If you can’t define your potential customers, STOP.
3. Not recruiting people who have a strong marketing and customer service background
Ultimately, the success of your idea will depend on go-to-market effectiveness. Better have people on board who have experience in serving customers and providing value-based solutions to people. Technology and finance expertise are needed as well, but in a supportive role. People responsible for customers must be your anchor.
If you can’t put together a team of people with customer experience, STOP until you find them.
4. Not testing your idea with potential customers
It’s not about how excited you and your friends are about your idea, it’s about what your potential customers think. Get them in a room and present your idea. Ask them to evaluate it. Do they think it satisfies a real need they have? Do they think it’s different than other stuff out there? Would they buy it?
How much would they be prepared to pay for it? Would they likely tell their friends about it? Does your idea excite them?
If you haven’t spent the time obtaining real customer feedback on your idea, STOP until you do.
5. Not defining the unique value you are creating with your idea
Business success comes from providing personal value to people. Figure out how you are satisfying a want or desire that your potential customers have.
This will form the basis of your marketing efforts and your pitch to potential investors.
If you are focussed on the gee whiz features of your potential product, STOP until you’ve figured out the value it delivers to people.
6. Thinking that technology will sell itself
It’s not about a product or service. It’s about how your idea makes a difference to people’s lives or business. People don’t buy technology, they buy what the technology creates for them. Happiness. Joy. Pleasure. Solution to a problem. Make it easy.
If you’re not looking for a way to deliver happiness, STOP.
Then there is the potential investor. What will it take to convince her to part with some of her money and help you launch your idea?
If you fall into the above traps, your audience with them will likely be short and unrewarding
Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
- Posted 1.5.12 at 10:01 am by Roy Osing
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January 2, 2012
3 great ways to avoid the perfection trap
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Everyone seeks perfection.
The perfect body. The perfect smile. The perfect manuscript. The product that destroys the competition and wins the hearts of people.
The business plan that on paper maximizes the economic benefits to the organization.
The problem is, perfection doesn’t exist.
It’s like pursuing ‘the impossible dream’. For some reason we drive on to get another 10% of what we think is perfection before taking action.
The consequences of chasing perfection are significant.
We burn time.
The return on the extra time spent is zero.
And the results of the incremental effort are unnoticed in any event (50% extra time might produce something that can be noticed but it’s unlikely that anyone will notice the impact of spending another 10% on anything.)
But the real negative is that it keeps you from doing stuff.
Bre Pettis says it well:
”Perfection is boring. And it keeps you from being done.”
Seth Godin talks about the importance of shipping stuff.
And that if you waited until is completed, you would never deliver anything.
Try these 3 things to avoid the perfection trap:
▪️ Force yourself to get stuff just about right.
And then do it.
The reality is, that anything more is a waste of time given the unpredictability of the world today.
It is impossible for you to accurately account for the unknown so why bother?
Get a 70% solution and ship it out the door.
▪️ Give yourself a deadline to finish your work. When your time runs out you’re done.
STOP. Get it out the door. Get used to doing what you can in the time you have given yourself.
▪️ Track the results of your imperfection with your customers.
Get feedback. Determine if they are ok with what you’ve done or not.
Satisfy yourself that you are able to produce good work in less time.
Tweak your work on the run.
In business there is no such thing as the right answer. It’s what people are prepared to accept.
Solutions to 6 decimal places have no role here.
Round up or down and get on with it.
Ponder no longer.
Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
- Posted 1.2.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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December 1, 2011
Middle management should do these 6 simple things to be great at execution
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Middle management should do these 6 simple things to be great at execution.
Good executers have few people in their organization who run interference. Their organizations are extremely flat with only a few layers of management separating leadership from the frontline.
Successful companies don’t impede their frontline from above with thick layers of middle management folks who seem to do nothing than delegate, administer, co-ordinate and other low value activities.
They don’t bulge in the middle.
Middle management can choke the folks in the trenches.
They can get in the way of achieving results expected by the organization’s business plan.
Take a look at the number of layers in your organization between the leader and the frontline. How many do you have?
If there are more than two layers, you likely are ‘bulging in the middle’ with excess managers who are getting in the way of effective execution.
I suggest you think long and hard about eliminating one or two layers and redefining the roles of the managers you have left.
Hold middle managers accountable for these 6 things if you want them to contribute to executing your business plan, not slow it down.
1. Bashing barriers
Managers in the middle should be bashing barriers for your execution squad of frontline people.
Removing the things that prevent them from moving forward to execute the strategic intent of your organization should be the role you recruit managers to satisfy.
2. Killing dumb rules
Managers in the middle should be seeking out and eliminating the rules and policies that get in the way of providing superlative customer service. Their primary role here is to ‘cleanse the internal environment’ of things that don’t make sense to customers and promote a customer engagement experience that fosters happiness and customer loyalty.
3. Translating leadership’s direction
Managers in the middle must be proficient at translating leadership’s direction into what executing the strategy means to the day-to-day job of every employee.
If employees don’t know exactly what the strategy means to their specific job, execution falters, synergy goes missing and progress to strategic goals stops.
4. Cutting the CRAP
Managers in the middle must be looking for ways to simplify how the frontline does their job. Lubricating business processes is essential to more effective execution, as is removing all activities that don’t directly contribute to strategic goals — CRAP.
And leadership must remove or reallocate managers involved in ‘yesterday’s relevance’ for they add no strategic value to the organization.
5. Allocating scarce resources
Managers in the middle must ensure that the critical few priorities are fed with the right number and quality of people to deliver expected outcomes.
They must ensure that the focus is one what must be done and not on what could be done. The ‘art of the possible’ must be avoided in the face of limited resources.
6. Doing, not delegating stuff
Managers in the middle must get used to doing more themselves rather than serving as a conduit that passes on directives given out by their bosses.
One of the biggest issues I’ve seen relating to middle management effectiveness is the ‘pass on’ function they seem to want to perform. Rather than pitching in and doing the hard work, they pass it on to others without adding any personal value to the expected outcome and thereby adding to the bulge in the middle.
If you’re in the middle and you’re not serving the frontline to better execute, you’re not contributing
As mentioned above, activity that adds little value to carrying out the strategy of an organization is CRAP, and it needs to be cut out; unnecessary layers of management fits the CRAP definition and should be cut out as well.
Eliminate non-execution layers and your frontline will love you for it.
For your to-do list today study your organization chart. How can you slice a layer out?
Start the boot camp diet process now!
Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
- Posted 12.1.11 at 09:25 am by Roy Osing
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November 24, 2011
Why chasing tactics can prevent progress to your business plan goals
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Why chasing tactics can prevent progress to your business plan goals.
Chasing stuff is fun. It’s non-threatening. It provides here-and-now gratification. It’s organizational comfort food
Go fish. Pick a card. Follow the instructions. Where does it lead? Who knows until you pick another card.
Many organizations function like this. Tactics rule. Immediate opportunities dominate how time is consumed.
Performance is often measured by how many things a person has on the go; the length of their to-do list.
Tactical driven activity, unfortunately, sometimes produces little value because it is often not consistent with the business plan of the organization
And activity with little or no connection to its strategic intent consumes copious amounts of time and energy.
You never know how much progress you’re making.
Get your strategic thinking straight before you give chase to action.
Be sure you are focusing on what is absolutely necessary to do in order to deliver your strategy.
If you can’t define precisely how your actions contribute to the strategy STOP!
Pick a card that puts you on the right path and follow it.
Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
- Posted 11.24.11 at 10:28 am by Roy Osing
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