Month: August 2007

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Survival Instincts

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YoungEntrepreneur.com: Most entrepreneurs who start a business will fail. The statistics vary but as many as 80% of people who start a business today will no longer have their company in 5 years. That is a pretty big failure rate.
According to the Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick:

“I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.”

What many new business owners fail to recognize is that entrepreneurship is first about survival, then about building a company. I have seen too many entrepreneurs to count who have grand visions of where they want to go but never even get to first base. They close down shop before they can execute any of their big plans because they run out of money.
If you cannot make enough to pay your basic bills then you will not be around in the long run to fulfill your dream. It takes a lot longer to get a company off the ground that most people think and in the beginning it is all about survival – do whatever you need to do to keep yourself, and your company, going.
Entrepreneurship Is About Survival [YoungEntrepreneur.com]

Categories
Work Life

Work Life Freshness

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Small Business CEO: Are you or your team stuck in a rut, new ideas just don’t seem to occur, everyone is almost zombi like in adherence to how things have always been done?
Do you need new ideas, would some fresh thinking be a booster shot for your business, then read on.
Here are Ten Actions you can take to Achieve Freshness Today:
1. Take a new form of transportation to work.
2. Read a new magazine or watch a new TV show.
3. Plan a lunch with people you never lunch with.
4. Get out of your normal work environment for a half-day per week.
5. Ask your family (especially your kids) to help solve a problem you are working on.
6. Allocate double the normal time you spend solving a problem, make at least three options.
7. Block out time for your whole team to do something new together once a month.
8. Take a walk in the park at lunch time.
9. Listen to the Pop Music charts.
10. Reinvent your personal job role at least once per year.
Stuck In a Rut – Ten Actions to Achieve Freshness Today [Small Business CEO]

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur Profile: Ben Kaufman

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Inc.com: Ask Ben Kaufman if his company, Mophie, will still be making iPod accessories a year from now and he’ll answer without skipping a beat: “God, I hope not!” And that’s after his line of slick gear — headphone splitters, FM transmitters, and remote controls, all of which function with a protective case — won a Best of Show award in the innovation category at MacWorld last year. So what gives?
“The thing about this industry is that everything is the same,” says Kaufman, 20. “So we set ourselves apart by branding.” Sure, Burlinton, Vt.-based Mophie (named after the CEO’s two golden retrievers, Sophie and Molly), makes cool products, but that clears just the first barrier to entry in a crowded marketplace. For Kaufman, the real key to his company’s distinctive brand identity is the product-development process, which can be summed up in three words: open source innovation. It’s a popular concept these days — allowing communities of users to drive the product development process — but one that can be tricky to execute.
Kaufman, who started his company as a freshman at Champlain College, decided to put all his cards on the table in January at the 2007 MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. “We said, ‘OK, we can have a regular booth, or we could shake up the floor and say we’re not going to have products today. We’re going to build and develop.'” Mophie’s team handed out pads and pencils to attendees, uttering one simple command: “doodle.”
In four hours, they collected 120 new product ideas for iPod accessories. That night, they scanned the drawings, put them up on the company website, and asked the expo attendees to vote for the best doodles. The result of the process, which Kaufman calls Illuminator, was a line of three new products, the first of which is a combination iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, and keychain called the Bevy. Its designer, 18-year old Jared Fiorovich, gets credit on Mophie’s website.
The Innovator [Inc.com]

Categories
Branding

Lingerie Brand

lingerie-brand.jpgFORTUNE: Lingerie retailer Bare Necessities spiced up sales by making it easier for women to find undergarments that fit online.
When we last met Bare Necessities, the lingerie seller, based in Avenel, N.J., was profitable but battling a personality problem: It lacked one. Enter FSB’s Makeover artists – five experts from Frog Design, the product design and branding firm known for its work with Apple. The Frog team led company employees in creative exercises that sparked fixes, which CEO Noah Wrubel says boosted growth.
“Business is unbelievable,” he says. The family-owned firm won’t give figures, but an industry magazine pegged its 2006 web sales – now about 90% of revenue – at $26.2 million, bringing total sales for that year to around $29 million. In 2005, Bare Necessities had total sales of $21 million. This year sales should hit $35 million.
The Makeover revealed that many women find buying underwear tedious and ego-deflating. Guided by the Frog session, the company revamped its branding and website (barenecessities.com) to change that. Now the site gives advice on fashion, quality, and, most important, fit. To execute this work, the company set up a new web-focused creative department and hired Victoria’s Secret veteran Jessica Jackson as vice president of E-commerce, a new post.
Move over, Victoria’s Secret [FORTUNE]

Categories
Starting Up

The Grand Strategic Business Plan

grand-business-plan.jpgSitepoint.com: Executives at large corporations and entrepreneurs in emerging companies struggle with the same question: “How do I write a strategic plan that actually gets implemented?”
A solid strategic plan delivers the following benefits:
1. You focus your time and energy on activities that are most likely to achieve your goals.
2. You know how to allocate resources.
3. You put a solid strategy in place to set your business apart from the competition.
4. You can communicate your plan to employees, and hold them accountable for results.
5. You can track the results of your efforts and make mid-course corrections to get back on track if you need to.
6. You can adapt your plan to create a second business plan to raise investment capital or get a business loan.
The process of writing the plan is often more valuable than the plan itself. That’s because the process focuses your thinking, and challenges you to answer some fundamental questions about your business.
Start writing today. You can write the plan on your own, but it’s better to work with other people to test your ideas. If you have a management team, you can work with them to write your plan. I know many entrepreneurs who spend a weekend with a colleague, and they work together on each other’s plans, like a strategic retreat. Or, you can hire a consultant/coach to walk you through the process.
Remember that quote from Alice in Wonderland. Too many of us are like Alice at the fork in the road, not sure where we want to go or how we will get there. Stay out of the rabbit hole and write your plan today.
Write a Business Plan that Works [Sitepoint.com]