Thanks Cardinal Stritch students

I did an entrepreneurship seminar with a great group of students from Cardinal Stritch University's Broookfield, WI campus one evening this week. As always, I come away from these student seminars smarter than when I went in.

It's inspiring to be around people of all ages that are looking for smart, sustainable solutions to doing enterprise.

There are so many hyped up start-your-own-business schemes that bombard the culture, it's really refreshing to be among people that reject that nonsense and want to get under the hood of start ups and get smart about it for themselves.

Best question of the night: How do start ups determine pricing?

I get smarter and feel more optimistic every time I do one of these seminars.

Thanks to the business program and my new friends from Cardinal Stritch University!

Cardinal Stritch University, College of Business, specializing in high quality, practical adult education

Nudging into the future

The May 16th New York Times business section had an interesting article by David Leonhardt.

While not specifically about start ups, it points out an important piece about the opportunities all around us that are typically overlooked.

Mr. Leonhardt cites small changes made in otherwise un-notable parts of daily life that can prove life changing and even life saving.

Two profs from the University of Chicago are writing a book about this phenomenon tentatively titled 'Nudge'. It is about the creative application of simplicity and common sense.

From a micro enterprise perspective, this is yet more encouragement. The world is full of small, important opportunities. While most won't make headlines, many will change the world in small appreciable ways.

Your ability to fix problems and make the world a better place has never been more needed or more possible.

Here's how Mr.Leonhardt closes his piece. "There are a lot of problems that nudging won’t solve. It won’t keep Medicare from going bankrupt. It won’t lift stagnant middle-class incomes or reverse global warming. But there are also a lot of problems in which neither politics nor knowledge is the real obstacle and a whole lot of progress is just waiting to be made."

Amen.


David Leonhardt’s article ’Sometimes, What’s Needed Is a Nudge’. May 16 NY Times.

Combining Ben Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt because I can

Hey, it’s the internet. If I want to string together a couple of quotes from guys I admire, who’s to say I can’t.

I’ve been thinking about the process of entrepreneurship lately and all that it implies for people who haven’t participated in it. The media make it out to be this do or die glory run toward an IPO.

Frankly, that’s idiotic. That’s like telling every kid on the schoolyard that they can play in the NBA or the NFL. That’s a cruel injustice to the kid and not a good way to approach life, or entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship in this society is flourishing at micro levels that have nothing to do with IPOs or mega-deals.

Entrepreneurship is much better represented by small scale, appropriately executed adventures that give the participants a chance to grow into their passions, meet new friends worldwide, pay their bills and fix some problems along the way.

The business media focuses on winners and losers, when in fact the entire process – if viewed with the right perspective – is highly beneficial for the participants and for society.

I like Theodore Roosevelt, and I really like Ben Franklin. I got two emails this week, both from overseas, with quotes from each of these gentlemen in their signatures.

They seem to me to represent a short, clear call to take the appropriate risks of entrepreneurship for your own benefit as well as helping the planet.

You learn something no one can ever take away and you prove to yourself that your life and your dreams are worth the effort.

I’ve switched the order of the quotes a number of times, but I’ve settled on Franklin to close because that’s the bottom line of any entrepreneurial effort.

So... Ben Franklin and TR, whose births are separated by more than 150 years, knitted together in an entrepreneurship rallying call, inspired by eMails from other continents a century later. Is this a great time and place to tackle opportunity or what?

"The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who strives valiantly... who at best knows the high achievement of triumph... who at worst, fails while daring greatly for he knows his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." --Theodore Roosevelt

"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." -- Benjamin Franklin

Follow your heart – and your head – into your hopes for self enterprise. These guys are right.

I wish you well, friend.

Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki evangelized me into the most productive parts of what I’m trying to pass off as adulthood.

I fell under Guy’s spell and bought our first Mac circa 1988. $6,000 for a Mac Plus with 256K of memory and a whopping 10MB hard drive. It was the single most productive purchase I’ve ever made. Family unit and I are now on our zillionth Mac and have never looked back.

I thank Mr. Kawasaki for his guidance then and now.

Guy Kawasaki’s blog is bright, fast, informative and always valuable. I highly recommend it. There is a permanent link on the right to get there (and I give those links up VERY grudgingly – two in two years)

You will love Guy’s current book ‘The Art Of The Start’, as well as his previous books. I especially liked ‘Rules For The Revolutionaries’.

In ‘The Art Of The Start’ Guy closes the last chapter with a great quote and then some wonderful (as always) writing.

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good”. – Samuel Johnson

From Guy:

(Chapter 11) “The Art Of Being a Mensch. The three foundations of menschhood are helping lots of people, doing what’s right, and paying back society – simple concepts that are hard to implement.”

Guy Kawasaki is an excellent writer. More importantly, he delivers a lot of valuable information in a great, no BS style.

My kind of resource.

Thank you, Mr. Kawasaki.


Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to change the world. A practical blog for impractical people

In today’s post (5/15/07) Guy interviews Penelope Trunk who writes a very interesting blog from my town of Madison, WI. Great writing style. Brazen Careerist. Advice at the intersection of work and life

wikipedia, Dr.Samuel Johnson

Citizen Entrepreneurs

I’ve been looking for a way to describe my approach to entrepreneurship for a long time.

The business press is full of many competing descriptions. It can get confusing very quickly when you look into the subject about just what it is to be an entrepreneur. If you’re starting out like most of us, as small scale, big dream types, the official entrepreneurship press can make you feel pretty damn inadequate.

I’m not here to disparage any style of start up. The world is a big place, and there are uncountable niches for fitting your start up style into an available slot.

I am here to say that you should NEVER feel second rate for any effort you can muster. Entering the world of entrepreneurship is your right and a privilege that people living in the generations before us could only dream of.

It took getting mad to find the language I was looking for to describe entrepreneurship as I see it.

When I write about this stuff, I focus on positive aspects of the subject. As you can probably tell, I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of guy (because the glass IS half full). I don’t write about parts of this subject that tick me off because they are usually worth ignoring.

And yet, here is my first post focusing on personal anger management.

The normally wonderful Wisconsin Entrepreneur Network’s newsletter, entrepreneur@work dated April 25, ‘07 links to an article titled in a way that attracted my interest. “The frugal company culture: How to make your start-up last.”

Cool. We all need that.

Then I read my way into it. What should have made me smarter initially made me feel inadequate for what’d I’d done as an entrepreneur. However the more I stewed about it, the more it seemed like an April fool’s joke. Ha! “Gotcha. You thought we were serious didn’t you…”

Advice to the frugal start up: “Don’t hire 100 new employees.”

Why thank you. We start ups rarely worry about payroll. You’re right, I probably shouldn’t hire 100 new employees as a frugal start up.

Granted this is at written for dot-com start ups that have been over paid by private equity types. However, if you think most new enterprises live in this kind of world, stop reading this and go get the comics.

Also of great interest to frugal start up is storing their excess cash, “A money market is another conservative option. On $10 million, even 5 percent is $500,000, which could fund you for an extra month.”

Half a million dollars buys me another month. Great. High comfort level there when that’s your monthly nut and you’re struggling for that kind of cash flow. Count me in.

OK, this is certainly not my niche. When I re-read the article to write this post, I found it to be pretty cool for people operating in that economic space. Some advice in the article is good for all of us (especially the advice about using incubators).

However, I spent the time following my first reading feeling like I’d just never gotten far enough, fast enough.

Then the new May ’07 issue of Fast Company lands and the cover photo and story is, “The kid who turned down $1 billion dollars.”

In working through all that, here’s what I came to and here is the way I’m going to describe the kind of entrepreneurship I’m talking about:

The citizen entrepreneur.

It is your right and your privilege to enter the commons and participate constructively, increasing value in our communities in beautiful ways, small and large.

My kind of entrepreneurship is at the citizen level. The place in life where we have responsibilities to contribute and rights to participate freely.

The kind of world where problems get fixed, families get raised, friends increase, bills get paid, and you feel overworked and satisfied.

There is no level of legal entrepreneurship that you should ever be made to feel inadequate about. Do not accept it. Don’t compare your story with anyone else’s. You’re in charge of your story and you need to honor it and build it. It’s your story and your most valuable asset.

Citizen entrepreneurship means that all of us have the right to change the world. We all have the capacity to build small, effective organizations to support ourselves, and any others we choose to include.

Age does not matter here. To my boomer freinds especially, I say, 'Welcome to a great new phase in your lives!' Don't put this chance off any longer. Take the shot you've always thought about.

For all of us, there are not many hard and fast rules when it comes to creating new enterprises. You’ll need to learn those rules and never deviate from them. The rest of it is your blank sheet of paper to fill in.

You do not need to meet standards set by the biz media or anyone else. The size and shape of your enterprise is yours and yours alone to define and build. Let no one make you feel small or insignificant because you don’t meet the standards shouted from headlines.

Your enterprise has significance because it comes from your heart and it’s there to make the world better.

As a citizen entrepreneur, no one can take that away from you.

Good luck and go get ‘em, fellow citizens.



The Wisconsin Entrepreneur Network index page for their newsletter Entrepreneur@work


Article about keeping your $10 million start up frugal This article is meant for entirely different start ups than I’m talking about, so I don’t mean to disparage it. There is a very good reference to using business incubators, which I highly encourage. Incubators represent the biggest steal on the planet for entrepreneurs. Everybody in your town/region is contributing money to get you a place to work from. This model doesn’t happen a lot elsewhere in life. I highly recommend incubators and gratefully use this resource myself.

Post 100. The value of looking back

I always wanted to write.

When I stuck my toe in the water during college, I didn't get rejection slips, I got hate mail.

I was trying to write about life threads that were very personal to me. I clearly sent them to the wrong addresses.

Writing into the web is better. Now it’s easier to delete the spam.

I still get to write about aspects of my life that have important personal meaning to me.

I’ve met many wonderful new friends through these posts, and I feel like I’ve gotten the first few percent off my chest.

Thanks to everyone for writing back.

I don’t want my 100th piece to be about how wonderful it is to be an entrepreneur. The culture is giving you that from a thousand directions at the moment. I want my 100th post to say something important, at least to me, about our responsibilities as citizens of the most entrepreneurial society in history.

In significant new ways, large and small, you have the ability to organize custom sets of skills and information needed to alleviate real human problems in ways that have never before been possible in human history.

This doesn’t mean you need to cure cancer. It means you can make some unique subset of the world a better place. You can organize that effort in ways that are profitable and deliver increased levels of personal self control.

No, it’s not easy. No, you’ll not likely get rich. That’s the good news.

Yes, there is opportunity everywhere. Yes, you’re capable of starting your own enterprise. That’s the tough news.

It means that when you look closely, it’s only hard work, common sense, and realistic expectations that stand between you and a more sustainable life.

Working smart and working hard to provide sustainable solutions has been the business of most people in most societies since the dawn of time. By and large, it’s worked out.

Despite the trappings, now is no different. Except we have better and cheaper tools than have ever been available in human history.

High tech headlines tantalize would be entrepreneurs, but I think they also deter most of us. That’s unfortunate.

The simple human skills of basic, sustainable entrepreneurship get thrown out for the false realities of spreadsheets and get rich seminars.

If ever there was a time to reclaim and celebrate small scale, sustainable entrepreneurship, and all it’s common sense tools, now is that time.

In the world of enterprise, looking backward is rarely touted. But looking backward is valuable, given the problems we face today. Many of the skills that got us here are waiting to be re-found. Honesty, virtue, hard work, living lean, and optimistic courage are there to name a few.

Looking backward brings us to quieter places for ourselves, where we can grow as individuals, enjoy commerce and contribute to society. Sure you can use the wonderful new 21st century tools, just learn to use them in ways that support you and the rest of us sustainably. It’s easier than you think.

Don’t be ashamed that your new enterprise isn’t wired into the newest tech trend, or the shining star of the IPO world. Those represent only one kind of commerce.

Sustainable work for me means building smart, repeatable business models around common sense solutions, executed with simplicity and when possible, elegance.

Work hard, stay vigilant, and take small bites.

The renaissance age of entrepreneurship

Look around. Congratulations. You're living in the renaissance age of entrepreneurship.

New tools, new problem solving skills, and new worlds of innovation are exploding like fireworks all around us.

Certainly our ancestors fended for themselves independently, but their options for gaining more freedom and control over their lives was quite limited.

The possibilities available in our commercial lives are rapidly becoming the exact inverse. We can work independently, in ways of our own choosing, while gaining increasing control and freedom in our lives.

Welcome to the renaissance age of entrepreneurship. The world will get better with or without you, but if you want to join the fray, there has never been a better time.

We are awash in new potential for entrepreneurial solutions in every facet of our societies, from high science to brick making to widget manufacturing. Improbably powerful tools are available free or at modest cost. The world is searching for innovative solutions to uncountable numbers of problems. We have access to instant knowledge. We have a shipping/logistics system available on every other corner that I would’ve walked miles uphill in the snow to get to 20 years ago.

Importantly, there is a real wisdom emerging about appropriate tools for financing new and emerging enterprises. From our newest Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and the wonderful Grameen Bank through community investments through green tech funds and all the rest of the traditional routes. There are many more niches on the supply side of financing than there has ever been in the past. This is smart and beneficial, not only at the micro economic level but at the meta level for civilization. The sifting and winnowing process for planting and developing new enterprises is growing up. There are now many efficient and creative new ways to match up the goals of the financing side with the goals of the entrepreneur.

It’s all lining up. Welcome to the renaissance. It’s coming hard and fast from every direction and it’s setting up a cycle of innovation that could drive progress and prosperity around the globe for many decades.

Here’s a nice summary from a recent CNN.com story...

“Almost everyone wants to own a business - from college students, who are signing up for entrepreneurial courses in record numbers; to those over age 65, who are forming more companies every year; to recent immigrants, who in 2005 started 25% more companies per capita than native-born citizens did.”

“We are in the midst of the largest entrepreneurial surge this country has ever seen. According to Small Business Administration projections, nearly 672,000 new companies with employees were created in 2005. That is the biggest business birthrate in U.S. history: 30,000 more startups than in 2004, and 12% more than at the height of dot-com hysteria in 1996.”

There is one miserable-ass phrase out there that you should not accept under any circumstance. I only bring it up because the following very good paragraph was headlined with the phrase I hate - ‘chicken entrepreneurs’ (meaning starting up while holding on to your existing job) – NEVER accept that slur!

However, I digress. The text that followed is inspiring. Here comes the next generation…

“Meanwhile, it has become easier for entrepreneurs to start new companies without quitting their day jobs. According to the SBA, the total number of firms with no employees grew by 26% from 1997 to 2004, to 19 million. A little more than half of those companies are run by workers with another primary source of income.”

Not only that but consider the rolling thunder of the boomers. At our age we’re able to be more engaged and creative than our parents could have ever imagined. We’re pioneering many smart new styles of entrepreneurship and bringing skills and tools to the table based on years of hard won experience.

On top of that, as I’ve said before in an early post, (boomers especially) you gain more personal security by starting your own enterprise. The risk is in NOT starting one.

In support, a nice article from BusinessWeek.com titled, “The Lure of Entrepreneurship Beckons Boomers”

"Baby boomers are looking at starting real businesses—looking for another 10- to 12- to 15-year career, God willing," says Paul Magelli, senior scholar-in-residence at the Kansas City (Mo.)-based Kauffman Foundation, a center promoting entrepreneurship. ‘Just the topic of whether Ford and GM would engage in consolidation talks sends a huge tremor among a huge, experienced workforce—they need to be thinking about opportunities with some kind of income security. It's somewhat subdued, but that anxiety is still very much in the workplace, from the reports we get.’ Entrepreneurship is, somewhat surprisingly, increasingly seen as a stable way to ensure financial security, Magelli says."

The story continues with a note about the amazingly high percentage of self employed folks over 50 who are starting enterprises, as well as the next group rising to the common sense of entrepreneurship.

“About one in three self-employed workers ages 51 to 69 made the transition to self-employment at or after age 50, according to a 2003 AARP Baby Boomers Study, and 15% of the 1,200 adults between 38 and 57 who were surveyed planned to start their own businesses.”

The renaissance is here for all of us, for boomers, for young people and everyone in between. There is no alchemy involved in starting new enterprises. The opportunities are everywhere. The tools for executing are cheap, and often free.

What you most need is common sense, viable planning and the gumption to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

The magic comes as you watch your new enterprise take its first steps, then build momentum, then take flight.

I wish you all the best.


CNN.com story

BusinessWeek.com story on boomers and start ups

The Kauffman Foundation

Paul Magelli info at The Kauffman Foundation

Subscribing to a pathof innovation

Sustainable new products and services can't be launched with the idea that you're going to put something past people.

The day and age of "you can't fool all of the people all of the time" has been with us for a long time. What's changed is the speed with which collective wisdom develops and is shared.

This works for you as a sustainable entrepreneur or new product developer. This only works against you if you're trying to game the system.

You need to fix highly definable problems for the benefit of the community you operate in commercially. You and your organization need to do this transparently and, to the best of your ability, elegantly.

I'd like to circle back to a very good book by Douglas Rushkoff, "Get Back In The Box". He concludes his introduction with, ".. we'll look at today's artificially fragmented landscape of customers, employees, and shareholders, and how this false division leads to an 'us and them' animosity. By seeing all of them, and ourselves, as part of the very same system, or even community, we break through this artificially adversarial relationship. We even start to wonder how our enterprises might actually solve real problems, rather than trying to 'create need' for our services. Answering real needs becomes the simple but astonishingly effective solution to almost every business challenge in this seemingly complex era."

If you are to be sustainable, you'll need the community you operate within. Be uber transparent and accurate with yourself and others. Define the metrics that describe success. Measure the progress you and your organization make toward solving the problems you've defined.

Especially for those of us working in sustainable new product development, the message is clear. Define the problem. Innovate solutions that honor simplicity, effectiveness and your community of stakeholders.

As Mr. Rushkoff says later in his book, "To put it simply, communities naturally build around product lines that overflow with intrinsic value. People may talk about a brilliant advertising campaign, but they will never advocate an ad the way they advocate a product they love. A company's real relationship with a customer is not communicated through the marketing, however compelling it may be. It is communicated through the cup holders in the doors, the easy-to-read LED display in the cell phone cover… Companies speak to us through the details and the quality of their products: the feeling of discovering a knob on the dashboard just where your hand happens to reach; finding a copy of the assembly instructions on the company's web site... the anticipation of one's desires feels awfully close to true love."

You need to set up your products and services so that they continuously improve your community with ever smarter, ever more sustainable solutions.

Or as Douglas Rushkoff says, "A real brand relationship is like a subscription to a path of innovation."

I like that a lot. Subscribing to a path of innovation. Sustainable solutions for the long haul.


Douglas Rushkoff's web site

First post discussing "Get Back In The Box" was Jan. 19, 2007

Sustainable practicesbuild bottom lines.

How can you tell which organizations are going to survive?

I want to recommend a Business Week story dated Jan 29, 2007, by Pete Engardio. It was the cover story titled "Beyond the Green Corporation."

The cover text led with this proposition: “Imagine a world in which socially responsible and eco-friendly practices actually boost a company's bottom line. It's closer than you think.”

Much of this article is looking at the green practices of large firms which is fine. There is so much low hanging fruit at these big companies that the smallest gestures on their part can yield significant results.

What Mr. Engardio focuses on nicely is the fact that managements of all sizes are getting smarter about the economic burden of unsustainable practices. Waste costs too damn much and management is getting it quickly.

He quotes Philips Electronics Chief Procurement Officer Barbara Kux, "For us sustainability is a business imperative."

If you’re in those big organizations, charge! Good on ya.

For start ups and emerging enterprises the message is just as necessary. The quiet bonus for the rest of us is that most every enterprise of every shape and size will be looking for help along these lines. Starting yesterday.

This is a big opportunity to create and grow your own new enterprise. It’s a renaissance time of new markets. The demand for services and products that increase efficiency and strengthen sustainability will flourish. In summary, pick a problem and fix it.

What is a nice theme to emerge from the Business Week story, is the suggestion that smart, sustainable business practices can be good at predicting who is growing into the future and who is fighting it.

I like the way the Mr. Engardio closes his Business Week story (except that smart green tech DOES help next quarter’s numbers)…

"Such laudable efforts, even if successful, may not help managers make their numbers next quarter. But amid turbulent global challenges, they could help investors sort long-term survivors from the dinosaurs.”

Yep.

Business week article

Green tech leads economic rebound

I can’t express how comforting it is to copy down that headline .

Working in green tech fields may look fun from the outside, but like any other kind of enterprise, it's got to be sustainable. You have to prove your economic value to the customer every time, just like the rest of the world.

In a world of rapidly restructuring economies, it has not always been easy to prove out enviro stuff. You need big, fast paybacks or nobody buys it.

However, the world continues to turn. And now I'm seeing headlines reading 'Green tech leads economic rebound.'

Obviously, the technologies are improving all the time, creating more green tech successes. On top of that, the paybacks from fixing environmental problems are rising rapidly. The many liabilities and inefficiencies implicit in generating waste cannot be understated. Fixing those problems is becoming a priority in every sector of every economy.

And where there are needs, there are opportunities for enterprise.

There was a good article in Monday’s New York Times by Laurie J. Flynn about green tech leading an economic rebound in Silicon Valley.

"... investment in clean technology - from alternative energy products, like solar panels and hybrid cars, to the use of nanotechnology to solve environmental problems - went from $34 million in the first quarter of 2006 to $290 million in the third quarter," according to a report released Sunday.

Software and semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley received about 40% of the new money, leaving about 60% to be spread around many markets, or as the article notes, "Clean technology crosses many industries..."

The NPR radio program Science Friday, hosted by Ira Flatow picked up on the story this afternoon. Mr. Flatow interviewed John Denniston, partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) about the 'business side of green tech'. These guys are in the elite lanes of the VC world, probably not a road many of us will travel. But it is very interesting to see what their view of the business side of green tech looks like.

John Denniston cited what he saw as the characteristics of the green tech field and why the funding for green tech was advancing so rapidly.

Mr Denniston cited two important pieces that rang true for me. I’m watching it happen in my day job.

The first is the rapid emergence of many new green tech niches, all focused on solving specific problems.

The second is the acceleration of talent coming into the field.

Your solutions don’t have to involve high tech, biotech, or nanotech (though all certainly qualify). You just need to solve real problems with repeatable solutions. No matter the venue, that’s green tech, friend.

The acceleration of talent coming into the field should include you.

Pick a problem and have at it. Welcome.

New York Times green tech funding article Jan. 29, 2007

$100K yearly prize for green tech innovation funded by Kleiner Perkins.

Ira Flatow /Science Friday archive page for this show with this green tech section available separately.

John Denniston page at KPCB