Radio interview on WPR

I did a very enjoyable radio interview on Wisconsin Public Radio today to discuss entrepreneurship.

Jim Packard was sitting in for the usual host. I love Jim's work and it was a real treat to spend the hour with him and the WPR callers.

The link to the show is posted below. WPR archives their shows for 52 weeks, so as this post ages, you'll have to drill down their archive list to find my slot which was today, Monday, August 6th in the 10 AM time period.

Thanks WPR!

Rick's interview on WI Public Radio - archive

Bootstrapping by the numbers

I've been thinking about ways to put real cost numbers to doing low cost start ups.

In truth, there are almost as many kinds of start ups as there are enterprises out there.

A 'low cost' franchise start up can cost many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and still represent the low end of that spectrum.

A 'low cost' high tech start up can cost millions.

So I circle back to this concept of the citizen entrepreneur that I wrote about earlier this summer. I've been looking for representative numbers that are accurate and also that can give hope to my peers that self enterprise is not only open to the rest of us, but available in ways that are startlingly inexpensive.

A good reference came in from an unexpected source this summer. Guy Kawasaki (linked on the right and mentioned often lately in these posts), one of the leading high tech venture capitalists in the world today, started a new company of his own.

I was anxious to read about all the high tech financing machinations somebody with his experience would be able to muster. I expected the inside details of dealing with his fellow Silicon Valley moguls would be a great look under the hood at that expensive start up world.

Nope.

June 03, 2007
By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

A really cool, international start up for about $12K. And a big share of that is expenses you and I wouldn't have to incur. Mr. Kawasaki is a big time venture capitalist and attracts a lot of attention, so he needed to defend his company digitally and legally. That contributed about $8K to his start up cost.

I want to use this start up example as a true to life, in the trenches, publicly validated example of how you can start up inexpensively.

I've done my own start up this summer for under $2K, but I, like Mr. Kawasaki, know how to do many of the steps myself. I have also started successful companies out of a loose change jar in the past.

Do I subscribe to all his thoughts 100%? I think you have to read everything carefully. Sure, Guy starts out saying he had zero business plans, but at the end he also acknowledges that he had 24 years of skinning his knees and banging his head in this subject prior to launch.

Overall, I think this is a wonderful post from Guy Kawasaki and I think you can use it to stir up not only hope, but reality as you design your own new enterprise.

Go get 'em, friend.


Guy's bootstrapping post

Guy's Truemors site

Deming does Detroit

I think car manufacturing in North America will rebound. Someday.

However, I've spent the last decade working inside car plants of GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and a number of others. I know what I'm talking about when I tell you what it's like to sell to each of them and then subsequently work in their plants installing equipment and training workers and managers to operate the hardware.

The headline from the Washington Post yesterday is well deserved.

"Foreign automakers surpass Detroit for the first time."

(story written by Scholln Freeman)

"Led by Toyota, foreign automakers captured more than 50 percent of the US vehicle market in July - yet another bitter milestone for Detroit's beleaguered auto giants."

One of my heroes is W. Edwards Deming. He was an engineer, a statistician and mathematician who turned his knowledge toward business management. The world has forever been made better.

We used Deming's knowledge during WWII but got fat after the war and abandoned the rigor of process and quality control for the gluttony of newly available worldwide profits.

Where did Dr. Deming find himself? In Japan. Helping the postwar reconstruction initially, then advising the core group of Japanese scientists and leaders who were working to rebuild their own society.

He talked to them about quality control and they listened.

For start ups and emerging enterprises, your job is to continuously improve the quality and value of your offering. It's that simple and it's that hard. Everything you do in the early days is an experiment, not a conclusion. You need to study and learn from failures, then act to fix your enterprise accordingly.

Your solutions must come from your own life not the latest management fad on the internet.

When you hear big shots pontificating about, well, anything, take a pause and consider one of my favorite Deming quotes.

"We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing."

Today's auto headlines bear this out.


wiki Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Startup vs Commercial Launch

I launched Business Diligence on line in late Dec '06 when I realized I wanted to go in this direction.

I marketed and networked but didn't do any commercial transactions.

I tried different biz model configurations on the site. While I had some eMail links included, I did not put up a 'Contact me' page until 6 months later, after I'd honed the model, done the test marketing and organized the process.

During that time I was able to get the accounting and banking stuff in place, and start to wire up the marketing network. Plus all the little steps needed to create a new enterprise that drag on no matter how hard you push or pull.

I didn't launch commercially until I was ready in late June, '07.

I don't think this is unreasonable. In fact, it's an enjoyable, measured pace for launching a new enterprise. If you can give yourself some time, it can be gold.

If you don't start now, where will you be 6 months or a year from now. Same old, same old? Likely.

Start taking the little steps soon. You'll thank yourself later.

Business plans and so much more

I'll start by saying I just can't keep up with Guy Kawasaki's blog. It is jammed with valuable entrepreneurial storytelling, guidance and fun every time I open it. I've posted references to his blog, and link there permanently from this site.

Guy just did an on line interview with Tim Berry, the founder of Palo Alto Software that sells a software program called Business Plan Pro. This is probably the most widely used software program out there for writing business plans.

They discuss in good detail the merits and challenges of writing business plans. I recommend it.

Here is one question and answer I think has special resonance for small, self-funded or micro-funded start ups...

Question 6: What are some of the common mistakes (in writing a business plan)?

Answer: The worst by far is focusing on the plan instead of planning. This generates the idea that you create a plan as a document, and the related misunderstanding that the plan is for somebody else. You don’t postpone life while you’re developing a plan; you’re always developing the plan. In the meantime, “Get going.” Here are some other common mistakes:

• Blue-sky blurry: lots of strategic thinking without any hard facts. Planning requires specifics: dates, deadlines, responsibility assignments.

• Trying to do everything. I use the rule of displacement: everything you do rules out something else.

• Thinking that being the lowest price option is important. It isn’t. The price and volume thing they talk about in economics classes is for 200-year-old lumps of coal, not your business. Use price as a statement of quality. Leave the low-price strategies for Walmart and Costco.

• Mistaking profits for cash. Profitable companies go broke all the time. You don’t spend profits. Plan your working capital well.


Mistaking the plan for the planning. Amen. This is the easiest mistake for new entrepreneurs to make. It's not the document. It's doing the document.

Incidentally, Business Plan Pro is what my new teaching venue, Waukesha County Technical College (WCTC) uses in their business courses. WCTC is making this software available at a really good discount to any class members of my new courses.

Now as Mr, Berry so aptly says about start ups, "Get going!"


Guy Kawasaki's interview with Tim Berry of Palo Alto Software's Business Plan Pro.

Tim Berry's blog. Excellent writing about business plans and planning, as well as a perspective from deep in the trenches.

Business Plan Pro software.

My training courses for new start ups at WCTC

Visual illusions

Let's see, how are we going to dress this up as entrepreneurial research, and not as something to do when you need to get your head out of your work for a bit?

I know. How's this for a thesis: entrepreneurship is something people stare at, wonder about, analyze, pontificate on, and get rhapsodic over. Yet it's my belief that we all see something different in the subject.

Ms. Kim Komando, The Digital Goddess posted a great 'site of the day' that I want to pass on for no other reason than it's... oh yeah, a great research site for entrepreneurship.

Professor Michael Bach, an optical scientist from the University of Freiburg has put up examples of 72 different visual illusions, with the capability of changing the speed of the components to prove to yourself that, oh yeah, you're doing research.

This is really cool!

Dr. Bach's visual illusion examples

Kim Komando, America's digital goddess. Kim has a very good radio show and newsletters you can locate from her site.

Entrepreneurial happiness? Get more out of life 5 different ways.

I read (and recommend) a blog called LifeHacker. Their posts for 5/26/07 included a link to PickTheBrain.com Though the author probably didn't intend it, I thought there was a good entrepreneurship spin in this piece.

Get more out of life 5 different ways

1. Live Below Your Means

2. Put Your Money to Work

3. Educate Yourself (Rick's note - entrepreneurship education is all over the place)

4. Develop Lasting Personal Relationships

5. Work Towards a Dream You’re Passionate About (Rick's note 2 - a good working definition of entrepreneurship)

Taken from 5 - (Rick note: A slow motion, small scale, DYI start up fits this perfectly. I recommend starting with a not-open-for-commerce-yet web site to roll out your dream and your emerging enterprise):

"Even if your life isn’t perfect, you can always build towards a goal you’re passionate about. If you aren’t building towards something, you’re probably stagnating. When this happens to me I start to feel like a victim trapped by my own life. The best way to reverse this is working towards a goal. We can’t control everything about our lives, but working towards a goal gives us something positive to focus on and lays the foundation for future success. No matter what your passion is, get out there and start doing something. As Lao Tzu said, even a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step."

Read the source post

Visit the always helpful LifeHacker

5 Reasons to Create Your First Start Up

The title of this piece is a blog title written by Chris Campbell. This was written in Nov. 2006 by Chris who co-founded Wufoo, which is a very nice new web based form that I've just started using. ("The best thing to happen to forms since the submit button" - I wholeheartedly agree!)

Chris hits on some real trouble spots possible in some types of start ups. Although I believe Chris is a young man, he speaks with experience and describes these pitfalls well.

This kind of talk will likely scare off many of my boomer pals but Chris Campbell's piece is not talking about boomer micro start ups.

It's geared toward small tech startups

Here is some from Chris Campbell piece linked below...

"The moral of the story is that now is a great time to begin your first startup because there is usually a lot to learn before your first real success. The act of starting a business will help to solidify your ideas, weed out bad co-founders and give you a feel for the time commitment required."

Here's Chris' list:

1) It Prepares You for How Much Work Is Involved

2) It’ll Teach You What to Look for in a Cofounder

3) It’ll Show You How Flexible Your Ideas Need to Be

4) It’ll Teach You the Importance of Passion

5) It’ll Show You How Little You Know About Money

Read the details. It's short and worth it.


The Wufoo blog piece

Check out this cool Wufoo site

I'm also a big fan of the venture folks behind them and one of their principals Paul Graham. Check out Y-Combinator

Why women live longer than men

I've made arrangements with one of the really great schools in the Wisconsin Technical College System to begin teaching a series of courses online to train new entrepreneurs.

I'm very excited about these courses. I've been writing and refining them over the last several years. Six courses will be available, starting this fall, to anyone in the U.S. with an internet connection and a telephone line, through Waukesha County Technical College. (The courses will cover these 6 topics... Intro to Entrepreneurship, Business Planning, Organizing, Managing, Marketing and Preparing/Executing for Micro Enterprises). I will post more info as it becomes available.

So two things crossed as I was preparing to take these courses public.

The first involved the course on creating sustainable business plans. I'm researching and writing about smart ways to encourage new entrepreneurs to think through the commercial details of their new enterprises. It's interesting work and I really love the way this course is turning out.

What crossed this in the background was a periodic purge of old saved stuff in my eMail folders. A little gem fell out called 'Why women live longer than men'. It's in a PDF with no attribution that I can find. I pass along the images in the link below. The photo above represents the idea pretty well.

Sustainable business plans encompass research to keep you from trouble and guide you toward your goals. The photos in this PDF exemplify the opposite path.

When I write the marketing course, I'm going to be encouraging new entrepreneurs to identify their ideal target customer.

After seeing this fun little PDF, I'm beginning to think I would answer that for myself by choosing women entrepreneurs first.

Enjoy.


Download the top 10 photos of why women live longer than men.
This is a single PDF file of about 468 worthwhile KBs. If anyone knows the origin of this, please let me know and I'll credit it here.

The world needs you now

I was doing some research for a new client and came across a wonderful piece in Ode Magazine.

It was not written in support of small scale entrepreneurship, but I think its message comes through loud and clear in support of people considering their own start up enterprises.

Jurriaan Kamp, the Ode Editor wrote the piece, titled, "What the world needs now is...you!"

Here are some excerpts from the July/August 2007 issue that I found to be empowering in support of people wanting to make a small difference through their work.

"'Science won't change the world. People will'" declares Ervin Laszlo, founder of The Club of Budapest, an international gathering of visionary scholars and artists. 'There is no single scientific recipe for positive change. We don't need scientific breakthroughs. We already have the tools we need for change. We don't need change in science. We need change in attitude'."

Mr. Laszlo is a renowned scholar and a philosopher of science. He is not taking the Luddite path here. He is imploring all of us to wake up and smell the possibilities for meaningful, positive change.

The article finishes with this: "Despite formidable challenges facing humanity, Laszlo remains optimistic, 'More and more people are starting to live differently and change their priorities. They experience the miracle of life instead of fighting for survival, wealth and power. It's a choice anyone can make. And each such choice will change the world'."

Many people around the world are taking it upon themselves to form new, small organizations to solve problems small and large in their neighborhoods, their countries and across the wide world. These can be commercial enterprises or non-profits. The problems can be as mundane as fixing some recurring everyday problem in the lives of people in their community to setting up big picture fixes they can contribute to.

The point here is that, well, as the article title states, what the world needs now is...you!

wiki Ervin Laszlo

Ode magazine And now for the good news... Thanks Mr. Kamp.