Move your marketing strategy from 'Hunting' to 'Gardening'

Have you noticed that more companies beg you to participate in their business today? It started with an email survey on your last stay at their hotel, but now includes requests for online product reviews, to social media input on the design of future products. They do it because engaged customers become loyal advocates and buyers. Welcome to the “Participation Age” of marketing.
Some say it’s happening today because it’s new, and technology makes it possible. Others say it stems from Intrinsic Motivation Theory, which asserts that people have always been motivated by a desire to join, share, take part, connect, and engage, and find that experience rewarding. In any case, your business needs it today to rise above the crowd and edge out competitors.
If you want all the specifics, you must follow the new wave of marketing experts, like Daina Middleton, and her recent book “Marketing in the Participation Age.” I’m most intrigued by one aspect that I believe relates to every business - the move from a hunter-based metaphor to a gardening metaphor – nurturing what we have planted, based on the following five rules:

1. Embrace test-and-learn values. That means constantly trying new marketing elements, understanding quickly what works, and immediately scaling, then moving on to the next alternative. Nurturing marketers reserve a minimum of 10 percent of their marketing budgets for testing and learning. It’s a dynamic customer environment out there.
2. Innovate; don’t perfect. The nurture approach leverages from the best of the moment, quickly adding value before someone else does it first. The concept of continual innovation is crucial, because the best may not last long. Pick something that is good enough and embrace the flaw as an opportunity to learn. Adapt quickly and move on.
3. Act quickly and motivate others, including participants, to act on your behalf. Motivate people, including your customers, to do something to improve your marketing today. Inspire your organization to act quickly and create an environment that rewards moving quickly. Estimate and act; because if you don’t, your competitors will.
4. Mix and blend; don’t invent. Partner with others to create unique solutions that might benefit your brand, product, or solution. Choose an agency partner who is pushing the envelope and remember to consider technology, media, and creative opportunities. Look for elegant blends of all three, not an elegant single media solution.
5. Embrace risks and champion failures. Prepare to learn from mistakes and accept that failures are inevitable in finding success. Partner with agencies that are willing to put skin in the game and get paid only if they deliver results. It often takes several failures to find opportunities that yield the best results.

In the current world of escalating change and information overload, marketing is not a luxury, and participative marketing can be the key to success, even for very technical solutions. We often see a mediocre product with effective marketing outperform a good product with little or poor marketing. Big marketing budgets alone and single blockbuster campaigns don’t assure results.
The message is simple. Ask your customers and partners for ideas, try them all, measure results, and scale up the ones that work. The participants, not the marketers, are in control, and they are demanding a relationship, not just a marketing message. If they don’t find value in the relationship, they move on. The choices and opportunities are theirs.
The situation is not unlike the attraction of current major social media sites, like Facebook, successful multiplayer game sites, like Activision, and today’s real world sports and politics. Gen-Y members were born participants, and they are a major force in every business domain. People thrive on continually learning, feeling empowered, and providing input to the world they live in.
So if you are a startup, or even a mature business, you need to nurture these intrinsic desires and develop more meaningful customer relationships that yield greater revenues. Marketing is no longer a one-way conversation. Does your marketing include listening as well as talking?
Marty Zwilling
more of Marty on http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Starting a Business with Your Spouse

When she was 24 years old, writes Allie Siarto in her article, she started a business with my fiancé (now husband) and one of our best friends. Three years later, our business and marriage are stronger than ever, but not without a few bumps along the way.

If you’re considering starting a business with your spouse or significant other, or if you already have a business and you’re considering bringing your significant other into the mix, run through this checklist to avoid major headaches down the road:

1. Create an emergency fund.

   Money is the number one reason for divorce, and cash flow tends to be the number one challenge for new businesses. When we first started out, we waited months to get our business cash flow in order and get paid. But we didn’t stress, because we had saved a personal emergency fund ahead of time.

2. Get office space.

   You shouldn’t run out and get an office right away, but start budgeting for an office or co-working membership as soon as possible. We spent the first year of our business working from home, but we also joined a co-working group and got together with other entrepreneurs twice a week at a local coffee shop just to get out of the house and find camaraderie. Co-working spaces, as the co-working center of the Small Business Development Center of the Davao Chamber of Commerce offer flexible part-time solutions that will give you a more budget-friendly opportunity to get out, meet new people and maintain sanity.

3. Know your personality types.

   I tend to draw my energy from being around other people, while my husband draws energy from focused time by himself. I am more focused and energetic in the morning, while he works best late at night. I am very focused on the big picture, while he does better with the details. By understanding our individual strengths, we are better able to find areas where we complement each other. Consider taking a personality assessment to figure out your individual strengths and how you can best work together.

4. Define management roles.

   Along with knowing your personality type, you should have clearly defined roles within the company. Write job descriptions for yourselves and set clear expectations about who will take on which tasks for the business.

5. Engage in separate hobbies.

   When you are starting out, you will be spending a lot of long hours working together to get your business off the ground. It sounds strange, but it’s important to schedule activities apart. When we started our business, I got involved in the local photography community, while my husband got more involved with the organizations in the local startup scene. This added some balance to our lives and gave us something new to talk about outside of work.

6. Discuss risk tolerance.

   Because our business is our main source of income, my husband and I tend to be less risk-averse than we might be if we worked separately. We decided early on we wanted to take a “slow and steady” growth path with no debt, loans or investments, but we reevaluate our views on tolerance for risk, regularly.

7. Balance praise and constructive criticism.

   Make a point to thank each other for a job well done, and be kind about how you approach constructive criticism. In a close relationship, we often forget these basic rules of business.

8. Have a sense of humor.

   Don’t take yourself too seriously. Take time to find humor and happiness in the little things each day. For example, I’ve been known to break into song and dance during the work day.

Starting a business with your spouse can be one of the most challenging and rewarding things you will ever do. There will be tears and laughter. There will be celebrations and frustrations. But in the end, there’s nothing like sharing the payoffs of working together toward a common goal with your life partner.

Allie Siarto is the co-founder of Loudpixel, a social analytics company focused on social media monitoring, insights, measurement and infographics. She also runs a project called Entretrip, a co-traveling experience for location independent entrepreneurs, and a digital marketing innovation podcast called The Apt Marketer.

Article published on YFSMagazine.com

10 Qualities every future business needs to have

The reigning theory in business has long been that “alpha” leaders make the best entrepreneurs. These are aggressive, results-driven achievers who assert control, and insist on a hierarchical organizational model. Yet I am seeing more and more success from “beta” startup cultures, like Zappos and Amazon, where the emphasis is on collaboration, curation, and communication.

Some argue that this new horizontal culture is being driven by Gen-Y, whose focus has always been more communitarian. Other business culture experts, like Dr. Dana Ardi, in her new book “The Fall of the Alphas,” argues that the rise of the betas is really part of a broader culture change driven by the Internet, towards communities, instant communication, and collaboration.

Can you imagine the overwhelming growth of Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter in a culture dominated by alphas? These would never happen. I agree with Dr. Ardi’s writing, that most successful workplaces of the future need to adopt the following beta characteristics, and align themselves more with the beta leadership model:

1. Do away with archaic command-and-control models.Winning startups today are horizontal, not hierarchical. Everyone who works there feels they’re part of something, and moreover, that it’s the next big thing. They want to be on the cutting-edge of all the people, places and things that technology is going to propel next.
2. Leaders of tomorrow need to practice ego management.They should be aware of their own biases, and focus on the present as on the future. They need to manage the egos of team members, by rewarding collaborative behavior. There will always be the need for decisive leadership, particularly in times of crisis, so I’m not suggesting total democracy.
3. Winning contemporary startups stress innovation. Betas believe that team members need to be given an opportunity to make a difference – to give input into key decisions and to communicate their findings and learnings to one another. Encourage team-members to play to their own strengths so that the entire team and organization leads the competition.
4. Put a premium on collaboration and teamwork. Instead of knives-out competition, these companies thrive by building a successful community with shared values. Team members are empowered and encouraged to express themselves. The best teams are hired with collaboration in mind. The whole is thus more than the sum of the parts.
5. In the most winning companies, everyone shares the culture. Leadership is fluid and bend-able. Integrity and character matter a lot. Everyone knows about the culture. Everyone subscribes to the culture. Everyone recognizes both its passion and its nuance. The result looks more like a symphony orchestra and less like an advancing army.
6. Roles, identities and responsibilities mutate weekly, daily, and even hourly. One of the big mistakes entrepreneurs make is they don’t act quickly enough. Markets and needs change quickly. Now there is a focus on social, global and environmental responsibility. Hierarchies make it hard to adjust positions or redefine roles. The beta culture gets it done.
7. Temper self-esteem and confidence with empathy and compassion. Mindfulness, of self and others, by boards, executives and employees, may very well be the single most important trait of a successful company. If someone is not a good cultural fit, or is not getting it done, make the change quickly, but with sensitivity. Pain increases over time.
8. Every individual in the organization is a contributor.The closer everyone in the organization comes to achieving his or her singular potential, the more successful the business will be. Successful cultures encourage their employees to keep refreshing their toolkits, keep flexible, keep their stakes in the stream.
9. Diversity of thought, style, approach and background is key. Entrepreneurs build teams, not fill positions. Cherry-picking candidates from name-brand universities will do nothing to further an organization and may even work against it. Put aside perfectionism, don’t wait for the perfect person – he or she may not exist. Hire track record and potential.
10. Everyone need not be a superstar. It’s about company teams, not just the individual. In case you hadn’t noticed, superstars don’t pass the ball, they just shoot it. Not everyone wants to move up; it’s ok to move across. Become their sponsor – onboarding with training and tools is essential. Spend time listening. Give them what they need to succeed.

Savvy entrepreneurs and managers around the world are finding it more effective to lead through influence and collaboration, rather than relying on fear, authority, and competition. I believe beta is rapidly becoming the new paradigm for success in today’s challenging market. Where does your startup fit in with this new model?

Marty Zwilling (more about Marty on http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/)

*** First published on Entrepreneur.com on 10/29/2013 ***

10 Key Steps For Aspiring Billionaire Entrepreneurs

Everyone recognizes a great entrepreneur when they work with one, but most entrepreneurs don’t know what to look for in themselves that will drive that perception by others. In my experience, there is no magic gene involved, just simple good habits executed consistently and convincingly until everyone around you in a startup wants to follow your example.
This leading by example is easy to say, but not so easy to put into action. Most leadership gurus, including John Baldoni, have provided generic recipes, like his book from a while back, “Lead By Example: 50 Ways Great Leaders Inspire Results.” The points are great, but can be made even simpler and more actionable by adapting then to the world of the entrepreneur:

1. Demonstrate character. In the dictionary definition, character is said to be “the stable and distinctive qualities built into an individual’s life which determine his or her response regardless of circumstances.” Steve Jobs of Apple had character, and the people around him knew what he stood for in good times as well as bad.
2. Be accountable for your actions. In a startup, things don’t always work, and it’s easy to blame someone else, the poor economy, or just bad luck. Thomas Edison made no excuses for ten thousand light failures. Challenged by his contemporaries, Edison soberly responded: "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work."
3. Check your ego at the door (and keep it there). For an entrepreneur, this is often evident in the willingness to be coached, by outside experts or by your own team. We all know too many people who won’t listen to any advice from anyone. That’s just hubris, and it doesn’t inspire anyone.
4. Promote resilience. There is no shame in getting knocked down; it’s getting back up that matters. In a startup, pivots and problems will happen. Learn to anticipate change, bounce back stronger, and teach others to do the same. Dean Kamen, while still struggling with the Segway Human Transporter, holds 440 other device patents.
5. Get in the habit of asking questions but do not expect easy answers. That includes taking a hard look in the mirror, and facing reality. Howard Schultz, who grew Starbucks to 13,000 stores by 2008, decided to step back in as CEO when the economy was killing his stores, and refocus everyone on the customer. Now he has over 20,000 stores.
6. Manage around obstacles. We’ve all seen the entrepreneur who is struggling to keep the business alive by tackling the daily obstacle. No one is looking around the corner to see the next one. Richard Branson, now worth about $4.2 billion, offers this advice: “Obstacles and challenges are healthy for everyone.” He is always looking ahead.
7. Drive innovation. Great businesses these days start with innovation. Entrepreneur examples include Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, who turned a new search technology into a tool that most of us couldn’t live without. Encourage everyone on the team to think and act creatively. Good ideas can come from anyone at any time.
8. Encourage dissent about issues but promote civility around people. Receptiveness to dissent allows for corrective feedback to monitor ineffectual startup practices, poor and unfavorable decision making, and insensitivity to team needs and desires. This is positive, but a loss of civility more than negates all these positives.
9. Create a winning culture. Entrepreneur leaders drive values, values drive behavior, behavior drives culture, and culture drives performance. High performance makes new leaders. This is the self-reinforcing circle of excellence every startup needs for success. Winning business cultures, like at Apple, are set from the top.
10. Teach others “the how.” Then get out of the way and let people do their jobs. Great entrepreneurs are mentors to everyone on their team. Effective entrepreneurs are not afraid to “get their hands dirty” working with the troops. Bill Gates of Microsoft, even late in his career, wasn’t afraid to jump in and write some code to illustrate a point.

Being an entrepreneur may start with that million dollar idea, but turning that idea into a great startup is all about results. The quickest way to great results is to build a great team, and let it multiply your productivity. Using the actions described here as a model, take a look in the mirror to see how well you are leading by example.

Marty Zwilling (more of Marty at http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/)

10 Cash-Flow surprises that could kill your Startup.

The sad truth is that cash flow surprises kill many startups, even though they should have been adequately funded to survive. Overall, 90% of small business failures are caused by poor cash flow, according to the D&B Small Business website. Cash is king when it comes to the financial management of a growing company, so this is not the place for shortcuts and sloppy practices.

Good cash flow management, in simple terms, means understanding every inflow and outflow of cash, and never delegating this function. In principle, you must delay every outlay of cash as long as possible, while incenting everyone who owes you money to pay it as rapidly as possible. Surprises are unanticipated lags between these two events, as well as unplanned cash outlays.

I will outline here ten key principles and disciplines that every entrepreneur must understand and practice to minimize surprises and failures in this area:

1. Failure to document cash flow projections is a disaster. No matter how small your company is today, there are more moving financial parts than you can manage dynamically in your head. Of course, you can’t predict everything, but writing down what you know will identify existing problems sooner, and allow other team members to help.
2. You can be on budget, and still run out of cash. In the real world, spending seems to happen fast, and money coming in happens slowly. Thus your monthly budget may balance, but if planned income comes later than planned expenses, you have a short-term cash flow surprise shortage. Neither banks nor investors will help you on this one.
3. Your startup may be profitable, but broke. Profits don’t necessarily translate into cash. You can make profits without making any money, since the first priority of most startups is to reinvest everything back into the business for growth. There are lots of accounting tricks to make you profitable, but it takes real cash to pay the bills.
4. Seasonal sales fluctuations eat cash. Fluctuating sales means more inventory is required to cover the ups and downs. Every dollar in inventory is a dollar less in cash available, maybe even two dollars less if your gross margin is 50%. If you try to vary the number of employees to match, that costs even more cash for hiring, firing, and layoffs.
5. Unanticipated expenses and emergencies drain cash. The chance of unanticipated expenses, in my experience, is close to 100%. It could be a natural disaster, like a flood or wind storm, or loss of key personnel, equipment failure, or a major customer complaint on the Internet. Every startup has an unplanned pivot, and these all drain cash.
6. New businesses don’t get “normal” terms. It’s easy to forget that your new office rent asks for first, last, and security; new utilities require an escrow account; and new vendors want immediate payment for the first couple of months, before they offer the normal net 30 terms. On the other side, your new customers expect a free trial period.
7. Sales volumes are still ramping up while marketing expenses are at max. In the early days of a new business, and every time you make changes, sales volumes slip just when you need them most to cover the extra marketing expenses and new infrastructure. Your old “cash cows” are dying, while the new ones are still being fed heavily.
8. Even good customers don’t always pay on time. The Kauffman Foundation reports that late payments are among the biggest challenges facing startups. According to the Receivables Exchange, small businesses now wait nearly 50 days on average to get paid. If you are dealing with distributors, that wait can easily be four or five months.
9. Higher than anticipated growth has put you in cash flow hell. The faster you grow, the more cash you need, to build product, facilities, staff, and service. These are “up front” costs that can’t wait the four or five months before the sales and revenue catch up. If you can’t deliver to match the growth, your house of cards comes tumbling down.
10. Bankers and investors hate negative surprises. If your execution doesn’t include the expected cash flow management, investments can get withheld, and executives lose their jobs. I recommend that you buffer your initial requests for funding by 25%, and then add a line of credit, to cover contingencies and minimize the chance for negative surprises.

Then there are the Founders that overreact. They pay just the smallest bills and let the rest slide. Or they stretch out all payments until vendors complain, reduce your discount, or eliminate your credit. If payroll is late, morale and confidence go down, the good people leave, and your startup spirals into the ground. For all these reasons, it’s worth your focus to prevent cash flow surprises.

 Article by Marty Zwilling -http://blog.startupprofessionals.com
*** First published on Young Entrepreneur on 07/12/2013 ***

The secret to Entrepreneurial Happiness

During our childhood years, measuring success was as simple as counting gold stars and smiley face stickers. In high school and college, we relied on report cards. But how do we determine success now, as entrepreneurs?
In Southern California’s bustling startup scene, known as “Silicon Beach,” many professionals leave the comfort of a steady paycheck to pursue the American dream of starting something they can call their own. And after numerous conversations with like-minded entrepreneurs, we found that many of these entrepreneurs measured their venture’s success not in dollars, but by their own satisfaction or happiness.
It’s no secret that money can’t buy happiness. In fact, according to an off-sited study by Stanford University economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, once you’re pulling in a salary of $75,000, any additional dollar earned does nothing more to increase personal life satisfaction.
So if happiness cannot be bought — and yet we use it to measure our business success — what can we do to attain it? Over the last decade, researchers in Positive Psychology have discovered a number of behaviors that boost happiness. To boost your own, practice these four behaviors:

1. Create a social circle of like-minded entrepreneurs.

Two heads are better than one when it comes to problem solving. A team of entrepreneurial peers can see what escapes our own attention, point out pitfalls ahead of time, and become a sounding board for critical decisions and actions.
Commit to creating a circle of like-minded entrepreneurs in which no money is exchanged between members.

2. Give your time away.

Many entrepreneurs think that devoting every waking moment to their company will ultimately be the key to success. But when you spend time helping others instead of yourself, your sense of time expands.
Professor  Cassie Mogilner, a researcher on happiness and time management atthe Wharton School, explained this recently: “The results show that giving your time to others can make you feel more ‘time affluent’ and less time-constrained than wasting your time, spending it on yourself, or even getting a windfall of free time.”
Whether it be through mentorship, volunteering, showing interest, or lending an ear to a friend, giving time to others expands your sense of time and results in greater life satisfaction.

3. Set attainable goals.

The art of goal-setting can take years to master. As entrepreneurs, we all have big goals, and to experience success we have to learn to break large goals into smaller goals that are within our daily reach.
Try creating one goal per day that you want to accomplish outside of your day-to-day emails and meeting commitments — then do everything in your power to turn this into a lasting habit.

4. Practice gratitude.

There are a variety of ways to practice gratitude that entrepreneurs can easily incorporate into their daily routine. One approach is to set aside time every week to write thank you notes, sent via snail mail or over email.
If you thank a client, that’s expected. But if you thank someone for an unexpected task, research from Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California suggests that your mind becomes more sensitive to positive interactions — and less sensitive to negative ones.
By practicing gratitude, you will begin to cultivate a chronic state of happiness.

Happiness is the new gold standard.

The traditional gold standard for measuring professional success is money, yet entrepreneurs almost always cite happiness as the highest-priority goal for attaining success.
Do you already practice any of these four happiness-promoting behaviors? If not, try integrating them into your daily practice today.
And guess what? Happiness can also lead to better health, more energy, productivity, and yes — more money.

Dmitriy Katsel is the founder of Spring Theory, an organization that matches corporations with universities in semester-long collaborations to explore solutions to big challenges. Sara Gershfeld, behavior analyst and founder of LoveMyProvider, also contributed to this article.


Read more at http://under30ceo.com/the-secret-to-entrepreneurial-happiness/#11p2d9U8JPmb7sAV.99

8 Key Focus Elements Will Attract Startup Investors

One of the most common failures I see in startups is lack of focus.
Unfocused entrepreneurs boast that their new technology will generate multiple disruptive products for consumers as well as enterprises around the world. Investors hear this as trying to do too many things with limited resources, meaning the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition.
For example, just last week, I received a startup executive summary, requesting Angel investor funding, that touted technology for a line of new medical devices, also to be offered in a new military radar device. Even a company with unlimited money and people shouldn’t try to step into those two domains for the first time at the same time.
Other elements of startup focus are a bit fuzzier, so let me zoom-in on some key ones here:

1. Type of business model. Startups that try to mix a non-profit entity with a for-profit entity to share resources don’t work, and scare off investors. Providing shoes for the poor is a laudable goal, but quite a different business than Zappos, which sells clothes profitably, and provides free shoes for the needy due to social consciousness.
2. Solve one problem really well. Focus means starting with a problem that is painful, rather than a technology, and showing how you can solve that problem better than anyone else. Later in the pitch, you can show that you are not a one-trick pony by prioritizing related solutions in your long-term plan.
3. Limited goals and priorities. No organization can manage more than 3 to 5 goals and priorities without becoming unfocused and ineffective. Keep these balanced and aligned between people (customers, employees) and process (quality, service, revenue), and keep the scope realistic (eliminating world hunger is too broad).
4. Segment the opportunity. Targeting all the people in China as your opportunity gives you big numbers from a small penetration percentage, but will be seen as lack of focus by investors. Narrow the scope more realistically to people with specific age, income, and education demographics, that you can realistically reach with your marketing plan.
5. Keep your value chain consistent. Your value chain is your preferred business model, like premium quality, high service. If you mix that model with some commodity items, with no service, that will be seen as a lack of focus. Your team, customers, and investors will all be confused, leading to a lose-lose situation.
6. Simplify product scope. Your product will never have enough features to satisfy everyone, and it will never be perfect. Focus means creating a minimum viable product (MVP) first, and validating it in the marketplace. Feature-rich products take too much time and money to build, are hard to pivot, and will likely be slow and difficult to use.
7. Realistically frame the competition. If you really believe that IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are your competition, you probably don’t have a business. It’s better to focus on a niche that none of them do well, and build your plan around that opportunity. Claiming you have no competition also implies lack of focus, or you don’t have a business.
8. Prioritize marketing channels. For a startup, it’s impossible to run an effective Facebook, Twitter, content marketing, and Google AdWords online campaign all at the same time. Focus on one channel at a time, measure results, and then move to the next. Offline, it’s not credible to talk about direct marketing, distributors, and integrators all in the same breath.

I certainly understand the pressure add more of everything to your plan, as you listen to more and more people, all with their own priorities and biases. But in the long run, you need a narrow and memorable focus to build a strong company. Even in the short term, customers and investors alike will help you carry a simple and clear focus all the way to the bank.
Marty Zwilling
more of Marty on http://blog.startupprofessionals.com