I have to answer the question “what types of start-ups do you work with?” all the time.
I have a couple answers.
‘The hard ones.”
“The ones that hire me.”
“The start-ups with boatloads of cash, a brilliant new market-defining, game-changing idea or technology that will go public almost instantaneously.”
Occaisionally I can get a laugh with the first two. [...]
My father always told me that every job is a sales job. That’s at least a little bit true, but in my experience, most entrepreneurs are a little disconnected from their inner
Harvard Business Review offered a special issue on Sales in 2006 (Vol 84, Issue 7/8) that included a number of articles that offers a [...]
Tags: closure rate·Clotaire Rapaille·coping skills·Entrepreneur·g clotaire rapaille·Harvard Business Review·huge market·initial offerings·LinkedIn·Marketing and Advertising·negative image·Sales·sales job·sales person·Salesmanship·zebras
This is another handy chart form McKinsey. It is very easy to feel like all you can do is cut costs right now, but the truth is, this is a great time to go after new customers if you have some resources.
Tags: business plan·great time·handy chart·hard money·mckinsey·McKinsey & Company·new markets·product planning·strategy·truth
If things are still slow for you, it’s probably a good time to rethink how you define product.
I spend a lot of time with clients outlining the space between how they define their products and how their customers define their products. Sometimes this has to do with real or perceived benefits. Sometimes this has to [...]
Tags: bridge the gap·funders·initial purchase·integration service·lease deal·leasing company·performance criteria·product design·product experience·product offering·work flow
Entrepreneurship is the art form of organization development. All art forms are about synthesizing or transforming or juxtaposing objects from one realm and infusing them with the life forces of talent, vision, and craft to create something new and quite different from anything that has existed before – something with a life of it’s own [...]
Tags: Cleveland·dazed and confused·efficiency gains·Hyland·john carrol·john patrick·LinkedIn·organization development·packy·passion·profit margins·rhinoceros success·unqualified success
Jim Collins has offered me no end of simple ways to describe complex issues to my consulting clients. His book are full of solid wisdom. I’m sure his next book will be no different, but for the moment I’m all about this article in the NYT about his methods. Genius – especially his hiring protocol.
Spend [...]
Tags: genius·Good to Great·hiring·Jim Collins·LinkedIn·nyt·organization·protocol·wisdom
This article about my sister’s businesses in Cleveland is a review of the restaurant, yes, but is also a review of the restaurants raison d’etre.(disclosure: I am part owner of my sister’s empire – but we’ve never really figured out what part.)
The first half of the review consists of a discussion of the social and [...]
Tags: Cleveland·Google Alert·Restaurant
This is a repost from themcompanies.com, a really useful post, for sure. I’ve made a number of half-baked attempts to build a list of all the sites I use on a regular basis, but the list always gets too cumbersome to be useful. Turns out that 65 is just about the right number. In truth, [...]
Tags: attempts·business owners·competitors·decision matrix·half baked·knowledge and sense·nbsp·repost·truth·web sites
My client, Vox Mobile, is growing but for CEO, Kris Snyder, there are always new things to learn.
There are a number of good snippets in this Plain Dealer series. I like this format..so much that I’m working on a book that uses a version of it. There are a lot of materials about what [...]
Tags: blind spots·leadership team·lumps·nice problem·plain dealer·road blocks·snippets·start ups·ups·vox