Category: New Business Development

When a waiter at Gjelina refused
a pregnant Victoria Beckham’s
special request for
salad dressing to be served
on the side,
Chef Gordon Ramsay
weighed in on
customer service
“It was a sour note.
I don’t think customers
should be treated that way.
That might not be the way
I choose to eat it,
but that’s what the customer wants…”

Chef Ramsay is known for
being (loudly) anal about
food prep and quality and presentation.
If he thinks chefs should compromise
on all this to keep the customer happy,
we should think about
what we’re willing to compromise
to do the same.

Many of my entrepreneurial buddies
started their first business
while at university/college.
Many of us are still working
with contacts we made there.

The University Of Waterloo,
the school with tight ties
to the founders of companies
such as Research In Motion
and OpenText,
has taken that one step farther.

Their VeloCity is a student residence
consisting of 70 budding entrepreneurs.

“Three-time VeloCity resident
Barbara Macdonald
enjoyed the experience so much,
she and seven other friends set out
to repeat it,
this time as an ultra-hack-a-thon.
7 Cubed’s ambitious goal:
seven applications
in seven days
with seven programmers
(and one designer).

“We’d arrive at 8:45
and do a post-mortem on the day before,”
Macdonald says.
Then the team would pitch
and rank ideas.
They had three criteria:
“fun to build,
useful for a wide group of people,
and feasible to develop in one day.”
The team coded until 10 p.m.,
when they were expected to release.

Their first app, QuickCite,
takes the sting out of assembling a bibliography.
Feeling bleary-eyed
after finishing that essay?
No problem.
Simply hold your smartphone up
to the book’s barcode
and snap a picture.
Select a formatting style
and QuickCite takes care of the rest.
To date, the software’s had
more than 2,000 paid downloads
from the iTunes and Android stores
and been profiled on
popular blog Lifehacker, PC Magazine,
and ABC News.”

Of course, you don’t have to be in university
to duplicate this experience.
My writing buddies and I
go on writing retreats.
One weekend
with no goal other than
have a publishable story
at the end of it.

Go back to school…
or at least
residence.

I recently received an email

marketing a mentoring service.

One of the testimonials

for the mentoring service

stated that she didn’t believe in

paying for mentoring,

but this service changed her mind.

 

What did that customer do?

She was a mentor herself

(in a different region).

She had the name of her company

proudly displayed and linked.

 

WTF?

 

I see this ALL the time.

A romance writer boasts  

about how she doesn’t read romance.

A saleswoman for Audi drives a BMW.

A postal worker sends a package by a rival courier.

 

And then you expect ME

to buy your product?

 

Hell no.

 

Believe in your product.

Use your product.

Support the industry

your product plays in.

Have you ever arrived

at a regular destination,

and you can’t remember the drive there?

Or you meet up with the girls

at a restaurant at 6pm ,

and then laugh

as none of you mentioned

a time or place

because you always meet them

at the same restaurant at the same time?

 

THAT is the power of routines.

 

As a marketer,

you want your product

to be part of your customer’s routine.

You want to be

their cup of coffee

in the morning,

a purchase they don’t think about.

 

As an entrepreneur,

you can use the power of routine

to get things done.

You find yourself

writing a blog post

because you always write a blog post

on Tuesday.

You get those commodity taxes filed

because it is the end of the month

and that is what you do

at the end of the month.

 

Use the power of routine

to drive your success.

Often I’ll work on
several projects
at a time.
Sometimes these projects
will be related,
and it is challenging
to look at the second project
with the much needed excitement.

One trick is
to do a small completely different task
between the projects.

For example:
I’ll revise a chapter
in my alien abduction story
in the morning.
I’ll then go for a walk,
or make myself a sandwich,
or I’ll return emails.
Then I’ll revise the chapter
in my android space spy story.

Another trick is
to change my environment significantly.
I’ll revise the alien abduction story
in my bedroom.
I’ll walk downstairs
and revise the android space spy story
in my home office.

Or I’ll listen to country music
during the alien abduction revisions,
and I’ll listen to rock
during the android space spy story revisions.

When you switch projects,
give your body and mind
a signal that you’re doing something new.
This will help you look at
the new project with fresh eyes.

Many entrepreneurs
straddle two jobs,
the money making day job
and the dream achieving business start up,
until their startups
are ready for full time.

But when are startups
ready for full time?

I make the leap
when the startup
(or my writing career)
covers my bare bone expenses
AND when day job
severely impacts
my entrepreneurial activities.

With my writing career,
I know I should write a short story
and a novella at minimum
every month.
I also have edits and revisions
to turn around
on a timely basis.
If I can’t make these goals,
I consider my writing career
severely impacted.

Going to one source
of rather untested income
is scary,
but that leap has to be done,
or you will stifle your startup’s growth.
Decide in advance
what you need to make that leap
and, when you reach that point,
go for it.

My buddy and I
decided together
on a world domination plan.
We’d publish shorter stories
every month,
and promote on
a couple of eBook reseller sites.

We stuck to the plan
for a month.
We were sending stories out.
We were advertising
existing stories.

In that first month,
nothing happened.
Neither of us made
a sale to a publisher.
We didn’t see an increase
in sales of existing stories.

My buddy decided
the plan wasn’t working.
She quit our world domination plan,
and started with a new shiny plan.

I stuck with the plan.
Three months later,
the sales of my existing stories
have jumped up dramatically.
I’ve sold three stories,
and am in negotiations for two more.

My buddy has switched back to my plan,
but she’s now starting from zero.

In this instant result world,
we sometimes forget
that we need to give a plan time to work.
Stick with your plan.

One of the things
many creative types
(artists, product developers, marketers)
worry about
is
managing the delicate balance
between
being unique
and
being marketable.

Be too unique
and your product won’t appeal
to very many
(or any)
prospects.

Be too mainstream
and your product is just the same
as everyone else’s
and you end up
competing in the race
to the lowest price.

I used to worry about this
with my writing.
I don’t any more.

Why?

Because I’m quirky.

I could rewrite a classic book,
following all the so-called writing rules
and it would still be uniquely mine.

If you have a VERY strong voice,
or
a VERY quirky way
of looking at the world,
you don’t have to worry
about mainstream sucking out
all your uniqueness.

You WILL be unique enough
to make a difference.
Concentrate more on understanding
the appeal of mainstream.

Yesterday, I received a
revise and resubmit email
from one of the larger publishers.

With a revise and resubmit,
the editor lists what she’d like fixed
in broad, general terms,
and then offers to look
at the story again
if these revisions are completed.

The work is enormous
and there’s no guarantee of
a publishing contract.

The serious writers suck it up,
rewrite their stories,
and resubmit them.
If the revisions show improvement,
usually the editor will work
with the author.

Many of the writers,
however,
won’t do all that work.
They’ll sub their stories
to other publishers.

Which is fine
because editors don’t want
to mentor writers
they can’t work with.

One of my buddies says
that working on TV and video production
is his dream.
Another buddy does this for a living
and offered to take him on a shoot.
The weekend was rainy and miserable
so the dreamer passed,
claiming he’d wait for a nicer day.

That day never came
because the doer never extended
the offer again.

If you want an achiever as a mentor,
she will likely ‘test’ you
before she works with you.
Expect this,
and when this test comes,
do your damnedest to pass it.

BTW… John Mongillo has a GREAT post
on how he tests prospective sales hires.
Well worth a read.

In romance writing,
there are a few key characteristics
that determine success.
One of these
is the number of (quality) stories
an author has released.
The more stories she has,
the more copies she sells
of each story.

It doesn’t matter how quickly
these stories are released.
It doesn’t matter how long
these stories are.
What matters is the number of stories.

So when I launched a new pen name,
I wrote shorter stories
(10,000 words or 40 pages long)
quickly,
releasing at least one story a month.
After a year and a half of publishing,
I now have a healthy readership
and am seen as an established author.

If you wish to ramp up cash flow quickly,
look at what determines sales
in your industry,
and then determine
the easiest sustainable route
to satisfy this characteristic.