Category: New Business Development

We often talk,
here on clientk,
about how bouncing back from failure
is a key success factor
for entrepreneurs and other innovators.

If you’re working your way
through your first failure,
take heart.
It may never be easy
but it gets easier.

I received a rejection on a story
yesterday.
I moped around the office
for the day,
keeping to myself,
but by the evening,
I had thought of a half dozen publishers
I could send the story to.

A year ago,
I would have moped around for a week
and not have any action plan
for my rejected story.

Did the rejection still hurt?
Yes.
That’s a good thing.
If failure was as enjoyable
as success,
no one would strive for success.

You will survive this failure.
Don’t give up the dream.

Seth Godin has a great post
on why not for you
is NOT the same as not for everyone.

Business is creative
and product development is extremely creative.
Great product developers
know their target market.
They not only know the demographics
around their target market
but they get inside their target market’s skin.

I’ve talked to actors
and it sounds very much
like what they do.
They live the character.
We live the target market.

We do this when developing ideas,
products, marketing, sales pitches.

Know your target market.
Become your target market
(if only for the length of time
it takes for you to make a decision).

My Kimber Chin pen name
is more indie.
It is about stretching the rules
of romance.
It is about trying different things.
Having a hero who flings the f-bomb
1,000 times in a 70,000 word novel.
Killing a pregnant lady off
in chapter one.
Roasting a kitten.
Playing with grammar and sentence structure.

The intent wasn’t to sell a million copies.
The intent was to play with the rules.
I consider the Kimber Chin novels a success.

I have another pen name
I use for more mainstream romance.
The intent, for that brand,
is to provide stories
a wide variety of people would enjoy.
Week 1 sales were greater than
a year’s sales of the Kimber Chin brand.

Two different brands,
two different definitions of success.

Whether or not
you are successful depends on your intent.
That is why goal setting is SO important.

A buddy has been trying
to find the ‘perfect’ solution
to her problem
for months now.

Perfect solutions
are no brainers.
They require no decisions.
It is easy to lead
when all solutions you have
to choose from
are ‘perfect.’
You can’t lose.

The thing is…
the perfect solution
is a myth.
Any solution provided
will have its pro’s and con’s.

Deciding the best solution
out of a selection of imperfect solutions
requires skill and confidence.

THAT is where leadership comes in.

Part of new product launches
is looking at what if scenarios.
What if the competitor
drops their price?
What if they launch
their competing product first?
What if the economy
tanks/improves/stays neutral?

These are things we can’t control.
I spend very little time on them.
What I do spend time on
is our reaction.
That we CAN control.

Lori Ann LaRocco
talks about this in her Forbes post.

“A great example is
Steve Sadove at Saks.
He said while he couldn’t control
the buying habits
of the consumer
during the height of the crisis,
the one thing he could control
was inventory.
He and his team
then took the necessary steps
to tackle that problem
through discounts and
also cut back on ordering
for the next season.”

Focus on what you can control.

I’ve been enjoying reading
the numerous predictions
about how iPad is going to eat Kindle’s lunch
on eReaders.

Why?

Because analysts are making
a classic new product launch mistake.
They are assuming that
the competition will do nothing
in reaction to the launch.

They’re assuming the competition
doesn’t drop prices
or launch an improved product
or… or… or…

That’s silly.
Of course, the competition
is going to react.
Of course, the iPad won’t be launching
under the current conditions.

That’s why there’s secrecy around launches,
why change has to be large,
why it helps if that change is ownable
by the launching company.

Assume your competition reacts
to your launch…
because they will.

Stephen Shapiro has studied
goal orientated behavior and creativity.

The results?

“The more creative the work,
the less motivation required
to hit peak levels of performance.
Studies reveal that creativity diminishes
when individuals are rewarded
(externally motivated)
for doing their work.
Why?
The desire to achieve the goal
overtakes the personal interest in the endeavor.
A myopic focus on the outcome
overshadows the intellectual stimulation
of the process.
As a result, risk taking becomes reduced
and creativity vanishes.”

That is why
often companies separate the creativity process
and action taking
(either with different people,
a lag in time between the two parts,
or by some other means).

We come up with ideas, simply ideas.
We test them using concept and idea screeners.
Eventually we take action.
But the two processes are separated.

This is what happens in the writing world too.
An established author will flesh out
several ideas,
pitch them,
and months later, write one or two or all of them.
There is a lag.

Being creative and taking action on the same day
usually means less than original solutions.

There is a great article on Forbes.com
on how to bootstrap your business.

One of the brilliant suggestions
is to locate your business
next door to your biggest customer.

“Joel Ronning leaned on
a $40,000 credit card loan
to launch Tech Squared,
supplier of computer parts.
He located his office
next to his principal vendor’s warehouse.
That way he could ship
the morning’s orders
on the same day
without having to carry loads of inventory.”

There are more benefits
to being next door to your biggest customer.
When I was working at one of the big Cola companies,
our can supplier had a location next to the plant
we tested all our R&D at.
We’d often call them in for consultation
on packaging
which, of course, gave them
a clear advantage when bidding for the new business.

Location IS important.
Leverage it as best you can.

There are some very thoughtful posts
out there in blogland
about how the U.S. is on the brink of disaster.

I’m not going to talk that gloom and doom.
Why?

Because I’ve never seen change
as a bad thing.
Yes, the rules of the game are changing.
Yes, those sticking to the old rules
will be hurt by this change.

But lets face it,
you and I are entrepreneurs.
We aren’t playing by the old rules.
We’re playing by the new rules
(and sometimes no rules at all).

We are small.
We are flexible.
We can play by one set of rules
this morning
and another set this evening.
Heck, we’ll play by any set of rules
allowing us to win.

And there WILL be winners,
likely as many winners as there are losers.
It is up to us
to decide which we’ll be.

A buddy wanted a change to happen.
There was resistance
(there always is).
The executive team said it wouldn’t work.
They didn’t want to allocate manpower to it.

So my buddy did it on her own time.
She didn’t do all of it.
It was too big of a project.
It would cost her
too much time and money.

What she did was
that part of the project
the powers to be
thought would fail.

The first try did fail.
So did the second.
She tweaked after each attempt.
Finally she had it consistently working.

THEN she presented it
to the executive team.
She got buy in for the entire project
and the rest is company history.

If your company is failure unfriendly,
if you can,
test high risk parts of your project
on your own time.