Category: New Business Development

In Forbes,
Becca Brown, founder of SoleMates,
says
“No one else will be as invested
in your business as you are,
so don’t expect everyone
to follow through
when they claim they can help you.”

I saw that with the release of my first novel.
I have over 1,000 people on my contact list,
my novel was priced at a very inexpensive $6
(before discounts),
yet I only sold 40 copies
that first year.
Why?
Because other than being ‘nice’,
there was nothing
to motivate my contact list to buy.

So they didn’t.

No one will be as excited
about your success or progress
as you are.

There are a number of great reasons
to build a business
or publish a novel.
Pats on the back from friends or family
is NOT one of them.

Right now,
you likely know of one supplier
suffering from the bad economy.
Often, another customer will take that opportunity
to scoop the weakened supplier up.

What to do?

You can’t afford to buy them out yourself
but
if you let them be bought out by another,
you’ve lost a valued partner
(one with insight into YOUR company)
and your competition has increased in strength.
Not a good scene.

One solution is
to help the supplier out as best you can.
Strengthen them so they can resist the takeover.

As Hiroshi Moriya outlines in
The 36 Secret Strategies Of The Martial Arts

“Should a small, weaker country
be sandwiched between your own country
and that of your enemy
and the enemy shows signs of military hostility
toward that small country,
then your own country must set out militarily
and come to its aid,
and later you can bring it
under your control.
If you make verbal promises
but do not follow through with aid,
you will be unable to gain their trust.”

One of the best ways
to get the creative juices flowing
is to draft up a list
of crazy or ‘dumb’ ideas,
things so fantastical
that you’d never in a million years
develop them.

Why ‘waste time’ like this?

Robert I. Sutton
in
Weird Ideas That Work
shares
“Research by psychologists
suggests two sound reasons
for generating allegedly dumb and impractical ideas
(and then imagining they are smart):
To jolt people into questioning the existing dogma
and to generate counterintuitive ideas.”

“This technique is also promising
because it helps overcome
the ingrained human tendency
to reject the unfamiliar.
Once any human being notices something,
he or she can’t stop from evaluating it,
from having a positive or negative
emotional reaction to it.”

Evaluation is always deadly for creativity.
That’s why writers write first
and THEN edit.

Draft your dumb idea list.

In Only The Paranoid Survive,
Andrew S. Grove
from Intel
outlines the 3 rules of product development
in horizontal industries
(horizontal industries are defined
by mass production and mass marketing)…

“One, don’t differentiate without a difference.
Don’t introduce improvements
whose only purpose is
to give you an advantage
over your competitor
without giving your customer
a substantial advantage.”

“Two, in this hype competitive horizontal world,
opportunity knocks
when a technology break or
other fundamental change comes your way.
Grab it.”
(First mover advantage)

“Three, price for what the market will bear,
price for volume,
then work like the devil on your costs
so you can make money at that price.”

Actually those 3 rules
apply to almost all product development.

I take the same bus every day to work.
There is one woman
who, even though the bus is crowded,
intentionally takes up two seats.
She then ignores
the people eyeing it up.

Today there was a pregnant woman
eyeing the spare seat.
I tapped on the woman’s shoulder
and said
“Excuse me, she’d like that seat.”

The lady huffed and puffed
and called ME rude.
I looked at her,
smiled,
and said “Yep, I’m rude.”
(I can be)
“But I take this same bus with you
every day.”

She thought about it.

If I had said
“I’m not rude,”
she would have stopped listening immediately
but I didn’t
and I got my point across.

Sasha Dichter shares
how you can use that same concept at work.

Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design,
shares his test for
finding great designers

“I apply a simple test with young students:
smash a teapot into pieces and
then hand out the glue.
Those who rebuild the teapot won’t make it,
those who create phantasy animals and spaceships will.”

Looking at the world
in a different way
is rare and valuable.
If you have such an employee on your team,
engage her.
They’ll give you solutions
you’ll never dream of.

In his awesome free eBook
279 Days to Overnight Success
Chris Guillebreau (The Art Of Non-Conformity)
addresses how most entrepreneurs and artists
start by working for free.

“Several people all said
that they were insane
to work for free
when first starting their business.
When I read those
comments, I thought,
“Am I missing something here?
I thought everyone
works for free
when they are starting something new.
That’s the whole
point of risk and reward.”

Working for free may be insane in the outside world,
but with most small
businesses it is actually quite normal.”

Not only normal, required.
Start ups mean long hours
with only the hope of getting paid.

That’s why advising a recently laid off employee
with no savings
to start her own business
might not be the best idea.

Amazon.com has over 230,000 titles
available for sale
in eBook.
Your local bookstore, within years,
will have the same availability
in print.

How?

The Blackwell Expresso Book Machine
has been unveiled in the UK.
This machine prints any book on demand
(112 pages per minute)
with library quality binding.

That means bookstores no longer
have to carry inventory,
pay for shipping costs,
or worry about running out of stock.
The space needed for the same sales decreases.

Now, you may be thinking…
revolutionary for bookstores
but I’m not in the book business,
what does this mean for me?

It means your business can change overnight.
You have to be prepared to change also.

Enterpreneur.com has a list of 10 must-have’s
for mompreneurs.

#3 is hire a housekeeper.
Working women spend 2 hours a day
on household activities
like doing dishes, laundry, making beds.

Silly stuff.
These are activities
any cash hungry teenager on your street
can help with,
freeing you up to build your business.

Delegate.
No successful person does everything herself.

Caught two episodes of
Better Off Ted
last night,
a sitcom from ABC
around product development
in an ethics challenged company.

It is witty, fun,
and has enough real information
to keep
this product developer interested.

What is especially entertaining
is how every product,
no matter how bizarre,
is put to use.
Not the one original planned.
A creative solution to utilize
even failed experiments.

Of course
in real life,
it takes more time to figure out
ways to use
‘failures’
but successful companies DO use them.