So what do you do when the day
before shooting starts on a shark movie,
your mechanical shark sinks to the bottom?
If you’re Steven Spielberg,
you improvise,
end up shooting an even better movie
and add, he estimates, 175 million to the box office.
Every film maker, entrepreneur, employee
is faced with “disasters.”
You can throw up your hands and walk away
or you can make your Jaws.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
stated that all truth goes
through three steps.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.
Entrepreneurs work within the first two steps
(by the third step,
all opportunity is gone).
What does this mean?
Don’t expect raving fans
on day one.
You’re going to have to sell your ideas.
There are a number of techniques
to sell into large companies,
most require an affiliation or introduction
from an already known entity
…like your lawyer or accountant or advisor.
That’s right.
One of the best value added services
your advisors can provide is access
to their contact list.
That should be taken into
any advisor evaluation.
I often get asked how to valuate a business.
There are general rules such as
10 year (or less depending on leases, trademarks, contracts, etc)
discounted cash flow
plus the net worth of the business
as of today
but a big chunk of that valuation
rests on industry specific metrics.
Valuing a blog is no exception
as Lorelle VanFossen points
out in her post Selling Your Blog.
Buyers,
as in the case I saw of
a telecom company buying
a computer consulting company,
ignorant of these metrics
are likely to overpay.
In the telecom’s case,
they ended up buying a lemon
(I had to reco they close the division down).
Millions of dollars wasted.
Charlie Munger recently said
in a commencement speech,
“I constantly see people rise in life
who are not the smartest,
sometimes not even the most diligent,
but they are learning machines.
They go to bed every night
a little wiser than they were
when they got up and
boy does that help,
particularly when you have
a long run ahead of you.”
That has always been my goal in life,
to learn at least one new thing a day
and to help at least one person.
It’s like a scene out of an old Western,
the boss walks into a boardroom,
seats herself at the end of the table,
facing the door,
so she can keep an eye on others.
Potential troublemakers are positioned at her right,
her gun hand.
Brownnosing friendlies?
At the opposite side of the table.
According to
Sharon Livingston, a clinical psychologist,
seating at meetings indicates company standing.
A wise woman uses this to her advantage.
I’ve been reading some posts
on the 7%-38%-55% communications rule
(55% of communication is body language and facial expressions,
38% is voice,
7% is actual words used)
and the web.
Basically promoting the idea of video
on sites to communicate more effectively,
to “capture” the 93%.
This reasoning is ridiculous.
It would mean that newspaper, magazines,
radio are completely ineffective
which we know is not true.
This rule is meant to apply to face-to-face communications only.
I don’t talk about traditional advertising
(tv, radio, print)
very often on this blog.
Why?
Because for most smaller businesses,
it is not necessary.
As Michael Philip and Salli Rasberry state in
Marketing Without Advertising,
“More than two-thirds in the U.S., certainly
– of profitable small businesses operate
successfully without advertising.”
There are other more effective
and more efficient means of marketing.
When people ask me what I do,
I tell them “I get things done.”
I say I’m going to do something
and then do it.
It might not be a successful,
it might not always be the “right” thing,
I may not actually do the work myself,
but I execute.
There’s value in that ability.
As Jeffrey Pfeffer says
“success depends on execution—
on the ability to get things done.”
An angel investor in India
posted that one of the first thing he looks for
in entrepreneurs is
“the ability to accept “delayed gratification””.
I thought that was such a given
that it was not post worthy
…until I started reading the comments.
Successful entrepreneurs HAVE to delay gratification.
There are no immediate results.
Products have to be produced before they are sold.
Posts have to be written before traffic comes.
The delay between the two could be months
(for blogs, 9 months in the Google sandbox)
or even years.