You know that it’s the right time and you have the right idea when you can write 10 pages about your customer’s persona. Then link that persona to a product, service, attribute combination that gives you some idea of the pricing power of (ideally) each feature or at least the product in total.
Milestone number one – the idea. You can’t move on with just a great idea until you figure out how you are going to build it and what it will cost you. Five quick questions: What are you building? What do you need to build
And now for balancing faith. The winners-never-quit question! The how-canyou-walk-away- when-we-are-so-close-to-the-end defense. I keep coming back to Sarwar’s last comment at Dana Point: “I can accept anything but a shortage of faith from you.” Was it shortage of faith or something deeper? Given a bad
Balancing faith is recognizing when you can win and when you can’t. It is going the distance when you can and cutting your losses when you can’t. Once again clichéd. In real life: Have you ever pulled the plug on the ventilator of a dying
The marked-for-death syndrome is quite common in first- and second-time ventures. Cookaracha Guides, my venture number two as well as a Type I failure, was done and finished with within three months. The idea was to give paid advice to aspiring MBAs and business school
The need for a framework arose when I realized it was difficult for me to retain an objective point of view when my ventures were cross fading between economic cycles. Instead of troubleshooting, which made things worse, it would have helped if there had been a
John Whitney, the turnaround specialist and management professor at Columbia Business School, did an interesting, inward-looking exercise in his “In Search of a Perfect Prince” course. He asked students to look back at their lives and pick one instance each of when they were a
I believed that we needed high-potency leadership from day one for us to attract talent, money, and customers. I was wrong. We wasted many hours and expensive international air time (four-figure MCI World Call phone bills during months of recruitment effort) interviewing and convincing candidates
Is there any correlation between targeting large customers, executing large orders, and new venture failure? I believe so. New ventures, with rare exception, lack the depth to handle large assignments and contracts. Without sufficient depth, new ventures make bad short-term calls on pricing, delivery terms,
Should you really care about what brings revenues into the company? Why is diversification a four-letter word? Because diversification comes in many distracting forms – none of which add any value and all of which solve a short term logistical problem called cash flow. From