Dinosaurs, Wind Farms & Let’s Twist Again

May 8, ’12 10:19 AM

Author Leonora Soculitherz Categories Business Books, Business Bootstrapping, Business Funding, Business Ideas, Business Marketing, Business Mentoring, Business Planning, Business Startup, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Getting Things Done, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Small Business / SOHO, Sole-Trader, Start-Up, Start-Up, be successful, do a reality check, not to do it!, start-up in business

Keep up won’t you – most websites that promote ‘how to successfully start and run your own business’ are sponsored by big companies and government bodies and written by people that are in jobs and have never started their own business. The advice is so yesterday. It is stuff from antiquity that belongs in a museum like my hopeless, but suitably ancient for a museum, agent – Tony Robinson OBE.

Most entrepreneurs I’ve met are looking for opportunities to make money all the time. If they followed the advice on these start up websites they wouldn’t just copy stuff and they’d be too late in getting the product or service to market and the opportunity would have gone.

Look at Loubi (Christian Louboutin to you), if he hadn’t read an article about a slashed out shoe with a red line, then thousands of rich women around the world wouldn’t have fallen off his killer heels to, legs in the air, show off his signature red soles.

Dear reader and fan, I want you to take a look at the mind of an entrepreneur. Let’s take one successful one, Stefan Topfer, Editor of this Small Business Blog and one unsuccessful one, the aforementioned aberration, Tony Robinson OBE. They have two things in common; they’re both badly dressed (fleeces – urgh) and they look for business opportunities all the time.

The Recycling Opportunity

So, yesterday, Robinson rang Topfer and the conversation went like this:

Robinson: I’ve just seen on the BBC News site that a scientist has proven that giant dinosaurs could have warmed the earth with their flatulence.
Topfer: Ja – I mean, so?
Robinson: Well, where is the equivalent place today where hundreds of dinosaurs, produce masses of hot air?
Topfer: In your House of Commons and House of Lords?
Robinson: Precisely and why will this supply of huge volumes of hot air continue ad infinitum?
Topfer: Would that be because it is mainly a boys club eating vast quantities of posh nosh provided by the City and the top 100 CEOs and one or two media moguls.
Robinson: Yeah that and their humongous expense accounts that they can spend on Big Macs and pasties. It makes you feel good to know that we can now recycle all that dinosaur fuel for the benefit of the people.
Topfer: Ja, I mean nein, I mean how?
Robinson: You’re fab at technology, do the math and turn Parliament into a massive great hot air heater channelling warmth into the council housing, parks, stations and shop doorways where those with no dosh to pay for heating live.

I won’t carry on – as Topfer told Robinson never to speak to him again. The point is that here are two dinosaurs discussing a business opportunity that utilises a source of natural energy that has been available for thousands of years. There’s nothing original here apart from the possible opportunity.

Stuff to ignore

So ignore the stuff on websites that is ‘conventional business guidance’. ‘How to come up with a great business idea?’, ‘How to pitch your idea to investors?’, ‘Getting finance’ ‘There’s a business in you’, ‘What needs to be in your business plan?’, ‘Get a mentor from a Bank or Corporate’ and ‘How to sell’. the enterprise essentials are much less complicated and far more common sense and natural than this guidance.

Most successful entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed haven’t done any of the things that are regarded as ‘good business practice’. Most don’t like borrowing money, especially from banks. Their business planning is always in their head. Most of them are action rather than words people. They often copy and improve other people’s ideas and activities like crazy. The point is that time is money and opportunities come and go and they can’t be wasting time on this theoretical business stuff.

Instead, my advice to a start up, from my award winning series of entrepreneur interviews (see my book ‘Stripping for Freedom’) is:

Look for what customers want and are buying that you’d relish providing too.
Then, preferably by bootstrapping, check that you can afford to produce it as a product or service.
Then test market your product or service with its ‘twist’, like Louboutin’s red sole or, more likely, with an additional service that the competition aren’t providing.
Then from what you have learned launch your new business always remembering that you may need more products and services or even businesses to make the earnings you need to make.

Let’s Twist Again

This ‘copying and improving with a twist’ is important to the success of many entrepreneurs.

For example, the unique ‘twist’ that Stefan Topfer achieves with WinWeb is that he is absolutely passionate about beating the global competition not just by great cloud software and infrastructure but with exceptional customer service too. His customer service people are mentors. He’ll sack people that ‘sell’ his products and services as he believes in the customer buying what they choose that is absolutely right for them.

The great news is that everyone starting a business on their own can provide their own ‘twist’, a unique level of service, to support a product or service that customers already understand, want and need. Just get your offer out there as quickly as you can after testing it.

-Finis-

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The Real Deal – Don’t Accept Anything Less

Mar 19, ’12 8:55 PM

Author Tony Robinson OBE Categories Business Funding, Business Ideas, Business Marketing, Business Startup, Finance, Freelancer, Getting Things Done, Reader Stories, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Self-employed, Small Business / SOHO, Start-Up, be successful, do a reality check, market and sell, plan your business, start-up in business, start-up in business

Entrepreneur Conferences need a business health warning.

November and March are always the biggest months for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship conferences. Last week, I was lucky enough to be in Liverpool for the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. Last year it was in Dubai and next year it’s in Rio de Janeiro so we were lucky to have it in the UK. Liverpool is awesome, as is the Beatles Story, but I’m afraid the Congress didn’t float my boat. However, I did learn something important, for start up success, that I’d like to pass on.

On jumping into the taxi to take me to Lime Street station from my hotel I said to the taxi driver ‘Heck you were quick, you surprised me’. To which the taxi driver said ‘That’s what my wife says’. I laughed and it was a fab trip to the station and the taxi driver certainly earned his tip for cheering me up and educating me about all the new exciting development in Liverpool. That Liverpool taxi driver was the real deal. Everything you hope a taxi driver will be and that comes from real experience of handling hundreds of fares.

Intrepreneurs ain’t entrepreneurs

However, many of the speakers at the Congress weren’t. The reason they weren’t is they were people with monthly salaries in jobs. They were passing on what they think is important to be a successful entrepreneur. But really they were still just successful people in jobs not the real deal entrepreneur/enterprise owner. That’s different. They have budgets and functions and staff – it takes quite a bit o success before a start up gets any of these. They hadn’t taken a risk, on their own, with their own money to start and run their own enterprise. Only those that have are the real deal and can new starts authentic advice.

It’s simpler than they make out

The problem is they were magnetic, interesting people and you could tell why they’d got to the top and why peers might regard them as great leaders and entrepreneurs but what they were saying was dangerous. Indeed it is safer if prospective enterprise owners ignore their advice – difficult I know – because they’ll overcomplicate things for you and over-complication usually leads to very expensive ways of doing business.

Sir Richard Branson and Lord Sugar, despite their many critics, are definitely the real deal and although they’re now at the top of large organisations they haven’t forgotten what it is to start your own enterprise. Hearing from them is a reality check. Some things they said that show they are still totally in touch with practical realities. Branson is in favour of student type loans for start ups, and so am I. The difference between him and many of the other speakers is that he says, something like ‘it doesn’t take much money to start a business’.

Lord Sugar says something similar when he advises start ups that a good tip is to ‘work out how you’re going to make the salary you need in your first week of trading’. They know the value of a £pound and they see a few £thousand as a significant investment. Many bank advisers aren’t interested in loans under £50,000. Yet you or I investing £500 in our start up enterprise will be regarded as a serious entrepreneur by anyone who has started their own business.

Enterprise isn’t complex and it’s about your ability to sell products and services. It is not about leadership, business planning, strategy and pitching to investors.

Multiple income streams and test trading

Two weeks earlier I’d been in Leeds City library at an event for people thinking of starting their own business. Apart from my wonderful co-founder of the Enterprise Rockers, Tina Boden, the speakers made setting up and promoting your own business sound very complex. Why? Because all of them were speaking at the event for free. They hoped that the delegates might seek them out afterwards and pay them for their advice. If they made starting up sound easy no-one would pay them to help them. Again, advisers are not always the real deal.

What was disturbing were the number of people I spoke to that after listening to advice from the stage thought they had to work one business idea into a serious business plan and then get the finance to fund their plan. Two people I spoke to were very relieved to hear from me that you should test as many ideas as you can.

In fact testing is more important than planning. Certainly you can start with more than one product or service and can have multiple ways of making money. You may even choose to have money from a part time job or freelancing to help you in the early months.

Happiness is more than one egg in the basket

One person I spoke to went away happy that he could start, virtually the next day, seeing if he could make some money from both landscape gardening and making bicycles easier to ride by perfect fitting and alignment. He had been trained in law and was very confident at writing and was even more pleased that he could blog about totally different subjects and lead prospective clients to two very different websites.

The big lesson to me from all this is that real entrepreneurs that have started and run their own business know that the focus is on what can I sell, to whom, by when in order to start earning my living through my busness. That’s the real deal.

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It’s SME Jim, but not as we know it…

Mar 1, ’12 8:24 PM

Author Lorraine Allman Categories Business Infographics, Economy, Micro Business, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Small Business / SOHO, Small Business Support

We all know how important small and micro-businesses are to the economy so it’s great to find some neat little INFOGRAPHICS which enable us to see at a glance some basic facts and figures about the number and characteristics of small and micro-enterprises across the UK.

There are, however, a number of areas of concern I have with this kind of information:

Firstly, much of the data has been sourced from the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills – the same government department which simply refuses (at least at the moment) to recognise the separateness of micro-enterprises from the all-encompassing term ‘SME’ which includes companies employing up to 250 staff and turnover in the millions. In fact for bank lending purposes under Project Merlin four major high street banks define SMEs with a turnover anywhere between £15m-£25m per year. I wonder where small and micro-enterprises feature in that definition?

Secondly, the estimated number of micro-enterprises in the UK in 2010 was 4.33 million followed by a statement that of these 4.33 million, 3.3 million employ no-one. Unless I’ve missed something obvious here surely those 3.3 million micro-enterprises/sole traders are by their very definition making not taking a job and if that were not the case then our unemployment figures would be even more shocking than they are. Yes, I understand that encouraging more businesses to take on employees is important but at least first recognise and support the brave step those 3.3 million (and growing) have already taken to make a job for themselves.

I know that many small and micro-enterprises in the UK and beyond are simply getting on with the job in hand – running their businesses, trying to make a living. Yet life could and should be so much better for them – a life where they can make a move from just surviving to thriving, a life where a support infrastructure recognises micro-business and gives proportionate allocation of areas such as government funding and a good package of support particularly at the start-up stage. This kind of recognition and infrastructure isn’t just achievable it is absolutely necessary to ensure the best possible outcomes for the economy and society as a whole.

Whilst we’re waiting and campaigning for this to happen there are a couple of things you could be doing…

The next time someone mentions in conversation the term SME, ask them what exactly they mean by it – are they referring to Small and Medium sized Enterprises or to the ‘engine room of the economy’ – Small and Micro Enterprises.
If you agree with what I’m saying here (or even if you don’t and want to debate it) rock on over to Enterprise Rockers – a voluntary organisation committed to making life in micro-enterprise better and fairer. You’ll be joining a happy band of people who believe micro-enterprise really Rocks and instead of complaining we’re getting off our seats and doing something for ourselves. I’ll see you there!

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The Best Biz Mentors Can Be A Tad Crazy

Nov 23, ’11 2:30 PM

Author Tony Robinson OBE Categories Business Ideas, Business Mentoring, Business Startup, Business Trends, Entrepreneur, Getting Things Done, Home Business, Micro Business, MumEntrepreneur, News, Personal Business, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Self-employed, Sole-Trader, Start-Up, be successful, grow your business, start-up in business

My Dad

I reckon my first business mentor was my Dad. He started his own business, working from home, because, like many people I know, it was the best way of earning a living. His health was very poor so he had to pack in his job. In the five years between me being 13 and 18, when he died, he built a very big business. It was always a micro business, like 95% of the businesses today in the UK.

It became big in income but never had more than six employees. It was a sales agency in the wooden box and pallets industry. Many years later, when I started my own business, I realised that nearly everything useful that I’d learned about enterprise had come from my Dad as my business mentor.

He was an unlikely ace business mentor. My Dad left school at 14, picked everything up as he’d gone along, and was a complete eccentric, a showman and a storyteller who instinctively turned anything formal into a party. At football, Hull City, he had a seat just behind the Directors’ box so that he could hurl abuse and one-liners at them from start to finish. I wouldn’t sit with him.

Corporate Crackers

The point is that what I’d learned in Senior Management, even Managing Director, at two major American multinationals didn’t help me much in my own business. This was despite having received the very best business training and completed two Post Graduate Diplomas in HR Management and Business Administration. All this was next to useless in my own micro business as against the valuable help I gained from my mentors.

My business partner of twenty five years, Clare, felt the same thing. She hadn’t realised it at the time but her corporate jobs and training hadn’t prepared her for running her own business but what she’d learned from her Dad, who had his own property business, was invaluable.

No surprise then that we decided to have a mentor, another micro business owner, for our first couple of years in business. We gave him our corporate contacts and in return he asked us wise questions which stopped us doing many of the foolish things we were about to do. No money exchanged hands although a heck of a lot of money went behind the bar during our, frequently scheduled, mentoring sessions.

Sitting or Standing Up Mentors?

One of the many theories I have, which perversely academic research and government policy has yet to pick up on, is that if you’ve got a primarily ‘standing up’ business you’re best to have a mentor that has a ‘standing up’ business too. ‘Standing up’ businesses would include most building trades, cafes, shops, blues bands, chocolate makers, ice cream makers and micro-breweries.

Similarly if you’re in a ‘sitting down in an office’ type business then choose ‘a sitting down in an office’ type mentor. I’m definitely not saying only get a mentor from a similar trade or industry, only government and BigBiz think in sectors, but do get someone who really understands what you have to do each day.

Oh and beware of men in suits if you’ve got a ‘standing up’ business’ or you’re a woman. I’m sure there are exceptions to these rules of mine for choosing a mentor but there won’t be many.

Sir Jimmy Fixed It for Us Every Day

Wrestler, DJ, marathon runner, TV presenter, volunteer hospital porter and the greatest charity fund raiser of all time, Sir Jimmy Savile, died recently. He was buried in Scarborough, where I live. Thousands turned out to acknowledge his real achievements for the people of Britain both at his service in Leeds and his burial in Scarborough. He was truly a man of the people, an inspiration to many of us, and the very same person on the telly as he was in the cafes and streets of Scarborough.

He made us feel better about life and he genuinely helped many thousands of people through adversity. He was eccentric to the last. He was buried in one of his trademark track suits, in a gold coloured coffin placed at an angle in the grave, so that he ‘could see the sea’. He was also a highly successful micro business owner, millionaire and a cracking volunteer biz and personal mentor.

Two of his proudest possessions were on his mantelpiece in his Scarborough flat. They were individual letters from Princess Di and Prince Charles thanking him for his help to them, as an informal mentor.

Lots of my business owner friends seem a bit crazy. The craziness is often just appearance and behaviour that shows we’re our own boss with our own values, passion and beliefs. Some can wrongly view this, like Sir Jimmy Savile was viewed, as not professional or not to be taken seriously. We are passionate about what we do and it’s bloody hard work doing it but we can be very useful business mentors too.

Get Mentoring

My businesses have benefited a great deal from the handful of business mentors I’ve had down the years. Most of the mentoring I’ve had is over the phone or nowadays by Skype. I usually contact my mentor when I’ve got a problem or see an opportunity that I want to talk through before taking a decision. I’ve also had a great time and learned a lot as a mentor to others. I have had some training on being a better mentor and I’m going to do some more shortly.

There are lots of places around at the moment where you can find a mentor or get some training to become a better mentor yourself. One such place is the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs, which I help run, and you can find out more here about Get Mentoring – free mentor training and free mentors.

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Building better relations with your customers starts at the end

Nov 18, ’11 12:11 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Ideas, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur, Failure, Generation-Y, Generation-Y, Personal Business, Relationships, Relationships, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, grow your business

Today, I want to tell you a personal story of doing new things, taking risks, being innovative and being willing to fail in the quest to create something of value for my business, the people that I know, the small business community and my customers.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

We live in changing times. We live in times where the power of the consumer is rising and it is changing everything. We live in times where harnessing the power of relationships with our customers and our employees is becoming more and more key to our future growth and innovation.

Therefore, the onus on business leaders to learn, share ideas and network is rising as we think about how we grow our businesses.

There are many events in existence for businesses but these can be:

Either for large or very small businesses;
Organised by professional or trade associations and vendors of some sorts;
Filled with talks/speakers that talk for around an hour that are ultimately trying to show you how smart they are or are trying to sell you something; and
Don’t offer enough time for attendees to network, talk about and debate the issues that are presented.

Therefore, we thought it’d be great to develop and deliver an event for established small businesses, especially those with growing teams, across sectors.

In order to do this and to try and create a truly different event, we first started by describing the customer experience ie. what did we want the potential attendees to feel after they attended our event.

Here’s what we came up with:

Imagine this.

An event where you get to the end of the day and your attendance has solved a number of your most pressing problems, you have heard some great people speak, you have met a number of great contacts and your head is full of ideas for the future of your business. So much so, that when we hold the next one that you’ll want to bring a number of business contacts along it was so good.

Does that sound good?

Why did we do it this way? Well, rather than being lead by the features of our products or services, we started with the end in mind as we believe that is a better way to create something that will have an enduring emotional connection and value with our customers.

With that in mind we developed RARE Forum (www.rareforum.co.uk), an event that is:

A place to share ideas, experiences and to discuss and debate the issues of the day;
Not focused on selling anything (although there was be a price to attend);
Filled with with a number of punchy 20min speaker slots (TED style) centred around a theme;
Full of facilitated networking and debate;
Where the whole day will be recorded (video) and made available via the website to the attendees for them to watch again at a later date or share with their team and contacts; and
Where the output of discussions and answers to Qs posed by speakers will be collated and made available via a digital resource.

All this thinking and development was done earlier this year and I am pleased to say that on the 3rd November at The Drill Hall in Central London we held our first RARE Forum under the theme: ‘Business is Personal’. Talks over the course of the day covered subjects like:

Business is personal and why it’s getting more so
Unearthing killer customer insights
The world is changing fast, how can we keep up and change with it
How you can use your customers to help rally your troops?
Creating a customer centric business
What does being a leader mean in this new world?
Generation Y and Z and the future of the talent pool
What will our customers want in the future?

The day was a great success and was the first of many, we hope. We are now busy making plans for what happens next.

One of the things that we promised to do was to capture the ‘story of the day’ afterwards so that we could share that with the attendees as an aide-mémoire and as a way of capturing the essence of the day. You can check out the ‘story’ by following the link below. You really should take a look it as it includes all of the slides that the presenters used, pictures from the day, some sketches from our artist in residence and a whole set of tweets from our twitter hashtag: #rareforum. It’s also been done on Storify which means it looks pretty cool even if I do say so myself.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

For the team involved and myself personally it was a huge learning experience. Both exciting and scary in equal measure. What it did teach me, however, was that starting with the potential attendees, my customers, and what sort of experience and feeling I wanted to create for them helped give us a better understand of not what to do. But, more importantly, what not to do. Once we understood that we had a great platform to build from.

Another big lesson that I learnt is that if you want to make your business great, if you want to stand out from your competitors then you have to be willing to fail in public. However, done with the right intention and in the right way the actual risk of failure gets much, much smaller.

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