Tag Archives: Business

Mission Before Business, Horse Before Cart

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People throw around the word “entrepreneur” like it’s a lifestyle trend. Many fancy themselves an “entrepreneur” with only the curiosity (or perhaps a lust) for building a business. Like movie or rock stars, many successful business leaders keep up a public image. Far too many people subscribe to entrepreneurship because it sounds and looks cool. Most fail to understand the real work involved.

Building a business is very hard. With very few resources at hand, you must pull everything together through favors and very long hours. If you do not truly believe in what you are building, then it will never work. You must have a mission or product you believe in first before chasing your lust for business. Not only that, but you must have a mission or product that can inspire other people to help you and customers to buy from you. That’s a tricky thing to find. Most wannabe entrepreneurs forget that the core mission or product is what it’s all about. And it must come first.

Everyone and his or her mother wants to start a business and be a boss. Nobody will care about you until you give him or her something to sink teeth into. If you cannot offer the world a product that changes lives, then you must start with a mission people can understand, sign on for, and follow to the end. You must get the team on board and excited. And to find success with your business, you must get customers on board and excited as well. As the character Proximo says in Gladiator, “Win the crowd, and you will win your freedom.”

Find your core idea, set your mission, build a product, and then build a business around it. You cannot have a business without something to be busy about.

The Tweetable Mission Statement

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Your core mission should be tight enough to share on @twitter. Why? 140 characters focuses your idea and leaves room enough for inspiration.

The School of Different

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Competition drives innovation. Duh. It sent us to the moon, after all. You can compete in one of two ways: 1) approach a problem from the same angle, trying to execute better than the next guy; or 2) approach the same problem differently. Both tactics have risks. By going head to head with another group wielding similar solutions, you risk falling behind in the race. By approaching a problem differently, there’s a chance your solution may not work at all. That said, there’s always a chance that two groups using similar solutions may fail to solve the problem as well. Two wrongs do not necessarily make a right.

Redundant solutions are a waste of resources, time, and marketplace space. What do you have to gain by trying to do the same thing better than the next guy? The chances that you will make a competitive impression are few and far between. Why not try something different altogether? Identify a problem or need, list the solutions available now, and brainstorm opportunities divergent from (or completely counter-intuitive to) other trends. Sure, you may fail to solve the problem. But you may also outperform the next guy with your unique approach. You’ll never know unless you try.

Remember what Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Embrace different.

Perhaps education could spend more time teaching students about what not to do. We should impart to students a fundamental understanding of what has been done already, and inspire them to approach things differently.

Through a culture of experimentation and differentiation, we will solve more problems faster and with more certainty.

The Controversy of Change: Netflix, Facebook, and Chameleons

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Many people freaked over Facebook’s face lift and Netflix’s reorganization. Yes, these changes are inconvenient. Some may break your routine or even damage your business. But what would you prefer instead? For the company or service to stay exactly the same?

Companies that fail to change fall prey to the market evolving around them. Inevitably, they are slain by the next best thing. By asking them to stay the same, you are asking them to fail. You are condemning the brand you embraced for so long to a slow death.

No, change may not always be good or necessary. But you cannot know until after you try. And neither can brands. No one has a crystal ball. Not even Steve Jobs. Smart leaders fail more often than lesser leaders and learn from their mistakes. They know that the biggest risk is avoiding risk altogether. You deserve to be eaten if you sit still in the savanna.

Like puberty, change may always be an ugly process. Some coast through it smoother than others. Those who make it out clean never forget who they are or what they believe in. A strong brand transforms with the market, but keeps its core mission at heart.

Embrace the chameleon business. Invest in progressive brands with solid foundation, not products destined for revision or absolution. If you truly believe in a brand, you should trust in change. Forgive the minor transgressions and take pleasure in discovering the next step along the way.

Think Big

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Why solve small problems when you can solve large ones? Why change the life of one when you can change the lives of many? Do not sell yourself short. Do not shy from a challenge. The difference between big and small impact lies not in financial or material resources, but in ingenuity and imagination. Think big, live big, solve big. Why not?

Sergeant Major Eats Sugar Cookies

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A handful of military leaders, notably in the United States Army, embrace a fairly standard five-paragraph memo to outline, strategize, and communicate unique action plans. I feel the following memo structure, identified by the acronym SMESC (or “Sergeant Major Eats Sugar Cookies”), will serve most civilian leaders well. I have every intention of practicing it into my business in the future:

  1. Situation: What is the problem?
  2. Mission: What is the principle task at hand and purpose behind it?
  3. Execution: What strategy are we going to use to accomplish the task?
  4. Support: What are the logistics? How many troops and resources will we need?
  5. Command: What other groups should be involved and how will they communicate?

Advertise What You’re Advertising

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I appreciate the need to launch marketing spots or materials to build brand awareness. But when you want to drive attention to a product, then make sure you . . . drive attention to your product. I am astounded by the number of designs, commercials, prints, and public gimmicks I see on a daily basis that fail to clearly communicate the product they mean to sell. Every good marketing campaign should tell a story, make the product clear to the customer, and clearly articulate where the customer can find the product.

For the last several weeks, my company has been running a spot for our latest web series on national television. Perhaps you’ve seen it? The spot is failing to communicate that it’s a web series that you should watch online. Am I crazy?

Feed Your Team

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An army marches on its stomach. Food boosts morale, energizes the mind, and rewards your team. Food is more magical than money. I am convinced through my experience that feeding your team is one of the keys to success. I calculate catering and craft service into my film budgets before any other line item. Not only is your team happier on a full stomach, they tend to stick around the office and get more work done. The traditional hour lunch break sends everyone off into the world and away from each other, making it difficult to get back into the gear of tasks at hand.

Afraid that feeding your team may be too expensive? Think instead about the productivity costs associated with sending your team outside for an hour lunch break. It will take an individual between 10 and 20 minutes to reach a destination for lunch, between 20 and 35 to eat, 10 to 20 to return, and as much as 30 minutes to get motivated again. On average, the hour lunch break could cost you as much as one and a half man-hours per employee per day. For a ten-person team with $60,000 salaries each, that’s $430 a day – over $2,000 per week! You could more than cover the costs of a caterer for the same price.

Find a way to pay for it. Feeding your team may be an added expense unaccounted for in your overhead and payroll costs, but the work output benefits are tenfold. Yum.

The First Sign of Great Leadership

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A great leader can make decisions quickly. Better than most, he or she can efficiently break a complicated problem down into its component parts and take action. Without hesitation. Without fear of being wrong.

Do not be afraid of being wrong. While leaders can only build great things with higher batting averages, it takes practice to hit the ball. With enough experience and mistakes, you should have better chances at making good choices. Over time, two wrongs can make a right.

Opportunities for decision making start small. If you cannot decide where your indecisive group of friends should dine together, then you probably cannot make important product, market, or life decisions.

The Self-Correcting Company

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Give your team ownership and authority enough to solve problems they discover without having to ask your permission first. If you are worried they will correct errors in a manner you do not agree with (or worried they will try to fix things you do not feel are broken), replace those people with others you trust – or learn to open your mind and have faith.

As team leader, you cannot act on everything yourself and are too far removed to supervise every detail of your organization. Therefore, you must either create a system of reporting and permissions to channel all information to you OR give your people the freedom to take care of it. For leaders who want control, the channel system sounds utopian – in practice, it is a staggeringly inefficient and damaging bureaucratic architecture. You simply have too few hours in the day to make decisions for everyone, and your organization will spite you for it.

To keep your company afloat and moving forward, empower your team to use their skills as they see fit. Trust me, it will be more stress off your back, and your company will be better for it.