In case you were on the fence about buying The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, Patrick and Brant have issued a discount code. Simply enter the code “startup” for a discount.

http://www.custdev.com

]]> http://www.apeofsteel.com/1600/discount-code-for-the-entrepreneurs-guide-to-customer-development-ebook/feed 0 http://www.apeofsteel.com/1218/how-to-run-a-company-into-the-ground http://www.apeofsteel.com/1218/how-to-run-a-company-into-the-ground#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:42:21 +0000 Dave http://www.apeofsteel.com/?p=1218

Part One - A recipe for a successful company

1. Hire really smart people and let them create. Give them some basic guidelines and the time and space to do what they do best. Leverage their creativity and deep understanding and let them surprise you with something amazing. (e.g. Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow“)
2. Hire mediocre drones and be prepared to tell them how to do every task that needs to be done. Create easy-to-follow processes and training manuals. Track everything they do to make sure it gets done. Plan meticulously for every deviation from the normal. (e.g. Michael Gerber’s “E-Myth revisited“).

You might hire separate groups of A and B people each doing different things, or you might hire a few A people and let them lead a team of B drones to create something awesome.

Part Two – How to run a company into the ground

A recipe on how to frustrate everyone who works with you, burn cash like it’s going out of fashion, and generally run a company into the ground: Treat the A people like B people, and treat the B people like A people. Don’t cross the streams.

The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.

Unrelated picture by 89AKurt @ flickr

This week’s Tuesday Wednesday push is whoseview.com, a community review site for Dublin businesses.  The Tuesday Push seems to have met some sort of untimely end – it may just be to do with general lethargy from the recent bank holiday weekend, or it may be that this week’s Tuesday Push is for yet another community business directory and reviewers are jaded. I’m wondering what happened – the concept started off with around fifteen or so bloggers pushing the idea and offering criticism and advice, and after a few weeks it dwindled to one or two. I deliberately avoided writing a post yesterday to see who’s still pushing, and the only review I could find for yesterday’s Tuesday Push is by Paul Watson. Get off your asses!

Whoseview is a nicely designed site who are picking a relatively tight niche by focusing on Dublin businesses, before planning expansion into other major Irish cities and beyond. A little more focused than the approaches by mytown.ie and loopthing.com who are trying to list all Irish businesses and all businesses everywhere respectively, but not as focused as Revahealth who have found a very focused, profitable channel. Trying to list everything in the country or world is no more a “series of narrow channels” then trying to swim across every ocean in the world is “going for a little paddle before dinner”.  I can get behind whoseview’s approach of focusing on one city and branching from there, and I’m a big fan of the look and feel of the site. It’s polished and professional, and blows the doors off most of the competitors in terms of usability. As Paul points out, the sign-up is a little convoluted though.

Now for the dispicable(sp) bit where the author gives out unwanted advice. Do we really need another Irish review site? Yes, it’s niche. Yes, it’s very polished. No, it’s not original – but then again, what really original concepts does the Internet really provide?  As long as you’re offering something even 10% new you can succeed, and if you focus on a small enough business area you will find it easier to make money than trying to cater to everyone and everything. That said, they’re competing in a crowded space where a lot of sites are offering similar and overlapping service offerings. I believe the key will be solid concent, SEO, and marketing.

If I offer a minor criticism (total nitpicking for the sake of it) it’s that the site loads somewhat slowly on my crappy national-telephone-company-provided connection. I’d recommend moving their static content to another server (from the cookie settings it looks like a the current one is a java container), and using apache/ngix/whatever flavor of server to set far-future expires headers to allow for browser caching and serve the images without cookies. Possibly also combine their CSS into one file, make Yahoo’s YUI Compressor part of their build process, and use Yslow / Google pagespeed to tweak accordingly.

Summary: A selection of industry leaders answer the question – Should I do an MBA, or should I start a business?

Photo courtesy of JustVodka@Flickr

Every once in a while I get the notion into my head that I’d like to do an MBA. I have a stack of GMAT study guides that I skim through, firing dusty synapses in the long-forgotten test-taking portions of my brain. I read through the theories, the course content lists, the testimonials from happy-looking people in suits and wonder if it’s really something for me. I left large companies for startups years ago and even in the toughest times have rarely looked back with regret. Is an MBA really something I want to devote my energy, money, and sanity to?

Then there’s the alternative: could I gain similar or better experience by jumping straight in and just starting something? An MBA is going to run upwards of €10,000 per year, what if I could take that money and start a software business, or try to take a product idea to market? One question remains – considering I have a list of potentially good ideas and the desire to work for myself “at some point” why haven’t I done it already? I’ve taken halfway-steps towards this sort of freedom by investing in a few Irish startups, but I still wonder why I haven’t fully immersed myself.

So which of these two paths is a recipe for success? I reckoned I could do worse than asking smart, experienced people that I admire what they thought, so I drafted an email and thought of some smart people who have inspired me recently.  Here’s the list (In alphabetical order…):

• David Heinemeier Hansson

  Creator of Ruby on Rails, and partner at 37signals. One of the most outspoken programmers you’re likely to find.

  It really depends on what you want to do. If you’re thinking about doing it on your own, I think an MBA is probably a waste of time. But if you want to work in a big corporation, then I’m sure that’ll look good on the resume. Only you will know whether you have that fire in the belly to chart your own waters. It’ll require more of you, but will probably be a lot more rewarding.

  Also, you don’t have to spend that much money starting a new business these days. You could try the “My Own Business” for a year and see if there was any traction. If not, you can always fall back on the MBA backup plan.

  Good luck.

• Sean Gallagher

  CEO of smarthomes, panel investor on the Irish series of Dragon’s Den, and MBA graduate.

  The first question must be – why do you want to do either?

  An MBA is great for developing and enhancing your overall knowlegde of business and in my opinion hugely beneficial to most of us. If you have technical background then learning about finance, accounting or strategy can be really helpful.

  If you are thinking of starting a business then having an MBA might well help you in the longer term to grow the business.

  Sometimes people feel that education can kill your desire to be self employed by highlighting too many risks when often it is about having massive self-belief and belief in your idea and just jumping in (with some homework done first I might add).

  My view is why not do both? In essence the business will benefit if you have a broader understanding of the principles and your studies will benefit from having some real life experiences on which to hang your new learning.

  Life is more then having and getting it is really about being and becoming. The real question is;
  What, or more importantly, who do you want to be or become and will either or both help you get there?

• Josh Kaufman

  Creator of the “Personal MBA“.
  

  If you’re ultimately interested in doing your own thing / starting your own business, self-education and moving forward with your small business idea is your best bet. The only advantage MBAs provide is a bigger hiring network within ~3 years of graduation, so if you’re not looking to take advantage of that, the time and opportunity costs of MBA programs are way too high.

• Guy Kawasaki

  CEO of Alltop, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, and author of “The Art of the Start”, “Rules for Revolutionaries, and “Reality Check”.. Guy is an MBA graduate from UCLA.

  This depends on what you want to do. If it’s to work for a established company, maybe the MBA is better. If you want to be an entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur.

  Guy also included some great resources on Alltop:
  http://innovation.alltop.com/
  http://smallbusiness.alltop.com/
  http://venturecapital.alltop.com/
  

• Pat Lynch

  Acting CEO of YouGetItback, finance director of Compliance and Risks Ltd,  and MBA graduate. Pat has founded successful businesses such as Microtech Cleanroom Services and TICN (The investment club network).

  Depending on your focus, this could be a very easy question to answer. An MBA won’t necessarially make you money.

• Pat Phelan

  CEO and founder of Cubic Telecom and “Telecoms disruptor”. A serial entrepreneur in the telecoms arena.

  It’s all about ambition. I would suggest that an MBA leads to an office and a start-up leads (eventually) to freedom.

• Penelope Trunk

  Writer of expert career advice, and founder of three startups; most recently BrazenCareerist, a web service to help companies find candidates.

  You can only evaluate the MBA when you evaluate what you will do with it when you’re done, and whether you needed the MBA to do that in the first place. Usually the answer is no to an MBA.

  You can only evaluate doing the startup by evaluating the chance that it will meet your goals.
  You don’t tell me about the startup or about your goals for doing a startup, bu you probalby know both and that’s what you should think about.

  My instinct tells me keep your day job; try the startup at night until you get enough revenue to be profitable and then quit day job. Forget the MBA.

• Bob Walsh

  Business consultant and author of Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality and several excellent ebooks, and moderator of Joel Spolsky’s “Business of Software” forum.
  

  Definitely doing a startup. Here’s why: Business Schools are repositories of knowledge about what has worked in the past. If your life’s ambition is to manage a LOB (line of business) for a large company an MBA is relevant. But if you want to not spend your life working for someone else, that means starting your own business(es). Also, over the next few years it’s a safe bet that disruption and change are going to be the order of the day in the business world.

  For existing businesses, this this is not good news. For startups, it’s opportunity time! Between the growing role startups play in society, the economy these past few years and major economic disruptions ongoing, there’s never been a better time to start a business.

• Paul Walsh

  CEO of Segala, Chair of the British Interactive Media Association, an advisor and mentor to several companies, and a partner in one of my favourite restaurants, Jaipur.

  The fact you’re asking the question leads me to believe that you haven’t recognised a real problem that people need resolved and you have the answer. So, in short, study for an MBA whilst you continue to earn money in full time employment.

  It doesn’t take much to start a company if you do it whilst working for someone and getting others to help build a site in return for a contra deal.   In my personal opinion, qualifications are over-rated.

  I’d never hire someone based on a qualification – unless I was looking for someone to build me a semantic web based application and they had a degree in computer science *and* knew what the semantic web was AND were able to build it. That said, a good friend of mine is getting a lot out of his MBA. Hope that helps.

Thanks to all who responded, these are some fantastic answers that have given me a lot to think about. But what do you think?

      While there are some signs that the tech recession may not be all that it was cracked up to be, there’s still plenty of reason to be both cautious and optimistic. At the moment I’m working a 4-day week instead of five in an effort to cut costs (Damn you Sequoia Capital!), though this is a blessing in disguise as my mortgage payment has dropped about 20%.  Essentially this gives me a spare day a week to work on my own projects.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a list of about 150 ideas that have accumulated over the last few years and sat languishing,  sadly in need of a bit of hard graft.  Some of these ideas are either too much of a novelty, or too complicated to complete.  Some have been done elsewhere, but then again – Why should this matter?  There’s one particular idea that I’ve been working on since January, and in the last two weeks an Irish site has been released which does something very similar.  There’s part of me that fears releasing something which would be seen as a derivitave of someone else’s idea, but another part that realises that even the best ideas out there have their competitors.  In some cases a copycat site or product does something slightly different, or offers a subtle innovation that kicks the original’s ass.  You just need to innovate 10% to differentiate a product from the competitors.

As Brian Tracy says in “The Psychology of Achievement“:

As long as there are people’s needs unmet and problems unsolved, there are opportunities to make money
  

Creativity is the magic elixir that turns a simple idea into a million euro business. How can you discover the innovation which can elevate your idea or brand above your competitors?

Here are Eight tips to stimulate creativity:

1. Write down clearly what you want to achieve 

   One of my favourite Japanese quotes is “The focused mind can pierce through stone“. Without focus on a specific end result you’re just wasting your time.

2. Learn Continually

    Research online, study, take courses, attend conferences, network, listen to audio books.  New concepts give your subconscious mind more fuel for ideas.

3. Try Divergent thinking

   Free brainstorming can yield great results. Don’t limit what ideas you write down by critical thoughts such as  ”Too complicated” or “Ah, that’s not practical”. Any random idea may spark a differnent idea which is a gem. 

4. Try Opposite thinking 

   If you’re trying to solve a particular problem, try writing down exactly what you wouldn’t do. If you’re designing software, try listing the features that would make the worst possible piece of software you could write and then work on ways to do the exact opposite. I was sceptical of this concept, but was surprised by the ideas that this technique delivered. 

5. Be Open to solutions

   Whenever you find yourself complaining about something, catch yourself. Instead of complaining list a few ways to solve the problem.  If you can ingrain this sort of thinking then suddenly everything becomes an opportunity.

6. Write down twenty solutions

   You want to make more money every month? Sit down and don’t get up until you’ve written down twenty ideas for revenue generation. Do the same the next week and you’ll find your brain has been thinking of new ideas somewhere in the background.  Usually the last solutions you think of are the best.

7. Define the obstacles to success

   List what is stopping you from succeeding, then determine which one if removed, would yield the most results. Attack the problem from as many different angles as you can. According to Pareto, there’s probably one problem which is causing the majority of your problems. It’s probably the toughest, but kill this one first.

8. Examine your competition 

   Find out what your competition is doing that’s working, and figure out a way to do it better. Break down their ideas or process into steps, and see where you can innovate or remove steps in the process to come up with something streamlined.