Category: Strategy

Saturday, 6.33pm.

Sheffield, U.K.

I saw a drawing on Charles Robinson’s post about books for entrepreneurs and it spoke very directly to me – and not in a nice fluffy way.

More in a kick up the ass kind of way.

It’s a very simple truth – and there’s no way to avoid what it’s telling you.

Do you know the kinds of people that succeed in business?

They tend to be the kind of people, in my experience, that you’d want on your side in a fight. People that stand their ground. That don’t give up. That move forward.

A surprising number seem to be born under the sign Taurus. Something about being bull-headed perhaps.

And the thing they do is get on with it.

A lot of us don’t. We have ideas. We talk about them, to our other halves, at the pub. It’s conversation and chat and wouldn’t this be brilliant.

Here’s the thing.

An idea is ephemeral, a thought in your mind. You might think it is valuable – but it’s worth nothing until it’s made real.

Now, one could argue over this – but what’s the point. Some people will say that ideas are valuable and you should protect them and sign NDAs before you talk about them.

Others will say that there is no point – no one is going to take the effort to steal and implement this idea of yours. If it’s that easy to steal, then you can’t protect it anyway.

So, putting those things aside, if you are – right now – in a position where you have an idea and want to be an entrepreneur, what should you do?

What’s the single most important thing you should do?

You should talk to someone with the power to make the decision to buy what you have to offer.

That’s the end game. So, you need to start there.

All this talk of ideas and businesses ends at this place. With you handing over something that the person who takes it wants more than the money in their wallet.

In economic terms, it has utility – worth or value.

What’s going to get them to make that decision to buy?

That’s a function of demand – and this gives you a hint of how to get from the idea you have to a viable business.

There are seven parts to this function – and it goes back to the first chapter of an economics textbook…

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the price of your product?
2. How much of it will the buyer want?
3. What are their tastes and preferences?
4. What else will they need that is related to your product to get full benefit from it?
5. How much money or income do they have?
6. What are their expectations about future prices?
7. How many such buyers exist out there?

Let’s do a quick exercise and work through these questions for a possible business. Lets say you’re setting up a marketing agency. It’s just you in the business.

1. What’s your price? Say your hourly rate is $100.
2. How many hours will the buyer want? Perhaps to get the job done they’ll need 10 hours a month.
3. Tastes and preferences? They like writing but haven’t got the time to manage social media and PR.
4. What else do they need? An advertising budget – perhaps $500 a month to get started.
5. How much money do they have? They’re okay with a budget of $2,500 a month.
6. What do they think about future prices? They’re expecting charge rates to stay broadly flat.
7. How many buyers are out there? You specialise in B2B consultancy firms – and there are perhaps 30-40 within 20 miles of you.

Does that seem reasonable? Say you need to get in $4,000 a month to maintain a decent standard of living. So you need 4 clients that have a budget of $2,500 – around 10% of your potential market.

If you think you can make that work – then you now have a plan for your business.

Now you need to pick the phone, send an email, send a letter, get a referral – use some way to talk to the kinds of people that can make the decision to hire you.

The one thing to notice is that an economics model doesn’t care what product you actually have.

There’s nothing in there that talks about quality or sweat and tears or your feelings.

It looks at your product from the customer’s point of view.

The only view that matters.

That’s reality.

And the sooner you face that, the sooner you will stop having ideas and start creating businesses.

Thursday, 6.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I am not a fan of Apple.

Yes, I have an iPhone, a Mac and an IPad – so they have got me in their clutches – but I’m trying to get away.

Because they’re turning evil. Perhaps they don’t realize it, but they are – and it’s making their stuff too hard to use.

It probably goes back to Steve Jobs. Most things with Apple do.

As far as Apple is concerned, all you need to do to live happily is use Apple products.

The iPhone is everything you need – a phone, a computer, a camera.

With iTunes and iCloud and the Apple Store – pay up and be happy.

Now, you may love Apple – and that’s just fine.

The point I’m making is that anything that tries to do too many things starts to become problematic.

Take pictures, for example.

If you have a camera and use a normal SD card, getting pictures off it is pretty simple. Stick it in a slot and copy the pictures across.

When you have a phone that holds 16, 32 or 128 GB, it starts to become more complicated.

Yes, iCloud will copy stuff off your phone – but it’s still going to fill up. If you add videos and podcasts into the mix, your new phone with more space gets stuffed quickly again.

Have you tried getting photos off the phone?

Once upon a time you could plug it in, take off the photos and clear the phone. Then you couldn’t clear the phone because iCloud got in the way and you had to…

Well, this isn’t meant to be a technical rant on how to use an iPhone and your photo management workflow.

It’s a warning.

Richard Stallman, the prophet of Free Software, says this “Digital technology can give you freedom; it can also take your freedom away.”

It might seem a brilliant idea to use Google docs and mail. To use a host of other online services to carry out everything from invoicing to data analysis.

But, when you have no internet access, you’re completely cut off. What would that do to you if your business relied entirely on such platforms?

You’re also better off sticking to a tool that does one thing well than a number of things badly.

However snazzy your todo list application – it’s hard to beat the power of a yellow pad and a pencil for making lists and ticking them off.

Stuff you write in plain text will still be accessible in half a century – while bloated Word and Excel documents will be hard to get into in a couple of years.

The advantage of a tool that does lots of things is that sometimes, when you need a quick task doing, it’s convenient.

The Swiss army knife is a rubbish knife – but it’s good for opening a bottle of beer. Just about.

If you really need to do some cutting – you need a good knife.

And the same thing goes for the rest of your life.

If you need to get something done – get the right tool. Choose a good one.

And watch out for the things that look good but really take your freedom when you aren’t looking.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 10.39pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Do you have too much to do?

Probably – if you’re like most people. Life seems to have a way of piling on stuff.

Whether its paperwork, gadgets or pounds around the middle, we pass the time attracting things that hang around and build up and get in our way.

The answer, some would say, is to work harder, get more organised and get things done.

It’s a long way from how people thought our working lives would pan out a century ago…

In 1930 John Maynard Keynes, one the most eminent economists of the last century, believed that in a hundred years we would all only need to work 15 hour weeks to have a good living standard.

Which goes to tell you that you shouldn’t listen to economists – financial crisis anyone?

The point is that we all work – some of us are in low wage jobs that mean we have to put the hours in to pay the bills. Others because we are in high wage jobs, but we are desperate for the new house or car which means we need to put in the time at the office.

Or, maybe you’re building a business and have a thousand things to attend to – from producing and delivering a service to the rest of the jobs that go into keeping a business afloat.

One way to free up time is to employ other people to do things for you. But what should you outsource and why?

Chris Tucker says you should make three lists. Make some columns on a piece of paper and get started.

In the first column think about the things you need to get done but don’t like – even hate – doing.

Do you get too much email? Does it take too long to carry out research? Are you sick and tired of doing background research before you try and reach a new prospect?

Or do you hate gardening or cleaning the house?

In the second column list the things you can’t do (or that you could do – but others could do better).

There is a tricky one.

Perhaps you can do copywriting, website design, photo editing, and vehicle repair.

But which ones can you do really well? To a professional standard?

This list is really the list of things that you can get a professional to do better than you.

Finally – there is the list of things you shouldn’t do.

One simple way of working this out is to look at your income and working hours. Let’s say you work 2,000 hours a year and you make $50,000. That means you make $25 an hour.

If you spend four hours cleaning your house that’s cost you $100. You might not be paid that by anyone – but that’s still the value of your time.

If you can get someone to do it at half the cost – you’ve effectively bought back time – which you can now use more effectively somewhere else.

The secret is to spend your time on the most valuable thing you could be doing.

The point of these three lists is to pull out everything you can outsource – and then you can go and find virtual assistants or local employees and get them to do these things.

Will this save you time?

Some. You will replace work time with management time – so you’ll need to get good at management.

Adding people is not an easy fix. So really, before you outsource, you should do everything you can possibly do to automate.

But before you automate – you should really see what happens if you just stop doing it.

In a nutshell – if something you could do is both strategically important to you and will have a big impact – then you should do it.

The things that are core to your business and life come first.

Everything else can be dumped, automated or outsourced.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9:12pm

Sheffield, U.K.

What would you think of a book called Winning Through Intimidation?

It brings to mind a book full of lessons on how to be more assertive, how to be the biggest, baddest person around. The kind of stuff someone about to go to prison for the first time might need to know.

The author, Robert Ringer, talks about this right from the start.

It’s not a book about how to beat others down.

Instead, it’s about how to get through being intimidated by others, how to keep going when there are obstacles in your way.

Where this starts to become useful is when we have to think about making and following a plan.

Take sales, for example. Every company has to makes sales.

It doesn’t always have to grow – that might be a goal but it isn’t essential – but it must make enough sales to cover its costs.

Here’s a pattern that seems to happen a lot when we’re trying to get sales.

Say you have a small company – it’s makes enough money to make the prospect of hiring a sales person a reality.

So, we get the cost of a person in the budget for next year – plan for the thousands a month it will take.

Is that enough? Will that person be able to come in and reliably meet the targets set every year?

Probably not… and that’s because just having one sales person isn’t enough to be successful.

You need a system. A system that includes a good product that is better in important ways than the competition, a good price, good information, a good order taking and distribution system and so on.

You don’t need a hugely expensive system that has every possible option thrown in.

But you do need a complete system.

A sales person can’t sign get a deal signed if there is no paperwork drawn up. They can’t get in the door if you don’t know the kind of person that wants to talk to you and can help them make contact.

It’s very easy to get discouraged and dismiss a project of this kind as a failure.

We hired a person who looked good on paper and at the interview, but it didn’t work out. We need to hire better next time.

We rarely notice that we have a broken or non-existent system in the first place – and no matter how great the sales person – we never had a chance at success.

But here’s the other thing.

We’ve also paid for a very expensive lesson – one that cost us in salary and time.

And it costs us even more if we fail to learn from what has just happened.

We’ve stumbled and fallen into a pit. We can curse and withdraw or we can move forward.

We can think about what we’ve learned, what went badly and what went well and, knowing what we know now, what we could do differently.

When we do this, we start to pull ourselves out on the other side of the pit.

And we start taking steps that move us in the direction of success.

We may stumble and trip again and again. There will be more pits.

But unless we learn and move forward, we will simply be left standing, looking at the failures we have had.

The next thing we try could be the thing that leads to success finally.

Failure is a state of mind. It happens when we decide to stop.

If we decide not to, if we always ask what is next, we’re going to find a way through. Always.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 10.34pm.

Sheffield, U.K.

Have you ever really really wanted to do something. Or known that you should do it.

Exercise more. Eat better. Be nicer to your other half. Spend more time with the kids.

It’s not easy. Change never is.

So, why don’t we just do it – what gets in our way?

Some people say you just need willpower. Set a goal – decide to do something and then get on with it.

Maybe it has to do with tracking. Measure yourself, keep records, take photos. That should work right?

It might have done, once. But for many of us, as life gets more complicated and full of stuff, we run into problems.

And a model from chemistry can help us understand this.

Let’s say you want to turn methane and oxygen into carbon dioxide and water. Methane and oxygen are the inputs.

You need to start by burning the methane – adding a spark – a flame.

That flame is needed to get things started. Without it, nothing happens. Once it’s there, the burning starts, the reaction takes off and we get the output.

Let’s compare this process to one many of us struggle with. Getting ready to go to the gym.

Let’s say you want to go first thing in the morning – perhaps 6am.

If you stagger into bed after a late night watching films and downing a few beers it’s going to take a lot more energy to get you out of bed when the alarm goes.

If you need to rummage through the wash basket to find your gym clothes, retrieve your shoes from the back of the cupboard and get any others stuff you need together – you’re using up more energy.

If you’ve booked a gym 20 minutes away from home because it’s got great facilities, you need to think about the 40 minute drive you have to do – is there time before work?

Perhaps it’s easier just to stay in bed.

What you’ve done is increased the activation energy needed to get you exercising to such a high level that the reaction never happens.

You turn off the alarm, roll over and go back to sleep.

Now – what happens when you add a catalyst?

A catalyst in chemistry speeds up the reaction – it lowers the activation energy needed.

In the gym example, if you sort your bag out the previous night, leave your gym clothes next to the bed, get your shoes and socks ready, join a gym a five minute drive away and go to bed at a decent time – you’re much more likely to make what you want happen.

In many cases – using more energy – working harder is not the answer.

Using a catalyst is – reducing the amount of energy needed to do something. Removing barriers, eliminating decisions and cutting out distractions.

Take sales for example. If you set yourself a target of making 100 calls a day, you’ll burn out in a week.

If you decide to make one connection a day – a call, an email, a LinkedIn contact – at the end of a year, you’ll have 300-400 more leads than you had at the start.

If you really want to do something – don’t try and work harder.

Set up your life so that it’s as easy to do as possible.

Then, even if you don’t feel like it, your system will kick in and you’ll get it done anyway.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh