Archive for the 'Home Office Business' Category

Will The Majority Of The Workforce Work Virtually – The Changing Climate Of Business

The perfect virtual storm appears to be on the horizon and the winds of change will soon transform the current business landscape, eroding traditional office based positions in favor of virtual positions. There are a plethora of compelling reasons which seemingly guarantee this change, ultimately resulting in a new working venue for the majority of the white collar work force. Of course, “white collar” is arguably an anachronistic term, since many virtual workers can include “blue collar” jobs which can be dispatched from home offices can also work virtually, saving on time, energy and overhead. Further, white collar virtual jobs may result in the demise of “white collars” per say, as virtual workers are very unlikely to don a shirt and tie, preferring their favored casual jersey or t-shirt. This virtual storm will change the working landscape and the change is happening now. Progressively larger segments of the population are going virtual, from technology consultants to computer maintenance crews, from computer programmers to auto repair technicians. This trend is accelerating due to many interrelated elements. These include:

  • Cost effective or free web meeting tools GoToMeeting, Dimdim, etc.)
  • Increasing costs related to energy and commuting
  • Inefficient use of time caused by commuting and travel, reducing productivity
  • Inexpensive or even free real time communication both real time (Skype, Instant Messaging)
  • Inexpensive or free asynchronous collaboration tools
  • Pervasive global internet accessibility
  • Powerful and inexpensive cloud computing solutions
  • Rising costs and challenges impacting travel
  • Significant savings opportunities relating to overhead for employers
  • Social networking tools including LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

I believe the compelling factors above will continue to provide the climate necessary to perpetuate this storm, until such time as a majority of the workforce will work from home.  Over the last several years, I migrated from a traditional land line ($50 per month), to a VoIP line ($25 per month) and I am now in the process of moving to a purely Skype based line ($3 per month).  Arguably, Skype offers great reliability, a simple click of a mouse on a PC screen to make a call, and allows me to use a PC headset while on the call, providing for ease of keyboard use while in discussion. I offer this example merely as a microcosm, a small leading indicator of the migration to more virtual and more cost effective opportunities.  Granted, VoIP can be accomplished in a brick and mortar environment, but it also provides a simple and cost effective way to communicate face to face with a distributed, at home work force. This is just the tip of the iceberg as the winds of change should propel us to a more virtual, less commute centric future. Does this spell the ultimate demise of office buildings and a complete metamorphosis in the urban landscape? With an expanding global population and the many jobs that still require onsite presence, there will be a need for a partially centralized and non-virtual workforce. That said, those companies which can embrace a partially or completely virtual business model will enjoy a significant competitive advantage over those which have not. It’s provided a windfall advantage for my virtual insurance marketing agency, and I’m confident the same approach will work for almost any business.

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Posted in Home Office Business, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency SEO, Insurance Agency Webinars, Insurance Agency Websites, Insurance Search Engine Marketing, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

When is the Last Time You Read the US Constitution – Take the July 4th Quick Quiz

When was the last time you read this?

When is the last time you (or your children) read the US Constitution, or for that matter, the Declaration of Independence? With our national birthday just around the corner, thinking about the Constitution seems particularly relevant. It’s great to go watch a parade, but you might find it truly worthwhile to take a little time and read our Constitution. If memory serves me correctly, I read it back in my college days for a class I took on constitutional law. Recently, however, I read a great book on my Kindle, called The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. The Nine frequently referenced the articles and amendments of the US Constitution. So, after finishing The Nine, I decided to reread the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution.  I came away with two surprises:  1. The Constitution is a surprisingly short document considering all that it represents – those framers were clearly a brilliant group.  2. Even with the formality of the language of the times, you can really sense the pent up anger in the Declaration of Independence.

The real question is, how much do you know about the Constitution? If you’re curious, take this quick quiz (answers are below):

  1. How many Articles are there?
  2. How many Amendments are there (last one was in 1992)?
  3. What is Article 1 about?
  4. What is Article 2 about?
  5. What is Article 3 about?
  6. How many Amendments are there in the Bill of Rights?
  7. When was the Bill of Rights ratified?
  8. Which Amendment abolished slavery?
  9. Where would you find the famous quote, “WE hold these Truths to be self evident?
  10. How many states were required to ratify the Constitution?
  11. Bonus question: What is the Fifth Amendment about?

Some of the language in the Constitution seems crystal clear to me, other language seems cryptic. After reading through it (twice), it seems abundantly clear why the judiciary has so many perspectives of Constitutional right and wrong and the myriad of interpretational perspectives on the document. This document represents one of the most important, guiding principles of our everyday lives. When is the last time you or your children read the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution? Answers to the quiz are below, if I made a layman’s error on these, I guess I’ll have to “plead the Fifth”. Feel free to send me comments, clarifications or corrections.

Answers: 1. (7) 2. (27) 3. (Legislative Branch) 4. (Executive Branch) 5. (Judicial Branch) 6. (10)  7.  (1791) 8. (13th) 9. (Declaration of Independence) 10. (9) 11. (Shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself)

If you’re interested in reading something on a leading edge business topic, try Your Virtual Success (Career Press), my new book on web centric sales, marketing and business management. Available at all bookstores, Amazon and on the Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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Posted in business, Business Book Review, emerging business, Entrepeneurship, Home Office Business, Insurance Agency Marketing, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

If Someone Hands You a Scalpel, It Doesn’t Make You a Surgeon – You Should Think of Web Marketing in the Same Way

There are many powerful marketing tools now available, everything from eMarketing engines and Search Engine Optimization Tools to ePublishing and Web Seminar Software.  Any of these tools can be very helpful to your business, but placed in the wrong hands, they can be extremely dangerous. Not long ago, a CEO mentioned to me that they were sending out tens of thousands of emails through their eMarketing “platform” and they could do so very inexpensively. Their platform (let’s call it an integrated web site and eMarketing system) could send out as many emails as they wanted. Their provider suggested they contact some email list brokers where they could buy tens of thousands of emails.  They even had some sample emails from other companies they could use.

Unfortunately, their email “blasts” of tens of thousands of emails, purchased from a list broker, resulted in no response. Literally, nobody responded to their offer. This is a good example of placing the aforementioned scalpel in the hands of a layperson. Placing this type of technology in the hands of untrained individuals is a recipe for failure, regardless of the ease of use of the application. This example is laden with huge issues:

  1. The email list they purchased looked like a low quality list, with first name, middle initial and last name all merged into one field, resulting in problematic personalization.
  2. The company was trying to “sell” something in their email – always try to educate or enlighten
  3. The email was graphically rich (a definite issue for many spam filters)
  4. Large scale email blasts often result in your prospects blocking your email address or in some cases your domain.
  5. They already burned their first opportunity to make a positive impression with all of these potential prospects

So before you hit the button and blast out 10,000 or 20,000 emails, and before you decide to run some of your own webinars:

  • Carefully study emails which you receive and like – why are they good – why did you open it
  • Attend webinars which sound interesting and relevant to you – how long are they – did you stay
  • Read a book about these new web marketing topics – read a few
  • Seek advice and guidance from experts in the field – surgeons get training and so should you

Make your web marketing operation safe and successful by combining advanced tools with knowledge and training to ensure the health of your program initiatives.

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Webinar Tomorrow: Blogging, Social Media and SEO for Lead Generation & Growth

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing for B2B Lead Generation

A brief, complimentary web seminar on Blogging, Social Media and SEO – New Marketing Tools for Lead Generation & Growth is open to registrants. We will review the new rules which apply to marketing and why sooner is better when it comes to social media marketing. Topics include SEO, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ePublishing, Blogging andsocial media marketing – live presentation of the Ezine dashboard and content centric approach to marketing.

* Blogging for Leads
* ePublishing or Blogging – which is better and why?
* Search Engine Optimization – SEO or PPC
* Should my company Link, Friend or Tweet?
* Social Media Marketing or eMarketing for your business

June 17th at Noon ET: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/864983264

For more information: info@startupselling.com

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Office Buildings Are Obsolete and Offshore Drilling is the Result

Your Virtual Success - virtual sales, marketing and business - photo from Flickr

Office Buildings Are Obsolete - "GoVirtual, Baby, Go Virtual"

These days, office buildings simply seem like an outdated concept, a horse drawn carriage in the age of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet, a stereo turntable in an iPod era. Of course towering skyscrapers and massive office buildings composed of brick and mortar, conference rooms and cubicles made sense at one time, but with the advent of pervasive internet connectivity and virtual meeting tools, these office buildings are rapidly becoming obsolete, resulting in unfortunate collateral damage like massive oil and gas consumption, unnecessary expense and wasted productivity. Office buildings, though seemingly innocuous, are one of the key catalysts causing us to use 350 million gallons of gas per day, and waste millions of hours of valuable time and productivity. Does is make sense for millions of white collar workers to spend an hour commuting into a city, searching for parking, scurrying across crowded streets to then spend 99 percent of their time working from their PC, talking on the phone, and communicating through email and on-line Web meetings?

Reducing the national commute is no longer a want; it is a clearly defined need as is evident by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling a mile down under the ocean illustrates the extreme lengths we as a society are willing to go to fuel our need for oil and gas. Why do we need so much oil, and why are we importing over 60% of the oil we need? Figures vary, but some, including the NRDC, estimate that passenger cars use up “40 percent of the oil consumed in America”. Many organizations are calling for improved fuel consumption, smaller cars, hybrid vehicles and carpooling. But I look at these suggestions, albeit good ones, as treating the symptoms but not the disease. We could easily cut passenger car fuel consumption in half (or perhaps by as much a 75%), if companies adopted a virtual approach to business, abandoning the tiring and tedious commute and embracing a home office based, internet model.

According to Wikipedia, “Estimates suggest that over 50 million U.S. workers (about 40% of the working population) could work from home at least part of the time yet, in 2008, only 2.5 million employees (not including the self-employed) considered home their primary place of business.” Yes, there are millions of telecommuters and home office based businesses now operating out of their respective homes, but this could and should be increased tenfold.

There are three major factors which need to be addressed to foster a dramatic increase the numbers of home based workers.

1. A new management style will need to be embraced by companies; management needs to be focus on results and not on the close daily supervision and behaviors of individual employees.

2. Workers need to learn how to work from home and get comfortable with the home based office concept.

3. A shift in tools toward cloud computing and away from traditional enterprise applications may be required.

Of these three factors, the first two represent a change management paradigm shift which as we all know can be very challenging and time consuming. The latter is a technology shift, more readily and rapidly addressable, almost everything this writer does is now cloud computing based. My days are now comprised of a handful of Skype calls, several web meetings, eMarketing, SEO (search engine optimization), website makeovers, blogging and Social Media Marketing and Networking, all done in the internet cloud.

Are office buildings and all they represent the underlying cause for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico? Can we rapidly curb our appetite for oil by adopting a virtual approach to business and commuting? Will the echoes of the Michael Steele and Sarah Palin slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” someday change to “Go Virtual, Baby, Go Virtual”? I think virtual business and management will be an evolution rather than a revolution, behavioral change lags technological change. This change, however, is happening and it is a change for the better, a more eco-friendly and lifestyle friendly model, and certainly a change for increased productivity and decreased fuel consumption. As this evolution unfolds, what will happen to all those office buildings? I believe they will simply be repurposed, whether they morph to condos, research facilities and light industrial (yes there will still be jobs which require onsite venues), warehouse space, and community, athletic or recreational facilities. Or perhaps they will slowly evolve to some purpose beyond our current scope of understanding or speculation. Regardless of what shall happen to these office building obelisks, encompassing both impressive and generic icons of an anachronistic business model, I think many would agree that it seems like an inherently bad idea to continue to foster a commuter centric model which requires millions of white collar workers to burn oil, time and money in this virtual age.

OK, I’ll say it, “Go Virtual, Baby, Go Virtual”.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press), available at Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble or Indie bookstores (or online). Or go to one of my websites: http://www.yourvirtualsuccess.net, http://www.startupselling.com. Has your company, agency, or professional services firm started the transition to a more efficient and productive virtual sales, virtual marketing or virtual business model?

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The Prospect Scorecard – A Simple Way for Salespeople and Businesses to Improve Close Ratios, Forecasting and Communication

Great selling starts with great prospect identification and qualification. Salespeople and businesses need to quantify prospects in such a way that they can improve close ratios and pipeline forecasting accuracy. To accomplish this, you need to use something I call a “Prospect Scorecard”. This Prospect Scorecard, combined with a simple but accurate prospect identification method makes it much easier to quantify your current pipeline and thus improve close rates and forecasting accuracy. It can also be used to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing programs, because you can more readily judge (or score) the quality of incoming leads. This technique will work for essentially any company.

It’s easy to create a prospect scorecard (or virtual prospect scorecard if you’re a virtual company or self employed individual). First, start with your top ten criteria for an ideal, in profile client (if you don’t have ten, you can select 5 or 6). Criteria can include items like industry, revenues, growth, target buyer title, specific technology requirements, total employees, solution needs, and other attributes relevant to your ideal prospect. Once you have identified your top ten (or whatever number you select), you can rate them on your scorecard on a scale of 1 to 10, a 10 being your perfect prospect and a 1 not even worthy of discussion. We currently use a 5 point scale on our own scorecard, and our sales agents consider anyone less than a 3 as an unlikely prospect. If they aren’t a 3 or better, they don’t even make it to the pipeline. The scorecard helps salespeople match their prospect against specific and quantifiable criteria selected for your ideal prospect profile, turning the subjective into the objective. They can also compare their current prospects with prior opportunities which were won and lost, and match their current prospects against this historical information. Prospect scorecards are easy to create and useful for almost any type of company.

Once you have created your scorecard criteria, you can simply add ideal buyer attributes, or to simplify the process, a prospect identification acronym. The acronym we use is “BUD”, which stands for Budget, Urgency and Decision maker. If we are speaking with a principal or CEO, and they understand the pricing paradigm, we have a capital “B” and know that the budget will not be an issue. If we are speaking with a marketing manager and they are uncertain, we have a lower case “b”, and they are a less qualified prospect. The same holds true with urgency and decision maker. If we have all three, and the prospect score is a 3 or better, we know they are very likely to become a client.

BUD can be modified for your company. For example, perhaps your prospect identification acronym will be BUNT (Budget, Urgency, Need, and Timing). What’s an example for “Timing”; a new person or organizational change is causing your prospect to rethink their needs and their service provider, thus the timing is a capital “T”. The prospect identification acronym needs to be short and simple, and should include critical qualification elements of your sales cycle. I remember using the scorecard and BUD at a high tech, high growth company about 10 years ago, as we rapidly ramped up our pipeline and sales volume. Salespeople would frequently walk into my office and say, “I have a BUD-qualified prospect.” Or they might ask for help, “can you come to XYZ Company on Thursday, they are a 9 on the scorecard and BUD qualified.” We were all speaking the same language, having turned subjective terms like “good prospect”, “hot prospect” and “well qualified prospect” into quantifiable terms like “a 9” which is “BUD qualified”.  Make this part of your everyday language and weave it into the fabric of your sales culture.

This is a win for both the salespeople and for management, as this simple process makes it easier to communicate, forecast and close. More information is available on The Prospect Scorecard in Your Virtual Success (Career Press): Available at all major bookstores and Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275487494&sr=8-1

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Tuesday’s Mail – Should Your Tax Dollars Subsidize Direct Mail?

We certainly like our mailman who faithfully delivers our mail, or to be politically correct perhaps we should say mail person or postal worker. Yet on most days, we should simply say why is he coming at all? Though we do receive physical checks each week, these could be delivered twice a week, or we could simply ask clients to pay via PayPal or online transfer. On occasion we receive a letter from a friend, but 99% of the time friend and family communications is now provided through email or social networking. My children’s grandparents, as they near 80 years old, have now moved to email as their primary method of communication.

Last Tuesday, our diligent and timely mail person delivered 11 mail items to our house. All of them were solicitations of one type or another including (see photo): Asian Food, Pool Supplies, Electronics, Cosmetics, Replacement Windows, Credit Card Offer, Window & Gutter Cleaning, University Fund Raising, Household Items, Religious Fund Raising and a Technical School Brochure.  All of this went into the recycling bucket, with the exception of the 20% household item coupon my wife might use. Of course, this store already has our email and could have emailed us the coupon. The University fundraising mailer makes no sense to me, as they have my email and my phone number, and email and call frequently. Even the window replacement vendor has our email as we had conversed in the past.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect the right of these companies to market their products and services, I just don’t think we should subsidize it, or expend time, money and gas to deliver it. Candidly, I’d like to see less trees, energy, cost and waste that is associated with the creation and delivery of paper in general. Direct mail, now known as snail mail, is an anachronism, a phonograph type solution in an iPod age. The post office, which has been running losses of over $1.5 Billion per quarter, recently offered the following statements in their 10-Q quarterly report.

  • “The recent losses are primarily attributable to unprecedented declines in mail volumes that began in 2008.”
  • “The Postal Service projects debt outstanding at year-end to increase over the September 30, 2009 balance by the maximum allowable $3 billion, to $13.2 billion. The $15 billion debt ceiling will become insufficient in 2011.”

Though taxpayers don’t fund the loss directly, the USPS borrows from the treasury to pay for the deficits. The net result is dollars out of taxpayer pockets. Should Congress move quickly here, after all, $1.5 billion in losses per quarter to deliver direct mail does seem a tad unreasonable? Recently, it was proposed that six day a week mail service should end. This is a ridiculous interim step. Discussions should revolve around reducing deliveries to three days a week, and we should increase the fees to direct mail marketers to encourage companies to offer more electronic marketing. There are now many choices available that are more efficient and environmentally friendly than direct mail: eMail, Social Media Marketing, SEO, and Web Seminar Marketing to mention just a few. All of these alternatives are less oil consumptive and less labor intensive than the “596,000 workers and over 218,000 vehicles” the post office uses according to Wikipedia.  Wikipedia continues on to say, the USPS “is the second-largest civilian employer in the United States (after Wal-Mart) and the operator of the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world.” That’s a lot of brick and mortar infrastructure to deliver my 11 pieces of direct marketing “junk mail”, and I doubt we want to run a $6 Billion annual deficit to accomplish this. Is there still a place for the United States Post Office? I think a scaled down version is still called for, there undoubtedly remains a need to deliver paper based documents which are still necessary and important. With the dramatic increase in virtual solutions, email, social networking and digital documents, perhaps three a day per week postal services is more reasonable and more cost effective. Will this scaled down version result in a dramatic reduction in deficits? One would certainly hope so, but at a minimum, it would result in a dramatic reduction in gas, oil and overhead. Regardless, my credo remains, go virtual, don’t go postal.

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The Top of the Sales Funnel – Who Is Responsible?

The theory of an efficient sales funnel (or pipeline) is simple enough; pouring high quality leads into the top of the selling funnel will result in more closes flowing out the bottom of the funnel. One question, seemingly on the minds of many salespeople, revolves around the top of the funnel, and depending upon the industry or company, some refer to this aspect as the marketing funnel. Let’s review a simple sales funnel for a moment, specifically one which might be applicable to many small companies. A simplistic sales funnel often consists of suspects, prospects, presentations (or meetings), proposals, and ultimately closes (new clients). It’s called a sales funnel because the graphic used to describe this is a funnel, wide at the top (suspects), narrowing at the bottom (closes). The top of the funnel is normally filled with suspects, which are hopefully in profile suspects. Let’s say that there are 1,000 suspects at the top of your B2B (Business To Business) sales funnel. If you are selling to “C Level” executives, these suspects might have titles like CEO, CFO, CTO, CSO and CMO, and predicated upon your company or solution, you might be targeting a vertical or horizontal market. Your target companies might be within a designated target revenue range of say $20 Million to $100 Million dollars, and may be in a geographic region, let’s say the Northeastern US. There are of course many other variables, but let’s stop here for the moment and consider the prior description to be an in profile suspect for your sales funnel. These suspects then need to be culled to find prospects which we’ll define as interested, in profile, suspects.

Who should be responsible to fill the top of the funnel, culling the suspects and finding prospects? Some companies

The theory is simple: Pouring High Quality Suspects into the Top - Results in More Closes at the Bottom

call for that to be done by their salespeople, particularly small companies or bootstrapped companies. This happens at many other types of companies too, particularly those organizations reticent to add marketing dollars to their current sales funding allocation.  Many companies expect their sales team to cold call, network, attend business functions, industry events and community events and send personalized emails to build their own pipeline, and fill the top of the funnel. Most often, this is a probable path to failure, as these new sales people are often unprepared to tackle the changing world of lead generation as it migrates away from cold calling and face to face networking toward eMarketing, Web Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, SEO and Web Seminar Marketing, to mention just a few of the new tools being utilized today. In other words, sales people often have good sales skills (working the lower portion of the sales funnel), but insufficient skills (or time) to work the top of the sales funnel.

Many salespeople lament that filling the top of their funnel can be an arduous and challenging process. That’s why so many new salespeople fail; they are not savvy marketers and fail to fill up the top of their funnel with good quality suspects, then culling the suspects to identify high quality prospects. Insufficient qualified prospects at the top, invariably means inadequate results at the bottom. Why don’t emerging or small companies invest more in marketing, and why do so many of them resort to traditional cold calling methods? I think there are a few reasons.

  1. If a small company hires a sales representative at a base salary of say $75,000 and is contributing to health benefits, overhead and certain expenses, they are already nearing an investment of $100,000 per year. Adding say $20,000 in marketing lead generation services to this investment seems like it is simply overhead, overkill.
  2. Some “C Level” executives in smaller firms simply don’t believe in marketing. In many segments, particularly laggard industries, many still look at cold calling and personal networking as a pipeline panacea.
  3. Many old school marketing plans and dollars simply focus on local events, traditional seminars and perhaps improving the look and feel of their web site. Web marketing lead generation is something they may not understand or simply don’t want to invest in yet.
  4. Many small companies lack a formal marketing department, have inadequate internal resources or knowledge and are not comfortable outsourcing their marketing. This dearth of expertise creates a marketing void.

There are likely a myriad of other reasons, but the net results are the same, salespeople that don’t have quality leads flowing into the top of the funnel, won’t have sufficient sales flowing from the bottom. The results are easy to predict in that case, with large sales expenses and a lower company return on their sales investment. Remember, if one of three salespeople you hire fails, the overall costs would be much higher that an incremental and supportive lead generation program. The best advice for smaller companies when it comes to hiring new salespeople is as follows. If you’re going to invest in three new salespeople, but not invest in marketing and lead generation services, consider investing in two new salespeople use the savings toward a marketing support, lead generation program specifically for those new salespeople. And what if the budget is only sufficient to hire one new salesperson with nothing left over? Try to convince the new sales hire to consider a lower salary while guaranteeing a lead generation program to “insure” their success – perhaps you could offer increased backend commissions as you both succeed with this new program. Hiring a new salesperson without a lead generation program is like buying a new car, without sufficient funds to pay for gas. You just can’t go very far with that formula.

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The Art of the Start, The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything – Book Review

The Art of the Start, The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, offers readers both good news and bad news on starting up a company. The good news offered by Guy Kawasaki rests upon his background as a venture capitalist. Kawasaki is the managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm. According to their web site, “Garage Technology Ventures is a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund. We’re looking to invest in extraordinary entrepreneurs who have the ability to build great teams and great companies.” Thus the good news revolves around strategies to pitch business ideas to venture capitalists, positioning your company, writing a business plan, “making mantra”, etc. These are all important activities and based on sound advice. Kawasaki offers exercises, tidbits and suggestions on redefining thinking in entrepreneurial terms, all helpful to early stage entrepreneurs.

The bad news revolved around bootstrapping and the fact that there was only one chapter on this truly important topic. The Art of the Start seemed slanted toward the “come up with an idea, write the business plan, pitch to venture capitalists, secure early stage venture, increase sales, find additional venture, liquidation event road”. I strongly favor bootstrapping, self funding and virtual business ideas over the borrow tons of venture capital funds to succeed path, and fully understand that reader bias could have crept into this perspective.

If your entrepreneurial idea absolutely requires the significant capitalization that venture capitalists offer, The Art of the Start should definitely be at the top of your list. There is an excellent section on pitching to venture capitalists complete with the questions which are likely to be asked and suggestions on the best answers to offer would be venture investors. I found the book to be well written and thought provoking, particularly enjoying the final chapter, The Art of Being a Mensch (and the three foundations of menschhood), which you may want to read first. So, the good news is, though there are more aspects to this book than venture funding, you should definitely read this book if you’re thinking of venture capital funding. The bad news is that statistically, entrepreneurs are better off finding alternatives to venture capital funding and might be better off reading books focused on alternatives to venture capital funding. Regardless, I enjoyed The Art of the Start and found it an interesting read.

For more information on start-ups, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) or visit: http://www.yourvirtualsuccess.net.

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Small Business Judo – Turning Your Competitor’s Greatest Strengths Into Clearly Defined Weaknesses

Judo is a method of turning an opponent’s strength into a weakness and overcoming their physical advantage by skill rather than sheer strength. You can use something I call Small Business Judo (I sometimes refer to this as Virtual Business Judo) to compete against large and established companies by turning their greatest strengths into clearly defined weaknesses. Don’t try to show greater depth of resources or feign an ability which is not at your command. Don’t try to convince someone that you have a broader product line than an established billion dollar competitor if you only employ five people. But you can easily convince someone that you have great expertise in a focused area or that you’ll be much more responsive than a multibillion dollar corporation.

If you were to take a 40 foot cabin cruiser and place it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, nobody would notice it, and even if you were searching for it, it is unlikely to be found. Yet if we were to take the same 40 foot boat and place it in the middle of a small two acre pond, it would be almost impossible to overlook. Small companies should consider this perspective when seeking market share for their emerging business. Some years ago, while leading the sales and marketing efforts of a small software startup, I decided to focus our sales and marketing efforts on a very small and specific target market, small medical offices with one to four physicians, in New England. We touted our local presence, ease of use and superior support, jabbed at competitors’ large, lumbering size, and critiqued their large scale platforms.

We then practiced Small Business Judo to help convey our competitive advantages. Don’t try to be what you are not. If you’re a small software company, don’t try to look like SAP. If you’re a niche integration firm, don’t try to act like IBM. Instead of fighting an uphill battle attempting to show you are superior in every way to an established competitor, take a boutique approach, leveraging their perceived strengths against them, and turning their superior size and marketing muscle into a weakness. Convey a responsive, flexible, expertise-oriented image by saying for example:

• We’re a much more responsive company because of our size
• Because we are a boutique, everyone who works here is an expert
• Your account will be working with our most senior people; there are no junior people at our firm.
• Our product is newer, taking advantage of current tools and technologies
• We don’t outsource your support calls offshore, when you call for support you deal directly with us
• We’re better because we specialize in this one specific area
• You’ll have direct access to our senior most executives
• It is much easier for us to accommodate your suggestions because we’re not trying to service 5,000 clients
• We’ll make you feel like our number one client

These types of statements attack your competitor’s strengths by turning them into weaknesses. You can leverage your modest size and resources as an advantage. Words like flexible, responsive, important, expert, focus, boutique, current and leading edge can make your startup sound like a winner. Imagine the small, swift ship that can change course at the slightest touch of the rudder, while the competitor’s battleship sails on another mile before beginning her turn. Think about the maneuverability of a Ferrari when compared to an eighteen-wheeler, or a jet ski compared to a yacht. Another great example of Small Business Judo can be used when you are competing with a firm that has a large account base and has been around a long time. Let’s say their solution has 1,000 customers installed and yours only has ten, and their solution has been in use for over a decade, whereas yours has only been in use for two years. You could say:

• Our system was written from the ground up two years ago and takes advantage of all the newer technologies
• Because our system is more recently developed it is more compatible than the older systems
• Our code is newer and more efficient than the competition
• We’re more focused than the older traditional companies because of our size and expertise in your specific market
• We’re more responsive because we’re not trying to service 5,000 clients
• We’ll make you feel like you’re our number one client (say it twice!)

With some practice and a good understanding of both your competitive advantages and your competitor’s weaknesses, you can leverage Small Business Judo to outmaneuver, out position and outsell much larger and more established companies. Today, the size of the company is not the most important factor; it’s the stability, viability and capability of delivering quality results at a great value. If someone is trying to leverage their size against your small or virtual business, just remember to mention Enron, General Motors, Washington Mutual, WorldCom, Conseco and Lehman Brothers, all monster size organizations that filed for bankruptcy. Today, small is good, and virtual is even better.

For more information read Your Virtual Success, Finding Profitability in an Online World: http://www.yourvirtualsuccess.net/

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