Jul 17, 2013 | Governance, Management, Marketing, Small business
Small business owners work harder, and often take home less than their employed peers. I see this all the time, again and again, in all sorts of contexts.
Ever wondered why?
In my experience, most go into business because they have great skill, contacts, and experience in the domain of their choice, which makes them great engineers, plumbers, food scientists, but does not necessarily suit them to be CEO.
The flip side is, do you need specific domain knowledge to be the CEO of an enterprise in that domain?, the answer clearly is no.
Most get confused about the purpose of their activity. Competent chefs try to run restaurants, simply because as a chef they can pay themselves only chef rates and remain solvent, but being a restaurant owner, perhaps a string of them, is where the money is.
Get your priorities right.
Want to be a rich chef, but love to be “cheffing” ? Probably can’t do both.
So many exchange the cooking for shuffling paper, suppliers, lease contracts, worrying about staffing, and doing the marketing, then wonder why the restaurant fails.
Fire yourself as the CEO, and hire a professional manager, while you do the cooking. After all, you would not even consider hiring an apprentice to replace you in the kitchen as you try to run the business, would you?
You can still own the business, and eap the benefits, you just do not have to run it day to day.
Jul 16, 2013 | Governance, Leadership, Strategy
For a long time now I have advocated the notion that to get something back, you first need to put something in. Time, effort, knowledge, care, whatever. What you put in is less important that that simple act of being generous, and contributing.
It has always seemed to work for me, although the effort to get momentum going has often led to a few moments when I wonder if there is really a return on the effort.
What I have realised is that the crucial element of success is how, and to whom you make the offer.
Assisting those who want your assistance is not as effective as offering it to those who deserve it.
Wanting has become an expectation that something will just arrive, no cost, no obligation, whereas “deserve” inherently acknowledges a moral debt, and that your generosity will at some point be repaid.
Jul 15, 2013 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
Public programs are great, they redistribute the largess of success to the less successful or fortunate via taxes. Every civilised society has some, of varying value, but necessary none the less.
Public entrepreneurial programs are a bit different, despite the best efforts of well meaning public servants everywhere, they just never work.
Entrepreneurs simply do not show up at public show and tells, they keep their ideas to themselves and those who are able to add some skin to the game, and feel the loss if this skin gets scraped off.
That is part of the reason we Aussie tax-payers pump millions into innovation via the various well meaning agencies, but get stuff all back. The vast majority of this well meaning but misdirected assistance ends up in the pockets of consultants (thank you) snake oil salesmen, and those with institutional ties, not with the people doing the real work of innovation.
In saying this you must consider R&D and innovation to be different, one is the development of the science, the other is using it. Public funding of the infrastructure of science is essential, although subject to political whim and manipulation, the leveraging of the science should not be the domain of the public sector beyond harvesting royalties to fund the continuing effort.
The only way to engage with entrepreneurs is one on one, with the absolute trust that what gets discussed, stays with those in the discussion, and is not spread around for some ephemeral notion of equity and greater good.
Real entrepreneurs find new spaces to inhabit, places others have not seen, all others then follow them in.
Jul 9, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
To talk to consumers, you used to stick an ad on TV, in one of the main mags, on maybe a few radio stations, a shotgun effort informed by some pretty rudimentary demographic data.
Then we migrated to the web, in the late 90’s, and advertisers transferred the techniques of mass marketing to this new medium. The cost of banner ads, in the early days calculated on a similar reach basis as mass advertising, has plummeted to perhaps 1% of that cost, and much better targeted, as we realised they simply did not work. Mass media consumption necessitated being interrupted by ads, we expected it as the price to be paid, but the web, we do not need to be interrupted, as we have the option to ignore. Increasingly, advertising became about direct response, as we can now count it.
Now the next shift is on, to mobile, where the “rules of engagement” have dramatically moved again, and we are figuring out how best to leverage the move. Customers need to be wooed, as shouting at them no longer works, you have access to mountains of data (using it is another whole challenge) that enable targeting at behavior rather than simple demographics, and you can count the effectiveness of tactics, one by one, person by person, directly.
Not only is the practice of marketing radically shifted to accommodate these moves by consumers and the tools to hand, but the organisation of the marketing function needs to have changed to reflect the immediacy of direct response, and the disconnect that has existed between the strategy held in the minds of the senior group, and those who by default spend the marketing dollars, often without any real authority beyond budget expenditure with little accountability for the outcomes.
It seems to me as I poke around that organisational inertia that is the greatest impediment to the potential productivity gains from this explosion of accountability of marketing investments that is now possible.
Jul 5, 2013 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant
Very few people have heard of Douglas Engelbart, who died on July 4, but it was he that thought up much of the stuff we accept as normal, every day tools and devices.
His relative obscurity is in stark contrast to the billionaires who brought commercial success to many of his ideas, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Elllison, et al.
This presentation, now called the “mother of all presentations” given in December 1968 is almost the public unveiling of computing as we now know it.
Vale Doug, and those who like him beaver away to make all our lives better, without accumulating the celebrity and bling that seems to be expected these days with every idea that sounds good to its urger.
