Tagged: entrepreneur

Mon: 02 Nov 2009

3 Big Ideas from Big Communications’s Lisa Stern

3 Big Ideas from Big Communicationss Lisa Stern We had the pleasure of taking the current team of Bizdom entrepreneurs (whom I am calling Team Hammer Pants, since they can’t come up with a team name of their own) to Big Communications, to meet with Lisa Stern, the Founder.

Lisa gave a great overview of the founding story of Big, as well as a description of their culture. I could easily write a dozen entries on Lisa and Big (hell, I could write one just on how great their offices are – they are absolutely beautiful), but I want to focus on 3 Big takeaways from their story and culture.

3 Big Ideas from Big Communications

1. The business you find success in may not be the one you start in.

Big originally started purely doing video production. Now they handle communications for health care companies. This isn’t to say your initial idea is unimportant and therefore unworthy of proper research. Rather, the lesson here is that you’ve got to follow the natural wave of your business and fish where the fish are – build on the success you earn, rather than the success you wish you had.

2. Passion means emotional investment in what you do.

This was a point I tried to emphasize at my TEDx presentation. It’s not about doing what you love, but rather loving what you do. I’ve heard lots of people talk about ‘passion’ and seen people confuse obstinacy and unfounded pride with passion. Having passion doesn’t mean that you can magically will something to happen. Instead, it means bringing an emotional investment to what you do – finding the love in what you do. When I asked Lisa what she’s currently passionate about she said “I’m really passionate about how we staff projects.” Trust me, no one says “When I grow up, I want to staff projects!” But she’s found the interest and passion in that task, and that’s a beautiful thing.

3. Vision is about having a goal you’re moving towards

Another great insight into an oft-cited entrepreneurial trait: vision. Vision isn’t about having a grandiose vision about what success will look like (yachts or being on Oprah), but rather about having a very specific goal you’re moving towards.

Bonus idea: Not really a bonus idea, but rather a combination of the final two, and it’s this – any old passion or vision won’t do. You’ve got to have a specific type of passion and vision to be a successful entrepreneur. I meet a lot of people who are very emotional (what they think is ‘passionate’) and have a well defined vision for themselves (usually of them on a yacht with Oprah), who think as a result they’re entrepreneurs. I can give you a well defined vision of what I’d do if I won the lottery (it wouldn’t be Oprah or a yacht), but that doesn’t mean I’m going to win it. I’m extremely passionate about fantasy football, but that doesn’t mean I should make a career out of it.

What do you think? Will any old vision or passion do? Or do you need something more?

3 Big Ideas from Big Communicationss Lisa Stern

Nothing is mandatory, everything is expected

I’ve often struggled with the notion of what should and shouldn’t be mandatory when training entrepreneurs. I’ve decided that nothing should be mandatory. If you have to make someone do something, they’re not really ready to be their own boss and run their own enterprise. Why? Because in business, when you’re the entrepreneur, no one is going to stand over your shoulder and make you do things. If a person can’t motivate themselves, they’re not ready.

Being an entrepreneur is like running a marathon. It is a challenging endeavor which requires commitment, focus and motivation. And yet, like a marathon, it’s a totally voluntary endeavor. No one can make you run a marathon – no one can make you become an entrepreneur. If you asked a marathon runner if their training regimen were ‘mandatory’, they’d likely look at you like you were a fool. ‘Mandatory? No. 100% necessary – absolutely.’ There’s nothing mandatory about a proper marathon training regime. You could easily show up for a marathon one hundred pounds overweight, never having run a day in your life, and wearing high heels. It’s your choice. But one choice will lead to success (completing the marathon) and the other failure (being forever known as the guy who had a heart attack while wearing high heels at the marathon).

When training would-be entrepreneurs, design your program with this notion in mind. Self-motivation is crucial. It’s a hard thing to train and coach people on. It’s certainly not impossible, but the first time someone asks if something is mandatory, give them the marathon speech; the second time they ask show them where the door is and wish them well somewhere else.

From Ambition to Execution: Practical Steps for turning your business idea into a business

On June 15, 2009, I gave a presentation as part of the National Summit. Here are my lecture notes, as well as the PowerPoint. Both are a bit unpolished, but you get the general idea.

From Ambition to Execution: Practical steps for turning a business idea into a business

View more presentations from DanIzzo.

“I’d like to talk to you today about taking an idea and turning it into a business.

Ideas are like elbows, almost everyone has at least one. There are a lot of personality traits and behaviors that can help a person with a business idea undergo a personal transformation or growth and become an entrepreneur – an actual executor of that idea. I’m not here to talk about that today. I’m assuming that if you made it this far into my spiel that you’re already the kind of person capable of starting an enterprise. What I’d like to focus on in the next 15-30 minutes are the very specific and deliberate actions you can take to shepherd your idea and turn it into a business.

In a nutshell here’s the key: To turn an idea into a business you need to refine the idea until it becomes a product or service that is so inherently attractive to users that they’ll change their behavior and use your product or service. And you need to do this all in a way that brings in more money that it burns up. Thanks for coming, enjoy the rest of the conference. But seriously, it is that simple, but in the simple lies the complex, so let’s break this down.

I very deliberately break this into two parts. I do that because here’s the problem most people face. They mix all this up together and try and eat the entire sub sandwich in one bite. There are two components: what the business is, and how it makes money. When you cross the streams, you lose focus. And brilliance in one of these areas won’t cure utter stupidity in the other. But when we let ourselves think of this as one undifferentiated mass, we can delude ourselves into thinking we’ve got a great business, when maybe all we have is a clever idea that’ll never make a profit, or a clever way of making a profit that’s attached to a product or service no reasonable person would ever want to use.

Refining the idea is what I want to talk about. Figuring out revenue and costs is extremely important, and a vital area for innovation. The business model end of things is a matter of marketing, sales, and being clever about costs. I want to talk about Refining Ideas.

You need to research to refine your ideas and the first thing you should do is GET OFF THE COMPUTER. Look, I’m no technophobe, but at some point the thinking became, if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist. Computers are supposed to make us smarter, not us more stupider make.

The most important thing you can do is Talk to People, better yet, Listen to People. Get out of your office, get away from the desk and talk to people. Have actual conversations with people. Preferably face to face, so you can sense the whole conversation.

Talk about what? WOOD BEFORE SCREWS. You’ve got some sort of idea for something. You saw some sort of problem, or opportunity. Something you noticed or experienced triggered this idea of yours. The person who invented the screw had wood that needed to be held together. Put your idea aside and get back to the wood. Talk to other people who might have this problem, and confirm that they’ve got the problem. Go deep on the problem, before you even begin to talk about your solution. People want SOLVING NOT SOLUTIONS. Your initial idea can change wildly because what you may have discovered in that initial a-ha moment isn’t a solution, but a deep problem that needs solving. And maybe your ‘a-ha’ solution isn’t a good solution. Good solutions achieve the ends sought, they resolve the problem fully and directly Without identifying the problem on a deep level you can’t know if your solution fits, much less if its a good fit, or what you’re really hoping for, a fit that is so good it motivates changes in people’s behavior. So RESEARCH THE PROBLEM BEFORE THE SOLUTION

CONTEXT IS KING. Talk to the people who have the problem about everything that surrounds the problem. What’s their mental state before and after solving the problem. What solutions do they employ now? You want to understand everything around the moment where the problem occurs and is resolved.

It’s inside that context that you’re solution needs to operate. YOURE NOT TRAINING MONKEYS TO RIDE BICYCLES. You take the customer as you find them. Can try and change their purchasing behavior, but woe if you’re trying to change the context. CHANGE IS SCARY. You’ve got to find out where the customer is at to move them to where you might want them to be. TALK TO OTHER CONTEXT PROVIDERS. See who else is solving the problem or providing context to the problem. They will have insights you and the client both lack.

So, identify the PROBLEM, the CONTEXT and CHANGE their behavior. How do you do that? REFINE THE IDEA SO THAT IT PROVOKES CHANGE. How? Well the problem and context will help you understand the customer’s feelings and motivations, and you need to craft your idea to have the greatest appeal to their feelings and motivations. You do that and you end up with a BETTER TARGETED CLIENT DRIVEN IDEA. A better idea than the one that led you down this path. Once you’ve got that PULL ‘EM, CLOSE ‘EM, KEEP COSTS DOWN and make a PROFIT. Better yet, make VALUE.”