So you want to launch a business...

Become a thought leader

David did, in fact, slay Goliath.

And your company-to-be can make itself well-known in the face of larger, older, and richer competitors.  Yes, you can.

According to Wikipedia, "Thought leadership is an increasingly vital driver of business success."  So, how does a poor, rookie entrepreneur earn the title?

Elise Bauer, way back in 2003, blogged a very nice how-to summary for wannabe thought leaders. 

Here's her top 7 list.

1. Cultivate the press.

2. Write. 

3. Spread the word.

4. Speak.

5. Use your website.

6. Unlock your white papers! Don’t make people register to learn more about you.

7. Make thought leadership a strategic imperative for your company.

But Elise's prime admonition (and it's shared by every commentator I've found on the topic of thought leadership) is this:

"Thought leadership requires a spirit of generosity - generosity of one's time, intelligence and knowledge. It requires a trust that by being open with what you know, and by sharing your time and knowledge, the world will reward your efforts."

Suck it up and get it done.  Yes, It takes MOXIE to deliver a strong Message, to become a thought leader in your industry.  But that's what separates the sheep from the goats. 

Grab the cool factor.  If they don't think you're cool, they probably won't buy your stuff.

Cracking the code

What you are doing must genuinely matter to your customers, and it must set you apart from your competitors.

I listen to a lot of elevator pitches. 

When people come to chat with me about their prospective businesses, I typically open the discussion by asking a seemingly off-hand question like this, "So, what's your thing?"  The idea is to evoke an informal elevator pitch that will do five things: grab my attention, tell me what they intend to do, for what client group, why those clients will care, and what kind of help they are seeking from me.

They almost never have a pitch down pat; so I have to do a bunch of interpolating, extrapolating, and inferring to get all five pieces out in the open.  But that's fun.  They are always energetic; and their "thing" is usually new to me.  I like energetic; and I like new; so I enjoy the process.

Once the basics are on the table, I engage them in more detail, almost always starting with "why the client will care."  That's near the top of my Fundamental Factors list, right after MOXIE.  I call it Magic.

Here's the feeling I'm after.  I want to be able to say, "Wow.  You've cracked the code."  And I want to be convinced that their prospective clients will respond in exactly the same way.  When I get that feeling, I become fully engaged myself.  I want to help them in any way possible.  I want to throw my gasoline on their fire.

Try your five part elevator pitch on your Mentors.  If they start throwing gasoline, you might actually have a fire going.

Thoreau on MOXIE

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

                                                                        Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Yes.  Thoreau, too.  I've quoted Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Daniel Boone, Calvin Coolidge, and many others.  Now Thoreau.  There is MOXIE everywhere, it seems.

Even Superman talks about it.  Well, to be honest, Christopher Reeve, who played Superman before his paralyzing, then fatal, spinal cord injury.  Here's what Reeve said from his wheelchair at the Democratic National Convention in 1996.

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable."

When we summon the will...

If we have the MOXIE.

  

Einstein was a really smart guy.

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” 

Albert Einstein wasn't an entrepreneur; but this little quotation applies directly to start-up businesses.  And it points out one of the most common mistakes made by company founders.  I have seen this over and over again.

Too many entrepreneurs launch businesses based upon unconfirmed notions about the "rules of the game" - more specifically, about how the marketplace is structured, and how buyers will behave.  And if the entrepreneur is a good salesperson, she will convince others of the correctness of her unsubstantiated conclusions.  They will follow her - investing money, time, and energy in a project that is doomed to failure, or at best to mediocrity.

By all means, trust your hunches.  But exercise appropriate Modesty.  Confirm your hypotheses with serious research.  And run them by your Mentors, too.  That's why you have them.  (You do have Mentors, right?)

You still have to "play better than anyone else."  But, if you don't know the rules, it doesn't matter how well you play, or how hard you try, or how long you keep fighting.  No amount of MOXIE, no incredible Magic, can save you from a faulty understanding of the Market.

MOXIE, by any other name...

"It's always too early to quit."

Do these recent book titles ring any bells?

Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention

John Calipari, Refuse to Lose

Rhonda Byrne, The Secret

How about this one, a best seller 50 years ago?

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Would you believe a Harvard Business School publication with the following description? 

"This chapter provides examples of why determination and resilience, for either a company or an individual, should not be overlooked as important factors in producing successful business outcomes."

That blurb refers to a chapter from

What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom about Management, by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Is there a simple name for the focused intent, and the vision, and the determination, and the resilience - for the refusal to lose?  Yes.

MOXIE.  It resists precise definition, but is clearly observable in those who have it.  We know it when we see it.

How much do you want it?  How hard will you work?  How long will you keep fighting? Do you have enough MOXIE?

Thanks, by the way, for the headline quotation, to Norman Vincent Peale.  It really is, after all, always too early to quit.

Business plan competitions - vicarious mentorship

"American Idol" for business.

VT KnowledgeWorks will be hosting an all day Entrepreneurship Summit in just three weeks. 

One segment of the program is a student business concept competition.  27 student teams from around our region submitted one-page concept documents in the first stage of the competition.  After two rounds of preliminaries, the field will be reduced to three finalists.  Those teams will do live, stand-up presentations before a panel of judges and a room full of spectators on April 2.  They will deal with both questions and criticism in public. 

This is not a revolutionary program by any means.  Universities around the world have been hosting similar events for years.  It's a great learning experience, and not just for the student teams.  Non-competitors who go to observe the public finals receive meaningful vicarious mentorship as the panelists point out to the teams how their concepts and their presentations might be strengthened.

In our particular case, the morning student competition will be followed in the afternoon by serious attempts by real-live entrepreneurs to convince angel investors to support their ventures - again, in public.  Two regional organizations that are deeply engaged in early stage investing processes will bring together pre-screened company founders and highly-qualified investors in a "Live-Fire" funding event.  Vicarious mentorship for prospective entrepreneurs doesn't get more useful than this.

This is where the founders' Market, Magic, Model, Message, and MOXIE get the ultimate Mentor test.

When events of this type hit your town, spend a few bucks and go sit in.  The payoff may well be more valuable than years of business class tuition.  (Just don't tell the professors I said that.)

Vendo ergo sum

Please quote me.  Vendo ergo sum.

With all due respect to René Descartes, pictured at left on one of his better days, his famous declaration of existence does not apply to businesses. 

"I think, therefore I am."  Or in Latin, "Cogito ergo sum."  Some careful translators and students of philosophy have rendered it from its original French as, "I am conscious, therefore I am."

For me, certainly.  For my business, not so much.

A business must be more than merely conscious.  To exist as a business requires that a sale be made.  Vendo ergo sum. 

An enterprise without a sale is at best a proto-business.  It might be an institute.  It might be a hobby.  But it is not, I repeat, NOT a business, at least not yet.

So, when in doubt, sell something.  It will amaze your friends, delight your family, impress potential investors, and get the attention of your targeted marketplace.  It's a really cool thing to do. 

Stop thinking.  Stop talking.  Stop over-developing.  Sell something.

GPS for entrepreneurs

Rule of thumb:  Without a Map, you WILL get lost.

And by Map I mean a well-conceived strategic plan, carefully vetted by your Mentors.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not a big fan of inch-thick business plans, especially early in the process.

But I am definitely a fan of a clearly articulated set of  “rules to live by.” This where you lay out in a nicely organized fashion the bullet points that describe your Market, focus the power of your Magic, and communicate your Model, your Management system, and the way you handle the Money.

Begin with the Four Fundamental Factors Self-Check.  That will get you started on the right track. 

A simple guidebook will be incredibly useful, not just to you, but to everyone else in the company. They will read and use bullet points. They won’t read or use your version of The Encyclopedia Britannica. Later, when the time comes to prepare a big fat plan in order to raise serious money, you can just fill in the space between the bullets and re-order them a bit to fit the latest trendy format for formal plans. That’s not hard, just a task along the way to outside funding.

Search on "business plan."  Starting with the Small Business Administration, you'll find a gold mine of free resources to assist you in the mapping process.

You can also buy my little book.  It's not free, of course; but it's a good read at a fair price.  At least I think so.

Single point of failure - MOXIE

"Why" really matters.

In a recent post on Inc.com, Joel Spolsky recalls asking Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work) to speak about why start-ups fail.  "That would be boring," she told him. "They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business."

Spolsky goes on.  "The more I thought about it," he says, "the more I realized Jessica was onto something. Why do start-ups fail?  As she pointed out, it's usually a collapse of motivation -- everyone wanders back to civilian life, and the start-up ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

Think about that.  "People just stop working on their businesses."

Wow.  They just plain run out of gas.  They exhaust their supplies of MOXIE.

And their underlying Motivation is insufficient to revitalize their spirits.  They lack the deep, personal commitment to some powerfully motivating outcome that empowers a person to persevere in the face of mind-numbing disappointments and frustrations.

This is why preachers like me place so much emphasis on the "why" of it all. Starting a business is actually relatively easy.  Nurturing it to success, on the other hand, is very, very hard.