Strategy Wins

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  snasta 6:08 pm on June 13, 2015 Permalink  

  Idealab’s Bill Gross on the most important factor in Startup Success 

  [ted id=2272]

  Bill Gross, long time entrepreneur and founder of Idealab discusses the factors to startup success:

  • Idea
  • Team
  • Business Model
  • Funding
  • Timing

  Which one do you think is the most important to success?  Why?

  The other interesting takeaway for me was the twist on Mike Tyson’s quote:

  “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.”   Mike Tyson

  What happens when the customer punches you in the face?  Is your team and plan able to handle it?

   

   
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  snasta 12:15 am on June 6, 2015 Permalink  

  “Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.” Dave McCullough

   
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  snasta 4:18 pm on May 29, 2015 Permalink  

  Alan Miltz on the right financial focus for a business 

  “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king.”

  A good metaphor for how the income statement, the balance sheet, and statement of cash flows integrate with each other.

   
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  snasta 3:46 am on May 21, 2015 Permalink  

  The purpose of life…. 

  “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
  ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

   
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  snasta 4:49 am on May 4, 2015 Permalink  

  Forgiveness… 

  Business can be highly competitive, highly charged.  I feel an entrepreneur has a and founder of a business comes in with a different set of emotions than a hired CEO.   I feel it is my time, my money that’s on the line–if I fail it’s my family’s well being that is affected.

  In the normal course of business, emotions can run high.   People will steal from you (sorry haven’t found a business person who this hasn’t happened to yet).   Competitors will use unfair tactics.   Deals won’t be honored.

  The mantra for some is “Always remember, never forgive.”

  (More …)

   
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  snasta 3:48 am on May 3, 2015 Permalink  

  “Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

   
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  snasta 1:26 am on April 2, 2015 Permalink  

  Decide in Advance or I want to eat healthy/I’m HUNGRY 

  I’ve been trying to eat a bit more healthy.   The easiest way for me to do so is not go out to eat.   Unfortunately as an entrepreneur that’s nearly impossible.  Folks want to meet for lunch.   By the time I get to lunch I’m starving and end up ordering the Mega Giant Fat Bombshell (Sure I’ll have the 3 fried tacos with Barbacoa and a bowl of chips).

  
  I found an easy solution.  When I’m checking my calendar in the evening if I see a lunch appointment on the schedule, I check out the restaurant’s menu and decide what I’m going to eat.  Long before I’m hungry, Long before I’m in a hurry.  Long before emotion has overruled my rational mind.  Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow basically divides our modes of thought into System 1 “fast, instinctive and emotional” and System 2 “slower, more deliberative, and more logical”.  I seem to do a lot better on being just a bit healthier when I let System 2 decide.  By the way have lost 10 lbs since I started that strategy.

  One of my goals for this year is to become a better investor.  I am a decent entrepreneur but, unlike my brother, not a great investor.  My best investments have come when my brother, mother or father has pointed me to an investment.   The rest have either been failures or have not generated respectable returns.  Why?

  I think as an entreprenuer i think with my System 1 brain when facing an investment.  I get excited about the product—but investment isn’t just about a cool product; it is about financial return.  I get excited by the entrepreneur and their passion.   I turn of the information gathering, analytical part of my brain.   I get greedy. I suspect that I make a decision and then use my analytical and research skills to justify it.   Investing one’s capital is truly about the risk and return not all these other criteria that have clouded my brain.

  Working with a mentor, I’ve decided to develop a list of criteria for my future investments (Warren Buffett clearly puts his criteria for buying a company in his annual shareholder report).    I’ve also decided to set up a due diligence checklist that every investment has to go through.   If an investment is outside my circle of competence (another criteria stolen from Mr. Buffett) I am perfectly good skipping it.  I have realized there is always another deal.

   
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  snasta 2:43 pm on March 14, 2015 Permalink  

  Tip: Write down your criteria before editing proposals or contracts 

  Here’s a quick tip that’s served me well for reviewing documents such as proposals or even more importantly contracts prepared by somebody else.   Before you open the document to review it write and outline of what you want in the document before you start reading the document.  I find that once i start reading the document I focus on the issues that are already in the document and don’t think about issues that aren’t already in the document—a dangerous mistake.   

  Another tip, read contracts from the bottom up—important issues are frequently buried in the back.   

   
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  snasta 4:16 am on March 3, 2015 Permalink  

  Moving your business? Have you thought of all the places to change your address? 

  When we moved MicroAssist, I thought we had managed to file all the change of addresses we need to:  Bank-yep, Post Office-yep, Domain Registrar-yep, Web Site-yep… We forgot a couple that almost cost us big….we forgot to change the address with the USPTO and when our trademark came up for renewal we didn’t get the notice.   That almost cost us our trademark—Oops!   We also forgot to change the address with the Secretary of State.  Oops.  

  Outspoken Media has a great blog on 31 Places to Change your Business Address when you move—a good checklist for y’all.

   
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  snasta 4:37 pm on February 28, 2015 Permalink  

  Working with Imperfect Information 

  Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
  To mar the subject that before was well?
  William Shakespeare, King Lear

  At MicroAssist we are in the middle of a deep dive into the strategy for our learning group.   I’ve learned that I over research, over think and look for the perfect answer.   I think it’s the engineer in me  In engineering school, especially in all those math classes, there was one right answer—I liked that!  I hated the ambiguity of history, literature, art and especially the philosophy classes that Notre Dame forced me to take.  Ironically, to succeed as an entrepreneur (and likely as a business leader) you have to learn to deal with imperfect information and ambiguity.   I still struggle with that.

  Harvard Business Review wrote an article Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy.   

  Strategy requires making choices about an uncertain future. It is not possible, no matter how much of the ocean you boil, to discover the one right answer. There isn’t one. In fact, even after the fact, there is no way to determine that one’s strategy choice was “right,” because there is no way to judge the relative quality of any path against all the paths not actually chosen. There are no double-blind experiments in strategy.

  The best strategists aren’t intimidated or paralyzed by uncertainty and ambiguity; they are creative enough to imagine possibilities that may or may not actually exist and are willing to try a course of action knowing full well that it will have to be tweaked or even overhauled entirely as events unfold.

  For our strategy discussions, I have realized that our learning group strategy is never going to be perfect—it is a living document.   Over the last year we have continuously looked at, improve and worked with our strategy document . It has had the benefit of keeping the strategy fresh in everyone’s mind and making sure we use it in day to day decisions.

  The quest for a perfect answer to a problem without one can be dangerously paralyzing.   As I was thinking of this issue, one of my favorite websites Brain Pickings (check it out!) published a great article on author David Foster Wallace’s struggle between perfectionism and performance. 

  “If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”
  David Foster Wallace