Monday, April 26, 2010

The Power of Tenacity

Mark Shuster, a partner at GRP once wrote: Tenacity is probably the most important attribute in an entrepreneur. It’s the person who never gives up — who never accepts “no” for an answer. The world is filled with doubters who say that things can’t be done and then pronounce after the fact that they “knew it all along.” Look at Google. You think that anybody really believed 1999 that two young kids out of Stanford had a shot at unseating Yahoo!, Excite, Ask Jeeves and Lycos? Yeah, right. Trust me, whatever you want to build you’ll be told by most VC’s something like, “Social networking has already been done,” “You’ll never get a telecom carrier deal done,” or “Google already has a product in this area.”

I love this. I have always believed that the greatest of difference makers in any business pursuit is tenacity. When I have been most successful in my career it has because I was out hustling the competition with tenacity. When I have been least successful it has been a result of complacency - even though I thought I was working hard, I had lost that tenacity that I once had.

I recently helped launch an SMS mobile search company called The MeNetwork (www.themenetwork.net). Here's what I heard: "Mobile search? Google will crush you, they already have mobile search figured out. SMS mobile search? You should be building iPhone apps, not messing with text based search..., etc."

Guess what?, The Menetwork has created functionality that no-one, not even Goggle has figured out yet. How? Because we looked at this space, not as opportunistic exit strategy people, but as a group of tenacious guys that saw business problems in the space. Business problems mostly being experienced by small businesses who are not served well by Google. Business problems related to the rush to launch more GPS based apps, as opposed to creating a service that works on every phone, not just the 15% of smart phones out there today.

It is tenacity that fueled us to press on and smile when we heard "Google will crush you." Wonder how many times the founders of Google heard that Yahoo! or even AOL would crush them? Sounds ridiculous now doesn't it? About as ridiculous as underestimating the tenacity of 3 guys that recently signed their first client for their text-based search engine (BTW: The client is a major US city).

Be tenacious.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Getting To Yes Can Suck

Many people have read the book called "Getting To Yes." It's a good enough book, but it makes way too much out of the process of negotiation - as with many negotiations themselves, the book tends to over-think the whole process.

In my life-long experience of trying to get to yes, there are really only two kinds of negotiations (1) The person you are negotiating with is trying to WIN or (2) The person you are negotiating with has a shared goal with you - they want to arrive at AGREEMENT.

If you find yourself up against someone who simply wants to "win" then you are in store for a pretty miserable time. In fact, this is when you should start thinking about if you want to do business with this person at all. If your initial negotiations start like this, what is it going to be like to work with them on a daily basis? Of course, you must be careful not to get sucked into their game or letting your ego drive decisions or to start taking things personally. This is easier said than done of course - but most business really is personal, no matter what.

Being on the other side of the table from a person that wants to win at all costs is frustrating and exhausting. When this occurs you must set deadlines and try to identify their real motivation. Are they trying to impress their boss? Do they get a bonus or any kind of special compensation if they "win?" Are they inexperienced at what they are negotiating and therefore just using it all as a defense mechanism.

My advice: Negotiators that are in it to win it are poison. Walk away. It may blow the deal - but that deal would of likely caused much heartache later. Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing, especially when getting to yes involves financial gain. But, the stress and sour taste of forging a bad deal is even more costly.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Marketing Saves Lives?


It's easy to get jaded about marketing and advertising, especially around the time that those damn Super Bowl TV spots run. But, I've spent the past few years using marketing efforts to actually save lives. The client I've been working with is called "The Love Hope Strength Foundation" (LHS). It's been billed as "the world's first rock n roll cancer foundation."

Here's how it works: We use unique rock concert-based marketing efforts to register people to the bone marrow registry. All names are tracked and attributed to their place and time of origin. We find matches. Our matches lead to transplants. We save lives and we know of the lives we save. There are measurable and tangible results to our efforts. No hazy investments into cancer "research" or payments to mysterious third parties. It's all direct to consumers with no middlemen and it all adds up to measurable results - just like any good marketing program. But, we're not selling sugar water to kids, we're saving lives.

Now, I'd very much appreciate your help - I want you to understand what it feels like to help an organization like Love Hope Strength. But mostly I want anyone that is reading this to understand that if you have marketing skills, channel them to client work like this. It will no doubt add a degree of much needed balance to your work, especially if you sometimes get down about helping clients simply sell more cars, beer or cleaning products.

Contact me to get involved and/or be sure to sign up at www.lovehopestrength.org Just Do It! (not the shoes).

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

It Aint Easy Being You

"The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed." - Chinese Proverb

If you are an entrepreneur, you understand how difficult things can get. And you probably are too damn proud or stubborn or irrational to quit when success seems impossible. Good. For that very factor is a huge part of what I would call your "defensible competitive advantage." Of course, they cant teach this in business school. Good. For this is why the best entrepreneurs tend not to be the kid that sat in the front row and got the 4.0 GPA. But, you already know this. Those guys were soft - they played tennis and drank wine. You bet on sports and drank beer. Nicely played.

You are working 24/7 but you just can't pay the bills? Good. Keep working. They can take your credit rating but not your will to win. They can take your copy machine back but not your tenacity. They can charge you overdraft fees til the end of time, but they can't make you stop your pursuit of what drives you. Just - keep - pushing - ahead.

You think you are alone and nobody understands why it so important for you to succeed. They tell you to give up and get a "real job." They tell you that you gave it your best but it's time to move on. After all, you have a family now - you're not a newbie college grad anymore. Blah.

Listen to me, you have a lot more left in the tank than you think and you have come too far and put up with too much bullshit to turn back now.

Need some inspiration? Skip the latest book from that motivational speaker and instead watch the movie "The Pianist" - you'll realize that you don't have it so bad after all. Just don't quit yet - like the proverb says you may be closer than you think.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Seeing Through The Eyes Of Others

"We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. " - Anais Nin

In business, I often find that my clients are so close to what they do every day that they fail to see what they could be doing differently - or be doing better. They rarely see things as they really are or recognize the looming threats to their company. Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty of the same problem (people in glass houses syndrome). Cough.

So what causes this very real phenomenon? It's human nature to want to protect things - your life, your family, your decisions, your business model, your sales and marketing efforts...etc. So, when faced with reality or the threat of change, it's also human nature to push back - to minimize the threat. Often, this results in rejecting good advice. Or worse, the advice you did not want to hear makes you now retreat and build walls around your business position. You dig in and stick to what you know - "how dare a consultant tell me anything about the business I have been in for 25 years!"

I know first-hand that it's hard to hear things about your company or your work product that threaten you. But when you hear those things, next time think before you react. See what you do through the eyes of the other person - and come to at least understand the perspective that they have shared with you. It's OK to disagree with it - but it's not OK to not learn from it.


Says me.