Two Rules for Business Start-ups
April 2, 2008
Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful entrepreneur, every successful businessperson has been a person who has been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before somebody else did. Here are the five rules for entrepreneurship.
Find A Need And Fill It
First, find a need and fill it. Ross Perot, when he was working for IBM, saw that his customers who were buying IBM computers, needed help in processing their data. He went to IBM with this idea and they said they weren’t interested, so he started his own business. He eventually sold it out for $2.8 billion dollars. He found a need and he filled it.
Find A Problem And Solve It
The second rule is to find a problem and solve it. A secretary working for a small company began mixing flour with nail varnish in order to white out the mistakes she was making in her typing. Pretty soon, her friends in the same office asked if she could make some for them. So she began mixing it on her kitchen table. Then, people in other offices started asking for it, and she eventually quit her business and worked full time creating what is today called Liquid Paper. A few years ago, she sold her company to Gillette Corporation for 47 million dollars.
Customers for Life
The highest paid salespeople and the most profitable companies have the best reputation for customer service. You learn a series of low-cost, no-cost ways to get customers to buy from you, buy again, and tell their friends. A satisfied customer is 10x easier to sell to than a new customer. A referral from a satisfied customer is 15x easier to sell to than a cold call.
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The Seven Demands of Leadership
February 26, 2008
An earnest young man once approached me during a Q & A session, and asked, “What is the ONE THING I need to know to be a great leader?” as if he was searching for the hidden key to unlock the universe. Amused by the simplicity of his question, my answer was equally simple: “To be a great leader, there’s more than ONE THING you need to know about leadership.”
Leadership is not easily reduced into a formula. However, I understand the urge to try to wrap our hands around effective leadership by breaking it down into a manageable set of principles. In my research and study of leadership, one of the better simplifications I have found was developed by the team at the Gallup Organization. After conducting extensive research on leaders across a broad spectrum of careers, Gallup boiled down leadership into seven essential qualities. Their in-depth study culminated in the article, The Seven Demands of Leadership, appearing in the Gallup Management Journal.
In this edition of Leadership Wired, I’d like to review the findings of Gallup’s research, and supplement them with additional thoughts.
The Seven Demands of Leadership
1. Visioning.
The foundation of a vision is reality. Develop a reality statement before creating a vision statement. The reality statement should explain the present situation, the process of pursuing the vision, and the price which must be paid to realize the vision. Be careful not to diminish the vision—it should be bold and daring—but refine the vision until it is realistic and achievable. A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow.
Leaders take the vision from “me” to “we.” They enlist others in a common vision by appealing to their values, interests, hopes, and dreams. Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.
When we lose sight of the distinction between our plans and the vision we are pursuing, we set ourselves up for a large dose of discouragement. A vision is a picture of what could and should be. A plan is a guess as to the best way to accomplish the vision. Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.
2. Maximizing values.
“By highlighting what is important about work, great leaders make clear what is important to them in life. They clarify how their own values – particularly a concern for people – relate to their work. They also communicate a sense of personal integrity and a commitment to act based on their values.” ~ Gallup Management Journal
A principle is an external truth that is as reliable as a physical law such as the law of gravity. When Solomon said, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger,” he stated a principle that is both universal and timeless. Principles are important because they function like a map allowing us to make wise decisions. If we ignore them or deny their reliability, we become like travelers refusing to use a road map because we dispute its accuracy.
While we may acknowledge the reliability of many principles, we only internalize those we deem important. When that happens, the principle has become a value that serves as the internal map we use to direct our lives. A value, then, is an internalized principle that guides our decisions.
3. Challenging Experiences.
“By galvanizing people with a clear vision and strong values, the leaders we studied were able to challenge their teams to achieve significant work goals. In fact, those leaders themselves had been assigned significant challenging experiences at key points in their careers while being given the freedom to determine how they would achieve outcomes.” ~ Gallup Management Journal
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From Business Survival to Business Growth.
February 13, 2008
For a start, all businesses share certain commonalities. Among these are what I call the “four oarsmen” of business success: survival, liquidity, profit, and growth.
1. Survival speaks for itself. Every living being is faced with issues of survival in routine threats to existence. In business, such threats can be as simple as overextending obligations or failing to fulfill a contract. Agency managers should never take survival for granted. Yet they often do. Many agencies risk their survival by allowing one or two clients to represent a dangerously high percentage of their volume. If those clients are lost, the agency may lose its life.
Mahatma Gandhi
2. Liquidity is the lifeblood of daily operations. It is the ability to meet payroll week in and week out, to pay the rent and the phone bills, reliably, with no duress or urgency. It is the ability to handle payables in a timely fashion so that work may go on. It is the ability to have adequate credit with banks, which expect regular payments on loans. The ability to spend and invest in those things that will improve the agency’s services to clients, competitive strength, and grasp of opportunity all depends on liquidity. To be illiquid is to be disabled.
3. Profit fertilizes business. Profit is to be shared with employees as reward for acomplishment and contribution. Profit is to be distributed to shareholder in return for investmen, risk, and patience. Profit is to be reinvested in people, plant, proactivity. Profit is to be retained for additional cash resources. Profit is to reaffirm that the company
s strategy is working and its operations are sound.
4.Growth allows for self-renewal: new opportunities, new challenges, new skills, new people, new clients to replace those that are lost. Growth means additional volume to offset spending declines by existing clients; larger scope of work, greater scope of workers; and a way to keep moving forward, to avoid staleness of being stationary. Growth reconfirms the good that clients already think of your company. Growth revitalizes company morale, making the conditions of employment even more promising. Growth provides a means to enlarge the company portfolio. Finally, growth enhances the probabilities of success.
Eric Mower [via] “The Advertising Business”
Cultivate Greatness, Success & Passion Blog Carnival #018
February 4, 2008
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Here we are with the 18th edition of the semi-frequent Personal Development Carnival at Cultivate Greatness! A great amount of wisdom to share within this edition of our Blog Carnival… many, many golden nuggets of wisdom to share… [ over 250 submissions! ]
If this is your first article listed in this personal development blog carnival, please provide a linkback to CultivateGreatness.com somewhere on your site, to provide a nice circle of link love! 
Here we are near the beginning of February. The year has just begun. Make sure to stay on task with your goals and move forward toward your dreams. You deserve them! Thanks for making the February 4th, 2008 edition of the Cultivate Greatness, Success and Personal Growth BlogCarnival a success!
