Instigator Blog

No matter what your job, whether you’re an entrepreneur, running a small or large business, or working for someone else, please don’t forget to inject a bit of FUN and PASSION into what you do.

For many, fun and passion are natural and a part of their day-to-day lives; but that’s not the case for everyone. If you employ people, fun and passion will help you be a better boss, and help your employees be better people too.

That’s a picture of a rather large birthday cake my wife and I made for my son’s 2nd birthday (celebrated on Saturday.) There’s no great sense of scale in that picture, but it was so long I had to cut a carboard box into shape as the “serving tray.”

It was fun to make (minus the near-fist fight that broke out over how to decorate it…don’t ask), and my wife and I are passionate about creating over-the-top cakes for our son’s birthdays. We haven’t gone the crazy “entertainment route” yet (with flying trapeze, dancers and who-knows-what-else is en vogue for birthday parties these days), but we sure do love our cakes.

(And yes, this post was just an excuse for putting up that cool picture. But I still believe in a wee bit of fun and passion at work…the “good clean” variety though, ok?)

From the folks at Cambrian House comes these thoughts on getting lost in product development and ignoring the customer. Oh, how easy it is! And these guys admit to making this mistake which immediately sets the tone for the rest of their blog post.

Customers = Good

(quoted from them)

Yup. It’s hard to say it much better than that. The tricky thing these days with the rise of Web 2.0 and the dropping costs of development is that the focus can so easily be on the development and not on the customer. “But guys! We can build feature X, then feature Y…ooh lets toss in Z cause it’s freaking cool!” Development costs are dropping, technologies are more freely available and there’s lots of talent out there itching to be the next big thing. But you might build the latest, greatest widget and fall flat on your tush…

The folks at Cambrian House have some good advice on how to engage customers early:

You force it.

You sell them something - anything.

Build the most compelling feature of your product and get it out there. Just build it and see if you’re meeting an unmet demand. If no one is willing to spend…on your product or service, you’ve got your answer.

Make the gap between product development and revenue as small as possible.

It’s good advice, but I’d like to add something. Building small and getting stuff out the door is a good philosophy, but it doesn’t guarantee success. Even if you are meeting an unmet demand, you might not realize it right away. It’s the “getting it out there” part that’s tricky. And without any sense of how you might do that, the advice is still a touch too focused on development. It’s still, “build something and get it out the door.”

But you might not recognize the most compelling feature. Or you might not know how to get it out the door well enough to generate the response/feedback you need.

This is where you need to do 2 things that many startups might not find particularly appealing:

1. Research. You don’t need to research the full ins and outs of your industry, etc. but you need to know what’s going on around you. Research can be fairly easy - find what’s out there, dig around, get a feel for what others in your space are doing or might be doing. Leverage your existing network of contacts (and/or clients) to talk about the idea, brainstorm, get some early feedback, it’s going to help you hone in on the critical features and the need you’re tackling.
2. Come up with a Marketing Plan. Gack! Marketing? Yup. And again, at the outset you don’t need some grandiose, full-blown plan, but you better have some sense of how you’re going to get the product out there, promote it, and who you want to reach. Again, leverage your network, do some research on what others are doing, think about ways of reaching out.

You can accomplish both of these tasks quite effectively by jazzing others about your idea. The more people you speak to that get excited about what you’re doing, the more evangelists you’ll have from the get-go. The more doors that will open. The more word-of-mouth will spread.

I’d follow what Cambrian House is doing. They’re not just “building stuff and tossing it out there” … I can see a much clearer vision and path towards what they’re trying to accomplish. It’s not just about product development, and it shouldn’t be for any startup either…

Good luck!

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be rich. Lots of entrepreneurs have that goal, and it’s a perfectly suitable goal. But greed is another story. And “greedy” is one of the 7 words an entrepreneur should never use. Not because the word itself is so awful, but the connotation and meaning behind it are bad news.

Dictionary.com’s defition of greedy is as follows: “excessively or inordinately desirous of wealth, profit, etc.; avaricious: the greedy owners of the company.”

The greedy owners of the company… You don’t want to be that person.

The greedy entrepreneur too quickly loses sight of what’s important when creating a business. Providing value. Ensuring employees are well treated. Happiness. And although it’s hard to believe, particularly when you’re not rich, people keep telling me, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

There’s a line in the corporate sand between, “making a lot of money” and “being greedy.” Where is that line? It’s around the point when you start to sacrifice yourself, your family, your friends and your employees for a dollar. It’s around the point when you start to throw away your morals and ethics for a dollar. When you lose sight of everything but making a buck, I think you’re in trouble.

Greedy people can be successful. But that success will often come at a steep price, one that entrepreneurs don’t have to pay. Wanting to be rich is totally fine. Being greedy is another story. “Greedy” doesn’t belong in the entrepreneur’s lexicon. Aside from the bad karma, greed is bound to get you into trouble.

And there’s more to being an entrepreneur than wealth. Consider the contacts you should be making, the networking, the other opportunities, the personal brand you can develop… Don’t be greedy. Don’t even say “greedy.” Be smart. Be honest. Be successful.

Deborah Brown re-inspired me to continue this series on the 7 Words You Should Never Say as an Entrepreneur by writing, The Worst Word in the English Language. It’s a great (or bad, depending on how you look at it!) addition to the list.

Care to add any others to the list?

During the most recent open mic session at Successful Blog I was asking the participants about some problems I’m having with Technorati. In the midst of that, Joe at Working at Home on the Internet suggested I try the WordPress plugin yes-www.

The plugin redirects all non “www” requests to “www” — so if you typed “http://instigatorblog.com” it would redirect to “http://www.instigatorblog.com”.

Great, I thought. Let me give that a try. So I downloaded the plugin, activated it and tested it. Seemed to work very well.

Today I noticed a couple weird things in WordPress Admin, and it took me a bit of time to realize it was the plugin. Two problems occured:

1. The “Dashboard” link in WordPress Admin was redirecting to the main page of the site.
2. The “Main Index Template” link in the Presentation area of WordPress Admin wasn’t working at all.

I think it has to do with the way the plugin is trying to redirect requests to “index.php”. So I’ve deactivated it.

Then I decided to email the author of the plugin to let him know about the problem. Gilad Gafni has a good looking blog called You on Top (great name!) but oddly there’s absolutely no way to contact Gilad on his blog.

• NO email address.
• NO contact form.
• NO commenting allowed.

All I’m able to do is link to his blog post to give him a trackback, in the hopes that he sees that and gets in touch with me.

Why wouldn’t Gilad want me to get in touch?

To me, it makes no sense. In this case I have a technical issue with his plugin, tomorrow I might have a great opportunity for him.

Now, one caveat — if you go directly to his main site there’s a contact form there, but I shouldn’t have to do that, especially when there’s no link from his blog to the main business site (I just took an educated guess as to the URL).

I’m not trying to pick on Gilad, but it strikes me as strange that in today’s world of ultra-connectivity and opportunity that it’s still so hard to reach out and touch someone. Who doesn’t want to be touched by little old me?

Talking about failure isn’t easy. Paul Allen does it more openly than I’ve ever seen. That could not have been easy.

The 2nd most popular post I’ve ever written was My Top 4 Mistakes as an Entrepreneur. I think people are naturally intrigued by other people’s failures; it’s like reality TV. For some, it makes them feel better about themselves, for others it’s “peeping Tom” curiosity. I hope others learn from it. The reason for people’s interest in failure isn’t really relevant.

What entrepreneurs have to remember is that failure is real. And it will happen. It happens to everyone, even those that are successful today.

What entrepreneurs also have to remember is that failure isn’t easy. And it can’t just be tossed aside. In many cases your failure doesn’t just impact your life, but others as well.

My biggest failure has been having to fire people.

It happened when the bubble burst in 2001. We couldn’t afford to keep everyone onboard, so we let people go. It wasn’t because they weren’t good at their jobs or important to the company, we just couldn’t afford to pay them. That was brutal, and I still think about it all the time. It made me understand the value in creating jobs and the awesome responsibility a business owner has for his/her employees.

Since then, the company grew but I’ve also let others go. In those cases it was with cause; they weren’t working out (for any number of reasons.) That’s a failure, to a degree, but not a colossal one, not one that burns me up inside.

While letting those people go in 2001 was a failure for me personally, it was a necessity for the company. If we didn’t fire those people, we wouldn’t have survived, it’s as simple as that. So from the perspective of surviving it wasn’t a failure…but it sure feels like one.

Here’s some of the best advice I can give any entrepreneur or business owner building a company:

Don’t hire too many people too fast.

Before you hire someone really really really think about whether you need to. If there’s another way (outsourcing, getting more productive, re-shifting priorities, magically creating more hours in the day), do it first. Or at least think about it first. If your first instinct is to hire someone, you’re in trouble. When times get tough, you’ll have a bloated payroll and no way of paying those people. And you will feel terrible letting people go. Having to think about how you’re affecting those people’s lives in such a way is not fun.

Paul Allen knows exactly what I’m talking about. Hopefully you won’t have to go through the same experiences to recognize what happened to him and me.

[tags]small business, firing people, hiring people, growing a business, entrepreneurship, failure[/tags]