A thought about Business and Vision

Here is your thought of the moment:

To create sustainable business success,
instead of 'competitive advantage' where I win, you lose,
think 'mutual advantage', where we both win.
- Coach Davender

The economic turmoil we are experiencing right now, painful as it may be, is a wonderful opportunity to reconstruct the concept of capitalism towards one that focuses on creating real, sustainable value. Business, when we get down to its core, is how we organize ourselves to move humanity forward. I believe business ranks alongside agriculture as two of the most significant civilizing forces in our history.

Unfortunately many have lost sight of what business is about by focusing on short term gain. Looking only at the next step causes one to drift randomly, ending up in a survival cycle.

To break out of the survival cycle requires that we look up, focusing on a vision that is larger than just me-me-me. In a sustainable model of business, profit is generated by an exchange of something of value that helps you succeed in a way that helps me succeed. Prosperity then becomes proportional to the size of the vision, its positive impact on the world, and our success in making the vision come alive.

To make a sustainable model of business work, we need to make quantum shifts in our thinking:

- shift from "business models" to "transformative vision" ...how does this vision make the world a better place?
- shift from "markets" to "communities" ...how do I engage people in a great conversation about the vision?
- shift from "sales" to "leadership" ...how do I encourage people to take action to make this vision come alive?

This need not be simply wishful thinking or dreaming. The resources of the world may be finite, but our capacity for imagination, innovation and ingenuity is infinite. Our brain power can multiply our resources many times over, if we focus on creating sustainable, win-win value.

The world needs people like you and I who aim for the stars with our feet on the ground. How will you create "mutual advantage" today?



This thought is inspired by an article on the Harvard Business Blog
by Umair Haque, "Why Ideals Are The New Business Models"
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/03/ideals.html

This article is from my newsletter archived at http://www.davender.com/newsletter/20090316.htm

Sign up to receive my newsletter
and get a FREE 6-Part e-course on how to Get More and Better Clients:
http://www.getmoreandbetterclients.com

Article: Your Two-Page Business Plan - Cut the Fluff, Get to the Good Stuff

One of the biggest advantages of being a solo-professional in the hyper-dynamic marketplace is the ability to quickly make decisions that adapt to changing conditions.

The value of your business plan is not its weight in paper, but rather in the clarity of the thinking at its core. Too many solo-professionals get stalled by their business plan, because they get caught up in details that are eventually inconsequential to their desired result or overtaken by events in the real world.

To make good decisions in a quickly changing environment, a clear strategy, based on simple principles, provides better guidance than a plan that is thick, detailed and difficult to adjust. By cutting out the fluff and focusing on six core questions, you can create a concise, dynamic template that will clarify the core of your success strategy for yourself and your colleagues.

The purpose of a clear, concise two-page business plan for solo-professionals, is to demonstrate that:

1. that your business project can make money,

2. that you can attract and serve clients who value what you have to offer and who can commit to you, and

3. that you are clear about what the resources you need and the actions to take.

When you can make your case using brief, precise statements, then you will be able to transform your passion into profit.

Set aside your old business plan brick and answer each of the following questions in a couple of sentences:

1. What is the key, compelling result you create for your client?

People don't buy your product or service, they invest in the results that your product or service provides for them. Describe your business in terms of the impact you make on your customer, how their life is changed for the better. Aim for the impact with the greatest value. Keep it simple, go for the WOW. In reading your statement, the response should be "this is something I gladly would spend my own energy, time and money for!"

Bonus points if you can state your compelling result in ONE sentence, 10 words or less.

2. How do you generate profit?

A successful business must have, at its core, a profit engine, where you input your products and services and the client inputs their investment of time, money and attention, and both of you benefit. What is your "value proposition"? A strong value proposition is a tight, focused mechanism that involves an offer, a customer, a consideration (money, time, effort commitment), to create the compelling result. How is this effect created? How do customers invest in it? Where do you generate your income, and your profit?

What is the reason why customers care that you exist? What is your long-term value proposition that will keep customers coming back again and again? Or that will create a permanent, powerful and positive change in the client's situation?

Is your value proposition scalable (i.e. can you quickly grow the number of customers without adding appreciably to costs)? Are there multiple points where customers can interface with you?

Note that your value proposition must focus on something other than reducing a customer's costs or saving money, because this is only a temporary advantage.

The simpler your value proposition, the simpler your profit engine, the sooner you can generate revenue, and the more successful you will be.

3. What can get in your way?

You can bet that at least five other people in the world are working on the same idea as you. How will you anticipate the obstacles that can slow you down:

- who has a business who can make the need for your product or service evaporate?

- where can you be blocked or sideswiped (technology, legislation, economy, environment)

- by what alternative ways can customers can achieve similar results?

In a couple of sentences each, identify the primary traps and how you can overcome them. Be brief and to the point.

4. What is your secret sauce?

What makes you THE go-to person for what you have to offer? What are the most compelling features that make you stand out from everyone else? How are your advantages something that make it difficult or impossible for someone to copy? Think long and hard about your answer to this question, because the more special your "secret sauce", the stronger your business will be.

5. Who is involved with you to make this happen?

Your partnering strategy can make or break your execution. Partners can give you the weight and leverage you need to make a big impact fast. What kind of partners and team do you need to make this happen? How quickly can you spool up your idea? How much are you going to do in house, and how much outsourcing? Who is in charge of what?

6. What is your next step to build your business, and what do you need to make it happen?

Be very specific about the next step you are taking, and what resources you need to make it happen. Have specific 90-day, 6-month, 12-month and 36-month goals.

Remember: keep each response short and powerful. Cut out the fluff and get to the good stuff. Your answers to these six questions should fit on the front and back of one standard letter-sized sheet at 10 to 12 point font. Bonus points if you only need one side.

The more concise and precise your answers to these six questions, the more successful and profitable your business project will be!

Davender Gupta is a business leadership coach and Certified "Book Yourself Solid" Coach whose mission is to guide passion-driven solopreneurs and beginning network marketers to accelerate their Vision from Passion to Profit. Join the discussion on his blog frompassiontoprofit.com and his main site coachdavender.com He welcomes your questions by e-mail at coach@davender.com or by phone, toll-free, at 1-888-788-8844.

Posted on EzineArticles.com: http://ezinearticles.com/?id=1694982

Nano-economics

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

A client recently asked me why I don't get them to do market studies and projections. This staple of "start your own small business" courses to me is a waste of time and money. Literally. Why?

The "science" of economics is divided into two worlds: macroeconomics, which deals with general economic trends, and microeconomics, which deals with the consumer-producer relationship.

Economics postulates the existence of a "market", an amorphous aggregate of consumers that is measurable both in size and in intent. Through market studies and analysis, you can apparently estimate the size of a market and the proportion of it that you can capture.

I believe there are several faults with this logic:

• first that you can estimate the size of demand with any kind of accuracy. Demand is rarely latent - is is generated when the means to satisfy it appear. When the first cell phone appeared, who would have figured that grade-schoolers would be toting them? Or remember that famous remark that the market could support five or six computers, that's all?

• second, that there is any loyalty between a provider and a market. I flunked economics (an engineering elective) in university because the element that was always missing for me was how to integrate the dimensions of quality of the offer, evolving technologies (various ways to satisfy the offer) and demand creation.

• third, as a solopreneur, measuring a potential market makes no sense. For example, in Quebec, studies put the number of self-employed at around 300000 (out of a total population of 7 million). The number is most certainly underestimated, but let's go with it for sake of argument. Even if I could service 300 clients in a year through my course, at $2000 a client (which is what my clients pay now), that is $600000 a year in income. For me right now 300 clients is huge (I don't have the infrastructure), yet it is not even 1/10 of 1% of the "market". And that's not counting the clients I want to serve through teleconferences and webinars across Canada, the US and elsewhere.

Therefore, as a solo or even a small business, even if I capture only an infinitesimal part of the "market", I have more than enough business to make me very prosperous.

"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make."

-- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

And at this nanoscopic level, the laws of supply and demand of microeconomics fall apart, because the strong link between myself and my client becomes that of trust.

That's why I talk about "nano-economics" - the economic relationship between individuals. There are three basic principles of nano-economics:

1. For every combination of passion and talent, there is someone, somewhere, who wants to experience it.

2. This person can be anywhere on the planet, to find him or her I have to broadcast a message that is specifically tuned to what they are looking for.

3. Once the connection is made, the bond of trust that is created generates a loyalty that connects me to others who want to experience what I offer.

Just as in physics, where at the subatomic level, the force of gravity is overtaken by other, special forces, then in economics, at the nano-economic level of individuals making offers to attract those who are looking for precisely that offer, the bonds of trust, loyalty and even love are stronger than simply price.

By thinking nano-economics, success as a solopreneur becomes a game of communication and trust rather than "domination", market share, and price comparison.

This is why the traditional business plan concept fails at helping the solopreneur in launching their business. What the solo has to do is to master communicating who they are and what their passion is, then the right people will show up.

Someone, somewhere, is waiting to hear from you. Are you calling out to them?

A shortage of money is the symptom of a bigger problem

A newsletter that I highly recommend is Roy H. Williams' Monday Morning Memo, an "insightful and provocative series of well-crafted thoughts about the life of business and the business of life."

In today's issue, he links to posting on his blog with the eye-raising title "Money and Jews"

Why is it that while this cultural group comprises only 1.7% of the U.S. population, they account for more 24% of the "mega-donors" (people who give more than $10 million dollars in a single year to social and cultural projects)?

On the other hand, why do Jewish people have a reputation for being stingy or tight-fisted with money?

Roy Williams describes it this way:

Jews hesitate to hand over cash because they’re taught from a young age that a shortage of money is merely the symptom of a bigger problem. “To give money and walk away is the easy way out. If you really care, you will do what is necessary to make sure this person never again has a shortage.”

Looking back, I saw this in my first business, a technology consulting practice. When starting up my venture, I was trained (through the "Start Your Own Business" course I took), that the main problem with starting a business is finding the capital.

I sweated through writing a business plan which I then presented to my banker, and was surprised at how easy it was to actually receive the money. I promptly proceeded to "burn through" this found money without generating any cash flow, because I did not know how to really be in business. It was only later I realized that they did not lend me over $75K based on my business plan, but rather on the basis of my excellent credit... (those days are now long gone!) The bank basically "gave me money and walked away". I eventually had to repay the loan, which was a very painful process.

In a previous post I ranted about the ineffectiveness of subsidies and government grants. Almost every solopreneur or entrepreneur I meet has a cash flow issue. They are looking to solve it by having someone give money to them, and in Québec that someone is more often than not the government. They want someone to give them the money, no strings attached. But even with "easy money", this access to cash does not make a business project more successful. (How many businesses that receive subsidies become profitable?)

What I learned is that it's not how much you get, but rather how much you can generate and keep... to reinvest and generate more. Money is generated when I make offers that provide people with genuine results, and when I take responsibility for moving my project forward. This means mastering the art and science of relationship selling - influencing the actions of another person so that they themselves willingly take action on what I suggest to them, towards a win-win result.

So to cure a money shortage, I have to go out and sell something that makes a meaningful difference to my customers. Mastering this skill ensures that I will never again be short of money.

Finding money is not the problem. The real question is... what will you do to never have money troubles in the future?