Just as indicators suggest that the worst is behind us in the US, things are looking a bit bleaker in Europe. This sent stocks around the world plummeting yesterday. For those of you considering expanding your presence into Europe, beware of the potential threat that the high debt loads carried by euro-based countries like Greece, Portugal and a handful of others present to local business partners’ abilities to transact business with you. Nice article by nytimes.com
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And Just When You Thought It Was Over…
By Carlos Navarro, CEO of Reneux Marketing, LLC and author of this blog
Toyota: Re-visiting the same old lessons on how to handle a recall
Just when you thought it was over, the news got even worse today for Toyota. Many experts now believe that the accelerator issue may be a more serious electrical one, and may not be remedied by the special adaptor Toyota has vowed to begin shipping to its dealerships later this week.
I had the unfortunate experience of being the global vice president for a consumer healthcare business that was hit by a global recall in 2006. Observing the Toyota recall unfold over the past several days has reminded me of the lessons learned from my experience and from other recalls, and how Toyota apparently has not learned from history.
First and foremost, companies run into issues by waiting until a clear root cause is identified for a problem before taking action in the market. From a purely analytical perspective, this makes sense. Academics and Wall Street types have been urging companies for years to quantify and analyze issues – then take proper action. However, what’s lost in this approach is that in the court of public opinion, your root cause just does not matter. Sure, it’s critical to eventually get to a clear root cause that’s causing a recall such as Toyota’s accelerator problem, Renu’s related eye infections and, most notoriously, the deaths related to Tylenol consumption. But, in the end, it’s all about regaining consumer trust, which is the most important element of brand equity. If consumers don’t feel that you’re acting in their best interest – including pulling a product from the market at even the slightest potential public hazard, then you’re brand will be devastated. Rightfully so.
Therefore, take action quickly to protect your customers. Don’t let a problem percolate. Certainly, some issues are hard to pin-point and may require months, if not years, of investigation to uncover a clear root cause. Toyota is experiencing this right now, where there doesn’t appear to be a definite reason for the accelerator issue. However, rather than keep their cars on the market until a clear cause-and-effect is identified, the company should have taken action earlier in the best interest of their customers. This is especially critical where health and safety are in question.
Don’t claim that you’ve fixed the problem, unless you’re really sure you’ve fixed it. This seems logical, but in a crisis situation companies look for quick solutions to make the recall problem go away. However, claiming to have identified the root cause without thoroughly evaluating the problem can be a slippery slope. Toyota claimed to have identified the problem several days ago, and began manufacturing a modification to be shipped to dealers for installation by this Friday. Unfortunately, the company has lost even more credibility as experts suggest that it could be a more serious, electrical issue.
Don’t let your legal department determine what actions to take. Legal counsel’s advice is critical during this time. However, what may be best from a litigation preparation perspective may be quite different from what’s best for the long-term health of the company. Your legal team will be thinking about minimizing exposure to the inevitable lawsuits; however, the company’s ability to rebound from a recall will be driven by customers actually buying product again – and as quickly as possible. This will be driven by trust, not the outcome of lawsuits which could take years to resolve.
Hopefully, companies will study the lessons learned from this Toyota, and other prominent, recalls and act accordingly if faced with a similar situation. Let’s hope that they do.
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Tagged: Recall lessons, Toyota recall, What to do in case of a recall
Perfectly cut pizza slices are a luxury most hungry eaters take for granted. If you’ve ever hacked away at your own homemade pizza, you get the idea. The good news, however, is that with the help of these merciless cutters, you will divide your next pizza with ease. You’ll probably look really cool while you do it too.
(Via GadgetHer)
Lots of tasty pizza news.
There’s always room for innovation –even for the most basic of products. In this case it’s design innovation. I’m increasingly becoming more aware of the importance of design to differentiate and to re-energize sleepy categories.
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Good article on the trending of venture capital investments; looks like VCs are spending money at a good rate, driven by strong second-half 2009 spending. Just goes to show you that there’s always money looking for a great investment. Entrepreneurism at its best!
http://bit.ly/8gV9aV
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Tagged: VC, venture capital
Jan 28, 2010 -
Creating great content is increasingly a cornerstone to lead generation and lead nurturing. In other words, it’s key to attracting new customers and to deepening relationships with existing ones.
But many companies have trouble creating enough of it. So blogs languish. Flip cameras gather dust. Your Twitter feed is as sparse as Oprah’s. How can you create and distribute a steady flow of stuff that your customers actually care about?
Here are 11 ideas:
- Think small. Creating a white paper or ebook is a huge task. Instead, create smaller chunks of content. A series of smaller blog posts will be easier to produce, more digestible for readers short on time and attention, and multiply your search love.
- Think really small. Ask your Twitter followers for their take on a specific theme or topic related to your business, and create a blog post from it (with credit to them, of course). Something open-ended (no wrong answers) and that solicits personal suggestions or advice works best. Such as: What’s your favorite must-have iPhone app for business? What’s your must-read book on Widget Management for 2010? What’s your favorite social media tool?
- Bundle. Conversely to #1, bundle existing blog posts around a central theme into an ebook or white paper. Give it away freely (not requiring users to register to download it), or not. See which approach works best for you here, in “Should You Put Your eBooks and White Papers (and Other Content) Behind a Registration Page?“.
- Record presentations or speeches. Record the speeches or presentations you or your team gives at industry events, and post them on YouTube. Repurpose as needed to your blog, on Twitter, Facebook, or other social sites.
- Post presentations on SlideShare. Upload PowerPoint presentations to share on SlideShare, and similarly share freely on Twitter, your blog, and so on.
- Chat with customers. Arm your sales staff or other customer-facing folks with Flip cameras to capture face time with prospects or customers. Bring a camera along next time you attend a networking event. Not sure what to say? Try asking customers a single question to unify their answers and string them together for a compelling video. Something like: What’s your biggest marketing challenge? Name one business goal for 2010. What’s a strategy you’re using working to grow your business this year?
- Interview luminaries. Q&A interviews with thought leaders, strategic partners, or flat-out interesting or creative thinkers makes for compelling text or audio content. (Bonus: It raises your profile with them, as well.) John Jantsch offers a great step-by-step approach to podcasting here. Alternatively, a simple text Q&A is easy to do via Skype, which allows for back-and-forth banter that gives an interview more energy and makes it more fun to read. Capture the text, edit for clarity, slap on a headline, and you’re done. (That’s how I did this interview, What’s a Dry Cleaner Doing on Twitter?)
- Share real-time photos. Configure your blog to work with Flickr, so that you can upload photos from industry events, meetups, or gatherings. Snap photos to share on Twitter via Twitpic. Speed matters here: The faster following an event you can get your photos up, the more likely it is that people will use them to refer to, share with others and drive traffic to your content. Rohit Bhargava offers more general advice on using Flickr here.
- Ask customer service. The front line is a great source for content. Ask them: What are customers contacting us about? What problems do they have? How might you help them resolve their issues? This kind of content is great for regular content with a recurring “Questions from our customers” theme.
- Go behind-the-scenes. Give readers or followers an insider’s view of your company. Twitpic a shot from a podcast or video in progress; share what content you’re working on producing on Twitter (Writing a post on the H1N1 vaccines for teenagers. Did you vaccinate your kid?); and so on.
- Bust silos. Do you have a print newsletter? Do you produce a regular podcast? Run a version of a print article on the blog, upload the best headlines to Facebook, post transcripts of your podcast online, and chat everything up on Twitter. A lot of the ideas here reinforce the notion that you should not silo your content. Rather, sprinkle it freely across any of your platforms. It’s important to think like a publisher, and leverage any publishing platforms you’ve created.
What other ways are you generating interesting, compelling content that your customers love?
BIO: Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs.com, which provides strategic and tactical marketing know-how. She also blogs at her acclaimed personal web log. Follow her on Twitter @marketingprofs.
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Tagged: online content
From Venture Made Transparent: How an entrepreneur finances his or her company is one of the most critical decisions that they will make during the course of their startup. The structure of their financing will be one of the key drivers of their financial return from their venture.
There are financing structures for companies that have small potential and structures for companies that have big potential. There is not a one-size fits all strategy for capitalizing a company.
Ultimately, financing a startup
properly boils down to aligning the financing structure with the business opportunity and capital needs. In other words, the way in which you elect to finance your company should at a high-level be determined by 1) how big of a business opportunity it presents and 2) how much capital is required to breakeven. While there are a number of other considerations, but I would argue that these are the first two dimensions to consider as they should help entrepreneurs more quickly find the right direction for their financial strategy.
The 2×2 chart below should help to illustrate how to think about which fundraising category that they are in.
Venture Capital
If you have a big idea that can generate at least $50M in revenue and the business requires millions of dollars to get the company to a cash flow positive position, you should probably pursue venture capital.Not Viable
If your business requires significant capital, but is not poised to become a large business you may not be able to find a viable funding source. You will either need to find dumb money or trick savvy investors into believing your company has bigger prospects. If your company falls into this category, you should probably go back to the drawing board and find another opportunity to pursue.Bootstrap
If you have the potential to build a small business – one that generates single-digit or low double-digit millions in revenue – while requiring little capital to achieve breakeven, you have a lifestyle business. In my opinion lifestyles business are best financed when the founders take as little outside capital as possible – these are companies where it’s really only exciting for founders if they own a large percentage of the equity. Additionally, by raising less capital entrepreneurs will be able to avoid accruing a large amount of liquidity preference. If there is a significant amount of liquidity preference in the company, it may be difficult for the entrepreneurs to realize a meaningful payout when the sell the company.Depends On Barriers
If your company has the potential to become a big business and requires little capital to get there the decision between bootstrapping the company and raising venture capital generally boils down to your expected barriers. If there is little risk of a competitor beating you to scale and taking the opportunity, because you have a unique approach, protected IP or otherwise, then you may want to bootstrap the company in order to maximize your ownership of the company. If your barriers are limited, however, and additional capital can help you capture market share more quickly, securing the opportunity, then you should consider venture capital.I frequently meet entrepreneurs that should be bootstrapping who are seeking venture capital or entrepreneurs that should be seeking venture capital when they are bootstrapping. The former could limit their returns by loading too much liquidity preference into the business, the latter is often building the business too slowly to capture the opportunity properly.
Picking the right fundraising strategy is often as significant of an indicator of the founder’s payout as selecting the right business strategy. Take the time to understand what type of company you are building and finance it properly.
Mark Davis is a VC at DFJ Gotham Ventures.
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How do you identify a new business opportunity? Or decide which among several has the best chance for success?
Professor Raffi Amit answers these questions in an interview for Knowledge @ Wharton, the online business journal of the Wharton School.
With any new business idea, Amit suggests some fundamentals that every entrepreneur should consider:
- Does my idea correct an inefficiency in the market?
- Do I have the resources and capability (or at least the power to bring those pieces together) to carry out this idea?
- Is the market for it real? (i.e. Are there customers willing to buy it? And at what cost?)
- Who are my competitors, and what are they doing?
- Is this industry growing, and how hard is it to enter?
According to Amit, the most important element of any entrepreneurial endeavor, and a common theme of most successful startups, is answering an unmet need.
When asked to identify the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when identifying business opportunities, Amit responds, “Customers buy products that add value. Customers buy products that they need, in order to satisfy some issue that they wish to satisfy… Very often, entrepreneurs… pay too little attention to what the customers want.”
“There is no substitute for understanding the unmet needs of customers,” he says.
It’s easy for an entrepreneur to get immersed in the excitement of an opportunity that these basic questions get overlooked. I’d also add that one should consider whether the business opportunity is sustainable, or whether the business environment, technology and customer need is changing so rapidly that the opportunity would be obsolete.
FedEx launched a business in the early 80s, which was basically an email messaging system. Interesting opportunity at the time, but that was a good example of an opportunity that was not sustainable. In this case, the technology was changing so quickly that it was not an ownable, sustainable business. Basically, this was a pre-cursor to email we use today!
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Editor’s Note: Check out our video interview with Matt, and click here to sign up and get $5 worth of free SpeakerText transcription credits added to your account (promotion valid for the first 100 people).
I founded SpeakerText during the financial apocalypse of October 2008. We launched the company in January 2010, burning through just $4k in meantime, the bulk of which was a loan from my dad. Along the way, I learned a few things that I hope other founders and proto-founders will find useful.
- Fake it ’till you make it. No one is interested in the company you’re going to start. Starting is a declarative act. Just go for it. People won’t follow unless you lead.
- ‘Stealth mode’ is a disease. Rid yourself of it. The difference between your initial idea and your ultimate product is the difference between a slab of rock and the David. There’s a thousand problems you need to solve, and the only way you learn about them––much less solve them––is to pitch, pitch, pitch and pitch again to every smart person you meet. Listen to what they have to say and regardless of how jumbled and contradictory their suggestions or complaints are, try to look for patterns and distill the deeper underlying pain points or problems with your model. Think of it as crowdsourcing. The masses have much to teach you, if you let them.
- Advisors, they’re easier to find than you think. This goes along with my above point about pitching everyone you meet. Most people with big ideas are afraid of embarrassing themselves, so they keep quiet, especially around successful, important people. Don’t. I landed my first advisor, Joe Kennedy, the CEO of Pandora, when I pitched him after he gave a talk at Stanford. He gave me his card; I followed up. I never wasted his time, but I was persistent and, most importantly, I listened and kept him updated on my progress.
- You need a Co-Founder, not just a CTO. Lots of business-y, idea-type people who say they’re looking for a co-founder are, in reality, looking for an “engineering bitch.” Here’s how the pitch sounds from the engineer’s perspective: ‘For ten whole percent of equity, you will slave away to build a prototype of my bad idea, not have any say in the decision-making process…and oh yeah, you could be fired at any point.’ This does not make for a happy long term relationship. Instead, find someone you know and trust––I called up an old college friend––who will call you out on your bullshit and push back when you overreach. And split the equity equally. It just makes like easier down the road.
- Recruit college students. They’re young, hungry and don’t need of a living wage. Experienced, talented software engineers have lots of options in life, and most of them involve getting paid. College students, on the other hand, have fewer options, and probably have their living expenses covered by financial aid. Thus, your startup is more like a resume-enhancing ‘extra-curricular’ than a regular job. The right person will love the responsibility you’re handing them. Win-win.
- Go to job fairs. You’ll be the only startup there. I went to the Columbia Engineering Career Fair in October 2009 and left with ~150 resumes. We hired three guys from that batch and paid them in iPhones. Doubtful we’d have access to such a rich employee pool any other way.
Matt Mireles is the CEO and Founder of SpeakerText. This post was originally published at his blog. We’ll publish Part Two tomorrow.
I came across this article and found it worth sharing. Good fundamental start-up advice for “boot-strapping” during your first year. I launched my strategy consulting firm (more at developnewproducts.com) in a similar manner; focusing only on the essentials that generated revenue, seeking advice from others who’ve been there and speaking to my target audience (what a novel concept) to hear what they’d like to see in a strategy consulting firm. By doing this, much of my first year was self-funded by my first customers, which I then re-invested in building the business.
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An excellent article by Forbes on macro issues facing the region over the next 3 – 5 years. The population is generally younger in the Middle East than the aging North American, European, Japanese and Chinese populations, and offers other opportunities. But along with these opportunities come many challenges — beyond the obvious. Enjoy! http://bit.ly/92QBHY
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I’ve worked in the vision care industry for two of the largest players, Bausch & Lomb and Johnson & Johnson. This is an amazing concept, albeit at least more than a decade away from feasibility. Nonetheless, I suspect that the lessons learned from their work could have implications for other vision correction needs where the installation of micro-electronics could help treat eye diseases.
For example, consider glaucoma, where pressure builds up within the eye and damages the optic nerve, among other things. A miniature pump could be installed and controlled through micro-electronics (which is actually already being explored by other companies). Also, consider the back-of-the-eye diseases, such as macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy; neither has a cure and both could benefit from the delivery of targeted doses of drugs through an embedded micro-electronic device.
With so many eye diseases that lead to blindness, this type of research could yield huge benefits to the aging global population. Posted via web from FASTInnovators
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Tagged: bionic vision, Innovation, vision care
BusinessWeek
