I was reviewing my personal “rutter” last night and came across an article I wrote several years ago about how to start a business fast.; and what I meant by fast was moving from conception (Stage I) to cash flow neutral (Stage II) in the shortest period of time. The following was my research and the script we are currently using to grow the company.
Executive Roll- Create Thought Leadership through products
- Create Thought Leadership by adding services to the products
- Physically and behaviorally representing the message (brand)
- Practicing the executive competencies ala Drucker's “Effective Executive”
- Coalescing the multiple messages into ONE
- Mastering Public Relations
- Identify market with under/unserved needs with high economic potential
- Build the best possible team of subject matter experts, executives, and entrepreneurs with high octane energy
- Go to market with the absolute minimum product and service offer in the minimum time while staying within the brand
- Do whatever it takes to delight early customers, spare no expense to make everything and everyone referenceable
- Develop and Research (not R&D – that's backward) inside customer accounts to close quality gaps on products & services, and develop metrics to measure our performance
- A - under $20m companies with self imposed constraints on growth
- C - too concerned about cash flow and giving too much away early, need to be able to survive several financing rounds
- C - engineer in me built too much, too many features, too complicated
- A - made no money on the first clients, but worked out the bugs without harming clients
- B - in the middle of building Generation 2 Assessment and automating the reporting and feedback process
It appears to be working as we roll out our offer of a lost-cost, high-quality business assessment that identifies gaps preventing our clients (and ourselves) from growing as fast as possible – a growth rate that exceeds the the market and our competitors, and is sustainable.
eastman
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