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Archive for the ‘operations’ Category

11 Surefire Ways To Make Your Start-Up Fail

Monday, January 18th, 2010

I stumbled on this post by written by Jacek Grebski of F3FundIt and wanted to share it with our clients. Great stuff!

Here are just a few ways to completely and utterly dig your startup into the ground, as such read them, and do what you can to avoid them.

1. Have a poorly defined value proposition. Having a poorly defined value proposition will cause you headache after headache when looking at and presenting your business model. You have to know who you are targeting, what you’re offering and why they would want to use your product or service. Who is your customer?

2. Setting unrealistic objectives in your development and deployment pipeline. No matter what you think you will not underpin the world in a year, you will not have income of €20.000.000 in year one, and you will be greatly disappointed.

3. Focusing on the bottom line instead of on the service / product you offer your customers. Your customers are your lifeblood, if they are unhappy your bottom line will suffer, if they are happy, they’ll be repeat buyers, and even help market your product. Simple as that.

4. Involving yourself and your business in ethically questionable practices. Unsavory marketing practices, overly creative accounting are just some of the things that will in the end ruin your business, don’t do them.

5. Developing a product without adequately deploying resources to market it effectively. Sure, you may have a product that could cure cancer, end world hunger, and fly humans to the moon, but if no one knows about it, no one will use it. Market it, and market it effectively.

6. Going on a spending spree. Meaning, poor cash management. You may have €250.000 that you received in the form of F3 (Friends Family Fools) Capital and you think it’s great so you pay a premium for services that could otherwise be outsourced, delivered in a more cost effective way, and get everyone a brand new Mac Pro to write e-mails on. Not a good idea.

7. Launching too early or too late. Timing is everything, think about the market, the economy, the sector you’re in, where is it now, where will it be in 3 months, 6, a year or two. You don’t have to change the world today, and launching today may lead to failure.

8. Flying solo. Think you can do everything yourself? You can’t. Involve others. Even if you’ve decided to start alone, bring in friends, talk to your network, and see if people will help you out. You don’t have to give them an equity stake in the beginning see how you work together. If you work well, ask them if they’d like to come on board.

9. Forgetting about scalability. Good ideas scale well, multi-million ideas scale at their core. How big can your product realistically get? Who is your customer, and how can fast can you grow without compromising service.

10. Secrets are no fun. Talk, and share your idea with people you trust, friends, family, colleagues, these people are inevitable to the success of your business, you don’t know everything, and collaboration can more often than not fix problems before they arise.

11. Doubting your idea early on. Doubt is natural, you will have ups and downs, this is completely natural, but if you doubt your idea within the first month, or three of your start-up career. Chances are you’ll become disheartened quite early on and quit. Save yourself the trouble and thoroughly analyze your concept before taking the plunge.

A friendly message from the people at F3FundIt, and with that. Good Luck!

Original blog post written by Jacek Grebski and found here.

badidea

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Posted in business start-up, entrepreneurism, entrepreneurs, marketing, operations, sales and selling, small business, small business consulting, small business marketing, start-up advice, start-up help, tips and tricks | 3 Comments »

How An Operations Manager Helps Your Small Business Start-Up

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Are you an early stage or start-up small business entrepreneur who’s so busy you’re running around trying to do ten jobs at once? Are you running out of time everyday and can’t seem to get caught up? Let’s discuss how an operations manager can make all the difference towards the success of your business.

“Operations Manager.”  The title sounds like something that is only suited for a large corporation.  No one really considers that there might be a need to staff for this position as soon as you’ve decided on your business idea, but frankly, it’s an essential part of running your own business.  As the entrepreneur, the feeling is going to be that you need to do everything yourself as the business ramps up and gets underway after funding.  Your fingers need to be in every transaction and every phone call needs to have your initials next to the schedule.  In some ways, this is true.  You should involve yourself with the business as it ramps up so that you are aware of what’s happening and you are taking responsibility for the direction.  You should also begin the act of staffing your business and there’s no better way to do that than the hiring of a competent and qualified operations manager to start handling the small day-to-day decisions for you while you handle the business itself.

The position of Operations Manager is defined as, “[being] concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labor and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and services).” This position generally translates to having someone whose job it is to make sure the day-to-day menial tasks of the business are run smoothly and make sure that the owner isn’t prone to micromanagement and spreading themselves too thin.  Deeming someone suitable for this role is daunting, but can usually be made slightly easier by following these requirements:

*Experience in the field: You want to have someone working with you who has a strong familiarity with the type of industry you’re embarking on.  This could lead to them having contacts in the field, personal experience with trouble shooting for this particular industry, or maybe just the general confidence from familiarity.

*Don’t work with friends/family:  We all want a familiar hand working next to us when we’re starting out, but once you’ve gotten to the point of staffing, putting someone in the position of operations who has close ties to you is not going to pan out well.  You have to be able to trust that this person is directly under you in terms of management hierarchy and willing to take orders and responsibility for the failures of others.  Having a personal history with that person tends to be counter-productive to that goal.

*How to read resumes:  Someone with previous experience under the title of “operations manager” might not have all of the skills you need for your particular venture.  Look for skills that show experience dealing with vendors, managing workflow and employees, and taking initiative regarding trouble-shooting.

Again, these are just key points to keep in mind for when you’re starting up your business and staffing this position.  People tend to forget that it’s important to have an operations manager of some kind in their company and that the position should be manned by an individual who has the required qualities required for the position.

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