Revisiting The Dutch Uncle And My First Blog Post Ever

At my old blog last year, I recounted a story about losing a management consulting deal. Some key snips setting the context for the Dutch Uncle (emphasis added):

  • Today I lost a freelance consulting deal to another consultant. Of course I’m disappointed, but once a deal is lost, it is lost
  • I think the most important things to do after a lost deal are to
    identify learnings
    with respect to your company’s product offering and
    sales processes and to preserve prospect relationships
  • Now I am not going to go into all of my learnings here, however, I
    think it is useful to consider a concept I learned in Ford Harding’s
    book, "Rain Making: The Professional’s Guide to Attracting New
    Clients". You need to ask as many people as possible (client prospects
    included) to be straight-up with you. No silverlining. Why did I lose
    the deal? This is the concept of getting the prospect to talk to you
    like a Dutch uncle.
    To quote a passage from Harding’s book, "The person
    who talks to you like a Dutch uncle does it for your own good … At
    its worst … [problems are] like a cheating spouse; friends know but
    don’t tell you about it. "

Well, as it turns out, I actually won the deal. The client prospect came back. That’s the happy story for Friday.

To change gears a bit, I actually started blogging probably back in 2003. I had one post up there for about a year on a Blogger account which I eventually deleted. I like to think that I won the deal above in part because what was embodied in my first blog post ever. The essence of what was there was (to my recollection):

  • my personal mission statement as a business development professional
  • my utmost goal to help people and not to sell to them
  • my commitment to safeguard one’s confidential and competitive information as a business partner
  • my goal to even help you find an alternative source for your problem if my company’s solution was not a good fit.

It probably went on and on for a bit, but you get the idea.

Blogging Companies Beginning To Specialize – 24H Laundry

Interesting development in the blogging world (hat tip to Om). New venture (by Marc Andressen, co-founder of Netscape) in the video blogging space called 24H Laundry (answering the question whether bloggers do work in their underwear). At this time of night, I should be. The name reminds me of White Pajama, the venture for virtual call centers (that is, providing technology where people could work from home in the their white pajamas).

College Student Near Southern Methodist University (SMU) Needed For Part-Time Marketing and Sales Work

I am going to need some contract telemarketing, marketing list generation, and related support for maybe 1-2 days per week for a person near Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I’ll have more details later, but here are some thoughts off-the-cuff on skills needed:

Continue reading “College Student Near Southern Methodist University (SMU) Needed For Part-Time Marketing and Sales Work”

In Search Of My Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneurship. This is a term I have never heard of before until last month. I must be living in a shell. I’m still not quite sure what the term "social entrepreneur" means, but I believe it is a fairly widely used term that refers to adopting entrepreneurial behaviors in non-profit organizations.

Read the full post at my 21Publish blog to get some briefs on what I found after some light Google research on the subject of social entrepreneurship. At 21Publish, I have been spending more time thinking about how to apply my MBA and entrepreneurial experiences in different ways to organizations in the non-profit, education, etc. sectors.

Good Post Overviewing Product Management

Deepak Thomas, a product manager in the Valley, recently launched a blog and catalogs some of the key functions of the product management discipline. His blog is one of the few blogs that I’ve seen address product management, and it is of special interest to me as it is one of a few practices areas (under the acronym PACE) that was core to the management consulting firm, PRTM (my alma mater), at its founding. Although lots of b-school students love to get on strategy projects after graduating and entering management consulting, I can think of no other process in a product company more core than making products. What is interesting to reflect upon after reading Deepak’s post is that in early-stage ventures, the product management "process" can be pretty compressed  – it can easily feel as if one is in a tornado as opposed to participating in an orchestrated planning process.

In any case, I find that a key aspect to focus on in venture with respect to product management is making sure that sales, marketing, and R&D work on product management jointly (i.e., on a cross-functional basis). This is probably #1 on my list of things that is usually broken in companies that come from predominantly technical origins. An essential question is this: Can the company list out the features of the product for future releases as mapped against R&D resources needed against competitive positioning and against sales & marketing priority? Time to get out the Excel spreadsheet. It will be easy to lose one’s way without having a guiding voice of the market built into a company’s products.

Some Creative And Too Creative Business Development Techniques

In entrepreneurial settings, sometimes one has to get creative about developing new business with new customers. Getting things done in a quick period of time with maximum impact is a necessity more so than in larger corporations.

Thought I would just share a few random business development techniques that came to the top of my head with respect to freelance work, seminar development, and new venture or initiative development. The post was motivated by offline and online discussions I’ve had with folks approaching me over the past few weeks. I’m comfortable with at least two of these techniques (as I have both done them myself and seen others do it), but I’m a little bit skeptical of one of the techniques (perhaps you can tell me which one):

  1. Figuring out how to get a whitepaper done – Lot of times these papers are sponsored by a company. In other cases, a freelance person may decide to write one and then make it freely available on the web to develop a brand identity associated with thought leadership. A third technique, which I’ve not seen written about as much, is to proactively solicit a few corporate sponsors for a whitepaper. Although this technique sometimes requires more sales skills, it is a way to spread out costs across a number of companies. The resulting work may also seem less biased towards a single vendor (depending on how you do it).
  2. Figuring out how to get a marketing seminar done – Rather than having a start-up bear the entire cost of sponsoring a roundtable or summit on a technology subject, some larger companies have been known to co-sponsor technology seminars with smaller partner companies. Consider fleshing out the idea on a one-pager, indicate the structure of the seminar, the co-sponsorship costs, and how many co-sponsors you need to get the deal done. If there are unknown variable costs that you are not sure how to finance, better try to pin these down or you will have a hard time selling your idea to the co-sponsors.
  3. Figuring out how to launch a new venture or business initiative – In the past I have seen my name appear in a business plan along with a number of other possible participants with bigger names, etc. When things are forming up, a plan document can give people an idea of how things are going to play out, and the intent is to rally people together. While some of the names appearing in the plan indicated "prospective participant", I noticed that mine did not have such a clear marking. The first time I saw the plan for the venture was the first time I even heard about the venture. I understand the plan had been shown to other folks too.

Now I think that each of the ideas above can be twisted a bit to get them to work properly, but perhaps people have other experiences. Again note that I have used two of these techniques before, but I have seen people do all three. I am *not* advocating all three techniques.

Steve Shu

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When Collaboration And Leadership Are More Important In Non-Profits Versus For-Profits

Ventures or new organizational initiatives, whether in the profit or non-profit sector, face tough mortality rates early on. Luck clearly plays a role in the success of new initiatives, but I find that many times it has to do with a combination of tackling too many items, lacking organizational skills or resources, and not working out important issues of collaboration and leadership.

Non-profits bear a bigger brunt in my opinion:

  • People tend to be naturally (and rightfully) more altruistic in non-profit endeavors –  This creates a large appetite, but it must be tapered with some discipline and a devil’s advocate mentality to say that "we should first bite off a smaller goal".
  • Non-profits may have greater tendencies to lack optimum organizational structures – As I mentioned in a prior post outlining how MBAs can apply skills in a non-profit environment, many non-profits I’ve seen have more diverse demographics than corporations. This is great, but it may also mean that a non-profit is getting contributed (pro-bono) support where one can’t control the quality or goals of the resource as one would with an employee of a commercial entity. Non-profits may also lack resources in the way of $$ or specialized help on-staff.
  • Non-profits may lack collaboration mechanisms more widely used in the high-tech space – Some of the team members may be working virtually from the organization (e.g., if contributed pro-bono work). Given that virtual teams have "amplified collaboration needs" (term coined here by Arienna Foley), it is worthwhile to figure out how to get the people to actively collaborate and get quick wins. Some bootstrap tools that may help in the greater effort of getting the team to work together include things like free conference calling (www.freeconferencecall.com), instant organizational intranet (note whitepaper PDF file)  and communication platform (e.g., using free configuration of 21Publish group publishing service), and Skype (free voice over IP, e.g., for international team members).

In any case, I hope that these items and pointers above may help give some ideas to those working for non-profits. This post was motivated by a portion of a broader discussion I had with Dr. Saraiya regarding  the South Asian Health Research Institute (SAHRI). Dr. Saraiya asked me to write down some of my thoughts in starting a new endeavor.

Steve Shu

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Venture Capital Elevator Pitch Podcasts

If you’re tired of the Michael Jackson news, all of my venture capital feeds are highlighting Fred Wilson’s (VC at Union Square Ventures) use of podcasting, tags, and RSS for accepting and listening to elevator pitches on his iPod submitted by others. You can find info here, here, here, here, here, and here on what’s going on and what the talk is all about … all from bloggers in and about the venture capital space.