Category: Random Walk

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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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.

It’s rare that I post anything like this, but in my 20 years of drumming (and 10 years or so of playing electronic drums now), I’ve never seen a good video that shows an example of all three side-by-side. This SONIC LAB drumkit shoot-out provides an excellent example of how far technology has come in the drumming market.

I just posted my first entry at my new 21Publish blog (as related to this post). Check my new blog out here.

This weekend I had a pretty scary and very painful incident with getting a towelette dispenser stuck on my finger (product is Cutter Backwoods Mosquito Wipes). I have two bruise points on the first knuckle of my right hand index finger
that look like the entry points for where a dull-toothed Dracula may have tried to suck my blood. I am surprised that my finger is not much more seriously damaged.

For those that may have used cleaning wipes or baby wipes, some of these dispensers have holes coming out of the top of the dispenser with plastic teeth all around the inner circumference that grip the towelettes as they come up through the hole. When towelettes come up through the hole, I (now) presume that people are not supposed to stick their fingers back into the hole to push things back in. As I might do with a Kleenex box at home, I tried to push back in a towelette after two too many came out.

*Very* wrong thing to do. The hole in this case is just a little larger than the size of my index finger, plus the killer here was that the teeth were both pointed and the plastic was much stiffer than other product packaging I’ve encountered. It was *not* just a matter of getting my finger stuck and waiting for the right solution to present itself. My finger was turning purple, and the teeth created a lot of pain just by waiting around. As I tried to get the product off of my finger, the teeth dug into my finger harder – I imagine that the experience would be similar to the difficulty to get a barbed arrowhead out of your body (in the direction of the entry point) upon penetration. The temptation was to push or twist, but this only drove my index finger in further. My wife tried to help me with a blunt butter knife as a wedge … after two to three more fractic attempts of finding something to get the thing off my finger, luckily my wife finally found a needle nose set of pliers laying nearby that we could use to bend the stiff teeth away from my finger. A bit of an emotional release on my part after the whole thing was over and done with.

I personally think that the product packaging on this Cutter product should be recalled (or the the product packaging should be modified with softer and/or non-pointed teeth). That said, sentence number seven on the back label of the Cutter product does say, "Do Not push finger through lid opening".

When do (generally) sensible people become stupid? When do products need to be modified for safety reasons? Would your answer change if it were a child’s finger that got stuck in the story I recounted?

Anita Campbell, editor of Small Business Trends, has a good post that highlights a qualified source of information on online factoring services. In her post, she provides some background:

Facteon is a factoring
service for small businesses. What that means is that if a small
business is owed a decent-sized invoice (typically US$25,000 and up),
but needs money for, say, payroll and can’t afford to wait 60 days
until the invoice is paid (because we all know employees won’t wait
that long for their checks), the owner can "sell" or
factor the invoice to a company like Facteon. Facteon will advance the
invoice amount, less its fee of course.

To be truthful, although I’ve investigated offline account receiveable (A/R) factoring services in the past, I’ve never used a factoring service. An online service seems pretty intriguing (because it seems as if it can save managers some time).

In at least two prior posts (here and here), I talked about the absence of blogs by those at traditional management consulting firms. Well I missed this one. It’s a blog by Michael McLaughlin, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. Looks like a very good one that addresses guerrilla consulting (and guerrilla marketing for consultants).