Startup News

Last week I was at the StartupEmpire conference. Thanks to Jevon, David, Rick and everybody else who helped in putting the conference together. It was a great demonstration of how the local tech community can come together to help entrepreneurs.

One session of particular interest was the ‘insta-pitch’ session. In this, 5 companies came up on stage to give a 2-4 minute pitch. They then received candid feedback from a panel of VCs on what was good / not good about their pitches. First off, kudos to the companies that took this opportunity to do their pitch and be willing to receive the panel’s feedback in a public forum. However, as was mentioned by the panel, the pitches all needed work. Being able to successfully secure funding is an important factor in the success of a startup and this all starts off with being able to pitch well.

So, in the spirit of interactivity, lets try something out. E-mail me your pitches in the form of a powerpoint presentation. I’ll select and post some of the good ones to show examples of good pitches. For the non-so-good ones, I’ll give some suggestions for improvement and post the before / after.

A few guidelines:

Keep it to 6 slides of content.

If you are in stealth mode, feel free to doctor the name of the company / facts but just let me know this is not real.

Craft the pitch as an initial pitch (i.e. one you would give to an angel group selection committee or use to get a meeting with a VC). Your goal is to give a brief overview of all important aspects of your company & build interest and excitement that people will want to spend the time to learn more about the opportunity in a more detailed follow on meeting.

The standard no-harm rule applies.

craig (at) mapleleafangels.com

StartupEmpire rocked! Here are some roundups in case you couldn’t make it: Flow Ventures takeaways, BlogTO learned why now is a great time to start a tech company, Joey Devilla has excellent summaries of Don Dodge, Hugh MacLeod, David Cohen, Rick Segal, and Howard Lindzon’s keynotes. Listen to Ken Seto’s recordings of StartupEmpire keynote presentations. And here is Don Dodge’s pre-conference interview on CBC Radio.

I just finished reading Certain to Win. It’s about the warfare strategy of John Boyd, as applied to business. In war, you build your team and dismantle the enemy. In business, you build your team, delight the customer, and incidentally dismantle the enemy.

You might know John Boyd as the OODA Loop guy. I never really “got” the OODA Loop so, based on Eric Ries’ recommendation, I read this book.

In a software startup, the OODA Loop looks like this: (1) Come up with an idea, (2) Code it, launch it, (3) Learn from usage data. Keep repeating the loop, each time using the Learnings to influence your next idea. This is the Idea-Code-Data loop.

As you eliminate waste in a lean startup, you can repeat the loop at a higher tempo than the competition; serve customers more effectively; and incidentally sow panic, paralysis, and surrender in the competition. For example, the Obama campaign used high tempo OODA Loops to win the most “market share” in the 2008 presidential election.

This might seem abstract or too obvious to be useful, so here are some of my favorite passages from the book—they should fill in some of the puzzle.

On agility and playing chess with half the pieces:

“Go find the best chess player you can and offer to play for $1,000 under the following conditions:

• Your opponent moves first
• You move twice for every move of his or hers.

“In fact, you can even offer to give up some pieces, to make it more fair. You will find that, unless you are playing somebody at the grandmaster level, you can give up practically everything and still win. Keep the knights and maybe a rook.

“This is a graphic illustration of how the smaller side, using agility, can overcome a large disadvantage in numbers. Does it strike you as far-fetched and removed from what happens in the real world? Consider that Honda and Toyota can bring out a new model in roughly 2 years, with superb quality, while it still takes Detroit at least a year longer…

“The idea that operating at a quicker time pace than one’s opponent can product psychological effects offers a way out of the “bigger (or more expensive) is better” syndrome. An opponent who cannot make decisions to employ his forces effectively—his command and staff functions become paralyzed by bickering and bureaucracy, for example—is defeated before the engagement begins, no matter how many weapons sit in his inventory. In this way, one could truly achieve Sun Tzu’s goal of winning without fighting. [Ed: If you move fast enough, every enemy is effectively incompetent.]“

On shaping the market through agility:

“With a strategy this powerful, your aim is not to respond to but to create the market conditions that you want…

“Customers often want things because competitors have dangled them in their faces… such “discovery of customer wants” does not provide the basis for strategy; it represents a failure of strategy…

“The essence of Boyd’s strategy in business competition is to shape ourselves and the marketplace to improve our capacity… to survive on our terms—generally at the expense of our competitors.”

On planning and strategy:

“Strategy is merely a scheme for creating and managing plans…

“There is nothing wrong with planning… generate and discard many of them as you cycle within your OODA loops.”

On not following the rules:

“The Americans would be less dangerous if they had a regular army.” – British General Frederick Haldimand, Boston, 1776

On culture as a long-term competitive advantage:

“Herb Kelleher, chairman and recently retired CEO of Southwest Airlines, brags that competitors could copy the details of his sytem—direct (as opposed to hub-and-spoke) routings, no reserved seats or meals, one type of aircraft, etc.—but they couldn’t copy the culture, the vibrant esprit de corps, because “they can’t buy that.” So far his words have been prophetic, at least as far as the other US major airlines are concerned.”

Related: Mike Cassidy: Speed as THE primary business strategy

It’s time for another SEO Advice post! Last week, I offered free SEO advice to Teach and Still Grow Rich . I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader Mus, from VUW’s School of Information Management.

Mus (Mustaqeem) Mohd. Adam - http://international.sim.vuw.ac.nz/

This is the URL: http://international.sim.vuw.ac.nz/

Please provide SEO advice for URL above. Thank you.

Mus

My Recommendations

1) Choose Your Keywords

Looking at the page, I have no idea what keywords you’re trying to target. Is it Information Management? Is it Victoria University? It doesn’t seem like you have targeted a specific set of keywords that you want your website to rank #1 in Google for. If you’re trying to attract students to find your school, think about what keywords they would be typing into a search engine for you to show up? Pick your top keyword choices and start the optimization process!

2) Use Your Title Tags

Your title tag on the homepage reads “About SIM”. The title tag is one of the most important components of SEO for a webpage because you only have so many characters (keep it under 100) to describe what’s on the page so Google gives more weight to what you put in the title tag. It’s also a great case where SEO doesn’t interfere with design because most people don’t look up at your page title (unless you’re in the SEO industry). Once you’ve figured out your keywords, put them in the title tag and use them throughout your content as well - a good rule of thumb is once every second paragraph.

3) Good Page Rank

The good news is your Page Rank is a 5 out of 10 which is pretty good. This means that you have a respectable website in Google’s eyes and you have other authority web pages linking to you. A higher Page Rank gives you a better chance of showing up in the search engines for your keywords if you optimize for those keywords properly (see point #2). Of course it’s all relative. If you competition (other schools) are all Page Rank 5’s or above then you’ll have to work on building more quality links to your site to give your Page Rank a boost.

Good luck Mus!

Readers, what do you think about VUW’s School of Information Management?

To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!

Closing Date: Nov. 19, 2008
Amount: $1,200,000.00
Round Type: Seed / Angel

“We can acquire knowledge from doing something incorrectly, but only if we can determine the cause of the error and correct it.”

– Russell Ackoff

Summary: It’s never too late to start applying five whys, even if you’re saddled with zillions of lines of legacy code. Just start asking why whenever you find a problem—you’ll automatically start fixing the 20% of underlying issues that cause 80% of your problems. Five whys was first discovered by Toyota—if it can work for cars, it can work for you.

This is a guest post by Eric Ries, a founder of IMVU and an advisor to Kleiner Perkins. Eric also has a great blog called Startup Lessons Learned.

In Part 1, I described how to use five whys to discover the root cause of problems, make corrections, and build an immune system for your startup. In Part 2, I explained how to get started with five whys and how IMVU built a startup immune system by applying five whys for months and years. In this final part, I’ll describe how to apply five whys to legacy startups.

It’s never too late to start asking why.

When I explain five whys to entrepreneurs and big-company types alike, I sometimes get this response: “Well, sure, if you start out with all those great tools, processes and TDD from the beginning, that’s easy! But my team is saddled with zillions of lines of legacy code and… and…”

So let me say for the record: we didn’t start with any of this at IMVU. We didn’t even practice TDD across our whole team. We’d never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of “agile skeptics” on the team. By the time we started doing continuous integration, we had tens of thousands of lines of code that wasn’t under test coverage.

But the great thing about five whys is that it has a Pareto principle built right in. Because the most common problems keep recurring, your prevention efforts are automatically focused on the 20% of your product that needs the most help. That’s also the same 20% that causes you to waste the most time. So five whys pays for itself awfully fast, and it makes life noticeably better almost right away. All you have to do is get started.

If it works for cars, it can work anywhere.

So thank you, Taiichi Ohno. I think you would have liked seeing all the waste we’ve been able to drive out of our systems and processes, all in an industry that didn’t exist when you started your journey at Toyota.

And I especially thank you for proving that this technique can work in one of the most difficult and slow-moving industries on earth: automobiles. You’ve made it hard for any of us to use the most pathetic excuse of all: “Surely, that can’t work in my business, right?” If it can work for cars, it can work for you.

What are you waiting for?

The MaRS Center is seeing the second phase of development go on hold.

Phase II, which involved the development of a second tower on the west side of the property, has been cancelled, despite having been ahead of schedule so far. The reason given by Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc, the American developer behind the project, is that they just couldn’t secure enough leases to make the project move forward.

I first heard about this a few days ago when an unsubstantiated rumor was posted on Urban Toronto (a great forum that I lurk in). Then when I was up in the area yesterday I noticed that the site was pretty quiet, but still wasn’t sure. That was until I looked at the National Post this morning and it was right there on the front page.

The MaRS center is a confusing thing for tech entrepreneurs. There are a few startups in there, and it is home to a Celtic House office and RBC Ventures. They also have some really fantastic people working there, such as Peter Evans and Allen Gelberg, who have reached out to the startup community in a big way and who have provided a venue for things like Mesh and the Facbook Developer Garage.

My sense is that MaRS has a much bigger impact on the medical research and commercialization community, but I am not connected to that community and have no way of knowing.

MaRS was never a center for the tech community however. Simple economics make it impossible for such a high-cost building to truly have an impact at a community level. There are three old garment factories at Spadian and Queen that have had more of an impact. This isn’t a new phenomenon either, when I was building some of my first startups in Charlottetown, the provincial and federal government spent almost $35million building something called the Atlantic Technology Center.

In terms of the size of the city and community, the Atlantic Technology Center was even more ambitious than MaRS, and it was even more disconnected from the community. While some of the best startups were moving in to great historic office spaces, government contractors and service firms piled in to the Tech Center. It was high-cost, anti-septic and too ambitious.

The truth is, if you want to transform the tech community in a place like Toronto or any other city, you don’t need $20million, or $200million. For all the dreams of trying to turn some city in to the “next valley”, the point gets missed every time. You could put Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary or Vancouver on the world map with almost no money. Put a couple million together and find the right people to deploy it. We need to start loving our cities and the communities that are coming to life in them.

The problem is that government officials can ascribe value to real estate. We all love to build big things that people can see, touch and talk about. Until those same people can understand the value of a vibrant and productive community, then we will never get the participation that we truly need.

It is worth pointing out that MaRS has billed itself as a home for academic research and eventual commercialization, not simply a home for the tech community. I believe that the same fundamental principals are in play however, and that the task of building a commercialization engine in this city is not a real estate problem, but a social one.

I don’t know what this means for MaRS and their efforts in the community, but I hope it is a chance for them to step back and refocus. They have a great team that I believe will still do great things.

Clutterme.com a do-it-yourself website builder and domain purchasing site is for sale, on ebay. This isn’t the first startup to put themselves up on Ebay, Toronto based Tucows bought kiko.com in an ebay auction for almost $260,000 a few years ago.

Will Clutterme get bids well past $200,000? Probably not, but I think the service is worth something, and a registrar such as Tucows, GoDaddy or another could really make good use of it. Clutterme is what they say it is: A really, really, easy way to make a website. It is the kind of really simple website builder that your mom would be happy to use. They also have a really slick domain purchasing system set up that lets people get their own domain and website builder all wrapped in to one.

I have had a chance to hang out with Mark and Alex and I know they are going to be successful. They are hard working and passionate guys and they have stuck with this project through thick and thin. It is too bad that ClutterMe isn’t going to be their winner, but I will be the first one waiting to see what their next project is.

So head on over and place your bids. Someone with the right sales channel and a little elbow grease could make this thing work.

You can try a demo of the tool here.

2003 2nd place winner Genologics announced that they have signed a global agreement with Pfizer.

Thanks to the Vancouver Island Tech Park for the full details:

Under the terms of the agreement, GenoLogics will provide an enterprise enabled lab and data management system to capture, contextualize and integrate science data in multiple locations world wide. In addition to the ability to leverage data standards across labs by virtue of a common informatics platform, GenoLogics will provide Pfizer with the tools to enable web-based collaboration, bioinformatics pipelining, auditability and reporting of cross-science data.

Congratulations to Genologics!

Enterprize Canada is a partner of NVBC and Canada’s largest student-run business plan competition and entrepreneurship conference.

Information Video: Enterprize 2009

From February 6-8, 2009, join over 450 students from across the nation in experiencing innovation and entrepreneurship through Enterprize Canada 2009, Canada’s largest student-run business plan competition and entrepreneurship conference.

With an unparalleled prize pool worth over $100,000, the 2009 National Business Plan Competition will showcase some of the best and brightest business plans from across Canada. Transform your ideas into reality as you compete against over 100 teams for a chance at cash prizes, mentorship opportunities, or even an opportunity to audition in front of a panel of venture capitalist investors on CBC’s Dragons’ Den!

Important details:
Date: February 6-8, 2009
Location: Hyatt Regency Hotel, Downtown Vancouver
Business Plan Deadline: November 30 (business plan submissions)
Conference Tickets: Available October 29

Visit http://enterprizecanada.org for more details and to register.

One of my favorite HR books is 1001 Ways To Reward Employees. It goes through 1001 ways that you can recognize your team starting from ideas that cost no money to others that start getting more expensive.

One thing I’ve found with my team is the actions that you reward get repeated so you want to make sure you’re rewarding the right thing!

I have two high school interns, for example, who work with many of my customers. What I started doing a few months ago was putting a line at the bottom of all the emails that they send out that reads:

“How am I doing? If you’ve had a good or bad experience working with me please tell Andrew at (email).”

Every time they do a good enough job for one of my customers to write in, I print off the customer email, make a small announcement in the office and reward the intern $10 for the job well done.

For a high school student, it’s a nice reward and it can quickly add up as they continue to do a good job! Yes, I’m out of pocket a little bit of money but how much is customer satisfaction worth? The interns now have an incentive to provide better service because they know they will get rewarded for doing so.

Every quarter I also give all my staff members different appreciation gifts - some get Amazon gift certificates because they are big book readers, others get ebay gift certificates because they are constantly bidding on different items, and others get gifts based on what they’ve been talking about in the office (ie. movie passes for one team member who has been working very hard and needs a break!).

These gifts are usually pretty small in monetary value ($20-$50) but the recognition helps motivate them to continue to perform and keeps the morale high in the office.

The quarterly gifts have worked out well as a general “Thank you for your loyalty” but the performance based ones are having an even greater impact! My next challenge is figuring out how to implement a performance based reward system for technical and editorial staff who are not directly tied to customers or revenue. The behavior I reward will get repeated over and over again so I want to make sure I’m picking the right behavior!

If you haven’t already established a rewards program you should try it out! It can be as simple as someone getting a trophy on their desk until someone else earns the right to have it or giving people hand written, thoughtful notes. You can promise to do something out of character if you reach a certain goal and money, of course, is also a great incentive but remember it doesn’t have to be much to get them going.

Have you tried any kind of performance based incentive programs with your team members?

In March I did a profile of Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokemon (Work Irregular Hours To Find Inspiration - Satoshi Tajiri). I wanted to continue the story today by sharing one of Tajiri’s closely held beliefs: Do It Your Way.

No matter where young Tajiri went as a boy, it seemed he never quite fit in. He collected insects when most of his friends were cramming for college. He spent his money playing video games when most of the other kids were saving up. And, he always remained just a little bit to himself.

Tajiri was an outcast, a person the Japanese called otaku. He had one or two obsessions which preoccupied his time, and he shut himself off to the rest of the world. Tajiri always preferred spending time with his insects more than with people, or playing video games more than living in reality.

But while Tajiri’s obsessions worried his parents, who were convinced that their son was a misfit and turning the wrong corners in life, refusing to change his ways for anyone else allowed him to go on to create what would become the Pokemon phenomenon the world knows today.

To this day, Tajiri maintains his reputation as a quirky game developer. Although he no longer physically goes on the hunt for beetles, Tajiri’s habits are still a sign of his uniqueness. For instance, if you do not see Tajiri around the office for an entire day, it is because he is sleeping. “It’s the way I work,” says Tajiri. “I sleep 12 hours and then work 24 hours. I’ve worked those irregular hours for the past three years. It’s better to stay up day and night to come up with ideas. I usually get inspiration for game designing by working this schedule.”

Tajiri has always shunned the limelight. Even after his tremendous success with Pokemon, he kept his company in the same office it had always been: two floors in a simple office building. But Tajiri was never worried about what anyone else thought of him or his habits.

That is the same attitude with which he approached Pokemon. Before then, Game Boy was host to a number of games, but all of them were about competition. “I liked competition too,” says Tajiri. “But I wanted to design a game that involved interactive communication. Remember, there was no Internet then. The concept of the communication cable is really Japanese: one-on-one. It’s like karate - two players compete, they bow to each other. It’s the Japanese concept of respect.”

In Pokemon, none of the monsters are really evil. As Tajiri describes it, “If a horse runs over you and you die, then the horse is bad. But if you’re riding the horse, the horse is your ally. So, if you have a monster in your collection, then it’s considered good. But if not, it’s still not considered bad, because it could be your friend one day.”

That is why when Tajiri first pitched the concept of Pokemon to Nintendo executives, they could not quite grasp it. But, just like he when he was a kid, Tajiri refused to give in. He stayed true to his vision and always insisted on doing things his way.

Are you doing it your own way in your business?

Current TV featured TechStars tonight. They came out this past summer and filmed Foodzie and Ignighter and created this mini-documentary. Thanks to Current TV and Alpine Light Productions who produced the video.

Name: TeamRemind
URL: http://www.teamremind.com/
Region: Edmonton
Description:
The original version of TeamRemind was to help a couple people manage a slow pitch softball team. We wrote the original code in a few hours and the idea was hatched. At first, people didn't use it. Read more...

“For every dollar spent in failure, learn a dollar’s worth of lesson.”

– Jesse Robbins, Amazon’s former Master of Disaster

Summary: Get started with five whys by applying it to a specific team with a specific problem. Select a five whys master to conduct a post mortem with everyone who was involved in the problem. Email the results of the analysis to the whole company. Repeatedly applying five whys at IMVU created a startup immune system that let our developers go faster by reducing mistakes.

This is a guest post by Eric Ries, a founder of IMVU and an advisor to Kleiner Perkins. Eric also has a great blog called Startup Lessons Learned.

In Part 1, I described how to use five whys to discover the root cause of problems, make corrections, and build an immune system for your startup. So…

How do you get started with five whys?

I recommend that you start with a specific team and a specific class of problems. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. But you can start almost anywhere—I’ve run this process for many different teams.

Start by having a single person be the five whys master. This person will run the post mortem whenever anyone on the team identifies a problem.

But don’t let the five whys master do it by himself; it’s important to get everyone who was involved with the problem (including those who diagnosed or debugged it) into a room together. Have the five whys master lead the discussion and give him or her the power to assign responsibility for the solution to anyone in the room.

Distribute the results of five whys to the whole company.

Once that responsibility has been assigned, have that new person email the whole company with the results of the analysis. This last step is difficult, but I think it’s very helpful. Five whys should read like plain English. If they don’t, you’re probably obfuscating the real problem.

The advantage of sharing this information widely is that it gives everyone insight into the kinds of problems the team is facing, but also insight into how those problems are being tackled. If the analysis is airtight, it makes it pretty easy for everyone to understand why the team is taking some time out to invest in problem prevention instead of new features.

If, on the other hand, it ignites a firestorm—that’s good news too. Now you know you have a problem: either the analysis is not airtight, and you need to do it over again, or your company doesn’t understand why what you’re doing is important. Figure out which of these situations you’re in, and fix it.

What happens when you apply five whys for months and years?

Over time, here’s my experience with what happens.

People get used to the rhythm of five whys, and it becomes completely normal to make incremental investments. Most of the time, you invest in things that otherwise would have taken tons of meetings to decide to do.

You’ll start to see people from all over the company chime in with interesting suggestions for how you could make things better. Now, everyone is learning together—about your product, process, and team. Each five whys email is a teaching document.

IMVU’s immune system after years of five whys.

Let me show you what this looked like after a few years of practicing five whys in the operations and engineering teams at IMVU. We had made so many improvements to our tools and processes for deployment, that it was pretty hard to take the site down. We had five strong levels of defense:

1. Each engineer had his/her own sandbox which mimicked production as close as possible (whenever it diverged, we’d inevitably find out in a five whys shortly thereafter).
2. We had a comprehensive set of unit, acceptance, functional, and performance tests, and practiced TDD across the whole team. Our engineers built a series of test tags, so you could quickly run a subset of tests in your sandbox that you thought were relevant to your current project or feature.
3. 100% of those tests ran, via a continuous integration cluster, after every checkin. When a test failed, it would prevent that revision from being deployed.
4. When someone wanted to do a deployment, we had a completely automated system that we called the cluster immune system. This would deploy the change incrementally, one machine at a time. That process would continually monitor the health of those machines, as well as the cluster as a whole, to see if the change was causing problems. If it didn’t like what was going on, it would reject the change, do a fast revert, and lock deployments until someone investigated what went wrong.
5. We had a comprehensive set of nagios alerts, that would trigger a pager in operations if anything went wrong. Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. (You can read a cool paper one of our engineers wrote on this approach.)

A strong immune system lets you go faster by reducing mistakes.

So if you had been able to sneak into the desk of any of our engineers, log into their machine, and secretly check in an infinite loop on some highly-trafficked page, somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes later, they would have received an email with a message more-or-less like this:

“Dear so-and-so, thank you so much for attempting to check in revision 1234. Unfortunately, that is a terrible idea, and your change has been reverted. We’ve also alerted the whole team to what’s happened, and look forward to you figuring out what went wrong. Best of luck, Your Software.”

OK, that’s not exactly what it said. But you get the idea.

Having this series of defenses was helpful for doing five whys. If a bad change got to production, we’d have a built-in set of questions to ask: Why didn’t the automated tests catch it? Why didn’t the cluster immune system reject it? Why didn’t operations get paged? And so forth.

And each and every time, we’d make a few more improvements to each layer of defense. Eventually, this let us do deployments to production dozens of times every day, without significant downtime or bug regressions.

In Part 3, I’ll show you how to apply five whys to “legacy” startups.

In a pithy but perceptive post on O'Reilly ONLamp.com several years ago (which has, in some quarters, achieved almost iconic status), Derek Sivers wrote the following, which I think is an excellent way of clarifying why angels and VCs put much, MUCH less stock in "good ideas" than do the entrepreneurs who submit them:

"It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas.
I’m not interested until I see their execution."

This week’s Entrepreneur University comes thanks to Andy Marken. Andy has worked in front of and behind the TV camera and radio mike. Unlike most PR people he listens to and understands the consumer’s perspective on the actual use of products.

Andy has been a hit in the past for our blog having been featured three times before:

• Should You Start A Blog? - Entrepreneur University
• How To Do A Media Interview - Entrepreneur University
• How To Create A Sales Incentive Program

Today Andy shares his advice on how to write an effective business proposal:

“Unless you’re on the agency side of the business (which we are), you don’t think much about writing proposals. That’s for those people who have that job…you know sales.

Congratulations.

You just missed a major point of the book that can help you land a job, get programs/projects approved by management and assist you in showing your CEO and VP of marketing that you understand one of your jobs is helping to sell the company, the firm’s reputation, the organization’s products.

At the end of the day, you’re selling. You’re helping put dollars on the bottomline.

We’ve prepared and given probably hundreds of proposals in our 30 years in the business. And we’ve gotten our hands on an equal number of competitive proposals.

Surprisingly they are all pretty similar – an intro tailored to the prospective client with industry, competitive, company facts and figures. This is followed by a fairly boilerplate offering. Then it ends with a dramatic close – the contract/working agreement.

With today’s computerized operations the boilerplate approach is all too common. About as predictable and uninviting as the recommendations lawyers spit out of their systems for several thousands of dollars.

Of course that might be a little predictable since Sant is most successful for his development, sale and support of two widely used proposal automation systems: ProposalMaster and RFPMaster.

Fortunately, we’ve never used or even seen either of the programs. And after reading Persuasive Business Proposals we wonder why anyone would use them unless they were in the cookie cutter service/product business.

By reading, understanding and practicing the guidelines Sant has put forward in the book you realize that it is pretty easy for the recipient to spot a formula proposal and know that it wasn’t prepared just for them – boss or prospective client.

This edition of his book outlines the simple, effective techniques you can put into practice immediately to organize, write and deliver your proposals.

The professional proposal consultant lays out the secrets he has learned over the years and gives you a step-by-step set of guidelines you can use to develop a proposal that zeros in on the recipient and his/her wants and needs. It spells out how you can develop and present the value proposition.

In today’s internet-centric, global economy; Sant shows how you can develop/present an effective proposal without doing it face-to-face. He guides you through the development of PDF and HTML proposals that can be sent electronically.

Once you get past the idea that “you’re not in sales,” you’ll find the actual illustrations that he sprinkles throughout the book – good and bad – to be interesting, informative and useful.

In fact these are the portions of the book that we found most useful. Concrete examples of actual proposals where he painstakingly and clearly spells out what was presented, how it was presented and the strengths/weaknesses of the presentation and messages.

If you want to be humbled in regards to your own management or prospect presentations, you’ll find his Seven Worst Proposal Mistakes invaluable.

We read this section three separate times.

The first time was in passing, perhaps even morbid curiosity just to find out what others had done to “blow a deal.”

The second time was about a week later after reviewing a proposal our staff had prepared for a prospective client and recalling some of the stumbling blocks Sant had outlined in his worst mistakes section.

After reviewing the proposal again we went through Sant’s examples sections and compared good/bad examples with the presentation we were about to present.

With two of our associates we dissected and revised every section of the proposal and perhaps for the first time in 30 years viewed the information from the viewpoint of the person sitting on the other side of the table.

We did the same for an on-going client’s program for a project we thought they should carry out over the coming six months.

Suddenly we realized that the development and presentation of programs, recommendations and ideas wasn’t just an offshoot of our real jobs but was a key business function because if we couldn’t present the idea effectively to the client, we certainly couldn’t carry it out properly!

Granted at this point in our firm’s history we do very few proposals. Our clients now come to us because of our experience in our specific industries. Most of them come because of referrals.

But even then it doesn’t diminish the importance of developing and presenting proposals that zero in on the prospective client’s business needs and objectives. Even if you have broad credibility in your field accurate, effective proposal writing helps you reinforce that credibility with tailored reader-centric messages.

The book helps you think through the entire process from the first contact to the presentation to the follow up. And it lays the foundation for a solid, long-term relationship.

Since we are each selling ourselves every day, we believe Persuasive Business Proposals is a book you’ll want to pick up and read…a couple of times.”

What have you found works best in the business proposals that you’ve created?

Well, it’s over. StartupEmpire was, by most measures, a success. Almost 300 people in total come by to either the conference and/or the after party and we didn’t lose our shirts in the process.

I would be lying if I told you that putting StartupEmpire together was easy or even fun (despite the title of this post!). It wasn’t. We struggled with the format, got it wrong, and then had to re-iterate the whole thing in the final stretch. Taking a conference from 2 days to 1 day, and changing venue basically doubles the work.

We stubbornly pushed forward with the conference for a few reasons, but the biggest one was because of what we saw by the time everyone had piled in to those just-a-little-too-small chairs on the dance floor of This Is London at 9am. The crowd everything I had hoped it would be, a mishmash of students, entrepreneurs, angels and VCs.

A few people pointed out to me how this wasn’t the typical conference crowd, most people were taking notes like they were going to be tested on it, and the buzz during the breaks was unmistakable.

There are some people I want to thank, personally, for what they did to help make StartupEmpire happen:

Michele Perras put up with David and I and kept the rudder of the ship on course. Michele can run the entire operational side of a businessnes, but she is completely unique in that her abilities as an organizer/operator aren’t even her greatest strength: She is one of the most creative and biggest thinkers I know. When I dove in to minutia, she pulled me out.

Jonas, who has written this blog with me for the last year and a half has been incredibly busy with his own startup these days. When I called him and said “I need your help”, I wasn’t sure he would even have time to step up for the all-hands-on-deck call, but he did. He swooped in and took over contract negotiations, managed a few pages of TODOs and logistics and was there with me unfolding chairs and carrying in stage boards on the night before the conference.

David Crow, who couldn’t print name badges if his life depended on it, but who still takes the job every time. I’m not sure how Dave and I get ourselves in to these messes, but they usually work out. Dave is one of those guys who does what he says he will every time and comes back with more ideas.

Rick Segal who stepped up with the idea for StartupSchool and said “let me run with it”. Rick took some of the most dry content of the day (legal, term sheets, etc) and made them a conversation.

Howard Lindzon who said “do it” back in August when I mentioned the idea of a conference and put his name up to help lead the way.

Robert Montgomery who helped me navigate a few mishaps and provided support when we needed it.

The Student Volunteers. Wow, this was one of the most hard working and impressive group of folks we could have hoped for. They took the iniative as soon as they got there and filled in gaps we had left. From creating an ad-hoc system of responsibilities to a make-shift coat check, they handled it all and left me in awe. I’d hire these folks in a heartbeat. A few of them are involved with the upcoming Impact Conference, which looks fantastic.

The Veterans, those in the crowd who have raised money, knew how to pitch and frankly just didn’t need some of the early-stage content that was on stage. It made me so proud to see some of the tech community’s most seasoned entrepreneurs who get it and were there not for who or what was on stage, but so that they could meet and help the other folks in the audience who are just getting started.

Our sponsors, who got on board for this event before they knew what would happen with it, and who stuck around when things were changing daily. These companies and organizations are some of the few who truly believe in the tech community and who have proven they are ready to stick by it. When everyone is talking recession and doom and gloom, it is easy to run away and keep your money. Microsoft, HighRoad, Gowlings, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, JLA, OCE all have my gratitude. I dreaded making some of those phone calls two weeks before the event, but they all said the same thing: The community needs this, we want to see it happen.

Finally, all of you who bought tickets and believed we’d pull it off. I hope you weren’t dissapointed. I met some incredible people through the day and can’t wait to find out more about what you have up your sleeve.

Most of all, I am thankful to my wife Laurel, who did nothing but support me as I was going between making this conference happen and bringing Firestoker in to one of its most exciting periods yet. At times it was 2+ full time jobs.

Startups in Canada are not dead, investment in Canada is not dead, smart ideas and innovative companies are not gone. We are just getting started, that is something I believe more than anything right now.

You’ll probably learn more from this clip than two years at Harvard Business School. From HBO’s The Wire:

(Video: The Wire)

I bet you didn’t know this is Obama’s favorite TV show.

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