You are here: Home / Archives for Opinions

Good Plans Start With Good Questions

January 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Have a big idea for your business or even a small one?  Then you probably need a plan to get you there.  And for me, the easiest way to build the plan is with a series of questions.

Who should you ask these questions? Anyone who is involved in your business will probably have valuable input.  Ask them in a working session with your employees, advisory board, or on paper by yourself. The key is to  answer them honestly.  It is ok to admit you or your business isn’t perfect.  Understanding your weaknesses is sometimes more important then knowing your strengths when you start to build your strategy.

What type of questions do you need to ask??  Here are just a few to get you started:

Ask about your customer

  • Who is your target? Remember it is not just who do you want to sell to, but who you want to avoid. Some prospects are too small and others are too large. Both will force you to adjust your business process, and the change for one client may not be worth the effort in the long run.
  • How big is your market? How many potential customers are out there?

Ask about the value of a customer

  • What will the average customer spend with you?
  • How long will they stay with you? Is it a one-and-done transaction, or do customers come back time and time again?  If you are in a business with a high repeat percentage, you can afford to spend more to acquire a customer.

Ask about your goals

  • How many new customers do you want? “More than I have now” is not a valid answer. There is no way to build  a realistic plan without a specific goal.
  • How many customers do you need to be profitable?

Ask about hour your sales process works?

  • How many interactions does it take to close a sale?
  • What percentage of good leads become customers?
  • How many new customers can you handle before you have to add another person or piece of equipment?   Sometimes the answer to a business goal  is not more customers, but simply more profitable ones.

How often should you go through this process? At a minimum, you should take time once a year to evaluate where you are and where you want to be. Need some help with questions?  Download some of our checklists and forms or give us a call.  We would love to ask you a few questions.

Filed Under: Business, Guest Post, Opinions Tagged With: , ,

Business Ethics: A Review of “These Shining Lives” at Indy Fringe

August 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For nearly a decade, one of the leading examples of both entrepreneurship and the burgeoning art scene here in Indianapolis has been the IndyFringe festival. The business model of this live theater program is brilliant. Instead of just selling tickets, IndyFringe also sells “backer buttons.” Theatergoers wear these pins, which serve as a walking advertisement but also as a way to raise money for the organization.

The upshot: 100% of door proceeds go to the artists themselves.

One of my favorite plays this year at IndyFringe is These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich. It’s a tale of the interplay of booming business, changing culture, and personal lives. But unlike the runaway success of IndyFringe, the production reveals a potential dark side of financial success.

Lives opens and closes with the charmingly optimistic Catherine Donahue (Ale Hudson), who explains with starry eyes that this play “begins like a fairy tale, even though it isn’t one” and that it “ends like a tragedy, even though it isn’t one.” The lead character is a young mother in the rapidly-changing world of the roaring twenties. Instead of staying home with her young children, she decides to explore the opportunities newly available to women of her era. Catherine Donahue takes a factory job with the promise to make more money than her husband. She is employed in the skilled handicraft of painting numbers on the faces of watches.

Along with guileless Pearl (Laura Elsworth), prudish Frances (Lauren Boughner) and sassy Charlotte (Eliza Griener), Catherine begins a decade-long career at the Radium Dial Company. Their fate is not just to detail watches at the stunning wage of eight cents per piece. In addition, the four women are slowly, unwittingly poisoned by the radioactive element that seeps into their bodies and eventually claims their lives.

Lives is a morality piece about the ethics of organizations told through the lens of the victims. Eventually unable to perform their duties, the company doctor declares each one unfit and ends their term of employment. The power of the Radium Dial Company—like the radiation from the paint—impacts the entire community. The women eventually must travel to nearby Chicago to find a doctor willing to tell the truth, and a lawyer willing to consider their case.

Every business faces ethical issues with regard to products, services, pricing and compliance. But the true story of the Radium Dial Company is one of choosing profits over people, choosing business efficiency over the moral imperative to protect and preserve life. In any organization of any size, it is easy to say “I am just doing my job.” Yet These Shining Lives reminds us of a more fundamental duty than to follow orders: to check any directives we receive against our own morality.

The play is beautifully and earnestly presented by the cast, who are all students at Carmel High School. Director Maggie Cassidy stages the play with clear intention despite the limitations of the Fringe format, using blocking and directed paths to create space without complex sets. Particular mention is deserved for Gus Leagre (Tom Donahue) and Eliza Griener, whose impassioned monologues as supporting cast bring a surprising dimension to the play.

See These Shining Lives on the main stage at the Phoenix Theater. Support Indy’s entrepreneurs and artistic creators at Indy Fringe!

-Robby Slaughter

Filed Under: Community Celebration, Opinions

Don’t Judge a Page by Its Cover–Or Do We?

August 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’ve all heard the saying, Don’t judge a book by its cover. But, isn’t that exactly what we do? Have you ever seen someone pick up a book and quickly put it down because it just didn’t look interesting?

Facebook plays a significant role in marketing products, services, and well, people. The latest layout of a Facebook page allows for some creativity in enhancing the brand’s image through the cover photo. Some companies, like Coca Cola, have different product pages as well as different pages for products in different countries. All in an effort to enhance brand identity. Do we quickly judge a company we are not familiar with when we look at their Facebook cover photo?

Here are a few cover photos that we found that we think enhance brand identity. What are some of your favorite Facebook covers? Does your business Facebook page cover enhance your brand?  

Filed Under: Business News, Opinions

Entrepreneurship means Time Management

July 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s an absolute rule of business: people who are able to be successful are those who are exceptional at managing their own time. I’d argue that there are no examples of successful people who aren’t also extremely conscious about how they use their time. But why is time management a second class topic in entrepreneurship? Why do we place our own personal productivity behind topics such as financing, team dynamics and product design?

I think that the main reason entrepreneurs don’t like to talk about time management is because they think it’s simply a matter of discipline. “I know how to work hard”, we tell ourselves. “I just have to find the right idea, the right team and the right support to make it happen. That’s when I’ll manage my time well.”

Of course, this is not how business works. We have to fail over and over again in order to find success. If we’re not efficient at identifying options and discarding those that don’t work, we’re not likely to build a growing business.

So what should an entrepreneur do? Here are some time management tips that apply best to people who are building a business:

  • Set daily goals, the fewer the better - Establish at most three major tasks you want to accomplish that day, and do them first. The tremendous advantage to this approach is that you aren’t just working, you are working on what you decided to pursue—not what just popped up ahead of you.
  • Practice explaining everything – It’s crucially important to have an “elevator speech” for your business model ready to go at all times. But really, all of the aspects of your business deserve soundbites so that you can share them with others and get quick feedback. No matter how brilliant an idea or important a story, no one will listen if you can’t tell it with brevity and clarity.
  • Say No – Building a business means having more opportunities to pursue than hours in the day. Turn most of them down. Say “Thanks, but I need to decline.” Ask to be contacted next year instead. Close the door, ignore the phone, reply to emails tomorrow and work.

If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, you had best be an expert in managing your own time. Be conscious about where you spend your minutes. Once gone, you can never have them back.

Robby Slaughter is a productivity expert based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Robby will be speaking at the Entrepreneurship Celebration Conference on October 18. Click here for conference details.

Filed Under: Community Celebration, Educational, Opinions

Define your Market and Your Competitive Advantage

June 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By John Marske, M&I Bank
EAC Board Member

The most challenging aspect of any business plan consists of convincing investors of your company’s competitive advantage. The first step is defining your target market. Are you targeting the mass market or are you targeting a specific niche market with unique, specialized needs? Once you define the market (in terms of total dollars), you must state a percentage of that market that you reasonably believe you can capture. Is the market growing, or is it a stagnate market?

The second step is defining your competitive advantage to capture that market.

If you are a start-up, it will be extremely difficult to convince investors that you can compete on price, unless you have some innovative, patented technology that makes you more efficient. After all, what will prevent larger firms, with a lower cost of funding, from duplicating your strategy?  Few investors will believe that price-conscious customers will be loyal customers. 

If you’re not competing on price, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition?

Do you have an existing customer base that will follow you in your new business? You need to communicate the size of that customer base, and communicate why they will remain loyal to your business.

Do you have an in-house knowledge base superior to your competition? Prove it. If you can’t prove superior knowledge to investors, how will you be able to prove superior knowledge to potential customers?

Do you have a specific branding strategy that will promote customer loyalty? Outline a financial plan for promoting that brand.

Do you have a unique product or service that is creating a whole new market that doesn’t currently exist? How do you define that market? Is your product a compelling substitute product for an existing market?

If you can answer the above questions with factual research, you are well on your way to completing a solid business plan. All that remains is inputting the numbers to convince yourself, as well as potential investors, that you have a sustainable business.

Filed Under: Business, Opinions Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Focus on Entrepreneurship

May 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Frank Howard, L5 Solutions
EAC Board Member

For those of you who have not taken the opportunity to visit the home page of the EAC, it lists the following beliefs that are core to the organization:

  • Entrepreneurship is the economic engine of our economy.
  • Entrepreneurial education is a lifelong learning process, starting at elementary school and progressing through adulthood.
  • The right support, provided at the right time, will empower individuals to choose an entrepreneurial path that will culminate in innovative, sustainable businesses that create jobs and build a healthy economy.
  • Supporting entrepreneurial businesses will create an economically vibrant community.

Fortunately, we are not alone in these beliefs. Effective July 1st, the state of Indiana now has a “Young Entrepreneurs Program” that was recently signed into law. It establishes a program that focuses on community economic growth while providing entrepreneurs from state educational institutions an opportunity to start a business in Indiana. Details can be found in House Bill 1251. In summary, it provides a program through the IEDC where at least once a year there is an auction where communities can bid on businesses/startups that have gone through the application process and met certain requirements. The selected bid is legally binding between the two parties.

What do you think about this program, its goals, and possible success? Does it conjure images for you as it did me… a version of the TV program “Shark Tank” with Indianapolis Mayor Ballard sitting next to Carmel Mayor Brainard talking trash about why their deal is a better one for the home grown Indiana entrepreneur.

Like all ideas, the difficulty is in the execution. Regardless of the program’s success, I am excited that we are not alone. We are fortunate enough to live in a state that sees the value of entrepreneurship and makes it a focus of our state’s economic development.

To learn more about this bill see the following state website links:

Filed Under: Business, Business News, Opinions Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why Write a Business Plan?

February 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Kevin Jones, Small Business Development Center

Young entrepreneurs, and even some older, experienced ones, sometimes balk when asked to write a business plan. They may argue that taking time to write a business plan diverts them from actually working on the business itself – developing product details, lining up vendors, making customer contacts, etc. Or they may be in a dynamic industry in which a written business plan would be out of date as soon as the ink is dry on the page. The impetus for writing a business plan usually comes from an outside stimulus, such as the need for financing or the prize package that’s awarded to the winner of a business plan competition. The financial incentive is certainly a viable motive for preparing a written business plan. But there are several other very good reasons why an entrepreneur should take the time and put forth the effort to develop a solid, written plan. Writing a plan forces you to consider important issues and to answer fundamental questions about your business before you actually start the business. As such, it helps you to organize your thoughts, as well as your resources, on paper before you start spending money – whether it’s your own or an investor’s. A business plan enables you to communicate the specifics of your business idea to others, including business advisors, potential suppliers and major customers, and family and friends. Your plan will provide a “yardstick” against which you can measure your progress during the initial years of your business. And research has shown that businesses that start with a formal business plan are considerably more likely to succeed than those that go without a written plan. Perhaps the most important reason an entrepreneur should take time to research, organize and write a business plan is that he/she will get a tremendous boost in confidence with a business plan in hand. The confidence–building effect stems from all of the reasons cited above. Entrepreneurs are often described as risk-takers. That doesn’t mean they thrive on taking unnecessary risks. Successful entrepreneurs are those who take calculated risks. A good business plan reduces risk.

What are your thoughts on writing a business plan?

Filed Under: Business, Opinions Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Ultimate Risk / Reward Proposition

February 2, 2011 By 1 Comment

By Ellen Dunnigan, Accent on Business

Starting your own company is perhaps the ultimate risk/reward proposition. When done successfully, the rewards of creating a profitable and valued business, beginning your legacy, designing your own future, and even being one’s own boss are pretty cool. When unsuccessful, the damage done to one’s finances and psyche are sometimes irreparable.

Even in the best of economic times, starting a new company is a gamble. While studies seem to contradict each other, there is at least some level of agreement that more than a third of all new businesses fail within the first five year.  Here at the Entrepreneur Advancement Center, we help people understand the risks of missing or incomplete business plans, lack of funding and market research, work and life imbalance, and other such limiting factors.  

Despite these risks, thousands of people start their own business everyday. Some do it as a change of pace, others out of necessity. Some want to be their own boss while others are chasing a dream or see an unmet need.  Success is not guaranteed, but for many that’s what makes taking the leap all the more exciting. How about you? Why did you go into business for yourself and what advice do you have for those who are just beginning?

Filed Under: Business, Opinions Tagged With: , , ,

Exhausted from Fatigue

January 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Terry Anker 

It seems we are all talking about the economy — or at least blaming it — more than ever.  And that’s certainly understandable.  It is one of the rare entities in which we all participate.  Whether we are employed or unemployed, rich or poor, young or old, or anything in between, we are all participants in the economy.  Manipulated by government oversight or left unfettered, the way in which we build, accumulate and distribute resources (the Economy) has a profound impact on the way that we see ourselves and others.

 The last two decades or so I’ve spent a good part of my life in the business of sponsoring new companies — or rescuing old ones — as they venture off to find their way in the world.  Routinely, people ask for the magic formula to success in startups.  I wish I had it.  Sometimes it is an especially important or impressive idea.  Sometimes it is an especially important or impressive individual.  But in each successful startup, there are common denominators.  One is an enormous passion for success — or least, a healthy fear of failure.  Another is a dauntless mindset about achieving outcomes (regardless of how that is defined).

 There are many dangers that are likewise common to all fledgling enterprises.  Certainly a lack of capital or vision or responsiveness or talent all come to mind.  But let me add to that list, fatigue.  Successful startups are the ones that persevere without exhaustion.  It is no simpler or more difficult for a particular successful entrepreneur than a failed one; but the successful somehow pushed off fatigue, until her objectives were met.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  Certainly he did not intend that we should not fear the impressive Nazi war machine.  I think it might be an appropriate interpretation to say we shouldn’t give up the fight until we’ve fought it.  Entrepreneurs achieve success by running through the finish line, not by losing confidence in the 23rd mile.

Reprinted with permission from Current Publishing, LLC

Filed Under: Business, Business News, Opinions

Close to Home

December 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Source: Current Publishing, LLC (www.youarecurrent.com).

While this newspaper routinely calls for us to spend our time and dollars close to home, when does the valuable booster club spirit become hateful provinciality?  As I write this document, the official launch of the Entrepreneurship Advancement Center, EAC (www.goentrepreneurs.org), will have officially occurred.  A 501 C3 dedicated to the economic health and vibrancy of Hamilton County by advancing entrepreneurship interest and working to ensure entrepreneurial success, the EAC will take over the high school entrepreneurship education effort and business plan competitions heretofore coordinated by the Hamilton County Alliance.  The group hopes to build upon the Hamilton County strength of encouraging business ownership and growth with reasonable tax policy, community amenities, and regulatory support.  The theory goes that young people steeped in entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional employment should be encouraged (and especially encouraged to do it here at home).  Who could disagree with an effort aimed at education?  Who could complain about an effort to create jobs in our fine state?

Surprisingly, some have suggested that we in Hamilton County should not invest in supporting the fledgling tycoons in our midst – instead they proffer, we should focus our considerable efforts on other Hoosier communities that might not be as well positioned as we.  Imagine the argument like this:  we can’t waste any coaching or training time on Payton Manning until all the players on the team have caught-up to his skill level.  If he atrophies, oh well.

Certainly, no players on a team are unimportant; but winning programs do not delude themselves through egalitarian idealism.  Success for all comes from focus on strengths and not from obsession with weaknesses.  From my point of view, as Hamilton County leads central Indiana benefits.  Cautionary tales about burnt out urban cores with thriving suburban communities (consider Detroit), should reflect more on failed urban policy than upon aggressive suburban innovation.

Filed Under: Opinions Tagged With: , ,