Doing Things Differently

After five and a half years I have to say that so much has changed. I have certainly grown up in some ways and learnt even more but now it is time for me to spread my wings and do so thanking the Ariadne team and all our clients, friends and investors.

My appreciation of the struggle that entrepreneurs face daily is very real as I now consider that path myself. It’s not only about raising capital. It’s about finding the team you can rely on, the proposition to engage investors, commercial partners and customers, the passion to keep the conviction alive and the openness, the wisdom to know when to adapt or stick your path and the humility to see luck, fortune and good things when they happen.

When I joined Ariadne I was certainly not aware of the intricacies of the venture world. I can’t claim to be an expert now, rather far from. In some ways I wish I knew only what I knew then because it made me question why some things were done the way they were and had the bliss of naivety. In many other ways I appreciate how people have turned to me for guidance. Thank you for that opportunity.

Five and a half years ago there was no iPhone, iPad or iCloud and no Google Plus (I still don’t understand Google Plus!). Facebook was the upstart while MySpace (remember them?) was going gangbusters. Pintrest and Instagram didn’t exist and Zynga was probably only a swear word in some far away land. In the time since then we have seen markets and behemoths (Lehmans, Woolworths, Border) fall, corporates have had to face burning platforms (Nokia, Yahoo!, RIM?) and we have seen the absolute rise of social media and its impact on all things digital and physical (FourSquare, Instagram, Twitter). In the five years I have worked with some of the smartest people I have ever met and know that many of them will go on to build amazing businesses and do phenomenal things.

I’d like to stay in touch with the people I have met in this journey while at Ariadne, do drop me a line if you wish to twitter the old fashioned way or Tweet me in the new (@Dordje). My contact details are on LinkedIn.

A common and increasingly asked question I find myself getting from start-up entrepreneurs is “Do I need a CTO or technologist as a co-founder, can I not just outsource the pure technical development and own the IP?” I have 3 key reasons, based on experience supporting start-ups through funding and commercial success, as to why I think the answer to be “Yes, absolutely”.

I can think of at least a dozen such conversations just from the last quarter of 2011. I can also point to an equal number of examples where early stage companies had made the decision to outsource only then later had to reverse the decision and to in-house their technology.

So in my experience, yes… you do need a technologist as a key part of your founding team – assuming of course you are in the digital/online/technology world. There are, of course, many advantages in having an outsourced development team (either on or off-shore) but the actual ownership and delivery of the product needs to be owned in-house. I am not alone… I had a chuckle when I read Charlie Crystle’s blog (a Founder/CEO/Hacker) where he posted: “Two posts ago I lamented the news that a local startup might outsource their core dev.” So to the why… Read more…

Getting a proposition wrong can be expensive and damage a product brand and yet so regularly I see great companies with great ideas and products miss the mark in their proposition.

One of the most difficult things for start-ups is building, testing, sharpening and reinforcing their proposition. All too often the entrepreneurs get the concept, design the software and launch it without spending the time on the “Marketing”. This is most often because people believe marketing is for the reserves of the big corporates or the focus of the washy people who could not do the business or science degree at university. This could not be further from the truth however. Marketing, positioning and proposition is fundamental to being able to get a going concern to really go! Why is this?

Developing the proposition is about defining the success criteria, understanding what you are selling and shaping the pitch to the right audience. It is about taking a step back and thinking about what it is you would want someone to tell you about your own product. Come to think of it, how many brands, services or products do you think you could probably define better than their own adverts do? Probably quite a few. This is the focus of proposition shaping.

There are typically 5 things that start-ups get wrong when they start to go to market (for investors and/or commercial development) which mean that people scratch their heads before they reach for their wallet, we need to rectify those 5 problems and sharpen the proposition and align it to our buyers.

The 5 typical problems I keep seeing in misaligned propositions are:

1) Thinking big and forgetting the baby steps that get you there

• the real market opportunity is won one sale at a time are you constantly refining your sale or slapping it out there?
• go-to-market is about aligning your achievable market to your vision, are you building credibility?

2) Spread too broad and lack focus

• fix-all solutions are hard to buy or too good to be true, is your proposition tight?
• tight propositions mean new services can develop in parallel, are you giving too much away in solving too much?

3) Forget that your audience don’t know your product

• even high tech can be simplified beyond technology into enablement, can your mother understand the proposition?
• don’t assume your market knows the problem like you do, are you selling from a common starting point?

4) Defining the proposition as a nice to have not a solution

• too much emphasis is put on the extra benefits, are you selling lots of benefits or a solution to a specific problem?
• people feel the need to over validate with external information, are you forgetting the original “spark” that led to the solution and how you solve the problem?

5) Don’t align the message to the solution

• proposition pitches try to be catch all and complex people buy simple, are you selling a solution or a service?
• people are looking to solve a problem, does your product proposition enable champions and evangelists?

When one understands these 5 concepts you can work to counter them in a tight and refined proposition. This means you can task your sales team, enable your marketeers and impress your investors. A tight proposition is one that is about what you can do for your customers, how you can help them solve a problem they have and how they can rave about your amazingness.

I am running workshops with entrepreneurs to test their propositions and help sharpen them with a focused strategy. Over a 3 hour session we:

1) benchmark for common mistakes
2) rebuild the proposition to be solution-centric
3) define the simplified messaging for enablement and championing

Do you want to run through your proposition or have a benchmarking session? Do get in touch.

For the sports-focused society that we are, I am surprised that there are not more high-paced businesses that make use of business coaches and mentors. I have come across very few people who admit to seeing the benefit of leveraging an outsider as a confidante, advisor and coach but rather the opposite “We are doing okay, why would we need one?”. Is okay enough or do we want to be brilliant?

I get the very real sense that in British business culture a business coach or advisor is a sign of weakness or failure and yet we would not expect any budding sports person to pursue a sporting career without a coach – how are they different? Sports requires agility, fitness, clear mind, focus, determination, vision and passion. Business requires the same, doesn’t it?

When I was competing in martial arts I had three coaches, one for my mental preparation, one for perfecting the practice of forms (Kata) and the third to focus on my sparring. I really benefited from their ability to help me think about the problems and where to find the opportunity in my opponent’s flaws. I could lean on them when I needed to and I felt supported by their stability and their perspective. While I was psyching up for the match or competition, they stayed calm and kept my focus. They knew my strengths and weaknesses and could help me train on improving between matches.

In business there are no matches, the battle is by day, minute and second. There is always a competitor looking for the same client, wanting to provide a better or cheaper product. The requirement to stay on top of ones game is relentless. There is more information sharing and data available and we are making decisions at breakneck speed. Business is now 24/7 and any successful or aspiring business person is always connected. Just like when I was warming up for the next sparring match.

In this environment, the need for perspective is great and yet the environment is not conducive… this is why businesses need coaches.

Today I ran a proposition and position workshop with a client over a three-hour session. The benefit of working with an advisor is that my client could take the step back and look at their business from where I am standing… on the outside. They had tried to do the work internally but they had not prioritised it, didn’t have the external perspective and had taken a long time to get not very far. This is not uncommon, rather the opposite!

Today we were all really fired up, inspired and extremely productive. Net-net: we transformed the proposition into one which is exciting and strong, they felt inspired by their business and they have a tool-set with which to go sell their kick-ass product. This is something that otherwise would have taken months to get to.

Obviously I would think that businesses need coaches and mentors given my profession as a coach and psychologist but I fell into this through looking for investment worthy businesses and kept coming across high-growth businesses that had not stopped to take a breath and as such were putting their own fires out. The most rewarding thing for me in coaching is seeing the clients eyes light up, their inspiration is at full tilt and they realise they probably do have the answers to the problems, it is the space and perspective they don’t always have and that is what I bring – along with some humour and external insight for validation.

A great business is fit, self-aware and agile. A mentor is someone who challenges, encourages and validates before the market gets to do that. A coach is someone who prepares for the fight and for the challenge. They provide the stability and insight by not being in the same boat rocking to the same waves or standing on the same burning platform.

If you feel like you are running a 200mph marathon and want to up your game, and see business as a mental and economic sport, have you thought about a mentor or coach as an investment rather than a weakness?