Joanna Van Vleck has revamped her business plan at least half a dozen times, made a new take on an old idea work sensationally, and is riding triple-digit growth during this recession.
So, when she humbly offers 10 lessons for startups, it’s worth listening.
Joanna is founder and CEO of the Trunk Club, which is a network of fashion experts helping men buy clothes in a new-world model using Skype video to give clients the online convenience with personal service. 
She’s 25 years old.
She spoke to my start-your-business class at the University of Oregon the other day. I say “humbly” for real, because she started her talk apologizing for presuming to offer lessons. But she had her list ready. With slides.
1. Have a plan
Interesting, because Joanna has changed her plan several times, wholesale revamped her plan, but she always had one. She switches the world “vision” for “plan” sometimes; meaning that she goes in and out of granularity. Recognizing that plans change doesn’t mean not having them. Expect it to change.
2. Find out what’s important to you.
Plans may change but you want to keep your eye on what’s most important to you. Joanna wanted to do it fast, and well. She loves the style business but she doesn’t aim for a lifestyle forever business. She wants it to grow. She thinks about when and how to exit.
3. You have a lot of time, they have a little.
Joanna said:
In the beginning, you will want to connect with the “been there, done that” people. Remember this: you have a lot of time. They have a little. Respect that. If you tell them you will need 15 minutes of their time, make sure you only use 15 minutes. It will make them respect you more as a young entrepreneur.
4. You don’t always need experience in that industry.
This is interesting to me, because it contradicts my instinct, and a lot of generally accepted wisdom. But she did it, so she can talk about it. She wanted style and clothing, but she didn’t work first in clothing retail, and didn’t have a partner who did. She just dove into it, learned on the fly, and changed the model as she discovered what worked.
5. Start Young
She’s 25 years old. She came out of college and built this business. She could talk about the problems of dealing with people who didn’t take her seriously because of her age. Instead, she says:
Being young is very advantageous. List the benefits of being young and risking it all. If all else fails, I will get a real job at 28.
No family, no kids needing shoes, no mortgage; easier to get by. Less underlying risk. This is the time of life to take these chances.
6. Fail often, and fail fast.
Joanna started with one business model, found it didn’t work, revised it, then found that didn’t work, and revised that one. She knows what this familiar-sounding fail-fast idea means. But she adds:
Personally, I do not believe in failing. I believe in learning from things that don’t work, or don’t work the way you intended them to. The sooner you fail, the sooner you will succeed.
7. Ask for help, respectfully
I know from experience — she was a student in my start-your-business class four years ago — that Joanna does this right.
8. Replace “selling” with “promoting.”
It is never comfortable to think of ourselves as a sales person. In fact, I never had official sales training. What I have learned is that you become a lot more effective when you think of it as promoting.
9. Are they all green lights?
I love this:
A wise mentor of mine once told me that if you wait to leave your driveway until all the lights on your route are green, you will never leave. You must jump and build your wings on the way. You will hit red lights. They are momentary and are times to stop, adjust and get ready to go again. Learn to embrace the red lights.
What a great example!
10. Never stop learning or listening.
No argument there. Why do I think it’s ironic that she’s only 25 as she says this? But then, before I get too uppity with my gray hair and all, she’s the one who’s got the business growth of close to 300% during a recession.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Dear Tim:
Friday, April 24, 2009 at 12:59PM Tokyo Time
My what an attractive website you have!
Joanna sounds like an “up and at em” kind a gal. I was struck by her decision to use SKYPE.
As for the plan, I wonder whether there is a solopreneur plan to be built that provides a seamless integration between the vision, the architecting of the website, the website metrics, and excel sheet projections of key data?
Yes BP’s for web solopreneurs seems like a fertile field. Internet marketer, Alex Jeffreys has done a reasonable job of inculcating the idea of planning forward using a google calendar to map out action steps to achieve a result over 9o days.
This type of thinking works if your into whipping yourself when you get behind and it definitely helps grow a presence in terms of blogging or twittering.
It does not seem to be the same though as a plan that gives you a sense of direction & expectation of success.
For example, when I was a banker we used to use Robert Morris Association ratios to compare companies performance in the same industry. Is there a viable way to do the same for web niche categories?
And now with tools like Market Samurai you can compare what it will take to move your newbie sight up in the organic search rankings.
A more internet marketing enlightening question might be:What “edge” do solopreneurs have to have to achieve an “edge” & thereby increase their % chance of success enough to justify the time suck?
Perhaps the “edge factors” can be broken down into: 1) personal drawing power; 2) product “fit” [the product's ability to solve a problem or delight user(s)]and 3) execution of a crafted plan.
There should be ways to accumulate and analyze solopreneuring data for on web businesses.
Anyway, with the advent of the web we have a new way to think about sole proprietoring.
So far I find it exhilarating but not lucrative. I suspect that this has a lot to do with execution but I’m also sure that if my plan were better formed I would have more convince in it and myself which would cogito ergo sum my success.
Respectfully,
HAL
BTW, I’ve joined a business for over 60 group on Ning with a guy from France… you might help inspire it if and when you reach this turning point (I’m almost there)
I like the idea of helping geezers, especially after the failure of Wall Street quants to get their notional values and complex derivatives delta hedged.
Great advice – nice to see someone learn adapt. Too often people become paralyzed by “their plan”. Business changes and you need to react. Our business recognizes the same issue in how small business uses QuickBooks to manage inventory. The settings are fixed and manual – making it difficult to adapt to changing conditions. We use the data that resides in QuickBooks to determine the direction to optimize their inventory.
The key again as mentioned above – remember what is important strategically and constantly steer your business in the right direction.
What I find so compelling about this story is the fact that the advice offered is nothing new (DO NOT mistake that comment for me saying the advice is UNIMPORTANT — it’s fabulous advice!).
What this woman did was IMPLEMENT! She took ACTION! She was RELENTLESS! She actually applied those things that most of us already know to be true.
We all can take a valuable lesson from Ms. Van Vleck’s example.
Invaluable info