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The Next Big Thing Already Happened

by Tim Berry on October 23, 2009

in Back to Fundamentals, Business Mistakes

The next big thing is never a repeat of last big thing. It’s always something new and different. It’s an original, not a copy.

Copy

What if the next Facebook already happened, and it was Twitter? What if the next Netflix already happened, and it was YouTube.

I see this a lot in business plans: businesses out to become “the next this” or “the next that.” Among the recent ones to cross my desk were “the Netflix of books” and “Facebook for business.” Yawn. Boring. Unrealistic. Copies are so unoriginal.

A tag line referring to some existing big thing (”Netflix for books“) rarely works.

(Image: Stephen Gibson/Shutterstock)

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Choosing Between the Plan and the Opportunity

by Tim Berry on October 22, 2009

in Business Planning, Venture Contests, advice

Imagine yourself as judging a business plan competition. You read the plan, watch and listen to the pitch, ask questions, and consider the answers. What do you do, in that situation, with a team whose opportunity is in your opinion bigger than it realizes? What about a team whose opportunity is different from what it realizes?

Do you reward the team for what you’re thinking and they aren’t? For the opportunity they’ve built that they don’t see?

For example: a team is trying to do too much too fast, spreading the business way too thin, and therefore losing, in your opinion, a really interesting opportunity at hand. That opportunity would require focus, and they’re trying to do way too much.

Another example, almost the opposite of the first one: the team is focusing very narrowly on a hard market, not seeing what you think is a much more interesting and easier to address market in a different direction.

Is it the best business opportunity, based on the assumption that this team will listen and redirect? Or is it the best business plan?

Having seen similar situations as angel investor, I want to put my money where the opportunity is; as long as I can reassure myself that the team will see it as I do. But as a judge in a venture or business plan competition, I think I have to go by what the team says, not what I think it could have said.

What do you think?

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Lots of Words in Italics Meaning I’m Jus’ Sayin’

by Tim Berry on October 21, 2009

in Current Affairs, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Writing

Accents, real speech, figures of speech, colorful speech. Expressions. The way we use language fascinates me. I wonder if technology changes it?

I have questions:

  • Why is groovy so hideously and embarrassingly obsolete, but cool is still cool? Am I the only one who still likes Paul Simon’s song, Feelin’ Groovy?

  • Why does just sayin work so well, especially in Twitter, to smooth out rough edges, frame thoughts, and soften things? It’s almost like a Photoshop effect to make a photograph look like a painting. I don’t get it. I mean, I’m just sayin.
  • And why does is it just me seem to flow so well, almost like just sayin, as a statement softener?
  • How do you pronounce LOL? Can you use it outside of instant messaging and/or Twitter? Is it okay in normal conversation? And what about WTF and OMG, both acronyms using single-syllable letters instead of single-syllable words. I think I know the answer to that one. Not that there is a single right answer. BTW, I liked it when my daughter was studying in Madrid, and came up with QTF. Although I hate the F part of that.

And also, some simple observations, about language in my lifetime, and how it’s been changing.

  • I love the way Spanish has grown and prospered inside our modern American English. Starting with simple expressions like nada and the whole enchilada, there’s Spanish all over the place now, and I, for one, love it. I think it’s a living example of the kind of natural change that brought French into English a few centuries ago, and that gave us, gradually, the English we speak instead of the English they spoke in Shakespeare’s time. I like to see that living change. And I like it that it’s happened before. Deja vu. And here’s a test of popular culture: can you say deja vu without adding the Yogi Berra addition, all over again? Nobody seems to use the naked deja vu expression anymore. It’s verboten.
  • I hate the expression that something sucks, meaning that it’s bad. Do you know where that expression has been? And if you don’t, I warn you, don’t ask anybody who was a boy in the 1950s or 1960s. And then there are those related expressions, like bite me, or it bites the big one. Not good. It’s weird, to me, that these are now commonplace, and accepted by picky censors, like on network TV.
  • And, speaking of what’s acceptable on network television these days, I kind of like what Jon Stuart and Stephen Colbert have done with the beeped-out expression. Have you noticed how well they both use that? This stuff can be overused, but still, language and expression prevails.
  • And all the cleaned expressions, like bleeping and fricken, [Ed. Note: and the popular (among sci-fi fans) frak from the Battlestar Gallactica TV series].
  • Is it possible that all of the silliness related to code works and acceptable and nonacceptable has contributed to the twisting and distortions?
  • Which reminds me, the overuse of certain words becomes just silly. I listen to people on a bus unable to say a simple sentence without adding fuckin after every three words. What’s up with that? Doesn’t it get in the way? I think an actual conversation with all that extra burden would be exhausting. Do they even hear it?
  • I suspect that the worst language anywhere in this country, in terms of supposedly swearing and foul words and such, is found on the elementary school playgrounds, particularly where the fourth-sixth grade boys are playing?

I’m just sayin.

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5 Reasons Why I Like Forbes’ $100K ‘Boost Your Business’ Business Plan Contest

by Tim Berry on October 20, 2009

in Business Planning, Venture Contests

I’m leaving for New York city today to participate as a judge tomorrow in the Forbes.com Boost Your Business business plan contest. This will be my second year. I love it.

I like judging business plan contests. I’ve judged the two big contests in Texas, both the University of Texas Moot Corp and the Rice University contest. I’ve judged the University of Oregon’s New Venture Competition 12 times. I’ve also judged at Notre Dame University, University of San Francisco, and some others.

As I leave to judge this one, I’m thinking about five reasons why I really like it:

  1. It’s open to any U.S. business, MBA-related or not. The MBA contests are reserved for teams with MBA members. Forbes is for everybody.
  2. The criterion for winning is simple and easy to understand. The winner is the business that can do the most good with $100,000. That doesn’t make the decision easy at all, but it makes the competition clear.
  3. The public gets to vote; not just the judges. The public vote helped choose the five finalists from the 20 semi-finalists you can see on the Forbes.com Website right now. The vote is closed now but soon you’ll be invited to view the five finalists.
  4. The competition is available online. Anybody can go to the Website to see the presentations, questions from the judges, the entrepreneurs’ answers, and vote on the winner.
  5. The prize is simple and easy to understand: $100,000 for your business. It’s not an investment, or a loan, or goods valued at whatever; it’s half in good old fashioned money, and half in advertising.

You can see for yourself on the website: click here for the Forbes.com contest site.

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3 More Questions About a Business Plan Writer

by Tim Berry on October 19, 2009

in Business Mistakes, Business Planning

I posted 10 questions on this topic last week.  Today I have three more, on the same topic.

It sounds attractive, doesn’t it? Get a business plan by hiring somebody to do it for you? I can see how you’d think of that as division of labor, like hiring an expert to do design, or programming; have an expert do a plan. And you can do that, if you’re careful; but you really have to understand the underlying management questions, what you’re getting, and what you want.

Still, here are 3 more questions:

  1. What would you estimate to be the hourly rate of somebody with business experience, financial knowledge, and computer knowledge to do a competent business plan?
  2. How many hours would you expect that person to take?
  3. What would you get if you multiplied that hourly rate question by the number of hours question?

I don’t know about you, but I’d estimate $200 or so per hour for that first question. It would depend on the market, and the specific person, but we’re probably talking about MBA or CPA. I’d say 20-40 hours for the second question, although that depends too, on other factors. And for the third question, multiply $200 times 20 hours and you get $4,000.

So what are you planning to pay that business plan writer?  And how is it that I see business plan writing advertised for a few hundred dollars? How do they make money like that? And if the plan writers’ prices are that cheap, is the plan quality cheap as well?

(Photo credit: Artem Samokhvalov/Shutterstock)

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Define Your Strategy by What You Aren’t Doing

by Tim Berry on October 16, 2009

in Business Planning, Business Strategy

Somewhere somebody described to me the process in which Michelangelo imagined his David from inside a flawed block of granite marble that had a crack in it. The crack became the hitch in David’s arm as he holds the sling.

I think that’s something like real business strategy. The general type of business, what other people would assume it to be, is like the uncarved block of marble. The strategy is locked inside it. And the end result is created by what you take away.

So, for example, a restaurant’s strategy is about what it doesn’t do. One of my favorite restaurants serves very healthy fast foods. That’s what it’s doing. What it isn’t doing is sit-down table service, breakfasts, cheap meals, drive-through, date dinners, and on an on.

Then there’s the attorney I’ve dealt with for years who sent me to somebody else for IP law, and to a different person for litigation, and yet another for employer law. What he does is small business law. And what he doesn’t do is much bigger.

First you define your market in general terms by describing your target market segments. Then you define it better by defining who, within that segment, isn’t your customer, and why.

First you define your general strategy by what it is that you do. Then you refine it by defining what it is, within that general description, that you don’t do.

(Photo credit: K Patel 1980/Flickr)

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On Cities, Food, History, and Future

by Tim Berry on October 15, 2009

in Current Affairs, Economics

In honor of Blog Action Day, the video here is a 15-minute TED talk by Carolyn Steel, author and architect. Among the startling things she says here:

  • We lose about 47 million acres of rainforest every year. And at the same time, we lose about 50 million acres of farm land to salinization and erosion.
  • Half the food produced in the USA is thrown away.
  • A billion of us are obese while another billion starve.
  • 80% of global trade in food is controlled by five corporations.

How did we get here, and what are we going to do about it? It’s a short talk, but she tries to answer the first question and ask the second. It’s fascinating.

If you can’t see the video here, you can click here to go to the original on TED.com

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Apple Computer Role Reversal as Big Brother

by Tim Berry on October 14, 2009

in Business Mistakes, Current Affairs, Web/Tech

What delicious irony. The champion of the little guy has become big brother.

Remember the groundbreaking first Macintosh television commercial, in 1984, with the young woman throwing a hammer into the giant video screen on an evil big brother, smashing it into bits? There’s a role reversal going on.

Apple Computer has taken the establishment role in the booming new iPhone application market. First the iPhone, then well-publicized stories of trivial iPhone apps making thousands of dollars daily, and then the application review process got swamped. And now there’s Apple Computer, the gatekeeper, protector of the establishment, standing between all those developers with stars in their eyes, on one had, and admission into the app store, on the other.

The original idea of review was a combination of protecting the software from crashing, and protecting the Apple store from embarrassment. Ever since the stories of iPhone application fortunes first broke — I fear it was with a fart app making $10,000 a day — the software developers are flocking to iPhone apps. Of course I have no special knowledge, but from the outside looking in, it would seem like the crush of applicants makes long waits, unfair rejections, and inconsistencies inevitable. I’m guessing Apple’s private-sector resources to manage the tidal wave are completely overwhelmed. Mobclix, which tracks iPhone applications with analytics, is reporting that there are more than 85,000 applications approved by Apple so far, and the wait has gone from days to weeks, and is rising.

On a Mobclix blog about the iPhone applications market, iPhone app developer Max Zamkow says:

iPhone developers live in constant fear of receiving an email from Apple with what can only be termed the ‘Death Sentence’: “We’ve reviewed your application and we have determined that this application…will not be appropriate for the App Store.”

He’s developed an app called FruitShoot Lite that lets unhappy iPhone developers (or anybody else) vent their anger by mock shooting at mock apples on their iPhones. But the default fruit target is a banana. And it passed the review.

It’s a couple of months ago now that Jason Calacanis, celebrity entrepreneur and blogger with a known taste for controversy, lashed out against Apple in The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts, in which he complained not just about the “draconian policies” of the iPhone app review, but also four other sins including “anti-competitive” practices with MP3 players, “monopolistic” dealings with telecommunications (a reference to AT&T’s lock on the US iPhone), “hypocrisy” of blocking competing browsers on the iPhone, and blocking Google voice on the iPhone.

TechCrunch highlighted a dumb-but-approved “upskirt” app last week, mocking the glaring inconsistencies:

Let me just get this straight: A hilarious satirical app made by the Someecards guys cannot get approved because it contains cards that, for example, mock Hitler. But an upskirt app is just fine? That is so ridiculous.

Yes, ironic indeed. On first glance, I look at the rising tide of complaints and I think they’re all delusional: Apple is a business, not a public service, and it owns the iTunes store, so it can do what it likes. Developers waiting weeks to get into the market, living in fear of rejection after all that work? It’s Apple’s clubhouse, so Apple can admit whoever it wants. However, as the whole thing starts to sink in, I have to add that Apple Computer has made this bed for itself, so it deserves to lie in it.

Not that I don’t like Apple. I’ve been a serious Mac user twice, first for about 10 years from the beginning in 1984 until the middle 90s, and again for the last two years. I like the Mac, love the iPhone, love Apple’s products in general. However, I’ve never quite accepted the odd phenomenon of Macintosh and Apple as crusade. The whole phenomenon of some connection between operating systems and good (Apple) or evil (Windows) has always seemed a bit creepy to me. After all, they’re just products for sale. Apple, IBM, Microsoft … they are all big companies.

Apple Computer, however, has actively catered to this odd canonization of brand throughout its history. It wasn’t for nothing that the Macintosh anti-big-brother image is part of our cultural heritage. It wasn’t for nothing that IBM became “big blue” and Microsoft “the dark side” … Apple spent a lot of thinking time, effort, and money on building that anti-establishment tinge to its brand. And it’s not totally crazy to suggest that Apple managed to change brand to aura, or halo.

Live by the anti-establishment brand, die by the anti-establishment brand. What we’re seeing, I think, with the rising protest of developers against Apple, is something akin to a jilted lover, or the famous Shakespeare epithet about a woman scorned. It seems like the backlash is whipped to a frenzy with Apple in a way that it might not be if it were some other big company, or, say, the US Patent and Trademark Office. Companies move slowly, government agencies move slowly, but not Apple Computer. The woman with the hammer in that 1984 commercial, crashing big brother and all. Say it isn’t so. Disillusion.

(Photo credit:wikipedia)

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10 Questions Before Hiring a Business Plan Writer

by Tim Berry on October 13, 2009

in Business Mistakes, Business Planning

No, it’s not that I have anything against business plan writers for hire. I spent some years doing that, although I never just wrote the plan; I always facilitated and translated and coached planning. (Unless, of course, you’ve read my post on my worst business plan engagement, in which case you’ll know I’ve used “never” and “always” wrong in the above).

  1. If you wanted to get your body in shape, would you hire somebody else to eat better and exercise regularly?
  2. How would you feel about sending somebody else to the doctor to be examined to determine your health?
  3. How do you feel about pre-packaged vacations?
  4. What would you tell your ghost writer? How long would that take you? Could you type that out, maybe? Could you do it in YouTube?
  5. How will you deal with questions that come up, after the plan is done?
  6. How much good will a single one-time plan document do you?
  7. What will you do about revisions later on? Will you just accept a plan done once, and never revise?
  8. How long would you estimate is the average shelf life of a written business plan, before it begs for revisions?
  9. What would you do about regularly reviewing and revising a business plan that some outside business plan writer had written?
  10. How would you get a team of people committed to a business plan that an outsider wrote?

(Photo credit: Linn Currie/Shutterstock)

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Compassion Should Be Universal

by Tim Berry on October 12, 2009

in Business Ethics, Current Affairs, Work Life Balance

I’ve posted about the Charter for Compassion before. In this post about a year ago, I said:

Do you want to help solve one of the world’s great problems? This has to be as important as clean energy: religious fundamentalism turning into violence and hatred. The darker side of humanity seems at its worst when powered by misguided religious fervor.

“Misguided” is the active word there. All major religions have some variation on what I learned as the golden rule — do unto others as you would have others do unto you– at their core. Despite that, some religiously oriented groups preach violence and hatred.

And now it’s just about a year later, and I stand by those words. And that organization, the Charter for Compassion, is now organizing a second annual global event, for Nov. 12.

Can we think about compassion for just a moment? Compassion is caring for other people. It’s very easy to translate into a business context if you just think about caring for customers, employees, vendors, and owners. There’s no down side. Right? I’ve called it empathy on occasion and posted here and here on this blog about how empathy can help a business.

And of course it’s even more obvious that compassion is essential to happiness, good relationships, mental health, and the survival of the human race. Right?

Why then does it feel oddly out of place to be writing about compassion here, as if I’m getting too “touchy-feely” or something like that? That’s weird, isn’t it? Is there anyplace where compassion isn’t a good thing?

The two-minute video here is very eloquent. And if you don’t see it in this site, there are links below to take you to the source.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

Compassion isn’t liberal or conservative, or Western or Eastern, or about one particular god or many gods. It’s not a code word for something else. It’s the human condition. I hope.  Here’s more from the site:

There is an urgent need for a new focus on compassion.
Bringing together voices from all cultures and religions, the Charter seeks to remind the world we already share the core principles of compassion.
On November 12, thousands of people across the globe will listen together.
Participate and engage with the Charter now at charterforcompassion.org

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