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The Hedgehog Principle
In “Good to Great”, Jim Collins (citing Isaiah Berlin) compares a fox to a hedgehog. The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox spends its day figuring out how to attack the hedgehog in various cunning ways, but the hedgehog remains safe because it knows that it is better than anyone else at one thing: curling up... [Read more...]
Business Process and Continuous Improvement
At Franchise Foundry, we spend a lot of time talking about process and thinking about how to improve processes. We do this for our partner businesses and we do it for our business too. For example, yesterday I was talking to the marketing team about how we could streamline the application process for potential franchisee candidates. The current process... [Read more...]
Raising Money for Your Business
A couple weeks ago a friend asked me to answer the question, “Where is the best place to raise $30k, aside from FFFs (Friends, Family, and Fools)? The person asking the question included this with his question: I have found it difficult to find lending on such a small amount for my business. VC’s and Angels usually aren’t too keen... [Read more...]
Feedback
This is a guest post by Clayton Blackham, partner at Snapp Conner PR. I first met Clay while I was at Sharp Analytics. He crafted a PR strategy that helped us gain great momentum in the market - momentum that I believe helped us sell our business to iCrossing. Your company might be small or fledgling. There’s a good chance that you wear a lot of... [Read more...]
A Change in Plans
I’ve been thinking about business plans lately and how they are both extremely important and irrelevant at the same time. It reminds me of something my high school algebra teacher used to say to us whenever someone would ask, “Are we ever going to use this in real life?” He would always respond that algebra was like Phys Ed for the... [Read more...]
Social Entrepreneurship
As I have said before, I’m not creative enough to come up with business ideas. I admire people who can come up with one good idea after another. I also admire people who can come up with business ideas that have a “double bottom line” — ideas that generate a profit and are socially conscious. I had the opportunity to participate... [Read more...]
It’s like Jim Collins Commented on My Blog
Well. Not really. In fact, not at all. But I did find this Inc. article where Jim Collins is being interviewed about entrepreneurship and he talks about Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur. Here’s what he says: I think we saw the best of entrepreneurship in the ’80s. I invited Steve Jobs to my entrepreneurship class at Stanford in 1988 or ‘89.... [Read more...]
The Yo-Yo Entrepreneur
Most of us are familiar with the concept of a yo-yo dieter. This is the person that you hate to eat dinner with because he tells you how many calories are in the entree you just ordered. He probably orders a side salad (dressing on the side, hold the croutons) but can’t leave without dessert. Or maybe the person you’re thinking of is the... [Read more...]
Questions Guy Kawasaki Wants to Ask Entrepreneurs
I saw that Guy Kawasaki tweeted about an interview that he did about ghost tweeting. The fact that Guy ghost tweets really bothers some of my friends and it seems to bother Shaq too, who is quoted in this NYT article as saying: As for the temptation to rely on a team to supply his words, he said: “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters.... [Read more...]
Ideas vs. Execution
I recently had the chance to talk to a university class about entrepreneurship. I think talking about business might be the thing I like most, so having the microphone for an hour and half was a lot of fun. During my 90 minute rant about entrepreneurship, I somehow started talking about two types of entrepreneurs: idea people and execution people. In... [Read more...]
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