But I am ahead of myself…

Every entrepreneur has that moment of truth – the one that marks the decision to take the path to entrepreneurship or the path to job security with a larger employer.  And down the road a bit, most of us face another when deciding whether or not to go for growth, requiring new investment and increased risks.

My self-confrontation

My moment of self-confrontation came many years ago when deciding whether to leave behind the relative comfort of a good income from my one-person operation or hire my first employee which would allow me to spend my time in sales and in growing the business.  It was perhaps the most difficult decision of my young life.  Just out of college, managing a business that had paid my way through college and several years beyond, the cost of expansion would cut my take-home income enough to impact my life style and perhaps, if not quickly successful, cause me to put off my pending marriage.

Not a small decision. 

So, I got in my car with a small overnight bag, pointed toward Mexico, and headed to Ensenada, a place I had been to a number of times before, to find solitude for a short weekend just to think about the future.

[Email readers, continue here…]   Checking into an inn I had visited before, which was located right on the beach, I walked out to the shore and found a large, smooth rock, perfect for a long, hopefully productive sit.  And I sat.  I sat for five hours that night, thinking about the alternatives and what I really wanted for myself over time.

The momentous decision

After that evening of isolated, quiet thought, it was clear to me that I wanted to take the risks, to go for it, to attempt to build a big business, to leave my comfort zone.

Executing the plan

The next morning, I returned to the rock and sat.  Planning ‘how,’ now that I was comfortable with the ‘what and when.’  And after a few more hours, I had devised my personal plan.  I would hire one full time employee and one independent contractor for a start.  I’d take no bank loans or ask for any outside investment.  This would be entirely my risk to take unaided.  Satisfied, I left that rock, checked out of the seaside inn, and drove home excited and ready to execute my plan.

The result

The story is true. The outcome was excellent.  I grew that company to over fifty employees, even taking it public after a number of years, and later selling my interest in that first company to get into the computer software business, just at the right time to take advantage of its amazingly rapid growth.

But it all started with the decision on that rock.  If you have a life-changing decision to make, where do you retreat to think?

Images created with DALL-e, Microsoft Designer, using prompt: “A realistic 3D image of a smooth rock large enough for a person to sit upon, located at the shoreline of a beach cove, in the afternoon sun. A young, casually dressed man is sitting on the rock, contemplating his future.”

Ten tests for your business success:

1. Is your market identifiable and accessible? Test yourself as to whether you can identify the size of your market niche, and whether you can overcome the many barriers to access customers within your niche.
2. Where in industry life cycle? If your vision is for a product or service that fills a need in a mature industry, you may be flying against the prevailing winds as a market shrinks over time, taking your business with it.  Conversely, a fast-growing industry lifts most all good participants, making excellent companies excel even more and grow even faster, like a small plane flying at 150 knots with a 75-knot tailwind.
3. How large is your total market? If the total market for your niche is under $100 million per year, it is going to be difficult to build a $50 million business, even if not impossible. If the market is ten times that size, there is probably room for competitors to fight for dominance and still succeed if you are not number one.
4. Can you dominate that market? The dominant player in any niche controls pricing for all those under it, and often sets the risk profile for new entrants into the niche if the dominant player’s products or services fill the needs of customers at reasonable prices and quality.
5. [ Email readers, continue here…]   Have you created high barriers to entry? If your business is a “me too” entrant into any market niche, even the smallest success will soon attract competitors that will sap some degree of your potential growth. What can you prove as a barrier to entry for competitors?  Is it the advantage of time – years of development ahead of any competitor? A core patent or “thicket” of patents protecting your offering?  A strategic relationship with one or more of the largest customers?
6. Are margins high enough? Some great ideas just can’t make money and ultimately die for lack of profit potential.  Profit margins are higher for unique products or services early in the life of an industry niche, or for products protected by patents that prevent others from undercutting you simply by releasing a cheaper product.  High profit margins are a sign of high barriers to entry and attract investors and ultimately good buyers for your business.
7. Can this business grow to above $20MM to $50MM in annual revenues? This is a basic test for investors, separating your business from those with smaller visions.  There is nothing wrong with a vision for a smaller enterprise if not in need of professional investors to make it a reality.
8. Do you have a world-class management team? The best way to protect against failure is to attract a team with members who have experienced success and failure and can recognize the ways to manage toward success and avoid the pitfalls previously experienced from past failures.  From a professional investor’s perspective, the team should be able to be flexible, coachable and experienced enough to get a business through breakeven and beyond the next level of outside investment, greatly reducing execution risk.
9. Can you translate an idea into a compelling product? Some great ideas just cannot be made into a product at a reasonable enough price to attract customers.  And some attract early adopters but cannot pass into the mass market.  Sometimes, an idea is just too early for the available technology to make it attractive.  Early cell phones were large bricks that required a large carrying case and cost up to a dollar a minute to use.  As technology caught up, allowing miniaturization and light weight, mass adoption drove the price down and allowed the building of infrastructures everywhere to support the use of inexpensive minutes.  Do anything you can to develop compelling products or early prototypes as proof of ability to reduce your technology risk.
10. Is there an exit strategy for the investor(s) over time? There are many professional services businesses that make fine lifestyle opportunities for architects, doctors and dentists.   But these types of businesses are not attractive to potential buyers willing to pay a premium for businesses that are worth millions more than their asset value.  Building a great business to create wealth for the entrepreneur at exit, means thinking of the exit strategies from the beginning.  Who or what type of buyer would be attracted to this business if successful?   Great wealth is made from selling great businesses at immense profit for the entrepreneurs and investors who took the journey.

Note: All images created for this blog by Dave using AI prompts with Microsoft Designer (DALL-E).

We’ll get to my heartbreak in a minute. But first… There is a relationship between timeand money that is more complex than most managers think.  Fixed overhead for salaries, rent, equipment leases and more make up the majority of the “burn rate” (monthly expenses) for most companies.  Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues.

The art of good management.

There is an art to efficient management of a process, whether that is the process of bringing a product to market from R&D to production or developing a new product’s launch program.  What most managers miss is that every month cut from the time it takes to perform such tasks cuts the cost by the value of a month’s worth of fixed overhead or burn.

How about young or pre-revenue companies?

Although young companies rarely measure profitability this repeatedly, more mature companies usually can bring from five to ten percent of revenues to the bottom line in the form of net profit.  Ignoring the cost of product for a moment to make a point,  saving a month’s fixed overhead by making processes more efficient, could easily double profits for the year.

Time and fixed overhead:

[Email readers, continue here…]   That relationship between fixed overhead and production time is as critical as any other factor in the success of a young company.  Many of the start-ups my various angel funds have financed died a slow death, not because of poor concept but because of poor execution, wasting fixed overhead and draining the financial resources from the company coffers.

The financial pain of unplanned delays.

In the technology sector where I most often play, extended unplanned software development cycles account for the majority of these corporate failures.  We often accept that development schedules for young companies are almost always too optimistic.  But we investors often allow too little slack in our estimates as well.

Underestimating time to completion:

The great majority of young companies developing complex products such as semiconductor-based products, new software-based systems and technologies based upon new processes greatly underestimate the time needed to bring the product to marketable condition.  So, the CEO comes back “to the well”, asking for more money from the investors to complete the project.  It is not a strong bargaining position for the CEO to ask for money to complete a product promised for completion with the previous round of funding.  And professional investors often penalize the company with lower-priced down rounds or expensive loans as a result.

Now: my story of investor-product-market misfit:

I have one story that remains as vivid in my mind as when it happened several years ago.  Helping the founder create a company and build a much-needed product in an industry I knew very well, I served as chairman for the newly formed company, and along with my several rounds of early investment, led rounds of other angel investors in what I knew as a successful opportunity to fill a need in an industry I understood.

Growth before the VC arrived was not a problem.

The company grew to be well known in this limited niche and was operating at slightly above breakeven, when the Board and CEO decided to seek venture investment from what we hoped would be a first tier VC firm in Silicon Valley.  And we were able to secure that investment along with a partner from that firm joining our board.  It did not take long for the partner to become impatient with the relatively small size of the opportunity.  Dreaming of a company many times the size, he led the board to approve a complete reversal of course, even stating that the company should ignore the existing market niche completely and redesign the product for the broad Fortune 500 corporate market.

My role as chairman and acceding to the VC’s plan:

Every one of us on the board expressed our concern that the time to make these product changes and position for the new, broader market, would eat away all the company’s capital.  Promising the full weight of his VC firm’s resources, the board voted to make the change against the best judgment of those of us who knew the original market niche so well and thought that there was growth to spare in that niche alone.

…and the result of not listening to our gut?

So, the company turned the ship, slowly it seemed, as R&D worked to develop an appropriate product using the base of the original design.  Time slipped; fixed overhead continued.  And exactly as you’d expect, there came the time when the company ran out of money as it ignored its original market.

Surprise? 

Since the company slipped in its R&D schedule, the partners of the VC firm voted to not add new money to the company for the project.  Not long after, the company was sold in a “fire sale” amounting to slightly less than the debt on the books. All investors, including the VC firm, lost everything.  Do you remember a previous insight, that “the last money in has the first say”?  That is what happened within the dynamic of the board, and the result is that the board was completely at the mercy of the “last money” VC to save the company in the end.  Yes, there were other issues such as a protracted patent rights fight that drained cash, but the largest problem, inefficient use of R&D time burning fixed overhead, led to the demise of the company.  Lots of good jobs were lost and many investors including me were left with the question. “Why did the company abandon a profitable market, even if it could not generate $100 million a year in revenues?”

We will revisit the relationship between time and money again in future insights.

There is so much history behind this insight, and so many stories that illustrate this point.  Your first customers for any product or service form your reference base, the important group of allies that your marketing and salespeople rely upon when attempting to create buzz and make a mass market for a new product.

Panic! A new product launch…

If you’ve been involved in the launch stage of any product in the past, you should recognize the overwhelming feeling of panic when initial customers make first contact with complaints about quality, functionality, speed of service or other critical part of the new release.

Be ready to over-allocate resources to a launch.

The best advice I can give is to allocate all your resources to supporting the roll-out of a new product, at least for a short period.  Respond immediately to every question and complaint.  Capture every compliment and ask if you can use it for marketing purposes.  If the product or service is especially complex or expensive, send someone from sales or marketing or even R&D to the customer location at the moment of first use.

What if my resources are limited?

[Email readers, continue here…]   Of course, most of us have limited resources for such overwhelming support of a new offering. So, make the first release a limited one, sized so you can support it with existing resources, even if that means releasing it to only three carefully chosen customers at first.

And I am serious about the “…at all costs” admonition.

If you must provide a free backup unit, personal on-site service for a month, your personal cell phone number for the customer CEO, or any number of unexpected offers of superior service and accountability to those first customers, do just that.  Make your customer a partner in the process.   Send flowers to the staff in the department using the product for the first time if appropriate.  Call the customer CEO and thank him for helping launch a product so very important to your success.

The result of your efforts?

The result of doing this right will be to blunt criticism, reinforce compliments and provide a solid user base to build upon.  And the alternative is a lost opportunity to shine, perhaps a first wave of negative public reviews that post and report across the Internet, and a loss of reputation and goodwill that will take years to overcome.

So, empower your staff.

I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer to spend dollars reinforcing a great first customer’s experience than fighting fires in the marketplace after seeing negative reviews.  Make sure your entire staff buys into this mantra. “These first customers are critical.  You are personally empowered to do everything possible to exceed their expectations.”

This week’s insight came from personal experience and from a good friend who advanced the notion of the “teacher-customer” years ago.  I internalized this phrase, recalling the many times I had partnered with customers to design new feature-functionality into my hotel computer system back when such systems were brand new to the industry.  It was an ideal partnership for my growing company, as it approached one hundred employees on the way to almost two hundred fifty and selected special customers anxious and willing to spend time telling us of their pain points.

How it works:

Together we would work out solutions in the form of new functions, new controls, new reports, and new safeguards.  The customer would be the first to receive the new functionality in a new release.

Providing feedback to your teacher customer.

At the annual user conference, I would often make sure the entire user community present knew of these extraordinary collaborations by naming the teacher-customers in the presence of their contemporaries.   Sometimes the audience would cheer one of their own, knowing that everyone benefited from the extra time and effort spent teaching their vendor the needs of the industry not yet addressed by competitors or by our firm to date.

But there is a balance…

[Email readers, continue here…]   This is not to bend this insight into a claim that a company should wait to develop new, groundbreaking products and services until a customer asks for them.  If that were the ideal mode, many game-changing concepts would never have made it to market, including Fred Smith’s FedEx, first explained to a college professor in a paper returned with a C+ grade and the professorial comment that the idea was “good but impractical”.

Final thoughts:

Even if you are an expert in an industry segment, partnering with one of those rare, willing teacher-customers during the design stage for your proposed product or service is empowering and fruitful for both parties.

All companies whether service or product-oriented must fight to gain and maintain quality of product or fall to the bottom of the competitive heap.  We have explored feature-functionality.

Next week we will focus upon product quality and its effects upon the organization.

You’ll recognize the truism, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy” first stated by German Field Marshall von Moltke in the 19^th century.

This variant of the “battle plan” truism is important to internalize. 

A product at the concept stage contains feature-functionality that customers may not want or be willing to pay for, or which just might not work well enough for release to the public.

Plan for change; sometimes at the last minute. 

Allow for the cost and extra time for tweaks to the product or service.  Make the first release a limited, controlled one, so that changes and corrections can be made much more easily than if a general release all at once.

You may recall that Microsoft planned a new file system for Vista but pulled the file system from the product before release, and has not released the WinFS file system yet as of this writing, years later.  It is interesting to note that not many of us even remember this “feature” let alone miss it.

Surprises when the market meets your product.

[Email readers, continue here…]    And how do we protect ourselves against surprises that relate to feature-functionality as opposed to product quality upon release?  Early contact exposing friendly close customers to the product is critical to the development staff, marketing and even to the customer that feels closer to your enterprise because of the special treatment.  This is not to state that the customer tests a new product before we do internally, although many of us are surely guilty of that error.

Rush to market? “Cowboy coding.”

Back when I was developing early systems for the hotel industry, with the full cooperation of the owner and managers of a hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I would fly in from Los Angeles on Friday evenings, install new releases that night and make fixes on the fly in a real 24-hour environment.  Sunday afternoon, just about departure time for my scheduled flight, the hotel manager would drive me to the airport barely in time to make the returning flight.

My excitement in having developed so many new and “somewhat tested” features over a sleepless weekend was exceeded only by the enthusiasm of the entire hotel staff for the new and wonderful capabilities left behind after the magic weekend of non-stop programming.  These trips were so common and their aftermath so predictable (a late-night emergency repair call waiting for me at home upon return Sunday evening) that the hotel owner created a mantra that stuck with me and caused quite a laugh at my expense for years.  He would be sure to remind his staff, shaking my hand goodbye as I left in a hurry to catch that Sunday evening flight: “Wheels up, system down.”  And that’s the result of “cowboy coding.”  Ouch!

I am not advocating such brazen behavior today.  “Cowboy coding” is no longer common or permissible in the computer software industry, especially for enterprise systems.  But those were the days.

You have a great new product or service that you and your associates love.  Early adopters should climb all over each other for a look.

But are you HERE?

But what have you done to test the concept against the realities of the marketplace?   Have you developed a prototype, alternate pricing schemes, even a PowerPoint mockup to show to potential buyers?  I would be very, very nervous without testing the product in the market as early as possible, ready to make changes and enhancements before committing to production and release.

Even with a perfect product, is the market ready for this?

Will you have to be both the evangelist for the product and for its marketplace as well?  Few early-stage companies have the resources to do both.

One way to test your market early…

[Email readers, continue here…]   There are formal focus group organizations to help you, or you can attempt to test the market yourself by calling together a variety of potential users and asking a third party to facilitate a meeting where the product is exposed to the group and a conversation freely formed allowing the participants to agree with the premise or reject the product as useless to them, all without personalities getting in the way.

No matter how you plan to test, make that plan an integral part of the development cycle, as early as possible so changes will not be costly.  Do NOT rest until you test.

I love absolutes – statements with no wiggle room for gray-area responses.  Well, here is one of those, and it deals with market research first and foremost.

Let me tell you a short story at my own expense. 

In 1994, (I know a long time ago), I invested over a million dollars (two million six hundred thousand in today’s dollars) into a company whose entrepreneurs had a vision that I bought into for many reasons, not the least of which was that I had industry experience and understood the need.

How would this have sounded to you back then?

The first of several advanced products was a unique cell phone for hotel rooms, connected through a special “switch” in the hotel’s telephone room that was able to detect when a call was coming to the guest room phone and simultaneously ring the cell phone assigned to that room, no matter where it was at the moment.  A tent card beside the fully-charged phone greeted the guest entering the room for the first time, inviting the guest to pocket the cell phone for the duration of his stay.  The phone could be used for receiving incoming calls when in the restaurant, on the golf course or anywhere.  The guest could even make room-to-room or concierge calls as if dialing from the room itself.  These systems were not cheap as you might guess.

How this did sound to buyers back then…

Four- and five-star hotels loved the concept, which included redirecting outgoing calls from the cell phone by the guest to be sent through the hotel’s land line switch, making the hotel a miniature phone company with its attendant profits.

But wait for the mic drop…

[Email readers, continue here…]   Here’s where some intelligent market research might have saved the company and my investment.  Fast forward just a few years to 1996.  Hotels were installing the system; guests were satisfied, and the company was growing. There was even talk of some phone companies using the patented system for serving communities of guests, not just from a single hotel. But that was back to 1996.

What? Market research matters?

Those of us who lived through those times will recall the nationwide advertising campaign the suddenly carpeted the newspapers and televisions:   The first digital cell phones were released to the market, smaller, cheaper and priced with roaming plans that made it no premium cost to carry these digital phones to cities far from home.  Overnight, guest use of the room cell phones dried up and hotels were left with expensive switches, phones and chargers unused.  Soon the company was drifting toward bankruptcy as the leases for the systems expired, one by one.

I tell the story often to make this point:

I guarantee that there were tens of thousands of people in the country who knew long beforehand of the imminent arrival of the digital cell phone and could predict its effect upon usage, especially roaming use.  And yet the company was blindsided as it continued to invest in the specialized phone switch and specialized analog phone hardware, soon to be instantly obsolete.  Merely adapting the switches to new digital phones would not work, since guests no longer needed the service itself, being instantly self-sufficient.  People no longer called guests in their rooms but directly to their cell phones, even when the guests were on the road.

Technology advances cannot be stopped.

In this case, the competition was not from a company but from a new technology.  In most cases, it is the competitor with a better product, lower price, faster service, better reputation that is the threat.

So, what or who would be competitors?

When I listen to a pitch from an enthusiastic entrepreneur or read the summary of a business plan, one of the first questions I ask is about the strength of the competition.  Surprisingly, many entrepreneurs immediately respond. “There is no competition.”  Now, there is a statement even Alexander Graham Bell could not make about the telephone (which he pitched to his investors as a device to aid the deaf).  Bell’s competition was the written message, doing nothing, the telegraph and old-fashioned word of mouth.  To state “there is no competition” is always the reddest of all flags to an investor.  For the most brilliant new ideas and business plans, the competition is merely to do nothing. That response is quite different than one where competitors have paved the way and existing customers prove through use that the product or service is valued.

So, I lost lots of money for lack of market research.  Bell was lucky, but the pace of technology was so much slower then.  Just to make a well-earned point now that you have heard my story: know your market and competition or don’t spend a dime on anything else.  Oh, how I wish I had taken my own advice.

As a professional investor in early-stage companies, I have long discounted long, detailed

business plans in favor of a concise “executive summary” followed by a believable spreadsheet-based financial forecast projecting three to five years into the future.

Yes, everything does change between drafting that plan and its successful execution.  But flying without a map of some kind seems just plain too risky.

A story of “secret plan

I once joined the board of a company that was growing slowly, running beyond breakeven, but had not approved a plan for the current year, let alone attempted to develop one for the next.  So, the CEO had one of his own that he did not share, while the CFO had one for internal use that was never shown to the CEO or to the Board.  No wonder the Board members wanted to dig in and find who was communicating with whom, and who oversaw the map to the goal.

[Email readers, continue here…]   By the way, there was no goal understood by all or agreed to by anyone.  How do you compensate executives and all levels for successful accomplishments if there are no established steps toward the goal?  And how do you measure a person’s contribution to an unnamed goal?

Here’s the simple advice for you.

So, if you have not, create a concise map for your enterprise.  Start with a reasonable goal, usually expressed as a revenue number some number of years into the near future.  Assess your current resources and attempt to calculate the resources needed to accomplish the goal.

Do you need to raise money, focus spending upon only core projects that advance the company toward the goal, or bring in new management talent to make it happen?  Write these steps down in any form for now. We’ll explore a more organized approach in the next several weeks of insights.

Ten tests for your business success:

1. Is your market identifiable and accessible? Test yourself as to whether you can identify the size of your market niche, and whether you can overcome the many barriers to access customers within your niche.
2. Where in industry life cycle? If your vision is for a product or service that fills a need in a mature industry, you may be flying against the prevailing winds as a market shrinks over time, taking your business with it.  Conversely, a fast-growing industry lifts most all good participants, making excellent companies excel even more and grow even faster, like a small plane flying at 150 knots with a 75-knot tailwind.
3. How large a total market? If the total market for your niche is under $100 million per year, it is going to be difficult to build a $50 million business, even if not impossible. If the market is ten times that size, there is probably room for competitors to fight for dominance and still succeed if you are not number one.
4. Can you dominate that market? The dominant player in any niche controls pricing for all those under it, and often sets the risk profile for new entrants into the niche if the dominant player’s products or services fill the needs of customers at reasonable prices and quality.  [Email readers, continue here…]
5. Have you created high barriers to entry? If your business is a “me too” entrant into any market niche, even the smallest success will soon attract competitors that will sap some degree of your potential growth. What can you prove as a barrier to entry for competitors?  Is it the advantage of time – years of development ahead of any competitor? A core patent or “thicket” of patents protecting your offering?  A strategic relationship with one or more of the largest customers?
6. Are margins high enough? Some great ideas just can’t make money and ultimately die for lack of profit potential.  Profit margins are higher for unique products or services early in the life of an industry niche, or for products protected by patents that prevent others from undercutting you simply by releasing a cheaper product.  High profit margins are a sign of high barriers to entry and attract investors and ultimately good buyers for your business.
7. Can this business grow to above $20MM to $50MM in annual revenues? This is a basic test for investors, separating your business from those with smaller visions.  There is nothing wrong with a vision for a smaller enterprise if not in need of professional investors to make it a reality.
8. Do you have a world-class management team? The best way to protect against failure is to attract a team with members who have experienced success and failure and can recognize the ways to manage toward success and avoid the pitfalls previously experienced from past failures.  From a professional investor’s perspective, the team should be able to be flexible, coachable and experienced enough to get a business through breakeven and beyond the next level of outside investment, greatly reducing execution risk.
9. Can you translate an idea into a compelling product? Some great ideas just cannot be made into a product at a reasonable enough price to attract customers.  And some attract early adopters but cannot pass into the mass market.  Sometimes, an idea is just too early for the available technology to make it attractive.  Early cell phones were large bricks that required a large carrying case and cost up to a dollar a minute to use.  As technology caught up, allowing miniaturization and light weight, mass adoption drove the price down and allowed the building of infrastructures everywhere to support the use of inexpensive minutes.  Do anything you can to develop compelling products or early prototypes as proof of ability to reduce technology risk.
10. Is there an exit strategy for the investor(s) over time? There are many professional services businesses that make fine lifestyle opportunities for architects, doctors and dentists.   But these types of businesses are not attractive to potential buyers willing to pay a premium for businesses that are worth millions more than their asset value.  Building a great business to create wealth for the entrepreneur at exit, means thinking of the exit strategies from the beginning.  Who or what type of buyer would be attracted to this business if successful?   Great wealth is made from selling great businesses at immense profit for the entrepreneurs and investors who took the journey.