1. Be flexible. Be coachable.

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Dave Berkus

If you missed last week’s launch, you can read the introduction to this blog under “Introduction to this blog” above and catch up.  Each week, I’ll start with a numbered insight, such as the very first one below.  These are divided into eleven stages of an enterprise’s life.  We begin with “IGNITION”, stage one.   As always, I look forward to your comments posted at the end of any blog posting on the site…

                As an early stage investor, the first test for me is whether the entrepreneur is flexible in both the plan and execution of his or her vision (since from experience almost everything about a business plan changes over time), and whether the entrepreneur, no matter what age or experience, is coachable.

                Doctoral theses have been written on this subject.  Early stage investor groups often list these traits at or near the top of their list when filtering opportunities for investment.  And I have numerous stories from personal experience that reinforce these two traits as the most positive indicators of future success in business. 

                In my book, “Extending the Runway” (Aspatore Press, 2006), I explore the thesis that there are five basic types of resources an entrepreneur must exploit in growing a successful business: time, money, process, relationships and context.  Understanding the effects of each upon an entrepreneur and early stage business plan is critical.  Being able to adapt to the realities and changes in the fast-moving environment is essential.  

 [Email readers, continue from here…]    Flexibility: the context in which a business plan envisions the enterprise in its marketplace is constantly changing as new products and services challenge competitors to innovate and adapt.  A plan written last month may easily need tweaking this month to recognize changes in the marketplace, the central context of the plan itself.  Everything happens faster these days than even a few years ago, especially in the arena of technology, where many new businesses are developed each month to solve problems or take advantage of opportunities that existed at the moment of an entrepreneur’s vision for the future.

                And the money and time required to bring the young company from idea to market extends out as changes require rethinking the plan.  We’ll explore this reality in later insights as we explore the stages of business development. 

                One of the best indicators of future success for an entrepreneur and an early stage idea is the quality and depth of great relationships with industry veterans or technology gurus, or experienced successful business leaders.  Those relationships would be impressive but worthless if the entrepreneur was not coachable, open to suggestion and criticism from those who have experience enough to surface the issues unspoken but obvious to the coach. 

                And finally, there are always ways to improve the process of design, test, roll-out and marketing a new idea.  And many potential coaches out there have made mistakes in these processes at the expense of their employers or even their personal savings.  Since we all learn from our mistakes, it seems reasonable that we should learn from the mistakes of others, particularly those who freely offer their experiences as lessons for our enterprise.

                I’ve seen entrepreneurs go through the complete process of raising money for a business from investors, many of whom were experienced and well beyond just friends and family, only to ignore all advice and execute a flawed business plan to death, ignoring the pleas and attempts at coaching by others including those investors. 

                Don’t be one of those.  Be flexible and be coachable.

Posted in Ignition! Starting up | 3 Comments

IGNITION… Introduction to this blog.

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Dave Berkus

 This blog is more than a labor of love. It is the result of insights gained in over fifty years as an entrepreneur, fifteen of them investing in other entrepreneurs with world-changing ideas and passion enough to move mountains.  Over seventy times I’ve bet on one or a group of those entrepreneurs, each time finding new stories and new insights to add to my caldron of entrepreneurial goop. When I speak as a keynoter at entrepreneurial or investor conferences, or when I conduct one of my half day seminars in early stage corporate governance, I weave some of these epoch stories of entrepreneurs good and bad into my presentations (of course leaving the names out the stories).   And universally, my audiences come back to me with comments that they remember and internalize the stories – and these short insights.   

Along came the social networks and the tolerance for a story-in-a-second, or if not in a second, then in 140 characters or less.  The entrepreneurial success stories didn’t get shorter, but the insights became sharper.  Is this the new communication norm?  Should all professors of business now find ways to communicate in the verbal shorthand of the Twitter generation?  Can a teacher push out enough information and expressed passion for a subject in such a short burst? 

I thought it was worth a try.  And so Berkonomics was born, partly of necessity to adapt to the shortened attention span of a young generation of entrepreneurs, and partly in an attempt to create memorable, repeatable, viral transfers of insight to this new audience of easily distracted but completely dedicated business professionals. 

Like a small stream feeds the rivers into an ocean, these short bursts have been parsed into arbitrary, random groups of 101 insights further divided into eleven stages of a business from ignition to liquidity (startup to sale).  The sum of these, the ocean of insight, is Berkonomics.    How do we feed the streams into the rivers that roll into the ocean of content?  We start with a tweet, a Facebook posting, a Plaxo or LinkedIn post.  Each leads to a link to www.Berkonomics.com, where a bit more space is devoted to each burst for those with the time and inclination to explore more.  The ocean in this case is my book,  Berkonomics, containing the same 101 compact ideas further expanded with stories about entrepreneurs and their businesses that have embraced or violated these rules, these insights, and created an opportunity to tell yet another story to reinforce one of the lessons in business insight represented by the whole of this effort. 

Every one of us has a story to add to this mix, one of passionate entrepreneurism, sometimes inside an existing larger corporation, sometimes alone on a kitchen table or back room desk.   And it is a sure thing that many of us will have cogent, insightful additions to this caldron, culled from their own experiences.  There’s a place for these in the blog, and I welcome any and all for others to read and learn.  This adventure we call Berkonomics should be fun and informative.  Let’s all try to add a bit of each and stir the brew in the process.

Posted in General | 8 Comments