Meetings With Remarkable Men

I saw a strange French movie in 1979 that made a big impact on me. It was called Meetings with Remarkable Men and told the story of G.Gurdjieff, a philosopher who traveled through Central Asia in order to discover spirituality through dance, music, near-encounters with death and by meeting remarkable people along the way.

Over the last 24 hours I have had 2 encounters with remarkable men. Both related to my last blog entry regarding how to handle a crisis. I learned something new.

The first encounter occurred yesterday with a friend who is fighting to recover from a life-threatening accident that left his body and brain damaged and has forced him to have to re-evaluate his entire life. His courage and his determination inspire me and remind me to stay focused on what is most important here in life. His re-evaluation of his career has also reminded me of how important these types of questions really are. When we are forced, due to a crisis, to re-examine things at a fundamental level, then we sometimes get a chance to start over and re-create our lives and our businesses as we would ideally have them rather than after a pattern that merely came about over many years. Crisis is a valuable opportunity and an important process if you want to grow your business or accelerate your own personal development.

The second encounter was in a meeting with a business associate. We met over coffee this morning and discussed plans to collaborate on some workshops and marketing projects. Two things were remarkable. First, his energy level was contagious to the point that I left our meeting charged with a sense of urgency and a new determination to attack the problems that this crisis has presented. Second, as we were parting he said “Thank you for being you”. I realized that in light of the current crisis, my true self - my true colors are being freed and are shining through. Adversity brings out the best in us if only we let go and don’t fight it.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Rick Salmon is an energetic entrepreneur who believes that this beautiful world that we have created needs our help. Subscribe to this blog to receive frequent updates and to join in the work. Learn more at www.ricksalmon.com

A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste (Part 1)

My own company is in a crisis right now… a real crisis with tough decisions to make, sleepless nights to endure and an impending sense of doom that is like a nasty hangover. A bit of bad luck, bad timing, some strategic mistakes and a global financial crisis have all combined into a witch’s brew of a startup company cash-flow mess. The squeeze we have gotten ourselves into is not all that uncommon for most small business leaders and entrepreneurs. A friend said “just get used to it… the bigger your business, the higher the stakes and the smaller your odds of survival”. Thanks for the depressing thought.

Now before you all start to worry that I am about to throw in the towel, shipwreck the business and go take a job flipping hamburgers at McDonalds, just relax for a moment. I am attacking this situation head-on because...

A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste.

Throw away 1000 years of history

When I arrived in Trento, Italy on Thursday the first thing I noticed were the city walls. Since the medieval times they have kept out invaders from the north and conquerors from the south. When you are reminded of your ancient past each day, perhaps it makes it harder to understand that THE PAST IS NOT THE FUTURE.

I was a speaker at a venture event in Trento this week that was sponsored by the local government and businesses. This region is making a fantastic effort in their attempt to break from the traditional thinking of old Italy and Europe and to foster innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. While perhaps this may sound novel, the reality of changing peoples’ beliefs and even values is daunting. In almost every single meeting I had with entrepreneurs it only took about 3 to 4 minutes before they started by telling me how difficult it is to succeed with a startup in Italy. It was almost as if they felt it was their task to convince me that this was impossible!

Entrepreneurs are Losers

A few weeks ago I was standing in line at the store behind two boys. They were probably 13, maybe 14 years old and these guys were really cool. They wore low-rider pants that constantly tried to slide down to their knees, big T-shirts advertising their favorite vampire heavy metal bands. One had a skateboard under his arm while the other had a ski hat tugged down over his ears in spite of the warm day. I overheard them talking about a friend of theirs who had recently quit the skateboarding scene and moved on to something else (I think they said he quit skateboards and started chasing girls…). As they talked about him, they both stopped, looked at each other and simultaneously lifted their right hands to their foreheads. Placing their thumbs against their foreheads and extending their index finger straight up, they had both created the big “L” sign. This stands for “Loser”. Having both agreed on this point and signaled what they thought about it, they smiled to each other and went on to talk about something else.

Are Entrepreneurs Losers? Today I will be speaking at a venture event in Trento, Italy. There will be 20-30 startup entrepreneurs who will pitch their business plans to investors in the hopes of getting capital for their young businesses. To be really honest, most of them will not leave this event with any promise of funding. Many will be frustrated and go home and wonder if it would be better to go back to the university or research environments they came from and live the easy life on student loans and government grants.

Only a fool would tell you that being an entrepreneur is easy. It takes a ridiculous amount of blood, sweat and tears in order to create a successful business when you start with nothing but a great idea. If first-time virgin entrepreneurs knew what they were getting into and how much hard work is required, then most would probably never even attempt a startup. This is not a career of choice for the weak of heart.

Entrepreneurs are Losers… but only if they quit. The only real failure for any entrepreneur happens when they abandon their idea and quit. “Success” for an entrepreneur is not any specific event or goal to be achieved. Success is the process of learning how to create businesses. Becoming a “successful entrepreneur” means that you know how to do this kind of work - you know how to start with a good idea and how to persevere with it until it becomes a real company with real value for it’s owners and customers. It means that you know how to do the dance and to make it rain on your cornfield.

Don’t be a loser. Learn rather than quit. Find a way to adapt or change your business until you eventually get what you are seeking. Successful entrepreneurs are winners.

For more about the Trento venture event and other funding opportunities for entrepreneurs, contact Europe Unlimited (www.e-unlimited.com).

For more information about how I work with startup groups to help them accelerate their startup business, contact me: rs(@)ricksalmon.com

Pitch your Baby

I have a friend who just had his first child. He’s over the moon about this baby and OK, all his friends are happy for him too, but he sends out constant emails with photos, short video clips, frequent little stories about first baby steps. There are facebook pages and even twitter messages from time to time. This is a great example of pitch and even the most experienced entrepreneur in the world could learn a thing or two from a new parent.

This is how you should pitch your startup company… just like it was your newborn baby child. Pitch your business with enthusiasm, pride, a strong sense of purpose and a belief that this baby will someday grow into something big and fantastic!

Pitching your startup to venture capital people is a blast and also a great way to accelerate your business development. I learned early-on that getting honest and direct feedback is essential in order to help me as an entrepreneur to face reality and to keep my startups on the right path. Honest feedback may not always be pleasant to hear, but it is always valuable – either to confirm or to correct your strategy.

Seek out opportunities to pitch your business to experienced businesspeople and especially to venture capitalists. There are lots of different venues for pitching. Check out the Europe-Unlimited venture events, which are free and open to all European startups. You will be amazed what you will learn.

Want my feedback on your business pitch? Contact me today. Maybe I can help.
rs(@)xelerator.com

Rick Salmon is an energetic entrepreneur who believes that this beautiful world that we have created needs our help. Learn more at www.ricksalmon.com

photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski

Street Smarts

European Entrepreneurs must Startup Global

European startup companies actually have a big advantage over US based startups and many don’t even know it. No, I am not talking about fat government subsidies or protected local markets. I am talking about “street smarts”.

When I was 13 I remember visiting New York City. Not just the Big Apple Manhattan, but I visited a neighborhood in a ghetto of the Bronx where not too many white people visit unless they come in police cars and carry guns. It was severe culture shock for me, a skinny white middle class boy from the suburbs. If you grow up in the Bronx you learn street smarts fast or you don’t survive.

European entrepreneurs and startups grow up in tiny local markets and are surrounded by different languages and cultures. They develop their own type of street smarts. I read an interesting interview on European Entrepreneurship today. Here is an excerpt:

TechCrunch Europe Blog: (http://uk.techcrunch.com)
Seedcamp Founder Saul Klein Talks European Entrepreneurship
by Mark Hendrickson, September 25, 2009

MH: What are some of the more unique traits of European entrepreneurs, especially when compared to entrepreneurs in the US or elsewhere? Do you find they are driven by different motivations or that they have different personality tendencies?

SK: I think that the best entrepreneurs, regardless of geography, have similar traits; they are very determined, single-minded, and not afraid of taking risks. And I think that’s true wherever they are. One of the things that European entrepreneurs might have different than US entrepreneurs is that they are typically more international in outlook, by virtual of the fact that most of their home markets are not big enough to sustain really big businesses. So you actually have to think internationally and globally from the get-go. Whereas in the US, you can build a huge business by just being successful in the US. I think with the web the way it is now, that’s potentially an advantage.

When I worked with USA based tech startups in the late 90’s, I remember how little they understood about internationalization. The rule then was that only after a company has passed 10 Million $ in sales should they consider foreign markets. Consider that less than 30% of the American public even own a passport.

If you are a European entrepreneur, then you have an advantage. Do you know how to capitalize on it?

Rick Salmon is an energetic entrepreneur who believes that this beautiful world that we have created needs our help. Learn more at www.ricksalmon.com

By the Bootstraps

My grandfather was an entrepreneur, just like me. Unfortunately he died of a heart attack at an early age. Big doses of stress and cigarettes were standard fare for entrepreneurs and shop owners in those days. Although I never met him I have envisioned that he would look at me with his ancient blue eyes, stare for a long, dramatic moment and then say “You´ll have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps son”. I expect that this would be his advice for my life. Little did he know that I would also have that entrepreneur gene (or is it an illness?).

Learning how to ´bootstrap´ a startup company is an important lesson. In every startup I have done I have been successful in raising capital, but only after I had proven to the investors that I had the ability to make sales and generate revenues on my own. Pulling myself up by my bootstraps has always been a healthy and necessary process.

But there is another kind of bootstrapping that is even more important to us entrepreneurs. It is the ability to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps when we are discouraged, tired, disappointed or disillusioned with our startup businesses. We all hit that stage. As entrepreneurs we all have those days when it just seems impossible to be able to hold out – to endure tight cash flow, limited resources, the nagging pressure of bills and the fear that we might not be able to keep our fragile little boats afloat in the storm. Those dark days are always a part of an entrepreneurs´life.

One of the key differences between the great entrepreneurs and the merely mediocre ones is the ability to rise to the occasion – to find a way to raise energy levels – to see the opportunity, even in the darkest hours.

Yesterday I had a dark and stormy entrepreneurial day - but I also found the way back to the blue skies and to high energy. How about you?

Rick Salmon is an energetic entrepreneur who believes that this beautiful world that we have created needs our help. Learn more at www.ricksalmon.com

The WHO is much more important than the WHAT

Too much to do all the time, but not getting the results you want? Struggling to reach your customers? Having a hard time getting your message across? Tired of cold calls and chasing leads?

“There is always just too much to do all the time. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up!” complained a struggling young entrepreneur yesterday. In spite of the fact that he has a good business concept and a great new technology, he is going crazy and considering quitting. In spite of his superman efforts and 70 hour work weeks, his startup business is just not taking off and accelerating like it should.

As entrepreneurs we should all recognize this situation. “Too much to do” usually means that we are attempting to do too many different things, and this is most often a result of an “inability to focus”. Focusing for a startup company is most often a matter of deciding “WHO” you are going to market to and not just “WHAT” you are trying to sell.

Determining the WHO you market to is actually much more important than WHAT you sell. You can have a great product, excellent sales arguments and yet you will still fail to sell if you are chasing all the wrong people. If, however, you truly understand WHO you are marketing to, then you will experience faster success and you will end up with less to do. If you understand exactly who your best customers are, what kind of problems they have, what keeps them up at night staring at the ceiling and what they are most worried about in their own businesses, then it will be easy for you to effectively create, adapt and sell your products or services to them.

The often fatal mistake that many startup entrepreneurs make is to attempt to market to a broad group rather than a tightly focused group. In the case of the entrepreneur I talked with yesterday, he is attempting to break-into a rather large market. A big investor would love this, because the market is huge and the potential earnings are impressive, but the costs and the level of sophistication required to even get noticed in this market is substantial and overwhelming for a startup company.

We explored a different strategy… We looked at how he could attack a smaller market with a much more focused message and offering, then use the rapid success in this smaller market to prove his overall business model, thus driving a powerful wedge into the larger market. For a startup company to succeed in a large market, it requires a different strategy than that which a larger and better-funded company would use. Prove that your basic business model works in a smaller market and it will be easier to get investors to fund your scale-up to larger markets.

Carefully choosing the WHO makes it easy to succeed with the WHAT. Narrow down the WHO to a small, manageable, easy to identify group of customers and you will use less time, money and headache in closing sales. Marketing is not difficult, but it does require focus.

Do you want to figure out how to work less, yet get bigger results? We can help you to develop a better strategy for your business. Contact us and ask how we can do this.

Attention European Entrepreneurs who are seeking investors and funding in 2009! We can put you in the spotlight in front of the very best European investors and venture capital companies. Europe-Unlimited (www.e-unlimited.com) and Xelerator have created a unique, new program to put entrepreneurs on a fast-track to funding. Get your funding in 2009 by contacting us today to learn more. See www.xelerator.com/fast-track

Heart and Soul

I read lots of business plans and I meet with many different companies each week. Not all impress me.

I meet lots of talented engineers who struggle with marketing and I meet plenty of brilliant marketing people who push lousy products. Sometimes I get bored because I want it all. I want brains and beauty, strength and gentleness, speed and agility, vision and attention to detail, heart and soul.

I want to meet highly competitive companies that deliver great products, and insist on excellence – and yet I also want to meet companies that live by their deepest values and put back more into this world than they take out.

I met such a company 2 weeks ago. Asker Produkt is a small business in Asker, Norway where all the work and production is done by employees who are either physically or emotionally handicapped. The company goes to extreme lengths to create work assignments and processes that compensate for the individual handicaps of each worker. Even though this is expensive and time-consuming, the result is that they have the happiest, most devoted group of employees I have ever seen. Anywhere.

But the best part was that their attitude towards the quality of their products is totally inflexible and unyielding. Their philosophy is that the quality of their products can never be compromised and must be the absolute best possible in order to maintain high standards of excellence and the ongoing loyalty of their customers. You cannot push social responsibility if you are selling junk. No matter how hard, you have to do both. Quality and conscience. Only then will your customers fully stay loyal to your products as well as to your ideals.

This is the combination that so many companies lack. Excellence

but also social responsibility. It’s rare, but something that business sorely needs. Heart and Soul.

- RICK SALMON (June 8, 2009)