The Three Best Ways to Stay in Business - For the Long Term!

According to statistics* 71% of all start-ups fail in the first 10 years.

That's not the scary number.

The scary number is that 25% of them already taste failure in the first year. Another one is that less than half make it to year 4.

And there are more, but this was supposed to be a helpful post, so let's see what a start up business can do to avoid becoming just another number.

The Danger of Product Multitasking for Start-Up Businesses

Putting aside for a moment basic incompetence, and lack of preparation, knowledge and so on, 30% of start up businesses fail due to over-expansion.

Sure, you have big ideas, or you wouldn't be an entrepreneur. But, especially in the beginning, try to concentrate on getting the process to produce a single, good, revenue generating product or service worked out, before you try releasing anything else.

As Barbara Cochran once said on Shark Tank - "You're moving too fast with too many things, and that's usually a formula for disaster in any young business."

She ended up investing, but only after making sure that the company understood that they had to concentrate on one product at a time.To pick another example - Levi Roots, the UK entrepreneur launched a single sauce "Reggae Reggae Sauce" on Dragon's Den.One awesome product.

So - product multitasking reduces overall quality, so make one awesome thing at a time.

3 Top Tips to Keep Afloat in Year 1, 2, 3...

Here are my own Top 3 Tips for staying in business long-term:

• Tip 1 : Pick the right business, and the right business for you. 

There are certain businesses with a high failure rate - think plumbers and restaurants - and others with a very low one : like religious organisations.

Now, I'm not suggesting you go off and found a religion, but I am suggesting that if you choose to open a restaurant your heart had better be in it, and you'd better have the skills. Top aggregate reason for going out of business? Lack of knowledge, and wrong reason for going into business in the first place.

• Tip 2 : Keep it Simple. Do one thing well. Not a hundred things averagely. 

I'm not the first to point this out, I'm actually paraphrasing from Sam Carpenter's excellent "Work The System". You should check it out if you're starting a business, or trying to live life to the full.

• Tip 3 : Cut Out The Emotion. 

Okay, that's a tough one, because if you've picked a business that's right for you, as I pointed out in Tip 1, you're probably also going to have an emotional investment in it.

However, if you can make decisions based on numbers (and that's the purpose of having a system, as I pointed out in my last blog post) or other objective information, and remove the emotion from the equation as far as possible, those decisions will likely be better than if you are guided completely by your passion.

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*Source : http://www.statisticbrain.com/startup-failure-by-industry/

How to Start a Business with No Skills Down (Except One!)

I've been absorbing a lot of wisdom of late. If I had to name drop, and let's face it, in this day and age it's the only way to prove your paying attention, here are a few voices that have been filling me with inspiration of late - Dane Maxwell, Sean Ogle, Tim Ferris, David Risley, Sam Ovens, Rosalind Gardner...

I could go on.

What's become apparent is that there are two approaches to building (starting) a business : stick to what you know and follow your passion/hobby, and forget what your passions are and find a market with problems to service.

Pro-bloggers, for example, tend to fall into the former camp. Dane Maxwell and The Foundation fall clearly into the latter, and then take it one step further by pointing out that the real money is in just finding people to consume services (i.e. lead generation.)

I'm sitting on the fence, and boy is it uncomfortable.

I understand that people want to follow their passion, but I also understand from watching Shark Tank, Dragon's Den, and The Apprentice, as well as listening to the wisdom of those who have gone before me, that not everyone will share that passion. It's also possible (even likely) that not enough people share your passion to make a business out of it.

So, what do you do when you find that the market wants something that falls outside your skill set?

Easy - outsource! Tim Ferris started me off thinking about this, and Dane Maxwell backed up my initial hunch that the most successful businesses are going to be those where the entrepreneur isn't doing everything themselves, and uses skills of others to help them achieve true greatness.

Plus, by outsourcing everything, you remove yourself from the business, meaning that it will happily run along without you, needing only a firm hand on the tiller from time to time.

For most of us, this is great, because we have the attention span of butterflies, and often find it tough to concentrate on the same thing for any length of time. If all we have to do is manage a bunch of outsourced processes, we're happy as can be.

The main message this - don't worry about not knowing (for example) how to write good copy, or how to create an app, or produce a membership based web site and software as a service (SaaS) offering. There are people who can do all of these things.

All you have to worry about is finding the right partners, at the right price, and then managing them. As an entrepreneur you've likely got the skills to be able to do these things, all you need to do is unlock them!

Amazing Travel Hack and All-Round Cool Car Rental Service

Here's one for all you fans of travel hacks and ways to decrease business expenses in general. The FlightCar service rents out cars left by people when they're off traveling the world, to those landing at the airport and needing a car.

That's a great service, but they've gone one better with their FlightCar Monthly service, which offers people a flat fee in return for the use of their car for a month. If you need your car back within that time, you get 4 free days with your car, or one very like it.

This is great if you don't use your car that much, but need it for things like family vacations - or if you don't need it for a month because you're off on a long vacation yourself.

All in all - works well for everyone!

Lessons from Sean Ogle (Location Rebel) On Fast Learning

Sean Ogle has just released a video (looks like it's filmed in Central Park - correct me if I'm wrong!) that talks about the concept of rapid learning and how it relates to Location Rebel.I recommend that you watch it - it's just 2 minutes long - just to understand his mindset. The video can be found here.

Before you rush off and watch it, though, here's a bit of preparatory work : the key takeaway is in knowing what you don't know, and knowing what you need to know to fill that gap. Read that through again, watch the video, and read the comments that follow it.

Then come back here, because I have something else to share...

Being successful in business is often about learning. For example, to do business in China, it's going to help you to learn Chinese. But that's hard, right? Yes, of course it is. It's useful, so it will be hard.

Tim Ferris (author of the 4 Hour Work Week, The Four Hour Body and The Four Hour Chef) spoke at the Entertainment Gathering about his experience learning Japanese, which is comparably hard. The video is here.


It's okay, you can watch it later - the key part of the message for me was that he, too, concentrated on what he didn't know. Ferris calls it Material vs. Method, and it comes up in his Four Hour Chef book, in the section entitled Meta Learning.

Even if you don't want to learn how to cook - and who doesn't? - the sheer discipline that Ferris applies is worth the cover price.

Come to that, it's worth heading over to Sean Ogle's web site, too, even if you don't plan on becoming a "Location Rebel" yourself, as there are many valuable business lessons to be learned just from reading through the blog posts.

My bottom line advice is to learn as much from these two as possible, as they've both had a dream, followed it, and had a great time along the way. They might not be billionaires, but they're leading the life that they always wanted, and you can't say fairer than that!

4 Things to Help Keep Your Business Fit for Purpose

There are a number of things we can learn from observing the ways that VCs (Venture Capitalists) and angel investors manage the relationship with their protégés. Chris Hudson, writing in '4 Things to Put In Your Monthly Update to Investors' isolates a few gems from the world of venture capitalism.


The article itself is well worth a read, but it also offers some controls that any start-up would be advised to consider implementing.


Control #1 : Cash


Investors need to know if the fledgling business has enough cash. Not necessarily to give them more (after all, even Steve Jobs, after investing in NeXT, had to face the reality of cuts in expenses) but to find out how healthy the company is.


Cash is important - it lets you do business on a day-to-day basis, gives you a buffer for unexpected bills, and is the lifeblood of your company. Keeping a constant check on the cash position, and recognizing the danger signs of running dry will help you manage your business more effectively.


There are always options when the inevitable happens - cut costs, sell stock or other assets, ask the bank for an extension to any existing loans or overdrafts, go on a fundraising drive, offer the employees shares in return for an investment : the list is almost endless.


Of course, there may be an underlying reason for the diminishing cash position, and part of that may be that the product or service just isn't popular.


Control #2 : The Target Market


The initial strategy may no longer be appropriate to the target market. The target market may not even exist any more. It's important to always adjust and refine the strategy and approach to the target market depending on how that market evolves.


PayPal, for example, started out as a device to device payment method, but evolved into a person to person web based payments provider over time. The target market wasn't big enough to support the investment, but the new market was crying out for their services, and the technology was much the same.


Following the changes in the market will often lead to some critical decisions. Key among those its likely to be related to staffing or team membership.


Control #3 : Corporate Structure


People drive companies, and nowhere is this truer than in a start-up. Many, if not most, start-ups exist purely on the drive of the individuals to create something from nothing. Without that drive, the company ceases to perform.


That's part of the reason that Apple re-hired Steve Jobs, why Google remains at the forefront of the Internet, and, in my opinion, at least, why most companies fail. They lose the people who have the drive.


So, as much as the money and the market will affect the direction that the start-up takes, the people involved in it will also affect the products and services that are created for that market.


New people often bring new ideas. People who leave inevitably take their ideas with them. Both of these need to be monitored, and measured against the performance of the company.


Control #4 : Metrics


I don't like the term KPI (Key Performance Indicator) as it seems to indicate a lack of flexibility. My own take on KPIs is that everything must be measured, and the resulting metrics need to be analyzed in order to determine:

• exploitation of existing opportunities
• new and emerging opportunities
• decline of current opportunities

Measurement needs to be easy to do, and easy to analyze. If it's hard it won't be done well, or indeed at all, in a timely fashion. Sales, leads, profits per customer, repeat sales levels, and so on, are all easy metrics to measure, track and analyze.


They show the health of the company, and whether the core business is working. Each company will also find things to measure outside the health of the company, which covers the market - trends and competitors movements being some of the easiest to track - and helps to isolate new opportunities.


So, these four areas, derived from how Chris Hudson describes communication between investors and start-ups, ought to help you keep focus, and makr your business a success.

The Membership Model - Magazine Subscriptions and Your Business

Recently I was skimming a magazine when I landed on their Subscription Offer page. Now, I like marketing, and I like to save a penny (buck, cent, or whatever) wherever I can, so the percentages caught my eye. It also helped that they were in a big red font.

What interested me is there were three separate percentages. The first said 'up to 33%', the second said '25% off' and the last said something like 'save 15% off newsstand prices'.

Now, people have become used to getting a discount when they subscribe to a magazine, after all, it's guaranteed revenue, with only a postal delivery charge, etc. etc. but to have three separate savings bands seemed to be something of a novelty, so I dug deeper.

The 15% saving was for an order placed for delivery to the newsstand. The 25% saving was for an annual subscription, and the 33% saving was for a monthly subscription, paid quarterly, by Direct Debit.

(For those outside the UK, Direct Debit is a recurring instruction to the bank to make a payment to the recipient, at the value that the recipient determines. Like a Standing Order.)

It's that 33% level that interested me. The magazine publisher has made a decision to attract Direct Debit subscribers over those that choose to pay an annual subscription. Having just chosen not to re-subscribe to another magazine for 'value' reasons, I think I understand why.

The accepted wisdom is that the cost of acquisition is highest for the first customer. Put another way, the cost of getting the customer in the first place (i.e. the first sale) in many cases will obliterate the margins on that first sale.

The margin goes up each time they buy. So, repeat customers are valuable - which is why we go to extreme lengths to keep them happy. And also why the subscription model is so useful.

The Subscription Model

The trick is to increase individual customer value by subscription. This doesn't necessarily mean that the customer has to take out a subscription to a magazine - virtually everything, from cigars to wine, can be sold on a subscription basis.

Even if it's a free subscription - to a newsletter, for example - you get all the subscription benefits : regular contact, regular delivery, the possibility for back end sales, etc. Of course, you have to offer something of value. This remains true whether the content is free or paid for.

The paid subscription model is often considered to be more powerful in terms of customer value, because, having spent money with the business once, the customer is more likely to do so again. If they are free subscribers to a newsletter, it might take a larger investment (of time, if nothing else) before they will actually spend on a back-end purchase.

In Internet marketing terms,  the king of the subscription models is the Membership Site.

The Membership Site Model 


PayPal makes it easy (using recurring payments) to set up a membership site that generates direct income. The Internet makes it easy to deliver quality content; the simplest of all membership sites are just forums that customers have to pay to participate (fully) in.


The value comes from the subscriber base, with the site (business) owner often just steering the continuous stream of information to cover subjects that will be of use.


More sophisticated set-ups deliver blogs, videos, and other content through the membership site, in return for the, usually modest, monthly fee.


It's also a model that can be replicated in the bricks-and-clicks world too : offering an actual product, posted to the subscriber, alongside the online content. The two delivery methods can work hand in hand; mailing rebate coupons with the product, or providing rebate coupons in a free newsletter.


The opportunities for leveraging the subscription model are endless, and applicable to almost every start-up business, to build a solid repeat customer base.

How Much is my Business (Idea) Worth, and How to I Get Out?

Serial entrepreneurs often start up companies thinking about one thing, and one thing only : what is my exit strategy?

Put another way – how are they going to get out of the company when they either get bored, or have realized enough value that it becomes more worthwhile to sell it on (or shut it down and dispose of the assets accrued) than keep it ticking over.

The most clinical approach is to build the exit into the business plan, and use that as a way to see (indeed, test) whether the whole venture is actually viable. If the exit strategy is to sell the whole company on as a going concern for a value of 1 million pounds (Euros, dollars, etc.) in five years time, it becomes relatively easy to work backwards through the numbers to test for feasibility.

Other exit strategies also include going public (selling shares on a stock exchange) or selling the company purely on the basis of its value to a competitor or related business – think of Google’s acquisition of YouTube, or Twitter buying TweetDeck, for example – where the classic measures of revenue, profitability, etc. don’t really apply.

However, these are subject to specialist knowledge, market awareness and probably a healthy dollop of good luck, so to provide an empirical example, we shall assume that the business valuation is designed to provide value to an investor – be it 100% (disposal) or some fraction thereof (to garner investment, or when going public.)

This kind of valuation is usually based on current performance. Examples of companies valued on potential performance (the most famous being PayPal) can also be found, but these are relatively special cases : for those that manage a PayPal, there are many, many, successful serial entrepreneurs who never see that level of IPO success.

On the other hand, many start-up investors will also be looking at potential. However, given that it has to be grounded in the figures that reflect believable performance, the discussions about exit strategies also apply here.

There are many, many approaches to valuing a company:

• Wikipedia : Business Valuation
• How to value a Business on BusinessLink
• ‘How to Value a Young Company’ by Martin Zwilling (Forbes.com)

Some reasonable, simple, valuations use trading figures and investor returns on equity to prepare a business plan that will provide targets that can be realized, and also help in the preparation of documentation for potential investors, from banks to angels.

A common measure is to take three to five times profit, and use that as a nominal value to establish targets for exit or investment. From the other side of the table, so to speak, if an entrepreneur needs 10,000 pounds (dollars, Euros, etc.) investment, for a 20% stake in their company, the investor will be expecting to be able to see at least 50,000 pounds worth of company value, as well as a return of 5-10% (using a better than bank rate) on their investment.

Using these techniques, it should be relatively easy for budding entrepreneurs to appropriately value their business idea, and potential of their start-up company.

Is My Business Idea Any Good?

Working out whether a business idea is any good is a tricky proposition. There’s the tried and tested ‘overnight test’ where the entrepreneur can leave the idea overnight and come back to it at a later date to see if it still holds water (and if they still want to do it!) However, as regular Dragon’s Den viewers will attest to, there are three key questions that often crop up.

Firstly, many investors, banks and Dragons included, will want to know the ‘margin’. This is the difference between the price of the product (usually wholesale) and the cost of manufacture; in the case of services, it is the difference between the cost or provision and price placed upon the service. In both cases, it is often quoted as a percentage, but it’s useful to know the actual numbers as well.

This becomes evident when the second question pops up : is the business idea scalable? In other words, are the processes, knowledge, and business activities replicable to the point that a decent return can be had, in terms of the margin? Does the business scale such that the return increases, at least in line, and preferably better than proportionally to the units sold?

A scalable business is attractive because it elevates the business from something that could make a living for one person working out of their own home to a profitable business that could make money for investors, employ staff, and perhaps go on to become a household brand. For example, if all the skill required to produce the product is non-transferable, it isn’t scalable, and therefore isn’t really an investable business.

Whether that matters or not will depend on the needs of the business owner – but even a scalable business needs to react to one final question : how big is the market? One person with a talent and a hungry market can make a living, but it needs a hungry market and a repeatable income generation process to become an investable business.

So, investors need all three to line up – the margin has to be interesting, the business scalable, and the market has to be big enough for it to scale into at those margins. Of course, there’s flexibility in there : higher margin products (houses) need a smaller market to generate the same amount of money as, say, biscuits.

Individuals such as human cannonballs who have a talent that is in demand, can only satisfy a finite market, and so are not examples of scalable businesses, even if they manage to build a profitable income for themselves. To become scalable, they would have to find a way to transfer that talent (stage schools take a similar approach) to others, and build a business that way.

If a business satisfies the margin, scalability and market criteria, and would be attractive to an investor, then it’s half-way to being a good idea, and certainly worth some additional thought!