Six Degrees: Business Start Up - Are you a Tortoise or a Hare?

Dear David

We've written about starting up a business before: about the importance of putting in effective accounting systems, and the appropriate legal and commercial infrastructure. This month we explore a further crucial aspect of business start-up: focusing your creativity and effort in the right areas!

Please feel free to forward this issue to anyone else you think will enjoy reading it and find it useful. They can subscribe to receive their own free monthly copy by clicking here.

Best wishes,

Phil Donoghue

phil@cmc-partnership.com

Are you a Tortoise or a Hare?

Think back to when you first started your own business. You were probably full of your big new idea and overflowing with schemes and advice about how best to market it. It's very easy to go one of two ways at this stage of setting up a business - you might be a tortoise, or you might be a hare!

Tortoises like to get everything in place. They can spend weeks establishing a domain name and website, setting up accounting systems, getting business cards designed, and getting stuck into designing and producing their product or service. With tortoises, we find our primary role is to encourage them to get out there and network - in short to do some marketing!

Hares on the other hand are the complete opposite - they're bursting with ideas, talking to everyone, and dashing off in new directions every ten minutes. The latest idea always seems like the best one, and they easily end up spreading themselves too thinly and trying to do too much.

Small Leisure-Wear Manufacturer

Take the example of a client of ours, a sole trader with a fantastically creative idea for women's fitness wear which is comfortable, functional and effective, while at the same time being attractive and fashionable enough to be worn as leisure wear, too. She's created a collection of mix-and-match clothing which perfectly fits a gap in the market, and she's bursting with all the possibilities!

Before she came to CMC for mentoring and support, our client was a typical hare, overflowing with opportunities and trying to follow them all up at once. She's a sole trader! There's only one of her, and she has to be available to manage everything in the business, from the financial systems, to the marketing, to sorting out production when one of her employees breaks a wrist and has to take several weeks off.

Learning to Focus

With our support, she has:

• Narrowed down her range of options for possible routes to market, currently to just one - a large national retail buying group. Other possible options are on the back burner for the moment.
• Trained herself to manage the demands of her buyers - without this, large organisations can easily overwhelm and unbalance small suppliers. They can want everything on their own terms and force you to increase capacity or compromise quality in the rush to satisfy their demands.
• Become an 'easy-to-use' supplier for her buyers, by finding out what problems they have and focusing on becoming a solution rather than a problem for them. For example, one problem the buyers had was ticketing the stock when it arrived at the retail outlet. Now they send relevant bar-coded tickets with their order, and our client's staff attach the tickets to the right garments before sending out the order - a real win:win.

Learn to Juggle!

It's important to note in your decision as to whether to be a tortoise or a hare, that you don't need to be exclusively one or the other. The growth of your business is organic, and what is needed will change from day to day. Your focus needs to change flexibly with the needs of your business, sometimes concentrating on marketing, sometimes 'back-filling' with the infrastructure to make it all work.

In the case of the client business outlined above, we are still working on putting in appropriate financial systems and business processes - alongside building powerful supplier-client relationships which will stand her in good stead in the future. Your business needs it all to be done, and at start-up, you usually won't have support staff and systems in place to shield you from demands which can change almost daily!

Our Tips

While you are small, pick one or at most two routes to market and focus on getting them to work really well. If these include supplying to 'big players', take great care to accept only terms which don't overload your start-up business capacity. Be adaptable and flexible and look out for ways to make yourself indispensable to your buyers - spend a lot of time asking questions and listening. Stay focused on what you and your business want and are able to do - don't be seduced by every good idea that comes along.

If you're struggling with juggling the demands of being the sole, or nearly sole, owner of a start-up business and the above has struck a chord with you, give us a call for a friendly chat to see if there's any help and support we might be able to provide. Contact Phil Donoghue on 01491 829 185 or 07747 444 960 or email phil@cmc-partnership.com.

CMC Free Seminar: Introduction to Google Analytics

From now on, following our popular networking lunches, we will occasionally be offering free short seminars on topics which we believe will be interesting and useful to you.

The first in the series, following the lunch on 22 July, will be an Introduction to Google Analytics, delivered by Cat Young of Solve the Web. On 15 October, Chantal Cornelius of Apple Tree will be speaking about how to Integrate Your Marketing for a better return on your marketing investment. Look out for further details of this nearer the time.

The Introduction to Google Analytics will take place on 22 July at 2.00pm, and last about 45 minutes. Cat Young offers an overview of Google Analytics and an insight into how this powerful free tool from Google can help you get the best results from your website.

There is no need to register for the seminar - you can decide on the day whether you wish to stay on after the lunch. If you would like an invitation to the lunch, please click here to email our event organiser.

Business Jargon Watch

There's nothing quite like work jargon, but we can't blame it all on US business. It seems to be a global phenomenon, as the recent compilation of 50 phrases you love to hate in the BBC news attests. And be sure to play along with the Boss Speak Bingo Card (PDF). There aren't any prizes beyond the satisfaction of "gotcha" and you may want to keep that to yourself. The BBC seems to be on a quest to rid the world of the phrase going forward, which really seems to get under their skin.

If you want to keep your ear to the ground for new jargon, you might try MBA Jargon Watch. Most of the phrases in the list sound painfully familiar, but there are a few new fingernails-on-the-blackboard contenders, such as "eat your own dog food" and "boil the ocean." Ouch! When it comes to office speak, we think we need to leapfrog into a paradigm shift - can we get any buy-in on that?