Rapid Innovation Group blog

Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

Over the past few years, I have frequently heard the title ‘entrepreneur’ brought up in the context of golden career opportunities. At my own university, a lot of resources have been put into giving students the chance to learn more about entrepreneurship and potentially start their own businesses, whether it be through courses, societies, work experience programmes or seed funds. From a ‘hands on’ perspective, it is interesting to learn more about how our clients got their start in entrepreneurship and how they run their business. However, being exposed to this has really made me wonder: what fundamental qualities do entrepreneurs possess that make them successful at what they do?

Mike Southon and Chris West’s The Beermat Entrepreneur: Turn Your Good Idea Into A Great Business suggests some important qualities that all entrepreneurs have to some extent. Some of these outlined in the book include: a ‘can do’ attitude, ambition, charisma, eagerness and energy to get things done quickly, competitiveness, a touch of arrogance (i.e. knowing that you are good at what you do), and knowing how to inspire people to work with you in order to reach your goals. 

While I believe that all of these qualities are beneficial, and sometimes necessary, to have at any given point when running a business, I think there are a couple more qualities that should be added to this list. Looking at RIG and its clients, they all have this in common: they are passionate about their solution and they believe that their offering is better than their competitors’. The former can help you get through the ups and downs of starting up and can capture the interest of potential clients. The latter provides a great foundation for sales and demand generation. Recognising your strengths and knowing how to use them to your advantage can ultimately prove to be a valuable asset in taking your business forward.

Running a demand generation campaign is a bit like playing pinball

Running a B2B demand generation campaign is a bit like playing on a pinball table.

You can put money into the system and get more balls into play by launching the spring. You control the paddles around the pinball table and you have to make sure you press each one at the right time, just when a ball is about land.

Each ball in play represents a potential customer of yours. The paddles are the various marketing or demand generation activities you have at your disposal. One paddle might represent sending out a newsletter; another might be interacting with potential customers through Twitter; another still might be presenting at an event.

Your goal is to push the balls progressively to the top of the table where they might 'convert' into sales-ready opportunities. You should also aim to prevent the balls from falling through the gap at the bottom. If they do fall through, they are lost opportunities and you'll have to replace them by putting more money into the system.

As a startup you won't have a lot of marketing material, case studies, videos, or blog content. You'll only have a couple of paddles on your table - perhaps a direct email or a cold call. You certainly can push a ball all the way to the top and generate a sales-ready lead using one paddle in isolation, but it's difficult. You're relying on a bit of luck with your timing; and the chances are that a lot of balls will end up falling through the bottom.

As you add more and more paddles (marketing activities) to your table you are effectively giving yourself more chances to keep your potential customers engaged with your organisation. You reduce the chance that good prospects are lost, since you have more ways to interact with them.

You still need to have management oversight of the whole system once it's up and running to ensure that the paddles are being activated at the right time and in the right order. You also need to know when the system is working well enough that you can invest more money with confidence that you'll get the right return. Learn to play this game effectively and you'll have a predictable flow of sales opportunities.

“It wasn’t a question of having a grand plan, but I knew what I didn’t want to do."

When thinking about starting a new business, sometimes one of the hardest steps is to know when to take the plunge and just go for it. We asked Tony O’Shaughnessy what were his key reasons for starting his own company, ABS, and how he knew it was the right time to go into the venture: 

“It wasn’t a question of having a grand plan, but I knew what I didn’t want to do. The decision to start a business was a combination of pure luck and circumstance. I had been in IT for seven years and I knew it was the right time to start. Even though ABS was an IT service provider, I knew that I didn’t want to carry on just as an IT manager, I wanted to do something different.” 

We also asked him to tell us more about the obstacles he came across during his entrepreneurial career and how he managed to overcome them:

“The obstacle to success for me - when looking back at my own experience - was my own lack of in-depth business knowledge, particularly service strategy and management. That really hurt us at one point in our development.

"If I was advising people starting up a company now, I would want to ask them if they have a clearly defined strategy, do they really know what management is about? In the majority of small to medium companies I know, the managers tend to be the best ‘doers,’ who are normally the worst managers to have.

"The steepest learning curve for me over the years was that we ended up giving people who were great doers - because they were very skilled at computer programming or analysis - a team to manage. Because we both had very little experience in management, we tended to aggregate problems. Especially with small companies, being very proactive with little management knowledge will only go so far.

"Retrospectively, it’s easy to say that it would have been useful to bring in mentors or consultants to help, but that wasn’t how we approached it. We were thinking that we had this great idea for a product or solution and we wanted to tell the world about it. What tended to happen is that we learned the hard way by running into the problem, wondering why the strategy isn’t clear, why the customer is only getting part of the message, why internal people love the company in one dimension and find it frustrating in another. It was a very long haul process about what is or isn’t a priority. Because we didn’t have the necessary structure in place, it cost us time and money.”

Entrepreneurship vs. corporate employment

On Sunday evening, I had the chance to meet up with my course mates at LSE. It was great to see them, but more interestingly, it was striking to learn about the differences between the tasks they are undertaking, and what they are engaged with during their internships, in comparison to mine. So I turned to ask myself: why is it that their internships are so different? Is my internship no good? This week, I want to express my thoughts on two topics: Entrepreneurship vs. Big brand on CV, and when do we stop humankind education frenzy? Since I have so much to say about this subject, we decided to split it up into two blog posts!

Entrepreneurship or Branded CV?

When I entered a conversation with my energised friends about their internships, the first thing that spilled out of their mouth was the name of the company… “I’m working for HSBC”, “P&G” or “Deutsche Bank” etc… Whereas my first sentence usually starts with something like “I am doing strategy and marketing consultancy for start-ups and medium sized companies at an entrepreneurial company called Rapid Innovation Group.”

What I want to emphasise here is that most people accentuate the name of the company rather than their job, because for most people at the beginning of their professional careers, working for a Fortune 500 company is more important than their day-to-day tasks, salary, and achievements.

The number of enormous organisations in the market has put pressure on graduates and job seekers to find the right corporate recruiter, and the competition makes people forget that not everyone is determined to get a foot into the “corporate world.”

I am not trying to position myself to criticise anybody working for large organisations. Actually, I have also done it myself - and I really enjoyed it. In fact, I want to stress the importance of a recognisable brand on one’s CV, and how proud a brand can make a person and their family and friends. But it is a matter of choice and it is not everyone's cup of tea.

Entrepreneurial spirited people (and I'd like to think I am one too) tend not to value the utility of the brand name much. Rather, we value what we have achieved personally after a certain period of time. We don't value the utility of where we have worked; rather we value what we have created.

I am driven more about the job itself and the impact I have on the company I work for. I do not have the patience, nor do I have the will to work for 15 years – if I’m lucky – before I can make my voice heard in the corporate world.

Experiential learning: An intern’s perspective of RIG

When I first knew that I wanted to expand my knowledge of entrepreneurship, I felt that the courses my university offered would help me gain a theoretical understanding but that they wouldn’t necessarily give me detailed answers to the questions I had such as:

• What are the key elements needed for starting a company?


• How do you identify and approach the right clients for your product?


• What are the potential ‘surprises’ that could derail the progress of your company and how do you mitigate the risk?


• How do you position your product in the market so that it is more attractive to clients than similar competitor solutions?

I knew that the only way to learn more was to find a role that would let me actively learn by doing. After looking at RIG’s website and reading through most of the entries on the blog, I realised that completing an internship here was exactly the kind of opportunity I was looking for. I was excited to see that former interns had the chance to work on more than just one project and that they found that working at RIG was a challenging, but more importantly, rewarding experience.

Although this is only my fifth day here at RIG, I’ve already learnt so much. I was allocated to three different projects on my first day which all have varying strategies and I believe will give me the chance to absorb as much information as possible during my time here. Plus, I’ve been given the opportunity to have my most burning questions about start-ups and entrepreneurship answered by some of RIG’s clients who have first-hand knowledge.

Above all, it is apparent that the cornerstone of RIG is its people.  Everyone here is talented; they really use their individual strengths to help the clients and this is evident in the high-quality work they produce. Although this could be slightly intimidating to someone new to the group, it couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a strong sense of cohesion here. Everyone works together to get things done, even when they are working on different projects.

In the short time that I have been here, some of my questions about entrepreneurship are already being answered. Interestingly, my perception and understanding of starting up a business is changing and, consequently, I find myself wanting to know more about subjects I hadn’t previously given much thought to. I know that in these next few weeks I will gain a better well-rounded perspective of entrepreneurship than I could have achieved by learning in a lecture theatre and I am looking forward to seeing where this experience takes me.

A Tale of Two Clients: Making the best use of relationships to grow your service company

Over the past two years since I joined RIG, I have worked with two service clients. In each case, the brief was the same: “we have plateaued in terms of growth, please help us go out and win new customers.”

Both had been in business for more than 10 years. They had reached what they thought was the limit of growth with their current clients and had been spending time trying, without success, to break into new organisations through sales teams and cold calling.

The similarities were striking. We found that:

• the companies’ service offerings on paper had little differentiation


• their current and past customers rave about their work – how competent, innovative, knowledgeable, and proactive they are


• most of their customers and projects had come from the founders’ networks


• they were so busy that they had lost touch with many old contacts


• they had foisted responsibility for ‘selling’ onto junior team members


• both companies had a core offering for which they were known but were afraid to take a focused message to the market in case they missed out on opportunistic non-core work

Where a product or service is hard to differentiate (because all vendors make the same claims) and only appreciated once used, then it falls into the category of ‘experience goods.’  In the B2B world, the best way to sell an experience good is via referrals.

First we sat down with companies’ principals and took stock of everyone they had worked with, and looked to see where they were currently working and where they used to work. In one case, we then gave each person two scores – one for how useful they are in terms of their job position and their networks; and one for how likely they were to want to help. The second prong was looking at how each of these people was networked into the individuals and organisations that we wanted to access.

We had our clients re-connect with their contacts, talk through their focused business objectives and find out what was important to them. Our aim was to be able to build a nurturing programme, and also to put together events and marketing collateral to address the needs and interests that would speak to our companies’ audiences.

The amount of goodwill, recommendations, and willingness to make introductions that we found was astounding. Just making contact was enough to put our clients front of mind and led to some immediate project enquiries.  Going forward, these networks provide the best way to leverage the goodwill that our clients enjoy.

 

Why "Venture Capital is just like poker" by Fred Wilson

In this video East-coast VC, blogger, and adviser Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, discussed the ups and downs in his lengthy career and explained why VCs still have something to offer, even in this "golden age" of angel investment.

In his view, Venture Capital is "just like poker" - and looking at your portfolio of entrepreneurial companies as a series of poker hands "is the right way to do the VC business."

He went on to say that any entrepreneurs looking for investment from Union Square should always aim to "get to know us early."

Marketing tips from "in front of the front line”

This week, I chose to compare RIG’s marketing strategy to IBM’s to determine the differences between marketing of an entrepreneurial firm and a global corporation. I referred to an article by IBM, which I had previously read whilst preparing for my exams at LSE, on how to use marketing and the internet in order to boost performance.

IBM’s whitepaper, 'Marketing in the digital age' recommends the following 5 tips from the “front line”:

• Create a global brand blueprint and express it locally;


• Architect a customer experience that is consistent with your brand;


• Gain a single view of the customer;


• Insist on a robust IT infrastructure; and


• Partner in innovative ways.

These all may seem common sense. They definitely made sense to me after I memorised them in preparation for exams. Now consider yourself working in a growth stage company with small number of employees...

IBM’s “create a global brand blueprint and express it locally” or “insist on robust IT infrastructure” recommendations don’t make much sense in this context, do they? Let me explain further...

For example, small firms often utilise commonly and widely available off-the-shelf IT hardware and software so it does not make sense to have “insist on a robust IT infrastructure” as one of the most important guidelines for successful marketing. It is simply not feasible for a growth-stage company to turn half of its office into a server room or own a 100GB domain. What I am trying to get at is that some global marketing tips are irrelevant for start-ups.

So, since I believe that global marketing tips cannot usually be fully adopted by start-ups, I decided to generate a few tips myself from what I have observed here at Rapid Innovation Group so far. Referring back to IBM's tips from the "front line", I shall call them 5 marketing tips from "in front of the front line”:

• Standardise your services and set aggressive, yet achievable actions list for both you and your client


• Be entrepreneur-spirited when it comes to technology – use the most up-to-date software available given your budget and utilise the new technology to your best use


• Get close to your clients – become a part of their company and team, talk to them on day-to-day basis (or all day in some cases), know everything about their offerings, and approach their clients as one of their employees


• Make best use of non-corporate culture – use your colleagues’ strengths and let them use yours to get the best outcome for the company, and be cooperative not competitive


• Use an “underground” approach to expanding your visibility/popularity within your target market – ‘what comes around goes around’, so always leave a good impression and you may get interest from the least expected people

The key roles of a CEO

Peter Collins, the CEO of Permasense, defines the key roles that a CEO has in a growth company:

1. The CEO must take overall responsibility for sales

"This is crucial: you must know what your customers and potential customers think of your proposition. You cannot otherwise guide development priorities, nor forecast cash flow. It would scare me silly if I didn’t know what our customers think of us and our offerings. I need to know why they are buying or why they are not - always."

2. The CEO must recruit the right people and build and motivate a team

"You need a number of legs on the table, and legs of equal length. Then it's about a sense of purpose, maintaining focus - and keeping it fun.

"With happy customers and the right team you'll be able to deal with the rest..."

Case study on forcing your business model onto the overseas market

I wrote this guest case study for OpenView Labs about a technology company in Sweden that had developed an innovative (and disruptive) solution for security firms and internal corporate security teams.

This is an important lesson for those looking to push their companies overseas, as structural differences do exist. In cases like these, forcing your existing business model onto the overseas market might not necessarily be the best move.

Read the full article and see comments at OpenView Labs.