Rapidly Growing Your Business: Tina Fey Has Some Great Ideas

Tina Fey, the writer, producer, performer, has been one of the most successful people in the highly-competitive entertainment industry.  An important key has been great hiring and managing of staff.

She downloaded her wisdom, much of it learned from mega-successful producer Lorne Michaels, in the New Yorker. I loved what she had to say, and if you change the word “actor” to “employee” this is very practical business advice.

Here are some things she learned from Lorne Michaels while working for him at Saturday Night Live:

• Surprisingly, most times managing is about discouraging creativity. Sometimes actors have what they call “ideas”
• Figure out if there is something you’re asking the actor to do that’s making him or her uncomfortable
• The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s eleven-thirty
• When hiring, mix brainy educated nerds with street-smart improvisers and stir. The staff of Saturday Night Live has always been a blend of hyper-intelligent Harvard boys (Jim Downey, Al Franken, Conan O’Brien) and gifted, visceral, fun performers (John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks, Bill Murray). You need a diversity of talents and backgrounds to get the best results
• Don’t make any big decisions right after the season ends
• Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning
• Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy

CASE STUDY of Successful Launch: Trust Your Gut Then Test Later

Thinking about something super-VC Fred Wilson said recently: launches should be guided by your gut passions. After a launch, then you can start testing customer opinions.

You see, you simply cannot do research on something that never previously existed.

Via David Pogue, the tech writer in the New York Times, is an interesting case study for all new product or company launches:

“An utter disappointment and abysmal failure” (Orange County Design Blog). “Consumers seem genuinely baffled by why they might need it” (Businessweek). “Nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks” (Bloomberg). “Insanely great it is not” (MarketWatch). “My god, am I underwhelmed” (Gizmodo).

Good heavens! What a critical drubbing! Whatever it is must be a real turkey. What could it be?

Only the fastest-selling gadget in the history of electronics: the Apple iPad.

Apple went on to sell 15 million units in the next 9 months, created a huge new product category and is has the copycats in a fury to cash in on similar tablet products.

Pogue goes on to say  that apparently it doesn’t pay to bet against the gut of an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs. I would guess it never makes sense to bet against the gut of an entrepreneur like you either.

Being True to Your Company’s Identity: What You Can Learn From the Butler Way

Your company needs to stay true to who you are in order to see maximum results from your team’s efforts. Here’s why:

I’m not a huge sports fan, but it’s hard to ignore the recent success of Butler Basketball considering the university is just up the road from our office. Operating on a total budget of $1.7 million (tiny compared to big school budgets upwards of $10 million), the Butler Bulldogs exemplified that resources don’t make or break you: your mission does.

The truth is, the foundation of the Bulldogs’ success is their commitment to five principles they call “The Butler Way.” And while it may sound odd for me to relate business growth to sports, there are some key takeaways that struck me about how these standards can be applied in business and foster positivity.

The Butler Way is associated with the five principles of Butler Basketball that are posted in the Men’s Basketball locker-room.

1. Humility – know who we are, strengths and weaknesses
2. Passion – do not be lukewarm, commit to excellence
3. Unity – do not divide our house, team first
4. Servanthood – make teammates better, lead by giving
5. Thankfulness – learn from every circumstance

Consider these things principles. Would your organization look different if it was committed to a similar vision that was personal in nature to what you believe?

The fact is that Butler will never have a budget like Duke… and that’s okay. In fact, that’s a good thing. And along those lines, your business will never be something it’s not. But it can be true to what it is by being founded on consistent shared values that drive your staff toward achieving greatness and ultimately allowing you to do less with more.

Our Office Featured in the Wall Street Journal’s Workplace of the Day

We are happy to be chosen as the first business to be featured in The Wall Street Journal inaugural column on interesting business work environments and cultures. Here is a link to their slideshow featuring our office.

We normally don’t blow our own horn this way but we are thrilled the Wall Street Journal found our culture interesting. Hope you enjoy it.

Technology is the “How” Not the “What” – “What” Will Make Your Company “High Growth”

Don’t confuse How and What.

Clients ask us how to use technology to grow their companies quickly. They want to know how to leverage social media to get explosive sales growth. That is backwards thinking.

The key is to figure out what you can do to provide extraordinary value to a customer. When you have that model down, then ways to leverage technology in your marketing are relatively easy to uncover.

Diapers dot com was worth $450 million because of what problem the company solved. Groupon over $8 billion because of what it did for shoppers and small businesses. Facebook is revolutionary because of what it did to get people together.

To experience explosive high-growth, decide the What; then the How might be solved by technology.

Highly-Functioning Collaborative Teams Are The Fastest Way To Double Your Business

Cultivating a turned-on, highly-motivated team is the best way to quickly solve any business problem. But it takes mature people with high Emotional Quotients to be great team members.

David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote a rebuttal to the Amy Chua book about raising kids like a “tiger mother.” His basic premise is that kids need to learn social skills to be highly-functioning later in life. I only mention this because I found the MIT and Carnegie Mellon research he cites interesting:

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions — when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths. Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.

Here’s to “high collective intelligence.”

“Different” – What Every Rapidly Growing Business Does the Same

I think any entrepreneur will find this video interesting.

The key success factor for rapidly growing companies is selling something “different” so that prospects can make a choice — a real value proposition. But the things most business owners try to pass off as different are usually irrelevant sales-pitches falling on deaf ears.

This video, and maybe the book, may provoke an important internal conversation.

M & A Fundamentals from an Experienced VC

We discussed in a previous post why and how you need to do a business valuation to grow your business.

After you put together three years of running a business with the sales metrics, you may want to sell the business. Here is a great basic explanation of merger & acquisition by Fred Wilson, a VC that has done hundreds of deals.

This is very basic information every entrepreneur must know.

The 10 Biggest Marketing Blunders of 2010

Here is a list of marketing cautionary tales via the blog Collateral Damage. Entrepreneurs can learn how to better present their businesses from these unfortunate organizations. Enjoy!

Doing A Business Valuation May Be The Quickest Way to Grow Your Business

Finding out your business’ current value will give you the metrics to you need to rapidly grow your business.

Business valuations usually happen in the event of a divorce, death, or partnership lawsuit. That is the first time most owner/operators find out the value of their businesses and how experts determine that value.

Every industry has different metrics they use as standards to determine the probable sale price of the business. But what every industry has in common is that wise business owners that get a valuation before a catastrophic event will gain immediate net worth and cash flow.

Wise business owners start investing in the right assets, copyrighting the intellectual property, and managing the key accounting numbers that make their business grow rapidly.

Valuations generally look at the previous three tax years. Valuation experts say that if owner/operators start managing operations and accounting to the metrics immediately, average appreciation is between 10 to 100 times more value in their business within the next three to five years.

That gives an owner many more options: to sell, or borrow, or ESOP, or whatever in new ways that would be impossible for them today.

What do you do next?

• Find our what your business is worth – call a certified valuation expert
• Set three year goals to get your numbers improved
• Start managing to the numbers

Want to successfully own a business? You gotta make unpleasant choices.

“Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

————————————————

You gotta do what you gotta do… and it is going to hurt sometimes. But hard choices dot the path to professional and personal integrity.

You have to fire people that do not fit, which may seem cruel and cold, but firing a mismatched employee is the kindest choice in the long run. They might be great people. But even Mother Theresa herself would need to be fired if she wasn’t a great fit for the job she was hired to do. Or your family member. Or a close friend.

You have to structure your payables – assuming you have had an honest conversation with your vendors – to make your cash flow work.

Sometimes you have to collect your receivables – as diplomatically as possible – even when your customer really needs the money worse than you do.

Again, you sometimes have to lay people off – at Christmas, or when they are sick, or pregnant, or going through a personal crisis.

If you run a business, the most compassionate and gracious thing you can do is keep your business healthy and able to employ people for many years to come.

Sometimes your “compassions” will appear to all to be cruelties.

For the tree to grow strong and straight, some of the healthy branches have to be pruned along the way. This is true in nature and true in business.

Do what you gotta do. Not doing it does not make you a good person. It does make you an incompetent business person.