We've Moved!

Thanks everyone for your continued support in reading my blog.  We have recently launched NoodleShare.com, and as a result this blog has now been merged with the company's blog.  Keep following us at http://blog.noodleshare.com/!

A Few Tips for Dealing With Business Partners

If you want your business to be successful, you inevitably have to think about pulling in a business partner.  Most likely you don't have all of the skills you need to get things up and running quickly.  Even if you do, there's usually way too much work for just one person to handle.  Before you start teaming up with other people, there are a few things you should keep in the back of your mind.  Sometimes you may overlook these if you're new to starting or running a business, but try to address them early on.  Otherwise, you may find it increasingly difficult to do so once your dreams begin to take off.

1. Do you need this person as your partner? Make sure they bring something unique to the table.  When it comes time to pay them back for their services, you want to make sure it was worth it.

2. Be upfront about the roles you need each member of the team to play.  This will ensure everyone has clear direction and avoid overlapping work effort down the road.  The last thing you need is a bunch of wandering entrepreneurial minds.

3. Keep them in the here and now.  It's easy for people to become distracted about getting rich and making it big 5 years from now, but make sure they stay on the current tasks at hand.  There's too much work to be done right now for them to worry about what the future has in store.

4. Don't waste people's time, it’s a valuable commodity.  Start your meetings on time, don't have meetings about meetings, and don't get sidetracked with one-off conversations while everyone else is still in the meeting.  There's nothing worse than wasting 15 minutes of everyone's time when two people are chit-chatting about something irrelevant to everyone else.

5. Determine how individuals will be compensated for their hard work and keep it on record.  This could be in the form of shares in the company, c-level positions or upfront cash.  You don't want to keep people in the dark about where their future will be when things take off.  Knowing what you are comfortable giving up in return for work is also an important part of the process.  If you feel like the compensation request is not within reason then walk away.

6. Establish a task list for each individual.  Meet frequently to discuss the progress of those tasks and if changes need to be made to the overall strategy.  This is an easy way to ensure progress is being made.

NoodleShare.com Has Launched

Last week was an exciting one for our company.  After a year of development and months of anticipation, we finally launched NoodleShare.com.  It's an online collaborative community where entrepreneurs can share ideas, request the role players they need for their company, and have those requests fulfilled with experts in related fields.

I've learned a lot from the last company I founded back in 2003.  One of the most important lessons was the value in having the right role players to meet the company's demand.  We created NoodleShare.com to directly address this issue and at the same time provide a community of supportive professionals.

We hope all of you can find value in what NoodleShare has to offer.  Everyone has an idea; this makes it that much easier for it to become a success.  Whether you are looking to join a team of experts or launch an idea of your own, sign up for NoodleShare.com today and become a part of something big.

Selling Ain't Easy

Have you ever heard someone say a product will "practically sell itself?"  Well I've yet to see a case where that holds true, and I doubt you will either.

Sometimes we think our product is so great that it will fly off the shelves. That's what we thought back in 2004.  We had just finished our first version of MobileBabble, an SMS text message to big screen platform.  Adrenaline was running high and we figured if we just showed people what we had, they would instantly be hooked. We never came up with an aggressive sales and marketing campaign because we were so confident.  Unfortunately, the results showed how unprepared we were.

We went into phone calls and meetings 'thinking' we had everything in order.  However, I remember the exact instance I realized we were being severely outclassed in the sales department. We were on the phone with representatives for Barry Bonds. Our company and another company were vying for a contract to create his mobile fan club. We definitely had the better product, and in fact the other company's product was just a prototype! We gave a live demo and they just had PowerPoint slides. But their sales rep was a thing of magic. He gave Barry Bond's team a vision for where his company could take them. He put forth an incredible sales pitch and boy it worked. The next thing I knew, I was seeing press releases about a joint venture between Bonds and the other company for a ground-breaking fan club application.

Frankly, we were caught with our pants down. We didn't even know how to follow up with a prospect properly. My advice to you is to take the extra time, effort and money to get your product the sales pitch and marketing strategy it deserves. Business isn't just going to fall into your lap.  And even if it does, at least you have a solid strategy to continue pressing forward.  Being overly confident in a product may be the biggest mistake you can make and you'll be in for a surprise when your best prospects are going with inferior solutions.

Let's Build On Consistency

A few days ago I posted a CNN Money article on my Facebook page about the recent struggle Twitter has been having with their leadership (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/14/troubletwitter/).  Quite a number of CEOs and executives have been bounced around.  It's a pretty long article, but one key point it makes is that lack of consistent and cohesive leadership has stunted the company's growth significantly.

It's hard for employees, and ultimately consumers, to rally behind the direction of a company if leadership can't step up to the plate and deliver innovative, concise and uniform goals.  Other companies like Borders (currently in bankruptcy) have made the same mistake.  They've had four CEOs in the past three years.  Imagine in the baseball world if your favorite team had that many coaches in the same amount of time.  That would likely pair up nicely with poor ticket sales and a losing record.  It becomes quite easy to see the repercussions of irregular leadership.

Make your management decisions wisely folks.  Sometimes it's easy to put family or friends in key positions, but whoever you hire, ask yourself if they are the proper person for the long-term task.  Is their vision in line with the company's?  You need to keep a strong team together and work toward a common goal to help maintain your company's identity.  This will also create a sense of loyalty in your employees and give them time to develop trust in the management team.  It makes being successful a lot harder if no one believes in who they are following.

Sharing Is Okay

It seems like every week I have a conversation with someone about a new idea they have for a product or service.  Inevitably the conversation turns into "we need to get this protected immediately" or "we can't let anyone find out".  I understand the need for people to feel protective about their idea, however, the reality is you are most likely not the only person to come up with the idea.

New products typically stem from a gap in an industry.  If you noticed that gap, you can bet someone else did too.  The difference in being successful lies solely in execution.  The visionaries are hardly ever the ones that become the most successful.  The invention of the modern-day automobile is generally accredited to the German Karl Benz.  However, it was Henry Ford that took that concept to new heights with a better implementation in 1914.  What about Blockbuster Video's mail in movie rentals?  Does anyone even get those now or are we all on Netflix?  Be free with your ideas folks.  You're wasting a lot of brain power figuring out how to protect it.  You should be focused on bringing in the best team that can deliver on execution.

If you still need more convincing, check out this article: 
http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/is-execution-more-important-than-vision/

Can You Please Just Focus!

The number one goal for any new company should ALWAYS be to do one thing and do it very well.  This is an old saying, but if it’s not something on your mind from the beginning and a foundation of your company, then you can very easily lose sight of what you’re trying to accomplish and become a “vague” company with a wandering identity.

Take a look at a few big time companies to see how they became successful.  Amazon.com started as the best online service for distributing books through an online service.  Google is immediately known for their search engine capabilities.  Honda Motor Company is synonymous with top quality automobiles.  Each of these companies has a number of other products they sell, but their corporate identity is unmistakable because they continue to do what they were originally founded on better than anyone else in the business.  Honeycat Cosmetics, started by a mentor and friend of mine, is another wonderful example of this concept.  They found their competitive edge in the world of cosmetics and have done very well because of their discipline in sticking to what they do best.

Back in 2003, some friends and I launched our first company.  We wanted to do it all.  We were a couple of young guns straight out of college trying to find our place in the business world.  In fact, our corporate slogan “Forward-thinking ideas, reinventing today” was reflective of this broad ambition.  This approach is fine if you’re an already established business ready to expand your operations, but it isn’t a smart approach when you are a small start-up with no significant financial backing.

I’m going to swallow my pride here and say from the onset, I should have listened to my older brother.  He tried to convince me that we should focus on the first product we created.  It was a mobile product that allowed consumers at large venues to send text messages and pictures to jumbotrons and other large screen displays.  It incorporated streaming video so that one venue could see and text to another venue anywhere in the world.   It was solid, impressive, and definitely had an advantage over any of our competitors from a technical standpoint.  Unfortunately, I was like a kid in a toy store; as soon as someone whispered a new concept for a product in my ear, there I went dropping the old product to race to the shiny new one.  We had a whole suite of products to sell, but not enough customers buying them. 

If we would’ve taken all of that R&D time and instead focused 100% of our efforts on selling what we had, I believe things would’ve been different.  We’re talking back in 2003 when things like texting for charities, large venue voting and mobile fan clubs were just a blip in the technology radar.  Just one of those products could have sky-rocketed our company to a large mobile technology firm. I wish I could go back in a time machine and warn myself of this because I think this is the biggest contributor to the collapse of the company.   From that experience comes a piece of advice:  Focus on one thing, and build your company.  When the time is right and you’re ready to expand your offerings to something new, you will always have your best product to fall back on.