SustainableWork

For any friends in southern WI who might like to attend one of my talks, the next one will be June 11th.

This one will be at the Connections meeting, a quarterly networking event held at Waukesha County Technical College in Pewaukee. Doors open at 6 PM. There will be an opening welcome from the Small Business Center Director Russ Roberts at 6:30 and my talk will begin at 6:45.

Here is the official description...

Invest in Yourself: How to Organize Your Small Business to Grow During Difficult Economic Times

What does it take to start and run a small business in difficult economic times? It takes an investment of time, and an investment in the skills and tools to organize yourself and your enterprise. Learn how smart entrepreneurs do more with less, while increasing financial security for themselves and their businesses.

There is open networking all evening following my talk, along with an opportunity to display some of your marketing materials. If you need additional information please send me an eMail.

The talk and Connections meeting will be in the Anderson Conference Center. I look forward to seeing you on June 11th at WCTC!


WCTC Connections meeting agenda

Register online for the Connections meeting

Map to WCTC

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, startups, The slow start up movement

This post won't be fun but it needs saying.

Many people are turning to self employment as corporations seize up and meta markets constrict.

In the past, many new entrepreneurs turned to their bankers to locate funding to start their enterprises. Often, the choice between acceptance or denial was the backup provided by the Small Business Administration (SBA). You may not have been able to convince your bankers of the worthiness of your idea, but if you could get that loan backed by the SBA, the loan went through.

There are a number of ways we could connect with the SBA, but over the years, it's influence has become greatly intertwined with the banking system and importantly, state Departments of Commerce. Entire programs to develop small businesses have grown up around this relationship.

In talking with friends in this world, I've learned that the SBA loan programs, in many cases, suffered from the same lax standards we are reading about in the general credit market. Often, diligence was not fully applied and as a result, the SBA default rate is up and standards are about to change.

Tomorrow, May 1, a new set of loan standards, called their standard operating procedures (SOP) will go into effect for all new SBA loans. These involve tighter standards and more oversight. In light of the wider credit crisis this is not really a surprise, but I am surprised by the lack of press this is receiving.

The new Small Business Administration SOPs are likely going to raise havoc in all existing programs you may know about at the state and local levels. Havoc in the sense that previously available programs will themselves begin constricting and possibly disappearing as regional governments fight their own fiscal battles.

Is this the end of small business? Of course not. Is this yet another sign that building a sustainable small business structure is your best bet to succeeding in turbulent times? Yes.

Going forward, startups and small businesses will need to control their enterprises carefully. They will need to manage for cash flow and profit, not debt repayment and outside funding.

This is indeed the renaissance age of entrepreneurship. There are problems galore that need fixing. Just don't make your new business one of the problems.

Labels: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, startups

I've been invited to give the next presentation to the Entrepreneurs and Inventors' Clubs of Columbia and Sauk Counties (WI). If you're in the area, please drop by. I'd like to meet you.

The title is Startups: What are the Minimum System Requirements? This will be a presentation exploring just what are the minimum number of things necessary to get in place to launch your own startup. It's a surprisingly short list, when you strip away all the hype and false expectations.

The date is next Wednesday, February 27th, '08. The location is The Sauk County West Square Building, 505 Broadway (B-30), Baraboo, WI 53913. The meeting will run from 6 to 9 PM. The meeting is open to the public and refreshments will be served.

I've used the picture above because I celebrated our New Year's Day in the Baraboo bluffs with great friends from China this year.

That's me on the right with my friend Yongchao from Jilin, China. Yongchao works in economic development in his home city. We were visiting Devil's Lake State Park near beautiful Baraboo, WI to celebrate our New Year's 2008.

Come to next week's talk early and take some time to look around beautiful Sauk and Columbia Counties, some of the most very beautiful in all of Wisconsin. Then you can start your own business and call the area your home!


Sauk County Development Corp.

Labels: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, startups, The slow start up movement

That headline is a quote from Medal of Freedom winner Dr. Peter Drucker.

I believe his statement is life-and-death true for startups and emerging enterprises, as well as the rest of the economy.

And it sounds so simple to execute. Measure the important stuff, then manage the important stuff.

However, for people I call independent entrepreneurs - venture capital folks often call them solo entrepreneurs - this can be painful to hear.

It's not so much as a 'Duh!' moment, as it is a Homer Simpson, 'Doh!' moment.

How can you measure anything when you can't find it? How can you ever trust your conclusions when you're not sure you've found it all? That's not management, that's sleepless nights stuff.

I have self-interest in this post.

I released the very first beta copy of Diligence™ last night. This is my new tool for organizing enterprise workflow I wrote about several posts back. Yikes, am I excited.

Here is the premise behind this tool…

Small enterprises of all kinds need to measure and manage their business accurately.

There is contact management software to add people to your digital rolodex.

There is accounting software to take care of your financials.

There are many, many details in between. All of it is critical to your being able to survive and grow as an enterprise.

And where do we, as startups and small businesses keep all of those details?

We all have our systems. This is good. But as we grow, we begin to patch our systems. Then we patch some more. Pretty soon our system is nothing but patches.

I've personally done this. To epic proportions. It's just what you do.

Some of our information is in text files, some is in eMail, some in spreadsheets, some in piles on the desk, some in file drawers, some in our notebooks, some in our contacts files, and on and on. As our businesses grow, the real number of storage locations is typically many more than these. It just happens over time.

Pretty soon, nothing is connecting to anything, and what is connecting is wrong and giving you fits.

That's why I'm calling this new tool 'enterprise workflow software'.

I've carried a story around with me about a certain class of very successful retail businesses that would first buy their software, then build the business around that. The idea was that you put the tools in place as soon as possible so that your enterprise has the capability of growing without crashing. You want to avoid dieing in the details of a patched up mess. Yet, that's an all-to-common path.

Doing your own business should be a lot easier.

That's why I've written this new tool I'm calling Diligence™

Whenever you're ready you can put your enterprise into this tool. Then, as Peter Drucker sorta says, you measure and you manage. Then repeat.

Diligence™ lets you capture all that random workflow data and organize it easily. The purpose of the tool is to make it efficient to store, search, use and measure your business information on demand.

This is intentionally NOT accounting software. There are many good options we all use for that.

I've built this tool for everything that comes before the accounting software kicks in.

Diligence™ is a powerful contacts manager (that's not nearly enough). It can also create and track orders and all the many associated details. Create quotes and bids and efficiently store critical business details. It manages your vendors and all their specific information. It gives you a place to efficiently organize all those small details that always end up being critical when you can't find them.

Most important of all, with a bow to Peter Drucker, the new tool lets you measure this stuff.

Organize. Measure. Learn. Manage better. Repeat.

I've had my biz running in this new tool for about 2 months now. Shaving off burrs, looking for breaks, making it simple, etc. It's certainly an early iteration, but I'm really loving it. This is the first embodiment of what I've learned building new businesses over the last 35 years.

It's in a tool that's as simple and easy-to-use as a big-button calculator.

So, I've been the alpha test and I'm a tough judge. The beta test started last night Feb. 1, '08.

I chose my beta very specifically because (1) she is doing her own independent entrepreneur startup and (2) she is an expert in business database software.

I'd love to tell you some early results, but this post would be too long. It's a great story. My favorite piece of the tool wasn't working, of course. But we didn't care because we were both so happy with the first results. I fixed my favorite part and got some great feedback.

I don't think I'm going to write much about this new tool any longer on this blog. I'd like to keep SustainableWork as focused on entrepreneurship support as much as possible.

I'm going to start writing specifically about Diligence™ on a blog linked to my day job, Business Diligence. I'll link below, and put a permanent link into the settings on the top right.

Whew. The beta is underway.


Wikipedia for Dr. Peter Drucker

The new blog for Diligence™

Labels: bootstrapping, databases, entrepreneurship, startups

There was a great article in the Jan 7, '08 issue of Business Week by Vivek Wadhwa. Mr. Wadhwa is a tech startup guy and is executive in residence at Duke University and is a Fellow at Harvard Law.

From things I've learned in my own experience with startups and from helping entrepreneurs as students and clients, I will agree with his opening paragraph.

"Before I launched my last startup, I prepared a business plan exactly as I had been taught in business school. I was determined to lure professional investors, and I thought the key lay in creating lofty financial projections and carefully documenting the details. If all went according to my 40-page plan, my software company would be worth billions in five years by capturing just 1% of the market. My CEO friends told me this was one of the most professional business plans they had seen. Yet it didn't take me long to realize that it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. It bore no resemblance to the company I finally built. I don't think that any of the 100 people I sent in to read more than the executive summary."

Mr. Wadhwa finds some merit in his research, but concludes, "But the two to three months I spent creating the plan would have been better spent if I had instead focused on building my product and speaking to potential customers to understand their needs."

There is much truth here, my startup friends.

It's my experience that the enterprise world is awash in people with ideas looking for money. The world is also awash in money looking for great ideas.

So what's the problem? The muddy middle.

For most of us the money can't see ideas. The money needs to see results and customers and buzz.

The money isn't going to pay you to do that. That's your job as a startup.

Mr. Wadhwa is exactly 100% dead on right. He encourages building prototypes and letting potential customers break them. Based on that knowledge he then offers up the 7 key points your biz plan should address with your newfound, reality-based knowledge: (summarized)

1. How are you going to find customers?

2. How are you going to set yourself apart?

3. What can you charge that's profitable for you and valuable for your customer?

4. How do you close your sales?

5. What are your sales channels to sell and service your customers?

6. How do you support customers with problems and product/service failures?

7. How do you be so good that your customers sell for you?

Yikes. If you answer those questions after you've skinned your knees on your beta tests, you've got yourself a business plan that will be the easiest pitch you'll ever make.

I personally gave the absolute worst presentation of my life to a room full of bankers. Technically the thing was a disaster. On the social stuff, I was worse than inept. I cringe as I type this.

But I was coming in from the field with a battle report. All I wanted to do was deliver that report, resupply, and get back out into the fight. It didn't matter to those good folks that I acted a bit shell shocked.

I addressed the points that Mr. Wadhwa so clearly identifies and the group signed the check.

If I'd been in there talking about what I was going to do, I am 100% certain that not a single person in the room would have approved that deal. However, I would never have been able to talk to them with just an idea in my pocket, so it's a moot point.

Here’s how Mr. Wadhwa closes, "The good news is that once you've perfected your business model, professional investors are likely to be much more interested in you. And you will have all the information you need to create a credible business plan they will take seriously."

Yep. Don't think your ideas will get you money. Lightening strikes but it's a risky bet. And if you're selling off an idea just to get money, you're not selling it for what it's worth. You'll be sorry about that later.

Do it the smarter, harder way. Get in the game. Get muddy. Get smart. Get going.



Business Week article by Vivek Wadhwa

Thanks to the Wisconsin Entrepreneur's Network, WEN, for pointing out this article.

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, startups, The slow start up movement

My next speaking stop is at the Green County Inventors & Entrepreneurs Club in beautiful Monroe, WI. The date is Jan 7, 08. The times are 6:30 to 8:30.

The Club meets at the Monroe Clinic, 515 22nd Av. in Monroe. Please call or eMail if you would like further directions.

The title of this talk is "From Idea to Manufacture: The Process of Invention."

Talk promo from their brochure: "Rick Terrien, owner of Business Diligence, holds patents on several products he designed and built. Rick has successfully navigated the process of getting ideas from his brain to a working prototype to a working machine. Rick is the two time winner of the Wisconsin New Product of the Year and 2005 United States Small Business New Product of the year Award. Rick's passion is helping entrepreneurs and inventors take the next step to success."

To my knowledge, Monroe, WI is the only place in North America still making Limburger cheese, so the trip would be worth it just for that! Come early and look around beautiful Green County and Monroe. This would be a wonderful place to start or grow your enterprise.

The economic support and wonderful quality of life bonuses available in our region would make this area an ideal place for new and growing enterprises.

See you in Monroe!


Green County WI Economic Development office. Better yet, call their office and ask for their Director, Anna Schramke. 608 328 9452. If you want to grow your enterprise and grow your life, our region is the place to do it and Anna can show you the benefits of Green County better than anyone I know. You're going to love our region!


Go to Baumgartners Tavern and cheese store on the square. Wonderful! No link available at this writing.

Labels: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, startups

A newly released paper from Harvard economist Edward Glaeser reinforces a theme regarding startups and emerging enterprises that I'm finding to be true everywhere I turn.

Professor Glaeser's paper, "Entrepreneurship and the City", was discussed in the online forum, The National Dialog on Entrepreneurship, a Kauffman Foundation site. The abstract is available from the Harvard Institute of Economic Research. I have purchased the full article, but it's not here yet. However, the abstract and NDE discussion is enough for me to make the point of this post.

While this research looked specifically at what made cities more successful, I have no doubt that the same findings can be said for any region and probably any country.

The paper concludes that it is the culture of entrepreneurship that is critical to the success of a city. Specifically, cities don't have entrepreneurial cultures by some magic stoke of good luck. They succeed because they support and educate the widest number of people who then become entrepreneurs.

Professor Glaesser finds that cities with a skilled and appropriate work force tend to have higher rates of self-employment and relatively higher proportions of small firms.

The paper also concludes that, "There is a strong connection between area-level education and entrepreneurship."

There is no mention of advanced business school training, only education leading to a "skilled and appropriate work force".

Yes. Absolutely. The culture of success is built person-by-person, startup-by-startup, new enterprises becoming small creative, valuable contributors to their cities and regions.
Does that mean all these small new entrepreneurial ventures are going to succeed? Of course it doesn't. Just the opposite. The vitally different - and better - way of asking that question is why is the idea of failure universally seen as nothing but negative by so many people?

Why can't failure be seen as the valuable learning step it can be? In successful entrepreneurial cultures, you aren't looked down upon for failing. You're looked at as someone that's working hard and could use an introduction or two, maybe a referral to a needed link in their next chain.

Now, if your failures involve lots of money and little planning, the value of that lesson is dimmer and can be hard to locate.

If you fail by losing important money in some high risk gamble, that's not failure, that's stupidity.

But if you roll out your startups following the ideas in the slow startup movement I've been writing about and you fail, congratulations! You've learned something valuable without paying much for it. You now know one small thing better than most of the population of the planet. String a few of those together, and you're gold. Nobody can catch you now. You'll know one specific set of things that virtually no one else on earth knows. If you launch your new startup by spending more time than money on it, the world of enterprise becomes an entirely different and more welcoming place.

But you need the culture of support for innovation that only comes from doing it not talking about it.

In many of the circles I travel in, I hear all kinds of supportive talk for entrepreneurship.

This week, I was fortunate enough to see this kind of culture-building support for innovation actually being done.

Was it valuable to for the entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs? There are a few metrics I could use to define success, but let's use one that should have obvious meaning. I saw a large group of people come out on a cold November night in Wisconsin, at the very same time the Green Bay Packers were playing the Dallas Cowboys (both with records of 10 and 1), to share and support their entrepreneurial ideas. Value? Hmm. I'd say.

This was an Inventor and Entrepreneur Club meeting in beautiful Juneau County, WI. Wow. The stories, the mutual support, the flat out usefulness of the entire process was really fun.

Terry Whipple coordinates the meetings. No, that's too orderly a word… Terry mobilizes the meetings. These are very peer-to-peer driven. I'm excited for their organizations. Terry and Sue Noble from the Vernon County Club, and I got to meet before, during, and after the meeting. Talk about getting it! Talking about building entrepreneurial cultures for all the right reasons.

I also came away from a recent Green County I&E club meeting with a similar sense. There are wonderful, low-cost, effective, and highly supportive ways to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, one person at a time.

This is new enough for a Harvard professor to be writing about it, and yet surely is as old as commerce itself.

The folks working at these grassroots levels in my state are not counting business plans and filtering them for their high tech/biotech/nanotech sex appeal. They are building cultures of entrepreneurship one person, one relationship at a time. They are building networks on networks, one network at a time.

Sue Noble told me a story about her I&E Club which almost had me in tears. I'm headed to one of their Vernon County meetings ASAP, and will post that story soon.

Professor Glaeser writes that "local entrepreneurship depends mainly on having the right kind of people". And I would suggest that to create the most efficient and widespread effects, the right kind of people would be those that are respected, supported, and trained to learn from failure and to grow in sustainable ways. That's a real culture of innovation.

Terry had posters all over the room reading 'Catch the Culture!'. I got it but didn't post it to my notebook. The next day I read about the Harvard study, stating that regions that create systems for supporting small scale entrepreneurship build successful cultures. Terry suddenly seemed smarter than he'd ever claim.

There is a tantalizing reference in Professor Glaeser's abstract for my boomer entrepreneur buddies. "Self-employment is particularly associated with abundant, older citizens and with the presence of input suppliers." Yikes. Boomer biz with lots of small operations. The research paper is ordered. Stay tuned.

I love studies that agree with me. They seem so prescient. Yet the truthfulness and the timeliness of these ground-up ideas makes perfect sense. The idea of building successful, entrepreneurial cultures from the bottom up has to be true.

Is this a knock on other kinds of enterprise creation? Of course not. Those high tech, biotech and nanotech models can be wonderful and produce spectacular results. What I do intend to say is that those models aren't the only valuable kids on the block. The entire entrepreneurship movement needs support and respect for the whole culture to grow and prosper.

This Harvard study focused on two measures of entrepreneurship: self-employment and the number of small firms. "Both of these measures correlated with urban success."

You do the numbers. Any region needs more entrepreneurs and more small enterprises to be successful. That is NOT the same as more headline grabbing this-tech or that-tech venture funded firms. It's sheer numbers. More entrepreneurs and more enterprises make the culture succeed. From this perspective, risk in the economy of our regions gets spread around and diversified, more people get to contribute, and more people become engaged solving problems. Tell me something bad about this approach.

Thanks, Harvard. More importantly, thanks Terry and Sue and all the other good folks working from the bottom up to create a culture of entrepreneurship for all of us.

To anyone considering their own startup or new enterprise, I'd say "Welcome aboard". We all need you.



Juneau County, WI Inventors and Entrepreneurs Club

Contact Vernon County, WI economic development folks to learn more.

Abstract "Entrepreneurship and the City" (October 2007). Glaeser, Edward L., Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 2140

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups, The slow start up movement

The new issue of Rural Life Magazine (Winter 2007) has a very good article called "The Rise of the Rural Entrepreneur", by Candace Krebs. The subtitle is, "A 'creative economy' spurs opportunity for rural start-ups". This is a subject dear to my heart and the subject of this piece.

The article brings in author Richard Florida, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University, whose book, "The Rise of the Creative Class" did a lot to predict and identify this trend. They quote him emphasizing what seems so important to the general discussion of entrepreneurship and sustainable commerce everywhere now.

"The American dream is no longer just about money. My research and others' show another factor emerging: The new American dream is to maintain a reasonable living standard while doing work that we enjoy doing."

The ability to exercise this dream from rural areas has never been more available.

We all have skills and talents. We're all capable of making a contribution. Now the tools and techniques for interfacing with the general economy from rural communities are becoming better, cheaper, and more reliable every day.

Importantly, those of us working from small or mid-sized communities are all learning the techniques of outsourcing to one another, building strong networks of independent enterprises that, together, are much cooler and - personally - more economically secure than most vertically integrated behemoths lumbering about out there.

Can you do this successfully from a rural area? The article cites a fish broker who easily moved operations from Oregon to Nebraska. Don Macke, founder of the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship in Lincoln, NE says, "A big part of the economy has moved from people being producers to being facilitators of services".

That's largely true, and new services are emerging every day that can be done remotely. While not in a rural community, I was starting capital equipment in Johannesburg, South Africa earlier this year with little more that a modest ability to explain things over the internet.
The work force of capable people is crashing. The ability to participate, contribute, and grow your own enterprise from a beautiful, rural county has never been more feasible.

There are tough and necessary questions that need asking when the subject of rural entrepreneurship is discussed. A reliance on outsiders to solve problems seems wishful and risky. Growing our own entrepreneurs from people already in place, on the ground in rural areas seems much wiser. Developing the skills to empower those would-be entrepreneurs is vital to the larger economies of rural areas now more than ever.

I'm not going to be a mask the fact that rural life in many areas can be economically challenging. I am going to tell anyone looking to develop a new small enterprise that rural life in my state of Wisconsin is strong, vigorous, and welcoming to new ideas and new people.

According to the Rural Life article, people working in the creative occupations include such job titles as engineers, designers, artists, writers, planners, micro-production specialists, web workers, and my favorite, small scale ag entrepreneurs. I would also include everyone in a rural community that has the gumption to reach out and engage the wider world with their entrepreneurial venture.

I'm working with several new friends that specialize in economic development in the rural counties of my wonderful state. They are working hard, and working very creatively, to help you establish your new enterprise in some of the best areas to live and work in all of the United States. I think this trend is beginning to occur in most rural areas of the U.S. Their doors are open, friends, and you are welcome.

The Rural Life article included these stats about the new creative professionals: "Creative-sector workers today outnumber blue-collar workers, and the creative sector of the economy accounts for nearly half of all wage and salary income - $1.7 trillion per year."

Richard Florida concludes, and I agree; "The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love".

Yep. And it's never been easier to do work you love from a place you'd love to live.

Top that.


Resources...

Here are just a few of the beautiful rural places in my state, which are looking to have you live and work and live out your dreams. I'd highly recommend getting in touch with these folks if you would like to learn more. If you are already living in one of these places or would like to, get in touch with the folks below. You'll never launch your own enterprise without taking the first step. Just start!

Juneau County, WI. Terry Whipple has built a program to support entrepreneurship and innovation that is unmatched. All this from a beautiful rural location you'd love to live in.

Vernon County, WI. I think it's among the most beautiful rural areas in the world and don't want to see it overrun. Sue Noble and friends will help their beautiful county develop with your needs and their beautiful county in mind so please call her.

Green County, WI. This county is among Wisconsin's best kept secrets. It's a beautiful rural setting with excellent access to Chicago, Milwaukee, Rockford and Madison. Anna Schramke and her team can get you all the information you could want about starting or relocating your new enterprise in this really lovely setting. Some of my very best new startup clients are based in Green County and the support there is excellent.

Sauk County, WI. Sauk County contains some of the most beautiful rural settings in Wisconsin, yet is bustling with commercial vitality. Not only that, this wonderful Wisconsin county hosts a community baseball park known as a national gem. Call Karna Hanna to learn more.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups, The slow start up movement

I've been helping a new client launch his enterprise. It's one of those situations where the marketing possibilities are almost endless.

What I was having trouble expressing is that, especially for bootstrapped startups, too many possible markets is a problem.

My friend was having trouble getting his head around my suggestions that we ignore most of those possibilities for now and focus on the art of the possible (which, by the way, are code words for cash flow)

Then I remembered a great quote from Bill Cosby that made my point better than any business book or management theory could ever do.

Here is Dr. Bill Cosby's approach to success..

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

wiki Bill Cosby

Labels: bootstrapping, marketing, startups

I've been thinking about ways to put real cost numbers to doing low cost start ups.

In truth, there are almost as many kinds of start ups as there are enterprises out there.

A 'low cost' franchise start up can cost many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and still represent the low end of that spectrum.

A 'low cost' high tech start up can cost millions.

So I circle back to this concept of the citizen entrepreneur that I wrote about earlier this summer. I've been looking for representative numbers that are accurate and also that can give hope to my peers that self enterprise is not only open to the rest of us, but available in ways that are startlingly inexpensive.

A good reference came in from an unexpected source this summer. Guy Kawasaki (linked on the right and mentioned often lately in these posts), one of the leading high tech venture capitalists in the world today, started a new company of his own.

I was anxious to read about all the high tech financing machinations somebody with his experience would be able to muster. I expected the inside details of dealing with his fellow Silicon Valley moguls would be a great look under the hood at that expensive start up world.

Nope.

June 03, 2007
By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

A really cool, international start up for about $12K. And a big share of that is expenses you and I wouldn't have to incur. Mr. Kawasaki is a big time venture capitalist and attracts a lot of attention, so he needed to defend his company digitally and legally. That contributed about $8K to his start up cost.

I want to use this start up example as a true to life, in the trenches, publicly validated example of how you can start up inexpensively.

I've done my own start up this summer for under $2K, but I, like Mr. Kawasaki, know how to do many of the steps myself. I have also started successful companies out of a loose change jar in the past.

Do I subscribe to all his thoughts 100%? I think you have to read everything carefully. Sure, Guy starts out saying he had zero business plans, but at the end he also acknowledges that he had 24 years of skinning his knees and banging his head in this subject prior to launch.

Overall, I think this is a wonderful post from Guy Kawasaki and I think you can use it to stir up not only hope, but reality as you design your own new enterprise.

Go get 'em, friend.


Guy's bootstrapping post

Guy's Truemors site

Labels: bootstrapping, Guy Kawasaki

I’ve been looking for a way to describe my approach to entrepreneurship for a long time.

The business press is full of many competing descriptions. It can get confusing very quickly when you look into the subject about just what it is to be an entrepreneur. If you’re starting out like most of us, as small scale, big dream types, the official entrepreneurship press can make you feel pretty damn inadequate.

I’m not here to disparage any style of start up. The world is a big place, and there are uncountable niches for fitting your start up style into an available slot.

I am here to say that you should NEVER feel second rate for any effort you can muster. Entering the world of entrepreneurship is your right and a privilege that people living in the generations before us could only dream of.

It took getting mad to find the language I was looking for to describe entrepreneurship as I see it.

When I write about this stuff, I focus on positive aspects of the subject. As you can probably tell, I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of guy (because the glass IS half full). I don’t write about parts of this subject that tick me off because they are usually worth ignoring.

And yet, here is my first post focusing on personal anger management.

The normally wonderful Wisconsin Entrepreneur Network’s newsletter, entrepreneur@work dated April 25, ‘07 links to an article titled in a way that attracted my interest. “The frugal company culture: How to make your start-up last.”

Cool. We all need that.

Then I read my way into it. What should have made me smarter initially made me feel inadequate for what’d I’d done as an entrepreneur. However the more I stewed about it, the more it seemed like an April fool’s joke. Ha! “Gotcha. You thought we were serious didn’t you…”

Advice to the frugal start up: “Don’t hire 100 new employees.”

Why thank you. We start ups rarely worry about payroll. You’re right, I probably shouldn’t hire 100 new employees as a frugal start up.

Granted this is at written for dot-com start ups that have been over paid by private equity types. However, if you think most new enterprises live in this kind of world, stop reading this and go get the comics.

Also of great interest to frugal start up is storing their excess cash, “A money market is another conservative option. On $10 million, even 5 percent is $500,000, which could fund you for an extra month.”

Half a million dollars buys me another month. Great. High comfort level there when that’s your monthly nut and you’re struggling for that kind of cash flow. Count me in.

OK, this is certainly not my niche. When I re-read the article to write this post, I found it to be pretty cool for people operating in that economic space. Some advice in the article is good for all of us (especially the advice about using incubators).

However, I spent the time following my first reading feeling like I’d just never gotten far enough, fast enough.

Then the new May ’07 issue of Fast Company lands and the cover photo and story is, “The kid who turned down $1 billion dollars.”

In working through all that, here’s what I came to and here is the way I’m going to describe the kind of entrepreneurship I’m talking about:

The citizen entrepreneur.

It is your right and your privilege to enter the commons and participate constructively, increasing value in our communities in beautiful ways, small and large.

My kind of entrepreneurship is at the citizen level. The place in life where we have responsibilities to contribute and rights to participate freely.

The kind of world where problems get fixed, families get raised, friends increase, bills get paid, and you feel overworked and satisfied.

There is no level of legal entrepreneurship that you should ever be made to feel inadequate about. Do not accept it. Don’t compare your story with anyone else’s. You’re in charge of your story and you need to honor it and build it. It’s your story and your most valuable asset.

Citizen entrepreneurship means that all of us have the right to change the world. We all have the capacity to build small, effective organizations to support ourselves, and any others we choose to include.

Age does not matter here. To my boomer freinds especially, I say, 'Welcome to a great new phase in your lives!' Don't put this chance off any longer. Take the shot you've always thought about.

For all of us, there are not many hard and fast rules when it comes to creating new enterprises. You’ll need to learn those rules and never deviate from them. The rest of it is your blank sheet of paper to fill in.

You do not need to meet standards set by the biz media or anyone else. The size and shape of your enterprise is yours and yours alone to define and build. Let no one make you feel small or insignificant because you don’t meet the standards shouted from headlines.

Your enterprise has significance because it comes from your heart and it’s there to make the world better.

As a citizen entrepreneur, no one can take that away from you.

Good luck and go get ‘em, fellow citizens.



The Wisconsin Entrepreneur Network index page for their newsletter Entrepreneur@work


Article about keeping your $10 million start up frugal This article is meant for entirely different start ups than I’m talking about, so I don’t mean to disparage it. There is a very good reference to using business incubators, which I highly encourage. Incubators represent the biggest steal on the planet for entrepreneurs. Everybody in your town/region is contributing money to get you a place to work from. This model doesn’t happen a lot elsewhere in life. I highly recommend incubators and gratefully use this resource myself.

Labels: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, startups