Upstart Wyn

Why Can't Google Speak English?

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 13:54:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker

If you own or run a website, have you gotten the notification from Google about their new, beta, Google Search Console? I just took a look at mine. I cannot figure out much of what it is saying to me. In some cases, I see errors, or problems with indexing. But another item says there are 0 errors.

When I click on explanations, I get tech gobbledygook: Carousels, breadcrumbs, hierarchy... What does the following mean, for example?

"Only elements containing at least one non-query-refinement link count as a position; elements that have no links, or have only query refinement links, do not occupy a position. For example, a carousel of van Gogh paintings (which point to new Google searches) are not counted as position placeholders, and their presence does not affect the position value of elements below them on the page. If a non-positional carousel had appeared in the example above above the AMP page carousel (at position 2), it would not affect the position values anywhere on the page."

It seems that you have to understand HTML and the many nuances of coding to have a viable website that Google can index and show in its search results. The old idea of mere mortals using "plug and play" website templates seems to have gone the way of the horse and buggy.

I guess we need the new sophistication because there are so many websites. The good news is that more coders will get jobs. For now, I'll just sit tight with what I've got.

What do you think?

How to Avoid Startup Failure: Step #1 – Use Your Distinctive Competence

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 17:11:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker

Here is the ugly truth: Most startups fail.

In fact, the startup failure rate ranges from 75 to 90 percent.

Why is that?

CB Insights conducted post mortems of failure startups and published the results. They found that the top three reasons are:

No Market Need
Ran Out of Cash
Not the Right Team

When my co-author, Ed McLaughlin, and I wrote our book, The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business, one of our goals was to disrupt the startup failure rate. In the process, we included one chapter that distilled the business concepts and lessons revealed in the book and called it “The Ten Commandments of Startup Profit.” We published the chapter as a separate manifesto at ChangeThis.com.

Four of those commandments can help you avoid the top three reasons startups fail.

Base your business on your distinctive competence
Don’t startup until you have a proven business model
Take charge of the money and control it
Recognize and hire lightning in a bottle

Today, I’m going to tackle the first commandment.

Distinctive Competence

When you have distinctive competence, you have a unique skill, talent or experience that gives you the special knowledge and insight into the market that enables you to create and develop an innovative business. Use your distinctive competence to find a real need in the marketplace and then fill it better than others can.

With Distinctive Competence, you will have insight into:

the needs of the market
business models that work
how customers think
pricing
competition

Let me give you some examples:

USI

Ed started two businesses. One was a great success. The other a dismal failure. The success was United Systems Integrators - USI – a real estate services outsourcing business. Ed left his corporate job and bootstrapped USI after he realized that real estate services outsourcing was where he had distinctive competence. He knew the business model. He had an amazing track record of success. He had the knowledge. In the long-run Ed’s distinctive competence helped him build his business into an Inc. 500 company, which he eventually sold to a Fortune 100 company.

Sigma

Nine months after starting USI, Ed started Sigma communications – to publish a commercial real estate journal that featured a corporate property exchange. It would bring buyers and sellers of commercial real estate together. This was a pure passion project. Ed had wanted to start a publishing company for years. But he lacked distinctive competence in publishing! His passion and lack of distinctive competence blinded him to the realities of the market and after three years of hemorrhaging cash, he had to shut Sigma down.

With the lack of distinctive competence, Ed failed to line up a lot of the things that made USI successful.

How Distinctive Competence Applies

I can’t promise you that you’ll be as successful as Ed was, but if you base your business on your distinctive competence, you’ll have a much better shot at avoiding the top three reasons for startup failure.

You will already understand the market and its needs.
You’ll have a grasp of business models that work – enabling you to use cash wisely, generate revenue, and ultimately make a profit and produce free cash flow.
You will be a founder with industry knowledge, business acumen, or technical talent – a cornerstone of a potentially great management team.

Wyn Lydecker is coauthor of "The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business", along with Ed “Skip” McLaughlin and Paul McLaughlin. "The Purpose Is Profit" (Greenleaf Book Group) is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon.

Startup Fever on College Campuses: 3 Questions

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 15:18:00 +0000

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker

The startup ambitions of MBA students and college undergrads have spawned discussions about whether aspiring young entrepreneurs should launch new business ventures while still in school. Students, graduates, professors and investors have varying opinions on whether startup fever should be a pursuit that is encouraged or discouraged while students strive to fulfill their academic requirements.

Here are three points of view:

1. Is Starting Up a Distraction?

Wall Street Journal writer, Lindsay Gellman, reported that Stanford Business School is encouraging its MBA students to avoid the distractions of a startup and to instead focus on their courses, campus life, and getting their degrees.

Educators argue that students need time to test their ideas and “embed desirability into the products, services, and experiences they create.” Instead of taking on the obligations of planning a new business and the pressures that come with meeting investors’ requirements, educators want students to spend their time on campus in preparation – not execution of their new businesses.

This runs in stark contrast to the lure of the Mark Zuckerberg startup experience with Facebook, which began with the collaboration of students in a Harvard dormitory and catapulted Zuckerberg to billionaire status by the time he was 23. But isn’t Zuckerberg the rare exception, the unicorn, not the rule?

2. Can Students Afford to Put Funding on Hold?

It’s tough to put startup ambitions on hold when one is convinced of an idea that’s ripe and time-sensitive to attracting investor interest. In Rolfe Winkler’s article, Secretive, Sprawling Network of ‘Scouts’ Spreads Money Through Silicon Valley, he describes how venture firm Sequoia Capital funnels millions of dollars “to scores of well-connected entrepreneurs and academics” through scouts who looked for aspiring young entrepreneurs and their promising ideas.

Students argue that it’s hard and even foolish to swim upstream against the undercurrent of investors’ dollars that are available today and may or may not be there for the taking upon graduation.

First and foremost, startup fever and the desire to take hold of available funds must be weighed against whether or not the timing is right. Capital raised too early could lead to giving away too large a portion of equity and control. On the other hand, entrepreneurs who wait too long could endure a cash crunch as they attempt to scale.

As I wrote in When Is the Right Time to Fund Your Startup? – I recommend that founders complete these three steps before seeking outside funding:

Make sure your business is positioned for consistent user growth
Make sure your business offers the promise of future profits
Make sure to develop a strategic plan that enables you to scale your business

3. Can Campuses Offer Real-World Preparation?

MBA and undergraduate courses on entrepreneurship are on the rise to meet the swelling interests of a generation inspired by a combination of Silicon Valley’s billion-dollar success stories and the glamorization of entrepreneurship through programs like Shark Tank. Most college students are not looking to graduate with a one-size-fits-all skillset that will slot them into long-term commitment at a single company. Besides, as proven out by prior generations, students are wise to the fact that big companies can no longer offer the benefit of long-term career security anyway. So many ask, “Why not take control and start my own business?”

Colleges and universities want to be prepared for an incoming generation of problem-solvers with the drive to find solutions and the ambition to turn their ideas into new business ventures. Today’s students are wired to make a social impact and are willing to take the business risk to make a difference. They want to know how to pitch to investors, build a successful small business, and even take a shot at becoming the next Unicorn.

The Real Question

Rather than trying to turn back the dial on startup fever and asking if students can receive real world preparation on campuses, the real question is this: “How will college campuses help budding entrepreneurs identify where they are in their startup journey, meet them at that point, and provide them with the resources and mentorship programs to set them up for success?”

Embracing Startup Fever

Since entrepreneurship does offer independence and the fulfillment of dreams, we can hardly be surprised that it is becoming an important component of the curriculum on college and university campuses around the world.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Ed McLaughlin. Ed McLaughlin is author of "The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business", along with co-authors Wyn Lydecker and Paul McLaughlin. "The Purpose Is Profit" (Greenleaf Book Group) is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon.

Have Libraries Become the New Startup Incubators?

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 17:37:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker and Ed McLaughlin

My friend texted me, I’m in the Rose Room at the New York Public Library. I’m getting some work done. In the throes of starting her own business and taking meetings in New York City, my friend found the library to be the perfect refuge and work environment.

When I go to our local library in Darien, Connecticut, the main reading room is filled with people using their laptops. A librarian told me that most of them were working on their business. Downstairs, virtually every seat is taken in the technology room. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between an incubator, a co-working space, and the library.

My coauthor, Ed McLaughlin, is very attached to the library. It’s where his company, USI, was born. As long as the local library was open, he and his early partners would lock themselves in a study room, basking in the air conditioning and figuring out their business model. The library provided an escape the cottage Ed and his family had moved into to reduce their expenses and minimize personal risk while he toiled at his startup.

Public libraries have been great places to go in the U.S. since the first one appeared on the scene in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1833. When large-scale book digitization and Internet

dissemination came on the scene, however, some people worried it would spell the end of this great institution. But that doesn’t seem to be so. NPR tells us that libraries are still the place people go to get guidance from knowledge experts. Although technology might seem like it would draw patrons away from the brick-and-mortar search facilities, it turns out that heavy library users are also heavy technology users. The New York Times gives a peek at the library’s future, integrated with the digital world and welcoming patrons in with open doors and arms.

Some libraries are transforming themselves into incubators for entrepreneurs with their quiet and access to WiFi and technology. My local library has gone out of its way to offer business, media, and technology services. I often hold client meetings in my library, and I’ve learned that patrons can use a 3-D printer, a Bloomberg terminal, and video editing software. You can even get coffee and a snack on the main level. The library in nearby Stamford, CT, has become the host of 1 Million Cups – a forum to connect local entrepreneurs through monthly presentations.

Your local library may have meeting rooms you can use for free or for a reasonable fee. Can’t find the research you need? Librarians can be an amazingly helpful resource for entrepreneurs who are seeking to do in-depth market and competitive analyses. They are not only up on the latest Google search tricks, they can show you how to access databases, financial filings, and industry association journals.

It is my hope that libraries will continue to be a haven of inspiration to the next generation of entrepreneurs. Maybe you’ll be one of them.

Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker are coauthors of “The Purpose Is Profit: Secrets of a Successful Entrepreneur from Startup to Exit,” winner of the 2017 Axiom Book Award in Entrepreneurship. Available on Amazon or at your local bookstore.

5 Steps to Starting a Successful Nonprofit

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 11:08:00 +0000

by Wyn Lydecker

After 20 years of working with entrepreneurs who were starting for-profit businesses, I became immersed in the formation of a new nonprofit. With the growing public interest in creating organizations that have a social impact, I wanted to share the top five lessons I learned from my experience of helping to launch and build a nonprofit.

Step 1: Recognize the Value of the Idea

When I first read about Beacon Hill Village, a nonprofit in Boston that helped local people stay in their homes as they aged, I could see the value of the idea. Rather than moving to assisted living, seniors could join the Village, pay membership dues, and have a suite of concierge services coordinated and delivered to them at home – anything from meals to physical therapists. Soon after an article about Beacon Hill Village appeared in the New York Times, two older women in my church (First Congregational Church of Darien, Connecticut) approached me as the co-president of our Women’s Association to see if we could explore launching something similar. We quickly attracted a small group who saw the merit of the concept and formed a committee to evaluate it further.

Step 2: Conduct Research by Reaching Out

A little online research showed us that a nascent “aging in place” movement was spreading across the country. An AARP study had revealed that 90% of seniors want to remain in their homes rather than move to assisted living or a nursing home. Our little committee fanned out to talk with other churches and local social service agencies to see if anyone else was providing an aging-in-place service. We soon connected with a wider local movement and learned that The Darien Community Fund, a nonprofit similar to The United Way, was forming a planning committee to look into the feasibility of establishing an aging-in-place program in our town. I found myself on this new, larger committee and was soon conducting research via self-run focus groups, a mailed survey, and a conference with providers of senior services. Our research results clearly showed that older adults in our town had a need and a desire for services that could help them remain at home. The top three services people wanted were: transportation, handyman services, and referrals to vetted service providers.

Step 3: Don’t Duplicate

During our focus groups, seniors told us not to duplicate services that were already in place. The seniors’ caution to avoid squandering resources made even greater sense as we talked in more detail with the directors of similar organizations. Established nonprofits told us that they did not like new organizations treading on their turf without communicating with them. They had wanted the new nonprofit to reach out to them and find ways to cooperate and collaborate.

It turns out that nonprofits are just as competitive as for-profit companies. They are all vying for a share of the market – competing for the same consumers and, importantly, the same sources of funding. The philanthropy pie is only so big, and the nonprofits clearly viewed its division as a zero-sum game. We discovered that even municipal agencies felt the pressure of competition, fearing that if a nonprofit could do the same job as their government departments that their budgets could be cut by fiscal watchdogs.

Step 4: Develop a Business Plan

Our sponsoring agency officially turned our committee into an advisory board, and we hired a coordinator to start a pilot program to begin to connect seniors to local services. In addition, the board set up a strategic planning committee tasked with writing a business plan and figuring out whether we should launch as an independent nonprofit or join with one that already existed.

That meant we needed to decide on a business model. Who would be our customers? What were their needs? How would we uniquely meet their needs? What would be our sources of revenue? The questions were not any different than the ones any entrepreneur needs to ask. Since I’m a business plan writer by trade, I volunteered to write our plan.

After months of meetings that proceeded at a seemingly glacial pace, we reached a consensus to run with a model that made every Darien resident over 60 a member of Aging In Place in Darien. Membership was free, and all our revenue would come from donors and grants. We would continue to connect seniors to available services and directly deliver others via a corps of volunteers. To get the word out, we planned a newsletter, a free luncheon, a website, and an email list.

Step 5: Communicate, Cooperate, Collaborate

While we were developing our plan, our board set up committees to promote communication among area agencies and to advise our paid program coordinator on how we should best offer the services. Heeding our research, the committees consisted of representatives from organizations (nonprofit and governmental) that were already delivering senior services. These other providers were excited to be involved because we actively cooperated and collaborated with them. They gained users as we connected seniors with their services.

Communication, cooperation, and collaboration became our watch words. So much so that our strategic planning committee recommended that we join with an existing 501-c-3 charitable organization called Gallivant, which had been providing transportation services to Darien seniors for over 20 years. We saw no reason to form a second independent nonprofit serving the same population and going after the same donor pool. After some tense negotiations – we were an upstart proposing to join with a well-established organization – we agreed to a trial merger of one year.

I’m happy to say that we’ve been officially merged for six years and have a new name: At Home In Darien. Our organization has been very successful in our fund raising efforts, and we are generating greater awareness, gaining more users, and delivering more services every year.

This article first appeared in the Wharton Magazine Blog.
Wyn Lydecker WG’76 was a former founding board member of At Home In Darien. She is the co-author of a book on entrepreneurship, “The Purpose Is Profit,”with Ed "Skip" McLaughlin.

Trying Oculus Rift

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:32:00 +0000

Two days ago, I stepped into the world of virtual reality. It truly was amazing. If you're a Star Trek fan, as I am, putting on the Oculus Rift headset is like stepping into the holodeck.

I got to try Oculus Rift because two friends of mine have formed a startup to develop a B2B application using virtual reality. One of those friends invited me over for a demo. While I didn't get to interact with her app, I did work through Oculus Rift's usage tutorial, learning how to use my hands and head to interact with my 3-D surroundings.

The imagination that has gone into this product is absolutely incredible, from the hardware design to the mind-blowing software. First, you're in a Japanese-like room with a fireplace and sounds of water, then you're in a blank infinity room, and you can see your virtual hands in front of you, holding the controllers. An English-accented woman gives you instructions. She sounds very other-worldly. You learn to push buttons and then shoot circles simply by pressing a button and pointing your index finger. Just like being a kid again. Blam! Blam!

But the best part was yet to come - winding up in a workroom filled with electronic junk and a little robot. The robot has personality and actually seems to want you to interact with it. My friend told me to turn around. You're really in a 3-D space! The robot gives you disks to put into a 3-D printer. Out pops butterflies. You can make them land on you and fly away. The experience is enchanting and somewhat addictive. I got to build and interact with a few more items - like little rockets - before the system froze.

I've known a lot of entrepreneurs over the years, but this is the first time I've dealt with ones who are in the field of virtual reality. Now I'm hooked and can't wait to go back and experience more. I'm really looking forward to seeing my friends' app and trying it for myself.

3 Reasons Entrepreneurs Should Be Financially Literate

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Tue, 09 May 2017 14:31:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker

If you are like most entrepreneurs, you have a big idea you want to develop as quickly as possible. While you may wonder how you will raise funding for your startup, chances are that you have not had much exposure to accounting or finance. You may even have no idea how you will keep track of the money flowing through your business. But your degree of financial literacy can make a huge difference in how much success you achieve. Here are three reasons why every entrepreneur needs to acquire at least some of the knowledge taught in an Accounting 101 course.

Reason #1 – To Know How Much Money You Make

Several years ago, when I was working with an innovative energy-efficient lighting company that wanted to raise half a million dollars, I asked the CEO why he needed to raise funding. His answer was typical: so he could grow his business. He and his partner had used home equity loans to finance their launch, and now they wanted to expand. But when I asked him how much money his company was making, he had no idea. “I have to ask my accountant,” he said.

I was stunned. How could someone who had put his home on the line and now said he needed to raise capital, not keep track of the money his business was making – or worse – maybe losing? This man was an intelligent and effective salesperson, highly capable of attracting new business. But he and his partner, who provided the technical brains, had completely outsourced the financial side of the business to their accountant. Once we had the financial statements in hand, it was obvious that the company had plenty of income and plenty of cash flow to fund a good, steady rate of organic growth. They just needed to keep plowing their earnings back into the business.

Reason #2 – To Enable You to Raise Financing

Blindly trusting an accountant or using QuickBooks to do your books yourself when you don’t have a basic understanding of accounting or of general financial management can hurt you when you try to get financing from a bank or an equity investor. In another case, I was developing a business plan for a fashion designer. Even though she kept meticulous spreadsheets detailing the amounts and the costs of every item that went into the clothes she produced – everything from imported fabric to buttons – she left her bookkeeping to her accountant. The statements he provided convinced her that she was losing money, and she desperately wanted to get a line of credit from a bank to enable her to create samples and inventory. She had to spend money on raw materials, labor, warehousing, and shipping months before she was paid by the boutiques that sold her line.

When I saw the statements, I was incredulous. Using QuickBooks, her accountant had allocated 100% of her raw materials to her cost of goods sold as they were purchased. A key principle of accounting is to match revenues and expenses. Some of those raw material costs should have been capitalized on the balance sheet. Then, as she sold her merchandise, she could match the revenues and the cost associated with producing those revenues. When we took her records from her own spreadsheets and developed fresh financial statements using Excel, it was clear that the designer had excellent gross margins and even made a net profit in some quarters. Her biggest problem was timing of receivables and payables through the different fashion seasons. She needed working capital to tide her over from season to season.

Armed with the revised statements, the designer went to her bank and received an unsecured line of credit, enabling her to produce new samples to sell at New York’s Fashion Week and to expand distribution to more boutiques.

Reason #3: To Build Financial Resources for Expansion

Contrast these last two scenarios with the following. Ed McLaughlin, with whom I coauthored a book on entrepreneurship titled, The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business, did not have a degree in business, so he asked his accountant for instructions on how to keep track of his cash and his accounts. His company did all the bookkeeping in-house, and he took home a print-out of the financial statements at the end of each day. Ed wanted to know where his company stood because he had bootstrapped his real estate services outsourcing business, USI Companies Inc, with personal savings, and he had a young family that relied on his income.

As USI grew, Ed hired a CFO who put in more sophisticated accounting software. With the CFO in charge, Ed stopped taking statements home every day, but he continued to read his financial reports each week throughout the life of the business. Armed with such knowledge, the company was able to built a war chest of retained earnings, which they used to invest in regional and product-line expansion. Ultimately, when Ed and his partners sold USI to Johnson Controls, they realized the value of their financial discipline.

It didn’t take an MBA for Ed to understand and track his revenue, expenses, payables, and receivables. He found people who showed and explained the concepts to him, so he could grasp how much cash was flowing through his company. It is cash flow, after all, that determines whether a company can stay alive or not.

The accounting systems we use today were first developed in the Renaissance by the merchants in Venice to keep track of the trade flowing through their ventures. If you are starting a business or own a business, it will pay to invest some time in understanding the power of these systems and in developing financial literacy. If you are starting or building your own business, take the time to learn about basic accounting principles. You can get advice online, in books, or from your banker or accountant.

Wyn Lydecker is the coauthor of The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business with Ed McLaughlin and Paul McLaughlin. This article first appeared on the Wharton Entrepreneurship Blog.

How Your Customers Can Help You Scale

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 15:35:00 +0000

by Wyn Lydecker

When Ed McLaughlin was growing his business, United Systems Integrators Inc. (USI), he realized that retaining his initial customers and serving them in new ways would help the company grow faster than just focusing on new customer acquisition. It turned out that his strategy paid multiple dividends. Experts estimate that new customer acquisition costs can be five to 25 times more expensive than retaining a current customer.

Your most valuable asset

Your customers are your most precious asset. Your goal is to build a customer base of repeat buyers who promote your business to other buyers. An effective customer-referral system is the business equivalent of obtaining the Golden Fleece.

If you expect to build a powerful customer-referral system, you should have solid answers to the following questions:

· Do you deliver on your value proposition?

· Do you maintain a clear competitive advantage?

· Do you provide superior customer service?

· Do you make doing business together a pleasurable and rewarding experience?

Listed below are 10 key ingredients you can provide to deliver superior customer service:

1. Make a cultural commitment to superior customer service from the outset.

2. Assess, manage, and satisfy the customer at every single interface point.

3. Provide a significant product performance guarantee.

4. Assign a dedicated account manager to each customer relationship.

5. Be available 24/7 to log and address customer concerns.

6. Provide a 24-hour-response-time commitment.

7. Schedule customer engagement forums for feedback.

8. Reward team members for providing superior customer service.

9. Make sure that senior team members get directly involved with customers and lead by example.

10. Develop customer-feedback systems to stay in touch with customers and ahead of the competition.

USI's commitment to customer service enabled USI to enjoy a 95 percent contract renewal rate, while growing the business at a compounded annual rate of 40 percent. And they never entered a courtroom to resolve disagreements.

The long-term relationships you build add tremendous value, as shown in an analysis by Josh Chapman, a finance expert at TOPTAL. His article, The Importance of Customer Retention — An Empirical Study, uses financial modeling to demonstrate the financial impact of customer retention when growing your business.

BUILD TRUST

To build trust with your customers, take the following actions:

· Develop an advocate or coach within the customer organization.

· Ensure your product’s benefits align with your customers’ needs.

· Work together to formulate plans to solve problems.

· Jointly develop and sign contracts for trial work.

· Exceed customers’ expectations on every assignment.

· Jointly market your success within the C-Suite.

· Execute a master contract for an exclusive relationship.

ADAPT TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

When Ed was growing USI, he made listening to his customers and adapting his business model to meet their needs top priorities. This practice enabled the company to grow by adding product line extensions. During the early growth stage, USI had the good fortune to land an exclusive real estate service contract with the Olsten Corporation on Long Island. Olsten was a high-growth temporary service firm competing with the likes of Manpower and Kelly Services. Olsten had hundreds of offices throughout the United States. USI was tasked with the responsibility to find, negotiate, and open new Olsten office locations. We also built and managed Olsten’s real estate information database.

Olsten's needs opened up a path for a new hire Michael Casolo to leverage USI’s business model and relationship base to sell design and construction services to Olsten. Under Michael’s leadership, USI’s service lines expanded to include space programming, space planning, project management, furniture management, signage, and workplace consulting. Each service line was managed as a profit center, which rolled up into USI’s Design and Construction P&L. USI became the first real estate outsourcing firm to offer comprehensive design and construction services. Michael’s contribution played a significant role in USI’s profitability and penchant for expansion.

As you grow your business, invest the time to listen to your customers. Your customers will tell you about their problems and help you to figure out the best way to solve them. Then hire entrepreneurial people who will listen, observe, innovate, and execute. Once you have them on board, listen to their ideas, and let them lead and build in their areas of distinctive competence. Give your leadership the opportunity to challenge the status quo and create genuine change. They will take you to places you never thought possible.

Parts excerpted from The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business (Greenleaf Book Group), coauthored by Ed McLaughlin, Wyn Lydecker, and Paul McLaughlin.

What Now? 10 Questions to Help You through Life’s Challenges

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 13:44:00 +0000

Wyn Lydecker

One of my favorite co-workers was fond of saying, “It’s not what happens to you that matters. It’s how you respond.” Jim (not his real name) was a person who had faced many high-stress events and bounced back. He had trained the Apollo I astronauts how to use their onboard computer just before they were killed in the tragic fire. He had been injured in a plane crash. And he had re-engineered a division of a corporation in such a way that he designed himself out of a job.

Jim and I were running a small business resource center at a small college together when a regime change resulted in our resource center being shut down and our positions eliminated. At the time I had no idea what I wanted to do next. But Jim offered to take me through a process of redefining my personal and professional goals. This was the same process we had used when we were counseling other people in transition who were thinking of becoming entrepreneurs.

If you are in transition and need a method to help you decide where you should head next, work on answering this series of 10 questions that Jim and I used in our counseling. You may be surprised with the results.

Weigh Your Trade-offs

Before we launched into the questions, we gave a preamble:

We all know that we are on Earth for an unpredictable amount of time. We also know that time is a non-renewable asset. For those reasons, it’s good to make sure that we are using our time in the way that is best for us. There is no one right way for everyone. And what was right for someone at one point can change.

As we weigh the trade-offs of life, most of us rely on some set of basic values to guide us. From time to time it’s good to step back and revisit those values and reset our goals. Normally, we do this at time of transition. We’re all living with change in our personal lives, our country and the world. All such events force us to look at life from a new perspective. When we are in touch with our core values, that helps re-center us and gives us strength to make good decisions.

Your definition of success reflects your basic values. It also provides the basis for determining your goals and the direction you will have for your life. As you consider the different paths that might be open to you, assess the probability of achieving success along each of those paths.

10 Questions to Ponder

1. How do you define success?

2. Consider five times you have felt that you were in high-performance mode. What made you feel that way?

3. What situations or actions led to the highest and lowest points of your life?

4. How do you set your short-term and long-term priorities?

5. What process did you use to set your major life goals?

6. What were your core values at that time, and did you base your choices on those values?

7. Do you want to transfer those values to the next stage of your life, and how can you do that?

8. What are your goals now, and how do they differ or align with the paths that are open to you?

9. How can you use the resources (internal and external) that are at your disposal to achieve your goals?

10. How will your decisions affect you, your family, and other important people in your life?

Be Open

I spent about two weeks thinking about the questions, writing down answers and discussing them with Jim. In the end, I felt amazingly renewed and very sure of how I wanted to use my talents, education, experience and time. I became confident and open to new opportunities.

Shortly after my last meeting with Jim, a fellow Wharton alum called to see if I would like to write business plans for startups. He was with a business plan writing company in New York, and it was right at the height of the dot-com boom. We had met at one of the events run by our small business resource center. Because of the assessment process I had done with Jim, I knew this opportunity was exactly the sort of work I wanted and grabbed it. The work was immediately rewarding and reinforced my realization that I love writing and working with entrepreneurs.

Where are you in your life? Are you at a point where an introspective process could help you look at your situation from a new perspective? Try thinking through and answering these 10 questions to redefine your goals and open yourself to a new, more fruitful and satisfying direction.

Originally published in the Wharton Magazine Blog under the title of “Weighing Career Transition Tradeoffs.” Wyn Lydecker is the coauthor of The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business (Greenleaf Book Group).

Does Your Startup Need a CFO?

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 22:41:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker

When my coauthor, Ed McLaughlin, was starting his business, USI Companies Inc, he kept his expenses as lean as possible. In the beginning his wife was the bookkeeper. She used a simple, single-entry system coordinated with the company checkbook. But as the business expanded, Ed migrated the bookkeeping to QuickBooks and handed the financial management and record keeping to his COO.

From the time USI started, Ed took home summaries of the company’s financials every night. He knew he would sleep better at night if he understood exactly where the business stood. Understanding the numbers is essential for any founder who wants his or her business to thrive. Eventually, Ed realized that even his faithful COO couldn’t handle the complexity of the expanded company, which had opened offices in cities across the country. It was time to hire a CFO who could be a strategic leader. Ed likens the move to hiring “lightning in a bottle.”

The new CFO redesigned the internal operating model, re-engineered the accounting and financial system, put together USI’s technology development team, and played a crucial role in facilitating USI’s eventual sale to a Fortune 100 company.

When Should You Hire a CFO?

CFO are expensive, and many startups and small businesses can get along just fine using software like QuickBooks and hiring a bookkeeper, or even an accountant to keep track of the financials, file taxes, and manage cash flow. But eventually, a growing business can cross over the line when stronger strategic leadership is needed, as it was at USI.

Scott Brown, a freelance CFO-for-hire, recently wrote an excellent article, "How Long Can Your Startup Survive without a Full-Time CFO?" Published on Toptal, the blog drills down into the reasons you may or may not need to hire a CFO. Following something akin to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Brown says to assess your company’s needs for financial control and analysis. He takes the reader through the stages that necessitate differing levels of financial and accounting expertise. Importantly, he explains why business owners need to keep analyzing their levels of need.

After delving into analyzing your business’s finance needs, Brown then takes the reader through five questions the owner must ask in order to make the right decision as to the level of financial expertise she or he should hire. If you are a business owner or founder, Brown’s blog is well worth reading and keeping as a reference point.

Wyn Lydecker is the owner of Upstart Business Planning and is coauthor of “The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business” (Greenleaf Book Group) along with Ed McLaughlin and Paul McLaughlin. The opinions expressed here are her own.

How to Make U.S. Businesses Instantly More Profitable (and Put More Money in Your Pocket)

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:40:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker

Intrigued?

I learned the secret to increasing the bottom line when developing the business plan for an Australian startup. As the COO and I went over the key assumptions behind the financial projections, he instructed me take out the expense I’d built in for healthcare benefits. Why? Because Australia has a single-payer healthcare system – i.e., universal healthcare coverage.

All the money that typically goes toward employer-provided health insurance in American companies went straight to the bottom line! Furthermore, the Australian company’s projected path to profitability was dramatically shortened. I was stunned.

Why should we keep in place such a high barrier to new business formation? Why do American businesses want to keep themselves saddled with this enormous, growing health insurance burden? In 2016, health insurance premiums cost employers an average of $18,143 per employee. Furthermore, workers had to contribute an average of $5,277 toward that cost, lowering their take-home pay (Kaiser Family Foundation).

Why a Single-Payer System Would Benefit Entrepreneurs

With a single-payer system, we could immediately lower the cost of starting up and growing a business. We could reduce the personal cost and risk entrepreneurs take on when walking away from employer coverage. In fact, starting up would become far more attractive without those burdens. The risk of shouldering out-of-pocket healthcare costs would go down. In a recent New York Times article, small business owners complained that the current system is unbearable. A single-payer system would be affordable for all.

· Besides the bottom-line benefit, healthcare costs would plummet because the administrative costs would shrink significantly. Currently, transaction costs account for one third of our health costs. Think hospital bills are high? Fully 25 percent of the hospital costs are administrative – think all that paperwork, negotiating with insurance companies, etc. (pnhp.org).

· Americans are now paying an average of 10 percent of their income for healthcare premiums, deductibles, and copays, up from six percent a decade ago. Even with Obamacare and its subsidies, healthcare costs are hurting all of us.

· With a single-payer system, more money would flow into workers’ wallets and stay there because they would not have to contribute their share of the health insurance premiums or be faced with onerous deductibles and copays.

How to Replace Obamacare

President Trump and the Republicans who control Congress have promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare.” I believe it should be replaced with a single-payer system that provides universal healthcare coverage for all.

A lot of people are afraid of a single-payer system. But countries that have it enjoy better health and longer life expectancy. Moreover, the other systems are more efficient. The U.S. ranked 50^th out of 55 countries for healthcare efficiency (Bloomberg).

In countries with universal care, research does continue. And their healthcare is no more rationed than ours is – how many times has an insurance company denied to cover a visit or procedure? How many people don’t visit a doctor or take medicine because they cannot afford it?

Best of all, with a single-payer system, the government would be able to exert its buying power to lower the cost of much-needed drugs. The big pharma lobby would fight this, but the lower costs would be a boon to our economy and to our entire population.

With universal healthcare coverage, everyone – sick or well, young or old, rich or poor – will be covered and will pay into the system via a tax. With everyone covered, and without the high administrative overhead, the cost per person should be far less than employers and individuals are paying now for their health insurance or through the taxes paid to subsidize the plans for poor and moderate income families. Thus, the tax for universal coverage will be more affordable than the costs we are now bearing.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of a single-payer system and about how this could work, go to: http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-faq

Wyn Lydecker is the owner of Upstart Business Planning and is coauthor of “The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business” (Greenleaf Book Group) along with Ed McLaughlin and Paul McLaughlin. The opinions expressed here are her own.

Does Silicon Valley Own the New Wave of Entrepreneurship?

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 15:39:00 +0000

(From Toptal's blog, The New Wave of Entrepreneurship;Photos from http://www.ablogtowatch.com, http://securityaffairs.co, http://geniusapp.com, and http://www.rakenapp.com )

I recently read a blog by Matt Swanson on the Toptal site that discussed the difficulty for innovative startups outside Silicon Valley to raise capital from Silicon Valley VCs (The New Wave of Entrepreneurship). Swanson says that Silicon Valley suffers from a closed ecosystem and accompanying tunnel vision. (I suspect this same exclusiveness is what keeps most of those VCs from funding women-owned or minority-owned businesses as well.)

He makes the point that developing the next cool app or the next iPhone is all people in Silicon Valley focus on, when instead there should be a way for entrepreneurs looking to solve problems in varying own industries in other parts of the country to have access to the capital and the brain power that is concentrated in Silicon Valley.

Swanson predicts this situation will change. I believe it already is. CB Insights says that AI deals are at an all-time high, and they are being done in 35 states. AI is only one fast-growing industry that is not just concentrated in Silicon Valley - think Real Estate Tech, FinTech, and HealthTech.

Harness Technology to Change Your Industry

Entrepreneurs come from all sorts of backgrounds and industries. But they can be uniquely successful if they can harness technology to fill a need in their field. My coauthor, Ed McLaughlin, did that with his real estate services business by starting a separate company called Sequentra. Sequentra delivered a proprietary software solution that enabled workflows, improved access to critical information, and tightened his company's link to their customers. (You can read more about it in our book, "The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business")

How can you harness technology to create a new business in your own industry? As he says in his blog, Matt Swanson wants to help you do that.

Writing a Book Is Like Starting a Business

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 21:03:00 +0000

When you've worked for 3 1/3 years coauthoring a book, the feeling of seeing the actual physical book offered for sale on Amazon and in brick and mortar bookstores is one of pure elation! But what makes my coauthors, Ed McLaughlin and Paul McLaughlin (pictured above), even more excited is when someone tells us that our book has actually helped them with their business. Comments like that make all the work worth it.

When we started out to create a book for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, we didn't realize that the endeavor would be just like starting a new business. Before we knew it, we found ourselves immersed answering a lot of the basic questions all entrepreneurs must answer:

What was our main idea for our product?
What was the purpose of our book?
Who was the target audience? (Who was going to buy and read the book?)
What unique value would we deliver?
Were we filling an unmet need?
How would we create the content and design its final form?
Who were our competitors?
How would we manufacture and distribute the book?
How would we market the book?
What other resources would we need to bring our creation to the market successfully?

These were not easy questions to answer. We spent hours discussing them and doing the homework necessary to develop our product, build an audience, and finalize and distribute the final product with the help of our publisher, Greenleaf Book Group. We not only wrote, edited, and rewrote every chapter; we also spent hours developing and executing our marketing strategy, which included feeding the social media machine, writing blogs, and developing an email list, in addition to using traditional marketing tools such as public relations.

The Purpose Is Profit

Here's a description of the book in a nutshell:

My coauthor Ed McLaughlin bootstrapped his first company, USI, grew it into an Inc. 500 company, and 14 years later sold it to a Fortune 100 company. The book uses the full arc of McLaughlin’s journey, including the failure of a second startup, to reveal the essential business principles all aspiring entrepreneurs need to know, including:

Why distinctive competence trumps passion in selecting the business to build.
Where and when to get funding without losing control.
How to build an entrepreneurial brand that lasts.
Why profit should be factored into every business decision.
How ethical behavior breeds trust and unlocks profit.

As a special feature, the appendix includes two essential guides: The Startup Roadmap and The Startup Funding Guide.

In the End

In the end it was worth the effort. A columnist for Entrepreneur.com wrote, "Here's a book every entrepreneur needs to read." Not only that, the book was the #1 New Release on Amazon in the New Business Enterprise category. All that made us feel pretty good.

If you want to learn more, go to: www.ThePurposeIsProfit.com. I'd love to know what you think of our book. Email me at wyn@thepurposeisprofit.com.

Become an Entrepreneur! Start Up Now!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Sat, 09 May 2015 23:50:00 +0000

I'd like to make all my readers a special offer. I've just had a book published that I co-authored with Ed "Skip" McLaughlin, "The Startup Roadmap: 21 Steps to Profitability." Ed bootstrapped his business, grew it into an Inc. 500 Company and sold it to a Fortune 100 Company. I've been working with entrepreneurs for 20+ years, mentoring them and writing business plans. Ed and I have put our combined knowledge and experience into this book. We are offering a complementary eCopy of the book from our website at: http://thepurposeisprofit.com/the-startup-roadmap/. The print edition is also available for $9.99 on Amazon. Anyone who wants to know more about the book, can read about it on our website at: The Purpose Is Profit.

About 15 years ago, I realized that one of the purposes I had in my life was to help entrepreneurs start and grow successful businesses. It turned out that Ed McLaughlin had that same goal. So when he approached me to co-write a book with him on his entrepreneurial journey, I jumped at the chance. We have been developing "The Purpose Is Profit" for the past two years. In the process, we realized that we had the makings of a separate book, "The Startup Roadmap." In writing and publishing "The Startup Roadmap," I feel that I am realizing this purpose. I want to share the knowledge with as many people as possible.

If you've been thinking of starting a business, I really hope you'll read "The Startup Roadmap."

Thanks!
Wyn

Publishing a Book

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 08 May 2015 11:25:00 +0000

I have not been writing this blog on a regular basis because I've been busy writing a book entitled, "The Purpose Is Profit: The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business." In the process of developing that book, my co-author, Ed McLaughlin, realized that we had the material to create a separate book-within-the-book that we titled "The Startup Roadmap: 21 Steps to Profitability." We then took the time to publish The Roadmap separately while we were finishing the editing and design stage of "The Purpose Is Profit."

Here's the upshot: although I have been a freelance writer for over 30 years, I have finally joined the ranks of published authors. We have just released "The Startup Roadmap: 21 Steps to Profitability." The book is a succinct guide for anyone who is thinking of starting a business of any kind. Thinking through the 21 steps will help you with the mechanics of planning, launching, and running your venture.

Ed took his experience of bootstrapping a business, growing it into an Inc. 500 company, and selling it to a Fortune 100 company and put it into the steps in "The Startup Roadmap." I've contributed my 20+ years of mentoring and consulting with entrepreneurs and 15 years of writing successful business plans. Together, The Roadmap is chock full of information to help you as you start up.

If you need to write a business plan, you can use our book as an outline to help you craft the plan. The value is in answering the questions we've posed and thinking through each step as you plan your business. There has been a movement away from planning. But after working with entrepreneurs before and after the dot-com meltdown, I've learned that the people who plan and execute their plan have been the most successful.

"The Startup Roadmap" is available as a complementary PDF from our website. (Click here to get to the Offer.) Or you can purchase the print edition on Amazon for $9.99. It's a small book, but it's packed with powerful information.

Please let me know what you think of our book. Email me at upstartwyn@gmail.com. If you have the time, we'd love for you to write a review on Amazon.

Or you can contact ed at: ed@thepurposeisprofit.com.

Our Book Is Almost Finished!

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 14:32:00 +0000

For almost two years, I have been co-writing a book on entrepreneurship. When I began the process, I had no idea that writing a book would take so much time, thought and energy.

The main author, Ed McLaughlin, wanted to share the knowledge he had gained from quitting the corporate world and starting two businesses in the midst of a recession. One business was a failure, but the other one was a roaring success. Ed grew the successful one, USI, into an Inc. 500 company and sold it to a Fortune 100 company. He learned plenty along the journey.

Long before Ed approached me to write the book with him, I had been longing to take the knowledge I have gained from working with entrepreneurs and put it in a book. I wanted to help entrepreneurs and want-trepreneurs to know the process they needed to go through to build a sustainable business. The problem was how to differentiate the book from everything else in the market. How to cut through the clutter. Enter Ed.

In the book, we take you, the reader, along on Ed's entrepreneurial journey. As his story unfolds, you will learn the process of creating, growing and selling a business. You'll discover essential principles of running a successful business. And you'll read about the real life of a real entrepreneur -- all the ups, downs, and anxiety.

The book is titled: The Purpose Is Profit: Secrets of a Successful Entrepreneur from Startup to Exit. Like all good authors, we've created a website for the book -- www.thepurporseisprofit.com, and we are blogging regularly to share our knowledge freely with anyone who is on the fence about starting up or who needs to know more about the mechanics of starting and growing a business. Read the blog at: http://www.thepurposeisprofit.com/blog-page/.

We are currently offering a preview of Section 1: The Pull to Become an Entrepreneur. It's available as a download on our website. Just click on the offer.

I'll be posting more on what it's like to write and publish a book in the near future. Follow along on the journey. I haven't been posting much on this blog because I've been so busy with the book and the book's blog and social media.

The Purpose Is Profit has just entered the editing stage. The design stage is next. Stay tuned.

How to Relax and Enjoy Summer

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 00:29:00 +0000

I was just outside putting the cover on the grill. I looked up and saw the gibbous moon. And I just totally stopped and relaxed and heard the crickets and looked at the fireflies in my garden and then back at the moon. And I felt complete peace. It was wonderful.

We need to grab these moments of peacefulness.

Out of Poverty Via Small Business Ownership

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 16:05:00 +0000

I have a new appreciation for the term "bricks and mortar." Early this month (January 2014), I traveled to the Dominican Republic with members of my church (The First Congregational Church of Darien) to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. We didn't build houses for the poor. We built with them. This was quite a meaningful revelation to me. I found myself to be overjoyed as I toiled side-by-side with my fellow church members, Habitat building experts, and the families who would benefit from the manual labor we were all doing together. The kids were on a school break, so even kids were digging foundations and mixing mortar. They were dying to help us.

These people were dirt poor, but they had a work ethic. They had clean clothes (which really amazed me). But most of all, they had wonderful, open, friendly personalities. In one site, we were building bathrooms for families who lived literally in tin and wood shacks. The mom in one of the houses had been a widow for five years, but she did laundry and cleaning for others so she could feed her family. She occasionally sold mangoes from the tree in her yard. Habitat was subsidizing the construction of a bathroom for her family who, up until now, had been using an open-air pit near their home that was screened off by sheets of tin and cloth.

At another site, we dug the foundation, laid the cinder blocks, and applied the mortar to build a small house for a family with no home. The family would also own the land the house sat on -- right by beautiful yucca and bean fields. Their livelihood came from their own small business -- a stand they set up in town selling freshly grilled sandwiches and fruit juice at lunchtime. The business provided enough income so that they could afford to make payments to Habitat for their home financing. If the family's income grew, they could add onto the house, as it was designed to be expandable.

All over the Dominican Republic I saw evidence of people with small businesses working hard to eek out a living. The experience got me thinking that small enterprise, entrepreneurship, and micro-finance (including micro-finance for housing) were the best paths out of poverty for much of the world.

I'm curious what others of you think.

An Evening with Angels

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 12:28:00 +0000

By Wyn Lydecker

It’s holiday season, so when I was invited to spend an evening with angels, how could it pass it up? Here’s the catch -- the angels I’m talking about are not celestial beings. They are investors in startup and early stage ventures, and they were all on a panel at Ultra Light Startups Investor Feedback Forum in New York.

I haven’t been to an entrepreneur pitching event in over a year, so I was really looking forward to it. I was not disappointed. Eight creative entrepreneurs gave a two-minute pitch to the panel of seasoned investors and an audience of over 200 at Microsoft’s New York offices. (Full disclosure: I was invited by one of the pitching entrepreneurs, Jim Medalia, owner of 225AM.) The panel asked questions and made insightful comments to each presenter. It was very interesting to hear the questions the panelists asked and the advice they gave not only to 225AM, but also to the other presenters. The investors saw the companies from such different perspectives than the founders.I could see how some of the comments gave new ideas to the presenters.

I was amused that during the advice portion, the hosts took the microphone away from the presenter. That forced the entrepreneur to listen and not use up time commenting on the advice. I’ve never seen that done before. Very good!

One thing that really struck me about the event was the number of women in the audience & in the mix of pitchers. In Connecticut, I only see a handful of women showing up at such events. And articles in the media would have you thinking that there’s a dearth of women entrepreneurs in the tech space. Not so last week. In fact, the entrepreneur who was chosen as the best presenter by the audience was a woman who had used technology to create new way for hard-to-fit women (ones who wear size 18+) to choose and buy custom-fit clothing. (Cynthia Schames - AbbeyPost)

Each presenter had developed an innovative solution to a genuine problem. Jim Medalia’s company, 225AM.com , provides an online service to help college and graduate students find full-time employment. Although the panelists joked about the name of the company, it captures the difficulty college students have today to fit job hunting into their demanding schedules. They only have time to work on their job search at 2:25 AM.

The need for help with finding employment is very real for college and grad students. Only 50% of college students graduate with a full-time job. 225AM acts like a mentor, guiding them through the process, organizing them, prompting them to take the actions they need to, and helping them connect to a network of referrals they didn’t even realize they had. If the student doesn’t know what they want to do when they graduate, the software helps them narrow it down. The placement offices at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford have all signed up to do beta tests with their students.

The other presenters had equally interesting businesses filling an incredible variety of needs:

· Cynthia Schames - AbbeyPost

· Raphael Crawford-Marks - bonus.ly

· Benjamin Bergsma - SeatAdvance

· Jim Medalia – 225AM.com

· Adam Stein-Sapir – LiveAce

· Graham Clarke – Insight Replay

· Pam Cooper – Boosterville

· Kaiyi Chu – Votopin

I left feeling really excited about all the incredible energy that is going into the creation of new businesses in the New York Metro area. As a bonus, I got to see the angels and the tree at Rockefeller Center on my walk to Grand Central from Microsoft’s offices on 6^th Avenue. This made for a perfect ending to the evening.

Entrepreneurs, Women and Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:33:00 +0000

When is a handmade good no longer considered handmade? Elizabeth Wayland Barber took up that question in her recent Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, "Etsy's Industrial Revolution." As I read her essay, I realized that she was bringing up topics much broader than the definition of handmade goods. She was also addressing the issue of women starting and running businesses.

Etsy, the site where artisans can sell their hand-crafted goods, has loosened its rules on the definition of handmade. Too many of its participants are finding it impossible to keep up with the demand for their goods, so they agitated to be allowed to start manufacturing their handcrafts. This change is running afoul of the Etsy ethos in some people's minds. Where do you draw the line?

Barber then draws upon history to make a point, women have been turning to machinery -- and inventing their own machines -- to allow themselves to create handcrafts to sell in order to feed and clothe their families. The drop spindle and the loom are both machines used for millennia all over the world to spin thread and make cloth. Would these machines be blocked by Etsy?

But this got me thinking of how hard women in all countries and in all economic levels find ways to start businesses to give themselves more control over their lives. The glory right now is going to tech startups. And Silicon Valley is being chastised for the lack of women-owned tech startups and women-owned venture-capital-backed businesses. Why are people so worried about women getting venture capital? 75% of venture-capital-backed startups fail.

The the small, manageable, low-tech businesses -- like making and selling handcrafts -- are more successful. These startups grow. And many of them are women-owned. Women are the unsung heroes of entrepreneurship. They are creative. They form businesses that create jobs and inject money into the economy. They manage their families and their businesses. Does it matter that they don't create million-dollar or billion-dollar companies?

We need to get away from lauding the male-dominated tech startups and start looking around at the entrepreneurial vigor in our own communities, particularly the women-owned startups.

Here are some choice quotes about women-owned businesses from the National Business Women's Council:

"Even as the nation’s economic growth slowed, employment in women-owned firms continued to expand while men-owned firms were contracting.1 Furthermore, projections indicate that the trend in employment growth among women-owned firms will continue. The Guardian Small Business Research Institute projects that women-owned businesses will create 5 to 5.5 million new jobs by 2018 – more than half the 9.7 million new small business jobs expected to be created and about one-third of the 15.3 million total new jobs anticipated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by 2018.2

"Women-owned businesses already are serious players in this nation’s economy. An economic impact study conducted by the Center for Women’s Business Research and the National Women’s Business Council documented that majority women-owned firms today are driving more than 23 million jobs – both directly and indirectly."

Let's understand what's really happening out there. Women: stand up and be counted for your contributions to the economy.

Funding the "Affordable" Care Act (aka Obamacare)

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:58:00 +0000

When Obama was elected president, he said he wanted to spread the wealth around. The Affordable Care Act, which some people are calling the "Unaffordable Care Act," is making good on Obama's goal.

I heard the best explanation of how the redistribution of wealth is taking place on NPR in their broadcast on November 7, 2013. The title of the piece was "How the Affordable Care Act Pays for Insurance Subsidies."
People who have had very expensive health insurance or no insurance, but relatively low incomes, can now get affordable health insurance plans because the government is subsidizing the plans. The subsidies are paid for in part from a higher Medicare tax on high-income earners ($250,000+ in annual income). That's a clear redistribution of income. Funding for the system also comes from lower Medicare payments to providers and taxes on medical-device and drug companies.

Read or listen to the whole NPR piece. Everything fell into place for me when I heard it.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of unintended (but easily foreseen) consequences from Obamacare -- consequences that Obama has actually apologized for. (Hear interview with Obama on NPR.) Individuals, sole proprietors and small business owners are getting slammed with much higher insurance premiums. Virtually every small business owner I know has had their current health insurance plan cancelled. And they can only find new plans that have 40% to 100% higher premiums, and in many cases lower benefits and higher deductibles and co-pays. Small and new businesses are the engines of economic growth and job creation in this country. These new, more expensive policies are surely going to hurt that engine.

We were supposed to be able to keep the plans we had, if we liked them. Will this problem get solved? Who knows? Obama claims he'll try to get this fixed along with the glitch-filled software running the Federal exchanges.

If I were in charge, I'd expand Medicare to cover everyone. The system is already set up. Businesses would no longer have to pay for health insurance. They'd improve their bottom lines. They would be able to hire more workers and pay them more. Yes, we would have to cover the cost with new taxes. But the benefits would be enormous. And with everyone enrolled, I suspect the taxes would not be as high as the premiums we now pay. People could always buy supplemental plans, just as they do with Medicare. We are the only industrialized nation without universal health coverage. Time to catch up with the rest of the world and stop trying to jury-rig a system that is not working the way it was intended.

"Give and Take" - a Review

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 14:28:00 +0000

There are far too many useful business and nonfiction books are the market for any one person to read. But Give and Take - A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant (Viking) is one I believe is well worth the time. Grant has looked at empirical evidence from many sources and discovered a novel idea: Givers can become wildly successful.

Unlike some books about success, this one is not full of hyperbole. And unlike some business books by professors -- Grant is a management professor at Wharton,-- this one does not drone on. In fact, Grant builds his case in an intriguing way, drawing the reader in with stories, surprising the reader with unusual outcomes, then explaining the paradoxical theory and supporting it with academic research. I wanted to keep reading to find out how Grant would turn each story on its head.

Give and Take really opened my eyes and got me looking at situations from a new perspective. The more I read the book, the more I recognized types of people I know and started to appreciate the Givers in my life even more. I also saw more opportunities to be helpful to others at random times. Now, I'm inspired to figure out how to start a Reciprocity Ring at my church. (Read the book to find out what a Reciprocity Ring is.)

The author does not just dwell on business and management. He uses examples from sports, education, grassroots dot-coms like Freecycle and Craigslist, finance, health care, and nonprofits, and he introduces several really fascinating concepts:

1. There are three types of people: Takers, Matchers, and Givers. Within those groups are subgroups. The Givers can wind up on the bottom, never getting ahead, or they can succeed so much that they wind up at the top.
2. Givers who get ahead build loyalty and high-quality teams. Takers can be so self-centered that they drive support away.
3. Givers can help others to realize their full potential.
4. Givers who succeed use time wisely and do ask for help occasionally. Grant calls this being Otherish.
5. Givers who fail don't use their giving time wisely and never ask for help for themselves.
5. There's a myth about Giver burnout.
6. Takers can be generous.

But wait, there's more! Give and Take is worth reading simply to discover how Grant came to all these conclusions and to figure out how you can be more of a giver.

Full disclosure, I read this book for many selfish reasons:
1. I went to Wharton, and Grant teaches at Wharton (a little alumna loyalty).
2. I'm co-writing a business book and want to read other business books to see what will hold my interest and how principles can evolve out of anecdote. I wanted to analyze what made me like(or not like) the writing. (I really liked Grant's writing. Why?)
3. I am on a nonprofit board for At Home in Darien, a nonprofit that helps seniors staying their homes. But seniors don't call us for help, transportation or handyman services. Why? They're all Givers. How can we get them to be Takers? (Adam Grant, if you read this review, please take on this question for further research.)
4. I've been on the pledge and the finance committees at my church, and I have often wondered why some people in the congregation give generously, while other don't. What's going on in their minds? How could we change the non-givers into Givers? I was searching for an answer.

Not all of my questions were answered. But I came away from Give and Take with enlightenment and inspiration. The book was a complete pleasure to read, even on beautiful summer afternoons.

Entrepreneurs Come in All Ages

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 14:46:00 +0000

When people typically think of entrepreneurs, they think of 20-somethings starting a tech company. But that stereotype is not quite right. Entrepreneurs come in all ages and start businesses in all industries.

A new study sponsored by Babson and Baruch Colleges and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Consortium shows that 42.7% of people over 65 work for themselves. Over 25% of Americans over 55 own their own businesses. Compare that with 30.5% of 18 to 24-year-olds who have "entrepreneurial intention."

I'm co-writing a book on entrepreneurship right now with a highly successful entrepreneur who started his business when he was in his 30s. So I was quite excited to see these stats. You do have more at stake when starting a businesses at a more mature age, but you also have years of solid business experience on which you can base your venture.

No matter your age or business background, if you have the entrepreneurial spirit in you, listen to it. When our book is closer to publication, I'll start posting some of the principles from our book that can help you achieve success in your new venture.

You can read more about the study in question at: http://www.gemconsortium.org/docs/2804/gem-usa-2012-report.

Bootstrap or Raise Outside Funding?

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 23:44:00 +0000

The New York Times Small Business Column in the Thursday, June 20, 2013, Business Section ran a great article on "Self-Finance or Raise Money? A Quandary for Start-Ups".

Since I've been working with entrepreneurs on developing business plans to raise capital since 1999, you'd expect me to be on the side of raising outside funding. But I'm not most of the time. Sometimes, I even counsel my clients to bootstrap and grow organically. (Organic growth is anathema in Silicon Valley.)

I believe bootstrapping is better. I'm even co-writing a book with a really successful entrepreneur which includes content on how bootstrapping can work in your favor.

For now, read the NY Times article and think about the two sides for yourself.

Self-Finance or Raise Money? A Quandary for Start-Ups

The founders of GoodData and RJMetrics took different approaches to starting their data analysis businesses.

Hearing Bob Dorf at Startup Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Wyn Lydecker) — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:07:00 +0000

When I learned that Bob Dorf was going to speak at Startup Weekend at the Stamford Innovation Center, I was excited. I'd been hearing about Bob Dorf as an entrepreneur, investor and business guru for years. Not only that, I had recently read much of his book, The Startup Owner's Manual, Clearly, I had to attend this event, which happened last Friday, April 26, 2013.

I was not disappointed. Dorf speaks at Startup Weekends all over the world, from the US to Brazil to Russia. In Stamford he spent an hour outlining the essential elements that you must have lined up to launch a new business. He illustrated the points with war stories of successes and failures. Here are a few of the points Dorf made:

It's brutally hard to achieve success. Out of the 650,000 businesses that get going annually, only about 12 will go on to become great companies that are wildly successful.
You do not need a business plan - just a Minimum Viable Plan "MVP"), which can boil down the essentials: value proposition, customer relationships, revenue model, and plan of execution.Get real facts to back up your assertions and assumptions.
Your business needs to be repeatable, profitable and sustainable.
Get out of the building! Go out and talk to customers and potential customers to learn if you have a viable idea. Listen to them.
Pivot if customers are not interested in your product or service or if they suggest modifications. More new businesses fail because they lack customers than for any other reason.
Put together a team. Every startup needs "a hacker, a hustler and an artiste."
Come up with a way to make money -- your business model.

I agree with everything Dorf said, probably because I've been saying similar things to my own clients for over a decade. While I am a business plan developer, I haven't written a full business plan since 2005. No one wants to read one, write one or pay for one. What I do now is very close to an MVP -- a three to seven page summary or a one-page angel summary. But what is more important is the planning process -- addressing the points made above, plus a few more.

Unfortunately, I could not stay to participate in the entire weekend due to family and client obligations. I wish I could have heard the final presentations. But Friday evening was well worth it.

Note: If you live in the Stamford, CT, area, check out the Stamford Innovation Center. They have a lot going on to support new businesses and entrepreneurs.