No Guts, No Glory! Leadership Tips For Entrepreneurs

Let's get real. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. Some have the stomach for it, most don't. What separates a real Entrepreneur from the dreamers is the willingness to take the first step, which usually involves spending and risking your own money. Hardly a comfortable notion. Knowing what you're doing, what you're getting into helps alleviate some of the anxiety. When it comes to going after what you love in life, Entrepreneurs don't take no for an answer. The true Entrepreneur understands the risk vs. reward ratio, and lives by the motto..."No Guts, No Glory!"

Learning from people who have already "been there, done that" is the best resource available. But at the end of the day, someone else's experience will not launch your company. It takes fire in your belly, passion and drive, and a deep and abiding belief in your idea and yourself. Nothing less will keep you on course in the turbulent waters that threaten an infant business. During the next few months, we will look at ways to optimize the chances for your start-up business to succeed. Stay tuned for more "NO GUTS, NO GLORY!" articles and tips for aspiring Entrepreneurs based on interviews with successful Entrepreneurs.

Product Launching

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Tip #1: When in doubt, just take a small step forward.

No Guts, No Glory! Leadership Tips For Entrepreneurs

Believe in yourself. This is the first rule of Entrepreneurship. There are enough barriers to starting a business without you questioning your own abilities. Once doubt creeps in, rash and ill-considered decisions are made. The vision loses focus and energy. Fear and doubt have an odor, and people can smell it. It is a natural repellent to investors or potential clients. It's normal to be anxious when you're embarking on a new venture...but don't let them see you sweat!

You are so protective of your idea that you aren't even willing to solicit feedback from your closest friends and family. Stop! Don't be too proud or frightened to ask for help. That's what family and friends are for, to listen to your crazy ideas. Even if they don't see your vision, articulating it helps to refine and strengthen it in your own mind.

Often the biggest impediment to moving forward is the clutter in your own head. Get rid of all that useless baggage, it'll just weigh you down. Live in the moment. Yesterday is a cancelled check, tomorrow is a promissory note - today is cash!

Tip #2: Grow thick skin.

Take a deep breath. It calms the mind. As Entrepreneurs we already have leadership tendencies, but we confuse that impulse with the need to dictate the vision and fight to maintain its sanctity. Stop! Not every conversation has to end with a kiss. Don't let business become personal. It's a bad practice which leads to bad decisions. Learn to yield, listen, and agree to disagree when the occasion calls for it. Also, if presented with an unfavorable deal, walk away. Leadership is not about being right, it's about accomplishing the objective.

On the flip side, a successful colleague once said, "If I'm the smartest guy in the room, my business is in trouble". Hire talented people and let them shine.

Learn to laugh things off. Time heals all wounds. Give time, time. Everyone makes mistakes, so ask "in five years, will this matter?" Probably not in most cases. Life is too short to waste time staying annoyed and angry. Plus, it's bad business to let anyone else live rent free in your head.

Tip #3: Don't compare your situation to others.

If we all threw our problems into one pile and saw everyone else's, we'd take ours back.
Often, when the work is overwhelming and nothing is going right, we have a tendency to feel like a victim, wishing we had never started the business. We may be envious of another person's success. Stop! You have no idea what their journey has been like. Envy is worse than a waste of time - it's a corrosive practice that blinds you to the blessings in your own life. You have all you need to unearth your own potential. At this point, go to a trusted friend who has started a business, and have a candid conversation about your situation. Vent with someone. It's far better than licking your wounds in solitude.

All Entrepreneurs have been through what you're experiencing, and most are happy to share some guidance. One of the moral imperatives of success is to lend a hand to the next Entrepreneur coming up, to mentor and inspire future generations of Entrepreneurs. Seek the counsel of experts.

Tip #4: Over-prepare, then go with the flow.

However good or bad a situation is, one thing is certain -- it will change. So, the best course of action is to prepare yourself for every eventuality. Commit your game plan to memory, then factor in all possible scenarios that may arise. Hopefully, you won't face the more dire problems that some start-ups encounter, but being prepared is the best way to combat adversity and sustain a company's prosperity. And when faced with a tough decision, don't agonize over it. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

As you go with the flow, new ideas will surface. Share credit. Does it really matter where a good idea comes from? Be grateful for any contribution to the success of your company, and acknowledge the source. Ignore the envious, the naysayers. Celebrate the idea because sometimes you're the only one who will. Be the idea champion.

Tip #5: Don't take yourself too seriously.

Come on, this is meant to be fun. This is what you always wanted. So show it. Smile, it's contagious. Simplify. Some claim it is "lonely at the top". Yes, if you're a tyrant, bully, or a real pain in the neck. But if you respect your employees, treat them like family; running a business can be fun. It's all a matter of your approach and attitude. If you go in with the mentality you are the "boss", then it will be a lonely road, but if you go in with the design you're the leader of a team and inspiration behind the plan, then you will create an environment which fosters growth and prosperity. Let people feel empowered, a sense of ownership, and a sentiment of belonging and being needed.

Confidence is important. Even if you don't feel confident, fake it. Confidence breeds loyalty, excitement and productivity, which are contagious. Panic and fear result in chaos, which will ultimately destroy your enterprise.

In conclusion, I leave you with this...be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to have blue hair. Now go out and have fun. Good luck. Remember, "No Guts, No Glory!"

No Guts, No Glory! Leadership Tips For Entrepreneurs

Marc Ford is the Founder of Tipstor.com and Partner of Brass Tacks Productions. Marc is currently enrolled in Western Carolina University's Master in Entrepreneurship Program. Webmasters and other article publishers are hereby granted article reproduction permission as long as this article in its entirety, author's information, and any links remain intact. Copyright 2009. Marc Ford. All Rights Reserved.

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Launch Parties - How to Organise and Plan a Launch Party For a New Product, Service Or Menu

A launch party is a sensational way to introduce a new product, service or menu. Parties create an opportunity for clients and suppliers alike to get together and get excited about your new venture. If you have never hosted such an event before it can seem like an overwhelming number of tasks are involved - however once you break it down, it is really quite simple.

This is a basic guide of what is required. First of all, find yourself some Party Helpers. This includes a Front Door Greeter to assist guests as they arrive, locate seats, hand out lucky door tickets, etc. This person should be friendly and familiar. Next allocate a Caterer Liaison to ensure smooth operation of food and beverage provision. The last two party helpers you should seek are a suitable Master of Ceremonies and an event Photographer.

Product Launching

Planning your launch party:

Launch Parties - How to Organise and Plan a Launch Party For a New Product, Service Or Menu

8 WEEKS OUT

- Determine your event goals
- Set a budget
- Choose catering style (buffet, cocktail, sit down, etc.)
- Select a theme
- Decide on date, time & place
- Reserve venue, caterer, photographer & other service providers
- Prepare guest list with addresses & phone numbers
- Order invitations
- Arrange gifts

Choose a trading time of intermediate or low regular business, such as a Wednesday or Thursday night to ensure maximum attendance.

Work out what decorations, table centre pieces, etc. you will need to convey your theme. If you are not sure what you need, hire a professional.

6 WEEKS OUT

- Send invitations
- Plan menus
- Arrange function staff
- Order Flowers &/or room decorations

Personally invite relevant key people in the community, such as suppliers (actual or potential), local business owners, community group leaders, tourism venue operators, mayor, leading sergeant, journalists, etc. Include a small gift with the invites (offering a gift up front is another tactic to maximise attendance), or a larger gift to attendees, like a goody bag. Get suppliers to provide the bulk of these if you can.

Choose a low cost, but impressive menu. If you can afford it, make the dinner free for guests. The purpose is a memorable night that will be discussed for days and weeks to come. Happy guests will tell everyone they know what a nice time they had how great your new product is. Happy suppliers will see you as a serious contender in town. This will lead to better deals and more cooperation for future promotions.

If you cannot afford to make the dinner free, try alternative ways to charge for it. One suggestion is to invite a local winery for 'tasting' on arrival. Guests then purchase a () bottle of wine for () and get a 'free' 2 course dinner. Otherwise, charge enough to cover your costs, plus an additional amount per head and donate the proceeds to a local charity. For example: a 3 course set menu costs per head to make. Charge per head to attend and donate per head to the charity. People like contributing to charity and they will make allowances for inflated prices when charity donation is involved.

Make the dessert (final course/speaker/activity) fabulous. This makes the last memory of the evening the biggest conversation piece. Ensure your branding, signage and new product is highly visible to guests as they leave, as well as enter. Also promote your address, website and phone number to remind customers how to find you.

2 WEEKS OUT

- Confirm all orders & bookings
- Create an attending guest list
- Personally contact all VIPs with a courtesy reminder & to check they have travel arrangements made

Distribute media packs where appropriate to allow enough time for journalists to arrange their schedules to suit.

DAY BEFORE

- Inspect venue, including accessibility & furniture
- Check decorations, flowers, seating chart
- Ensure gifts have been received by venue for table placement

See if there is any opportunity to place products, posters, brochures, order forms and the like in bathrooms, ante rooms, elevators, hallways, foyer, and other areas that your guests may visit to increase the impact of your message.

AT THE EVENT

- Arrive early to meet and mingle before guests enter
- 'Work the room' as best you can
- Obtain feedback by listening to and asking guests
- Thank guests as they leave

AFTER THE EVENT

- Send out thank you emails or notes to all who attended
- Follow up on new contacts made
- Fulfill orders placed at the event with priority
- Evaluate effectiveness against your event goals

For further event management assistance, contact Catherine @ http://www.wanttobebigger.com

Launch Parties - How to Organise and Plan a Launch Party For a New Product, Service Or Menu

Catherine worked as an event organiser for two years, covering all kinds of events from 50th wedding anniversaries to cosmetic company launches.

Catherine Whelan is now a small business consultant who focuses on small business growth. After years in corporate Australia, Catherine decided to turn her big business knowledge into a resource for helping small businesses compete for greater market share.

Catherine now keeps abreast of small business trends in Australia and overseas, delivering relevant, timely and up to date information to her small business clients.

For more see: [http://www.wanttobebigger.com]

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Enhancing Customer Relationships Through Trigger Marketing

Consider the following scenarios:
Any salesperson knows a lead has to be nurtured. Why? Because most everyone you initially speak to is not ready to buy. There are various steps a prospect must go through before purchasing. Would you throw out the "non-purchasing" leads? This allows the salesperson to "work the lead" gathering information, follow up calls and/or visits culminating in a purchase. Equally important, prospects are handled differently based on their specific requirements and actions. Some will need additional information, others a call back in "x" days. Now think about the traditional marketing process. A direct marketing program is executed generating sales from responders. Often the marketing department plans the next marketing campaign for another target audience. Or, in some cases, non responders from the past program are re-solicited with another campaign.The two scenarios are diametrically opposed. The second scenario represents "lost opportunity" in sales dollars by not nurturing the "non-purchasers".

Historically, it would be a manual process of developing various queries through the IT department identifying each "group" based on their pre-determined marketing "actions". The marketing department would take the data and coordinate with external printers or email providers to launch the targeted message to those groups. Secondly, you would incur minimum production costs. It would be financially prohibitive to launch one piece of communication. Finally, the logistics of tracking and analyzing responses would be a manual process requiring another request into the IT department. All but the largest companies, having ample financial resources and time, could develop this type of sophisticated marketing program.

Product Launching

Now, you can. Recently, I came across a company specializing in, what I call trigger marketing. What is a "trigger"? It is a responder's action (or lack of action) such as:
A request for information by telephone Filling out a web form and requesting specific information Responding to an email via a web form requesting follow up in a specific time period Making a purchase Filling out their birthday for special announcements Not making a purchase in a specified time period Making a particular type of purchase indicating a particular preference encouraging cross and up selling opportunity Requesting a follow up phone callThe company targets small to mid size corporations. Their platform, called "Smart Tracks", automates the sales and marketing process through the development of specific "touches". What is a "touch"? Simply, it is a series of emails, phone calls or direct mail pieces sent to an individual contact at a predetermined time. It is an Outbound Communication compared to an Inbound Inquiry. You create a series of Touches in Smart Tracks using personalized post cards, emails and business letters. You assemble the series of Touches in a Track and the Track is assigned to a Campaign.

Enhancing Customer Relationships Through Trigger Marketing

Campaigns are set up with all pre-defined collateral (i.e. emails, direct mail, web form(s)) along with rules determining which prospects receive which series of "touches" based on their "triggers". Once the rules and budgets are established, the marketing campaign is on auto pilot. It starts and stops based on the your predetermined instructions and budget. Responses are collected within the same platform facilitating response analysis and ROI.

The software integrates with your website. Specialized web forms can be created to collect specific information from a campaign's visitors. Based on the selection(s) through the web form, (they will be stored in the internal database), the prospect will be funneled into a particular track based on pre-defined rules.

Another technical feature is something called Variable Data Printing (VDP). This is a high tech printing, (email or print), feature allowing any collected data element change the message for each recipient. Why is this valuable? Because response rate increase when communication is personalized to the individual receiving it. Examples include:
Changing the name and address Changing images Changing promotional offersWhat is especially cost effective is that the software will execute (on demand) one response or 1000's of responses. Smart Tracks is customer relationship marketing at its best.

In an earlier post, "Your Marketing Database", I discussed the importance of a database in collecting and storing information about your company's prospects and customers. Your database along with Smart Tracks goes to the heart of customer relationship marketing. Customers will generate the greatest return on investment (ROI). Therefore, focus your marketing dollars on your customers and highly qualified prospect leads that require nurturing.

Think of the possibilities using Smart Tracks:
Develop a campaign to cross sell customers after they make purchases. Specific products are tailored to customers based on their specific purchase. Based on specific customer triggers, automated communication is emailed or mailed. Sales executives can automate their follow up communication with a series of touches to each qualified lead to increase their closing ratio. Birthday announcements can be tailored to each specific announcement. For example, a picture of women's clothing can be included in one announcement, and men's clothing in another based on gender (The gender would have to be a data element stored in the database). Special loyalty promotions with different promotional offers can be sent based on the customer's historical purchasing behavior.In the May 4, 2009 issue of DM News an article entitled "Mining for (data) gold" discussed the increasing importance of well maintained in-house customer and prospect databases. Mr. Jonathan Marguilies, of the Winterberry Research Group stated that non-targeted, saturation and "spray and pray" type mailings were declining.

He went on to state:

Where we're not seeing declines is in data-driven, impactful, relevant communication. The channel that continues to drive and be positioned for growth is personal, digitally produced, variable content around creative offers - the true one-to-one communications.

In short, just the type of marketing communications Smart Tracks produces. The software is not for the non-marketer. It is available through authorized Smart Tracks agents. Additional information about Smart Tracks and how it can help your company is available on my website's CRM page.

Enhancing Customer Relationships Through Trigger Marketing

EBM Direct Marketing Services LLC's focus is building a company through maximizing your customer revenue base. By incorporating online and offline marketing solutions, we increase customer revenue through a combination of data driven, analytical and quantifiable solutions achieving the highest top line sales returning the optimum return on investment.

If you would like additional information how our solutions can increase your customers' revenue, please visit http://www.ebmdirectmarketing.com. For more helpful direct marketing articles, please visit our articles page on our website. Eric B. Mohr, EBM Direct Marketing Services LLC© 2009

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Product Launch 101 - Developing Product Launch Indicators

Establishing Product Launch Indicators

Launching a new product into the marketplace is always a risky venture, and even the smallest misstep during the launch phase can sometimes doom a product to obscurity and failure. It would certainly be nice to think that you could launch every new product with the expectation that the public will immediately embrace it and ensure its success. That, however, is not the way the real world works. In the real word, there are a host of factors that need to be taken into consideration to provide a product its best opportunity to succeed. Developing a series of product launch indicators in advance of the actual launch will help you to measure how well your product is performing against your expectations.

Product Launching

Most customers are pretty much oblivious to the amount of risk that is associated with any product launch, accustomed as we are in this society to an ever-expanding range of choices in almost every area of our lives. But the fact is that every single new product launch is a roll of the dice for the company executing it. All of the market research in the world can still fail to deliver on the sort of insured success that any company would love to have. If you doubt this, go read about the history of New Coke.

Product Launch 101 - Developing Product Launch Indicators

Promotional activities play a crucial role in the success of any new product, as one of the main reasons for product failure has to do with customer awareness of the product. In order for a product to be successful, the manufacturer must be meeting a present demand, or marketing in such a way as to create that demand. Obviously, a failure to promote a product properly will lead to a low demand for it due to a lack of awareness on the part of the buying public. Moreover, those promotional efforts cannot end with the product launch. Effective promotion is an ongoing process that is necessary to ensure not only that a new product launch succeeds, but that the product's marketplace momentum continues long after the launch is completed.

One of the most common types of launches these days comes in the form of brand extension. This occurs when a new product is launched as an extension of an existing brand. It can be an effective strategy for a company whose business maintains a tight focus on meeting a selective market need, though in many cases the new product has little association with the old. Another effective strategy is product extension, which is merely the use of an existing product to introduce a new one, usually in the same product category as the company's existing line.

Any attempt at developing product launch indicators to measure the progress a new product makes in the marketplace has to take all of these factors into consideration. By doing so, you will be able to establish legitimate benchmarks by which you can judge your new product's effectiveness during each stage of its launch and beyond.

Product Launch 101 - Developing Product Launch Indicators

Finally, here's a great free resource for learning more about constructing the perfect product launch. For a limited time you can watch these videos online, for free ( value). Simply Click Here and you'll be granted instant access to the series.

This video series will teach you how to grow your business and offers some great ways to organize your business and product launches. Have a look: http://www.7figurelaunch.com

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