Strategy

According to the experts quoted in this Fast Company article, writing down your ideas and intentions has a more powerful effect than using a keyboard (or touch-screen) to record your words:

“…as your hand executes each stroke of each letter, it activates a much larger portion of the brain’s thinking, language, and “working memory” regions than typing, which whisks your attention along at a more letters-and-words pace.”

Hmm… so if writing things on paper engages your brain more deeply, imagine what using a pen to create drawings and diagrams on paper can do for you. I’m developing some material about using mind-mapping for strategic planning, so this little tidbit is very timely.

Check out the article!

This morning I presented at the HOST Victoria Meetup (Home Office Support Team). I really enjoyed being with this group of people and I appreciated their awesome questions.

This is my Powerpoint presentation from that workshop – as promised!

If your non-profit organization has been considering embarking on a social enterprise, you should tap into the resources provided by Enterprising Non-Profits. Their next granting application deadline is November 24. Organizations must have participated in an ENP Workshop prior to applying. If you haven’t yet taken in a workshop, definitely put this on your to-do list if you’re in a non-profit that might have even a glimmer of thinking about doing social enterprise.

Directis Consulting has been asked by some organizations to assist with their grant applications and their projects. While we don’t (as a matter of principle) write actual business plans, we can help out with the legwork / building blocks (market research, environmental scans, pro-formas) and facilitate the Board’s process of planning and preparing for a social enterprise. ENP has a great two-pager on Hiring a Consultant which may be of interest if you’re looking for resources outside your organization to help with a social enterprise plan.

Before you get to the stage of embarking on a social enterprise, your Board, Executive Director and key managers do need to have a very clear understanding and agreement on your organization’s mission, core values and the main strategies you will use to achieve your mission. Please don’t begin a social enterprise if there is doubt in your organization about your direction, and be aware that a social enterprise may take several years to yield contributing revenues. It is not the solution to your short or medium-term fund development problems. (But we know people who may be able to help with those).

One of the most important tenets of marketing strategy is KNOW THY CUSTOMERS. (Second-most important would be YOU ARE NOT YOUR TARGET MARKET). This applies to all marketing, but today I’m going to point out how it applies in the world of online marketing, specifically if you expect to reach out to your target markets using socila media tools.

Forrester Research has published a rudimentary version of their Social Technographics tool online for you to play with:

http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html

Take a peek. Then imagine you’re planning an online marketing campaign in which you hope your potential customers (let’s call them “users” to be polite) will become active participants in your online forum/community/tool/discussion/what-have-you. What you’re going to need to do is create a platform in which your desired customers can engage at a level that will help you meet your business objectives.

One of the things you need to bear in mind for creating your platform is how involved you want your users to be, and how involved they want to be in the online interaction. Are they participators? Passive viewers? We need to think about what level of engagement is required to make an “ideal” user for your online marketing activities, and what age/demographics we might expect that person to be. If the sort of person who’s going to play along with you online is NOT the sort of person who your product/service is aimed at, then you need to readjust or rethink your online marketing activities.

Define your ideal user profile. For an online community dedicated to the chess community, for example, it might be:

• People who are open to connecting with other people or organizers in an online community (therefore they have some level of trust for online interactions);
• People you expect are interested in chess;
• People who have at least a moderate amount of disposable income and spending ability (otherwise good luck selling your product to them, or getting advertisers to pay for space on your site: advertisers will not be interested in people who do not spend money).

This is going to start pointing us to certain categories of age, education, income level, gender, geography, etc. There will be an “ideal user” and then several categories of “semi-ideal users” that we want to plan around. Your decisions for site design, functions, activities etc. in your online marketing will need to be slanted towards those specific categories in order to get enough users to make it worthwhile.

Bringing us back to the Forrester Research Social Technographics profiles, we don’t get very much information to go by on the free version of this tool, and I’m opposed in principle (and pocket) to paying the outrageous prices these companies charge for their research reports. But it does give us some suggestions about the age and gender groups we can expect to demonstrate certain types of online activities.

Take a look… see what conclusions you start to draw from it.

I had a wonderful conversation this morning with Jayne Weatherbe, a family and couples therapist (okay! she’s a sex therapist! I said it!). Aside from showing up in the most fantabulous, colorful jacket I’ve seen in ages, Jayne got right to my heart by telling me about her love of dance. We also talked about what I do, and Jayne shared of some of where she is at with her business. That’s HER business and I’m not telling tales out of school here, but as a result of where our conversation went, I found myself reflecting on something that I felt was worthy of a blog post. Here it is.

In my workshops, I teach people about strategic planning so they can use those skills themselves and build a stronger business (or non-profit). But sometimes you get to a place in your business where you’re not sure if you are still totally in love with it (maybe the same as marriage?). I just feel it’s important to tell you this: strategic planning will not make you fall back in love with your business. Similarly, if you are not sure whether the life of entrepreneurship is right for you, no amount of business planning, strategic planning, marketing, social media, yadda yadda etc. etc. will make your decision to go into business for yourself any easier. You’ve got to feel a drive for it.

You MUST have passion for what you want to do as a business. Don’t just do it for the money – do it for love, and the money will follow (or not – let’s be realistic – but at least if you’re doing it for love you can still respect yourself in the morning).

So what happens when you’ve got a business that used to give you the “shock tingles” and now leaves you somewhat “meh?” There are a few ways that I know of to deal with this situation:

1) Find something new about your business that draws your heart into it again. I used professional development and some personal soul-searching activities (yes, involving visuals) to help me through the transition I needed to make when I moved from Vancouver to Victoria, after I became a mom. Allowing yourself to renew your skills may refresh your passion for work, or give you some new flavours to work with. Learning graphic facilitation did it for me in December 2008, and since then I’ve invested in continual professional development because it keeps me falling in love with my work over and over again. I’m lucky like that.

2) Make an exit plan. Identify the value of your business, and ask whether it could be operated by somebody else. If you’ve been in business for a while, your client lists and reputation may be worth something – but you can’t just dump them on some poor unsuspecting buyer and flee. That’s not doing your clients or your buyer any good. Instead, make a short-term plan (6-12 months) for how you will get your business ready to be operated by a new owner, and do what needs to be done. Finding a buyer is challenging; I will not fool with you on that one. Business brokerage is not my line of work, alas, but there are professionals out there to help you!

3) Take a break – without a firm return date – and see if you can rediscover your passion after you’ve been away from the day-to-day crush for a while. It could be that you’re just burned out and need a rest. Some time away will help you see your business more clearly, and you may realize you need to make some changes to continue being happy.

Options 1 and 3 can probably be combined quite happily!

The bottom line is that there’s no point in being in business BY yourself – be in business FOR yourself. If you’re not in love with what you’re doing, take action. Life’s too short to stay shackled to something that doesn’t make you feel happy.

Sometimes customers know what they want – they want a public relations expert, perhaps, or someone to give them HR advice. They know what that person should be able to do for them and what the results should be. No fuss, no muss. It’s simple. Then they start looking out there for a service provider and find… complexity. Lots of verbiage that says in 500 words what they’d really like to find in 50 words or less. Promises of engaging, visibility, transparency, accountability, reassurance (insert other words from Marketing Buzzwords 2010).

I recently discovered this when I went looking for a few good folks to help me out on a couple of management/marketing tasks for Directis. So it occurred to me to ask myself, does a visitor to my website know what services I provide, for whom, within 30 seconds of landing? I’ll be making some changes to the Directis front page over the next couple of weeks to try to answer that question.

It’s been a reminder that despite your desire to add all kinds of flowery language about value, benefits, etc., those messages should be secondary to the basic “For Who” and “Do What?” that is the core of your business. Answer the simple questions first!

Recent coverage of the Dervaes family’s attempts to trademark and protect the phrase “urban homesteading” reminds me of a question I used to hear when I was teaching at the Self-Employment Program at Douglas College, in Vancouver.

“How should I copyright or trademark my business idea?”

My answer was usually, “don’t bother.” If you’ve got a business idea, that’s fantastic. It’s not worth a DIME until you successfully roll it out to the market and begin racking up sales. If you can build a good reputation for your product or service, consistently manage to distribute and sell your offering, and experience positive returns on your investments of time and money, then you are very much ahead of the game.

“But what if somebody steals my idea?”

You should be so lucky. If somebody wants to rip off your concept and take it to market, it’s probably a good idea.

Is this the core of your business plan?

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’ve invented something fantabulous, like a great new polymer that makes soft squishy shoes that can go in the dishwasher, float, and somehow be appealing to ages 13-93, then yes you probably need to speak to a patent lawyer. Real scientific advances should be registered with a patent so that the intellectual property is validated and registered, so that your brilliance is not lost to mankind if you are hit by a bus. Also, you need to get working on a business plan for marketing, sales, distribution, human resources, finance and IT to support your invention. Because it’s worthless otherwise.

But if all you’ve figured out is a better way to get people to part with their money, for something that is perhaps a little novel or particularly useful, it’s still not worth anything – and not worth protecting – until you have demonstrated its market viability. And once you have validated that viability, then you are probably sitting on a healthy business that can easily weather competition from others who wish to copy and compete.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When you’re starting a business, don’t be worried if somebody wants to copy you. Be worried if NOBODY does.