Learning to be a Champion Blog

Envisioning the step of stress testing growth when you are at the very beginning of your journey can seem like a huge and immensely challenging step outside your comfort zone.  However, by the time you arrive at this step, you should have mastered the habit of stepping outside your comfort zone.  And, if you have embraced the other keys for great ventures up to this point, this step will seem no more scary or challenging than any other step outside your comfort zone.

That’s not to say there are not real challenges to stress testing growth.  However, what you have become and what you have created so far on this journey gives you the best chance of meeting the challenges of stress testing your growth.

Let’s look at some of what you have become and created by mastering the other keys to a great venture:

- You started where passion, vision, and opportunity intersected to deliver an uncommon offering.  You adapted and adjusted like other great ventures along the way (60 percent of the great ventures in one study made it on products and services that were not a part of their original plans).  You resisted the temptation to pursue opportunity for opportunity’s sake – you made sure that passion was a big part of the equation!

- You checked and verified viability along the way.  You made sure:

• it serves a customer’s important needs enough to get them to exchange currency for it
• it delights customers and other shareholders so much that resources become more readily available
• it attracts talented and passionate people to the cause
• it changes the risk equation in your favor (the opportunities, rewards, possibilities far outweigh the contained risk)

- You developed solid plans (business plan, financial plan, and strategic meeting rhythm plan) to start and you regularly updated and modified them to support your evolving path.

- You built master plans (Best of Breed Analysis, Scalability Model, Business Development Model, and Dashboards) for ultimate success while serving your earliest customers.

- You made the different and better choice to identify and fervently pursue “The Right Chunk of Scalable Business.”

- You cemented your foundation in the right way through facilitative leadership, true empowerment, a winning culture, and an employee ownership mentality.  Your foundation is strong and able to support the test ahead.

In all that you have become and created during the earlier stages of your great ventures are the seeds to stress test growth.  You may have the choice at this stage to just continue your current business model and current level of success.  Or, you may not have that option because you can not deliver the appropriate return on the investment to those who supported your early efforts.  Either way, you could not be any better prepared to stress test the growth of your venture right now.

It is time to focus on adding another 3 to 5 chunks of business and assess the minimum operational efficiency of your business.  You have all the tools necessary at this stage, you just need to set a new focus and test your business model.  You will put similar skills to test during this phase but you will have to face those tests while you ramp up your systems and add more people to support several orders of magnitude increases in output during a 12 to 18-month window. 

You will now put professional management systems and structures in place to manage the chaos associated with scalable growth.  However, these systems and structures must direct the flow of chaos, and not choke it.  Now is NOT the time to suffocate all the success and energy for your early efforts!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

We all know by looking at our surrounding housing structures that a foundation is important for any lasting functionality during changing conditions.  The foundation is the lowest supporting layer of any physical structure.  It is also a supporting layer for any organizational structure.  It could be argued that the foundation of an organizational structure is the highest supporting layer!

Several key ingredients go into a strong organizational foundation that will support a great venture.  These ingredients include facilitative leadership, true empowerment, a winning culture, and an ownership mentality.

Facilitative Leadership – Passion is one of the essentially elements necessary for great ventures.  Without passion, greatness is NOT a possibility.  The road to greatness is just too hard without passion fueling the journey.  Passion can not be commanded.  Thus, a facilitative leadership style is necessary to allow passion to flow throughout the organization.  As the organization grows, so too must the capacity of the facilitative leaders.  They must understand that their job is to live and inspire the passion in others!

True Empowerment – Empowerment has been a popular term for a few decades now.  However, it rarely lives inside an organization in a way that it was originally conceived.  Empowerment requires that the empowered individual has an appropriate set of tools and skill sets to solve the problems at hand.  It requires active coaching and development to enhance tools, skills, and decision making.  It requires boundaries, guidelines, frameworks, and forgiveness to help the empowered individual do their job and grow from the experience. 

A Winning Culture – An organizational culture is defined as “the specific collection of values and norms shared by people and groups in an organization that control the way they interact with each other and other stakeholders.”  A winning culture is defined by Senn-Delaney as one where:

• decisions are made unselfishly for the greater good (so you need to know the greater good)
• individuals and teams are aligned on goals and priorities
• people walk the talk by living the values of the organization
• (and thus) people assume best intentions and interact openly with others
• teams encourage debate and dialogue to arrive at the best decisions and then fully unite behind them
• people participate fully and understand the shadow they cast

The specific purpose, goals, priorities, and values give the particular winning culture a unique personality.  However, the characteristics above are seen across all winning cultures.  Zappos.com is a very interesting example of how the above characteristics combine with specific purpose, goals, priorities, and values to create a unique personality.  Culture is their number one priority and you can see their personality though their efforts to hire for cultural fit, investment of 5 weeks in training up-front, and their offer to pay new trainees $2,000 to quit.

An Employee Ownership Mentality – With the right culture in place, you can trust your educated employees to act as a vested owner in the business.  When individuals understand the boundaries in which they can operate, where the company wants to go, feel empowered with a freedom to decide and act, they most often make the right choices.  Also, leadership facilitates continual coaching and development and thus minimizes the impact of incorrect choices.  Employees think and act like an “owner” and it enables them to take educated risks to achieve grand goals because they truly understand and embrace the purpose, values, and aligned goals of the organization.

Great ventures do not take the key ingredients of a strong foundation for granted. They cultivate them, plan them, monitor them and manage them so that they remain aligned and flourishing.  Great ventures sustain success by maintaining a strong foundation and making sure it does not deteriorate.

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

Verne Harnish, The Growth Guy, mentioned the importance of the proper mindset for growing your business in his July 16, 2010 blog post.  He references John Warrillow’s book, Built to Sell, which provides 8 Steps for Creating a Sellable Firm.  While I haven’t seen the list yet, I imagine the mindset that this list helps create is very similar to the one needed to pursue your 1st chunk of scalable business.

“The vision must be followed by the venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps – we must step up the stairs.”
– Vance Havner 

There are really just two basic strategic choices to make when building a successful venture.  The first choice is to go after any and all business around your uncommon and unique offering.  The second choice is to identify and fervently pursue the right chunk of scalable business.  Both can lead to success but only one allows for a great venture (highest potential in the shortest timeframe).

Let’s look the choice to go after any and all business around your uncommon and unique offering.  When you launch your venture with grand plans for success and challenges seem to pop-up quite regularly, you can get overwhelmed and frustrated quite easily.  So, when real business opportunities present themselves, you may eagerly engage in the exchange of goods and services for some much needed cash flow.  This cash flow relieves some pressure and allows you to survive another day, week, month, etc…

The problem with this approach is that this business exchange and these customers may create many more roadblocks on the path to a scalable business.  They may divert a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in serving them.  They also might require constant care and attention.  They help you pay the bills but they also prevent you from scaling your business.  Not all customers are good customers when you are looking to build a great venture.

“Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.”
– Dale Carnegie

A different, and perhaps better, choice is to identify and fervently pursue the right chunk of scalable business.  It takes more thought, time, and energy upfront to clearly identify and pursue the right customer with the right message at the right time.  But, the reward is much higher in terms of the level and speed of success.

You still may have to make some tactical choices along the way to take on less than ideal customers while bootstrapping your growth.  This is fine while you are getting the gears to mesh at this stage of your venture.  However, you do that while fervently pursuing the right strategic chuck of scalable business that you will build on in the future.  You need to view your ideal customers as assets to add to your business and you should strategically make choices each day to build a greater share of ideal customers in your customer base. 

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
– Jeff Bezos

As you set out to get customers for your venture, you must get clear on your strategic choices.  That strategic choice should be to identify and fervently pursue the right chunk of scalable business if you want to build a great venture!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

“I learned to embrace risk, as long as it was well thought out and, in a worst-case scenario, I’d still land on my feet.”
– Eli Broad

Great ventures not only have basic plans to start them on a great course for their journey but they also develop master plans for ultimate success early on in their journey.  These master plans are developed after the journey has started but NOT before action is taken.  Much of the input for master planning comes from the information gathered from and interaction with the marketplace.

The business vision, values, and purpose as well as the original business plan and financial plan provide the jumping off point for action.  They provide enough education and guidance to allow you to make early intelligent decisions about how to begin to mold your great venture.  These plans will have to be adjusted and modified on your journey but these basic plans are not enough to provide a strong sustainable competitive position to excel in growing a great venture.

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.”
– Winston Churchill

A great ventures financial model must be part of your master plans for a great venture.  This great ventures financial model includes:

• A Best of Breed Analysis – performing a market analysis of the best performing companies in the same or similar industries to determine a reasonable financial model.  With this reasonable financial model in hand, you can look for ways to be more efficient, effective, and innovative in capturing market share.
• Stress Testing Scalability Modeling – This is the process of determining how well the organization’s processes and structures will work when the output of the organization significantly increases in a short 12 to 18-month accelerated growth period.  You need to test assumptions in business development, production, coordination, and communications to scale appropriately.
• Minimum Efficient Scale Model – a friend of mine has grown dozens of businesses with what he calls his “Chunks and Buckets Planning Model.”  These models help you determine the minimum revenue necessary to build the infrastructure necessary to develop a competitive market position and appropriate return on investment.
• Business Development Model – this is the cost and process to obtain a customer based on experience and best of breed analysis.  Can it be improved?
• Dashboards – the set of metrics that are critical for the success and progress of your business at any given stage.  You must create attention, line-of-sight, focus, and energy around these key metrics.

These five components are the keys to master planning a great venture.  With them in place, the chaotic journey of creating a great venture will be more steady and clear.  You will be armed with the right information to adapt and adjust to the challenges of the journey and create your ultimate success!

“Strategic planning is worthless – unless there is first a strategic vision.”
– John Naisbitt

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

In all things, planning serves a purpose.  The purpose in NOT to develop perfect plans!  It is to channel and challenge your advance worrying.  It is to work through your thoughts and ideas on what is possible.  It is to feed our positive belief about the future.  It is to help us see our path for handling the worst case scenarios.  It is for building our confidence.  It is for focusing our sub-conscious mind.  It is for creating opportunity when none seems present.

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”
– Sun Tzu

There is a crucial balance to be achieved in planning your ventures.  You must go at it with the intention to create great plans but with the expectation that your plans will never be perfect.  You must plan thoroughly enough to cover the breadth and depth of the issues and challenges to not be caught off guard but still expect to be surprised.  You must plan so that you can take action sooner rather than later but be willing to regularly step back from action to review and plan.

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”
– Unknown

Planning serves ultimate success and reduces your chances of experiencing ultimate failure.  Planning does not eliminate the little and regular failures along the path to ultimate success.  In fact, it is has been said that the only way to accelerate success is to accelerate the rate of failure.  So, don’t expect to eliminate failure with your critical planning efforts.  It won’t eliminate all the risk but it will give you confidence to handle and minimize the risk along the way.

I love what Jeff Olson said about planning in his book, The Slight Edge:

“You have to start with a plan, but the plan you start with will not be the plan that gets you there…And that the reason you need a plan: if you have no plan, there will be no jumping off.  In fact, if you put too much energy into the plan, and make it too perfect, you’re more likely to squelch all the life, spontaneity, intuition, and joy out of the doing of it.”

You must put energy into your planning and your plans should direct your energy to start but don’t rely on your plans to create the results you are after.  There is a dance that occurs on your journey.  It is filled with life, spontaneity, intuition and joy.  It is also framed by your plans.  The energy of that dance is what produces the decisions, adjustments, and right actions to make a great venture possible!

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”
– General George S. Patton

There are several critical plans that make a great venture possible.  You should focus some time and attention to developing these plans to start you on your journey.

1. The Business Plan

• Business Plan Pro Software – I have used this software several times with clients (and my own ventures) to develop a sound business plan to start.  You can get this software for $100 to $200 and it will allow you to create a great plan to start in just a few hours time.
• The Business Plan Presentation – With your business plan complete, you then need to develop a short PowerPoint presentation to present to key people (investors, banks, employees, strategic partners,etc…) around your venture.  Don’t let the plan speak for itself, develop an appealing 10 to 12 slide presentation that engages and energizes your target audience.

2. Your Business Vision, Values, and Purpose

• This is the general strategic direction for your venture.  Some of this will come together over time but you can 80% accurate with a few hours of commitment upfront.  It will be invaluable in improving the quality of decisions you make along your journey.

3. The Financial Plan

• Elements of a financial plan will be a part of your basic business plan.   However, you should spend some time developing more detailed financial plans to help guide you forward.  These financial plans might include different financial strategies and more detailed Budget and Cash Flow Projections.

4. A Strategic Meeting Rhythm Plan

• You strategic meeting rhythm plan is critical in getting you and your team to dynamically move between action and planning.  I first heard of this concept from Verne Harnish and he compares the rhythm necessary to that of a great jazz band.  At work, many people have a bias toward either action or planning and thus spend too much time in their preferred realm.  A great venture has a meeting rhythm to create the right balance between action, learning, planning, and improved action.

“When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.”
– Napoleon Hill

Take time to get your critical plans to start in place.  Without them, a great venture is just NOT possible!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

To create a potential great venture, you must nail passion, vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering.  It sets the ceiling on your potential and greatness is certainly possible with these components in place.  However, just because you have nailed them does not mean that greatness is inevitable.  You must check the viability of your venture regardless of whether or not you have nailed passion, vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering. 

Checking viability involves early prototyping along with active interaction with potential clients.  The viability phase can also be a very important contributor to you nailing your vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering if you haven’t done so already.  That is why you must develop a lean venture model from the start.

Your lean venture model is your model for delivering the most value from your customer’s perspective while consuming the fewest resources and tapping the creative talents of your people.  It takes into account the three critical components of verifying viability – customers, resources, and the creative talents of your people.

Something is not viable just because it can be done.  It is viable when:

• it serves a customer’s important needs enough to get them to exchange currency for it
• it delights customers and other shareholders so much that resources become more readily available
• it attracts talented and passionate people (not a mistake – same link as above) to the cause
• it changes the risk equation in your favor (the opportunities, rewards, possibilities far outweigh the contained risk)

Your lean venture model should allow you to build a great “thing” while also attracting interested customers, abundant resources, and enthusiastic contributors in a dynamic and iterative way.  It will allow you to modify and adapt along the way and help you nail the vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering that makes great ventures possible.

So, simultaneously build your “thing” and talk to potential customers at the same time to check viability.  It is the path to a great venture!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

The starting point, or turning point, for all great ventures occurs at the intersection of passion, vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering.  You can have a good venture without all four components.  However, in order to create or have a great venture, you must nail each component.

Passion is the fuel of your enterprise.  It gets you through the tough times and amplifies the possibilities in good times.  All great ventures require action on the part of employees and customers to make them great.  Action is driven by both the logical and emotional aspects of a situation.  One might even argue the emotion is the more powerful driver for any action.  Thus, passion or some powerfully compelling emotion will raise the ceiling of possibility on any venture.

The Container Store is a great example of using passion to fuel a great venture.  They started the business with a passion for customer service and built their team with that in mind.  The only hired people who were self-motivated and team-oriented around their passion for customer service.  Then, they designed their training, processes, and compensation systems to fuel that passion for customer service and not to work against it.

Vision sets direction and targets on which to direct that passion.  Passion is great but, without guidance and direction, it won’t amount to anything more than cheerleading.  A vision sets the path for a great venture but a compelling vision connects with the passions of people and energizes that journey. 

Alan Mulally, Ford Motor Company President and Chief Executive, talked about overcoming the challenges of the great 2009 recession when speaking at the 2010 North American International Auto Show.  He said…

“I just can’t share clearly enough how important it is … to have a compelling vision,” he added. “If you don’t have a plan to deal with current reality and long-term growth, it is absolutely terrifying and you come close to losing your company.”

Opportunity is the space where passion and vision come together to stimulate the voluntary exchange of currency.  In this space, people have an explicit or latent need that must be met and they are willing to exchange currency to meet that need.  The currency is often in the form of money but could also be time and energy in spreading and sharing the opportunity with others.

Finally, the uncommon offering comes when you combine passion, vision, and opportunity in unique and useful ways to separate your venture from all the other things going on in this world.  This product or service package creates immediate value and helps you attract, get, and keep ideal customers and clients.  These ideal customers and clients then provide the booster power to propel you toward your compelling vision.

The Cheeseboard Pizza Collective in Berkley, California is a great example of an uncommon offering.  They are in a very common business – selling pizzas.  However, they have combined passion, vision, and opportunity to provide an uncommon offering.  Instead of providing a variety of pizzas on a menu from which to order, they offer one unique pizza each day as their only menu item.  These pizzas are vegetarian and use high-end ingredients and sell for twenty dollars a piece.  They frequently get people lining out the door and down the street to order their one pizza each day.

It takes time to find the right intersection of passion, vision, opportunity, and uncommon offering.  However, this combination is what determines your ceiling of success.  Thus, you must find ways to regularly, and rhythmically, work on getting them right.  When you do them right, you open up grand possibilities for your venture!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

If you have been listening to any of the news reports the last few days, you have heard references to a 20% to 30% chance of a Double-Dip Recession. What does that mean? It means things could to get worse again before they get better!

Last fall, Jim Collins presented at the Gazelles Growth Summit and discussed the research behind his book titled How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. He said…

“Turbulence is an amplifier, not a cause, of success or failure. It is more important what you do before the storm comes than what you do when the storm comes!”

Therefore, an entrepreneurial contingency plan is a must! 

Ask yourself,  am I (are we) prepared for each of these scenarios?

1. A steady recovery
2. A long slow recovery
3. A Double-Dip Recession

The One-Page Strategic Planning Process developed by Verne Harnish can help you make sure you are. It will give you the margin and ability to simultaneously do “the MUSTs and CANs” (as Jim Collins put it) needed to thrive no matter which direction the economy heads! With the One-Page Strategic Planning Process in place, you and your team will be able to experience a more certain and confident summer.

Call me (877-342-4267) or email me to discuss my special “Acclerated Strategic Planning Offer” for this summer.  This special offer compresses the planning process (50% shorter time commitment on your part and 33% cost savings) for faster, better, and smarter strategic plans and strategic execution in these uncertain times!

P.S. The planning process for this offer must be completed by Thursday, September 2, 2010 to qualifiy. This one-time offer ends on July 1, 2010 or when 3 NEW Clients enroll, whichever comes first!

The world has dramatically changed since the Great Recession that began in 2008.  We no longer live in a world of perceived stability and certainty.  We live in a world of perceived instability and uncertainty and many have predicted that it will remain that way for some time.  We are really all on our own ventures, whether we recognize it or not.

The two definitions I like best to describe ventures come from Dictionary.com.  They define a venture as 1.) an undertaking involving uncertainty as to the outcome, especially a risky or dangerous one and 2.) a business enterprise speculation in which something is risked in the hope of profit.  During this Great Recession, most everything we did vocation or avocation moved into the realm of being a venture by these definitions.  There was much less certainty, more risk or danger, and we had to proceed forward with more hope for success than probability of success.

We now live in a venture-based world.  Embracing that paradigm or viewpoint puts you in a space that increases your odds for success.  On the other hand, if you resistance this new reality, you increase your risk of failure as we find our path to recovery!

But it is not only your success that is based on this new mental model, but your happiness as well.  Tony Hsieh, Founder of Zappos.com, built his latest company on the premise of “delivering happiness.”  In order to deliver happiness through his company, Tony spent a great deal of time at work and home researching happiness.  Thus, he decided to write a book and create a movement on “delivering happiness.” 

What really strikes me about his perspective and the application of his viewpoints on happiness is that he looks at it from the venture-based mindset.  He is a serial entrepreneur who has successfully built multiple great ventures.  However, the lesson he learned from his first venture (that he sold for $265 in 1998) was that success was not nearly as sweet as it could be without happiness.  He was miserable in the later stages of his first venture and thus determined to make happiness a part of his next ventures.

Pursuing Great Ventures is about pursuing both abundant success and great happiness!  Based on Tony Hsieh’s research and application, happiness involves:

• Perceived Control
• Perceived Progress
• Connectedness
• Vision/Meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself)

Some of these are the same components needed for abundant success.

Embrace great venture-based thinking and you will become the commander and controller of your destiny in the post-recession economy. You will also experience much greater success and happiness on your journey!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.

Think back two years in time.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average was near its all time high at 13,058 and US unemployment was at a modest 5.50%.  You may or may not have been working in your current job or company but you were probably doing alright given your level of experience and education.  Things were pretty good and you were pretty sure of the value you brought to your job or marketplace.

Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at 10,174 and US unemployment is hovering at 10%.  Just this week, we saw dramatic swings in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with a 4.18% loss in the last 5 days.  In turn, much sh__ has rolled down hill at you wherever we sit in your company or the marketplace and you are swimming with more responsibilities, more accountability, and more challenges. 

How can you possibly think about delivering uncommon and unique value in these circumstances?  The fact is you can’t afford NOT to invest your time, energy, and resources in delivering uncommon and unique value!  If you don’t, the psyche of your organization and your customers will simply prevent you from succeeding in these continuing troubled times.

Value is defined on Wiktionary as:

• The quality (positive or negative) that renders something desirable or valuable
• The degree of importance you give to something
• The amount (of money or goods or services) that is considered to be a fair equivalent for something else

Has the quality, degree of importance, or fair equivalent of value changed in your mind as a cons gmer during the last few years?  Has it been a small change in your mind or a large change?  My guess is that you, and most people around you, have experienced significant change in the perceived quality, degree of importance, and fair equivalent.  And given that much sh__ has rolled down hill at you during this turbulent change, you probably have spent a great deal of attention and energy on JUST maintaining value in your daily and weekly activities.

Delivering common and ordinary value is equivalent to a slow and tortuous existence.  You may or may not die but you will certainly be living with a great deal of normalized pain!

All this change requires a different approach!  You must make a proactive and consistent effort to focus on delivering uncommon and unique value.  General commerce has decreased significantly in the last two years.  You can only sustain success through a focused effort on uncommon and unique value!  And this focused effort must transcend the executive meeting room to the entire team throughout the organization.

Commit now to regularly focusing on uncommon and unique value for a few hours a week.  To do that you will to do as Jim Collins suggests and STOP doing something – like focusing on just SIMPLY maintaining value in your daily and weekly activities.   

It is as effort in futility to think you will add the focus on uncommon and unique value to everything else you already do.  So, carve out what you think is needed and immediately STOP doing things that just add waste and time to your efforts. 

In other words, get “Lean” with your current efforts so you can focus on delivering uncommon and unique value.  It is the only way to determine your destiny in uncertain times!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.