Living the Startup Life

The idea of working for oneself circles the brain for more reasons than potential earnings, supposed freedom, and pure thrill - it does so because at some point we need to have our personal touch on business direction, and feel the joy of creating businesses that make a difference. Truly, no one knows business potential like each and every one of us does.

Beyond mere potential though, are the elements that make businesses successful; two of which are marketing and product creation. Last month I wrote about the differences between product-based businesses and service-based businesses in my given industry - forestry. At the risk of creating an “easier said than done” situation, in this post we’ll explore some tips and steps for taking a service-oriented business, and marketing it as (or making it) a product.

#1: Market Your Services As A Product

My biggest fear in creating a consulting business based on carrying out a service - in my case a service to both business and ecosystems - is that it is seen as an extra or mere option. To quell such fear, offer the service as a product, meaning that it must have positive consequences both long- and short-term.

The best way to carry out this transfer is to research and outline the consequences of ignoring your service. Cite law, case studies, and true benefits of your service. Incorporate them into your mission statement, as it is very important that you believe in them yourself. Lastly, market the ways in which your services make businesses run smoother, attract investment, and foster confidence and development.

When your system has been in place long enough, you may want to approach regulation that would make your business a necessity. An example of a service built on necessity is Environmental Assessment consulting: when development requires assessment to continue, the service deliverable becomes a valuable product.

#2: Diversify Your Services

Diversify your services not just for name and fame - but do so for multiple, viable revenue streams. Importantly, spreading your butter too thin may be worse than building a crap business to start with.

Identify people and trends that relate to your idea, and build them into your business plan. Integral to this are people you can trust to build your business alongside you; those who work in a niche which you may not be very familiar with. You must be familiar enough to know how to market and identify opportunities, then trustful enough to pass the task on to your business partner.

…and #3: Better Than Trend-catching is…

In fact, MUCH better than trend catching is trend CREATION. As with my first point, if you can take a mere trend, and make it a requirement you would be golden.

It’s a tough world out there. Not only are we seeing real signs of economic stagnation, but even the top performing businesses are cutting costs everywhere. Nowhere is this more evident in Canada than in the business I have the pleasure of partaking in, the forest and timber industry. But, hidden within the fact that the industry and its funding sources are in the crapper is the fact that we are in a time open to innovation and change, a.k.a the best time to build business.

Be that change, make that innovation, and most importantly, use it to follow your dreams.

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Helpful Links: Initial Steps, Management Help (more to browse within), and Canada E-business training.

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Torbjørn Rive is the writer and owner of Variable Interest. Variable Interest is also a member of the Brazen Careerist blog network.

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So my girlfriend and I were driving to get some late night Boba Loca over in Garden Grove when I saw the billboard for I Hate Sarah Marshall. I saw this about 6 times the last time I was driving around in Westwood, so I finally decided to check it out. I asked Kim to look up Sarah Marshall on her iPhone and we found out it was a blog of some sort.

I’ve recently dived into the blogging community and I thought, “Wow, blogs have gotten so powerful that jealous boyfriends are now using it to ruin the reputation of their ex-girlfriends.” It was literally a blog about how much this guy Peter Bretter hates Sarah Marshall for breaking up with him. I joked around that I’m going to get the url ihatekimear.com just in case

And then it hit me. I had the I-think-I’ve-seen-this-guy-before feeling and it was because I had seen Sarah and the guy on top of the horse in a movie preview before. Kim and I had gone to see Semi Pro last weekend and The Sarah Marshall movie was on one of the previews.

WOW! If this is not a great way of using blogs for viral marketing, then I don’t know what is. These billboards were posted absolutely every where I looked, which drove me to the site. The site itself is very cleverly made and is made to seem like it is actually the blog of Peter. There is even a little youtube snippet of him hating on Sarah. There is a picture of Sarah on the top right that says “Click here only if you’re over 18.” Of course everyone is going to click there! It’s like putting a red button in front of people that reads “Don’t click.” We will click; it’s human nature.

So this is the power of viral marketing. If you use blogs effectively, you are able to reach your target market directly and have them spread the word for you. The only things that I can add to their strategy is to incorporate comments, trackbacks, and all that other good stuff on their posts. If you can get a conversation going on the site, it will attract even more attention.

I have read two great blog entries about why CMO’s get fired: John Rindlaub and David Meerman Scott.

Now, I’ve only been a CMO for about a little over 6 months, but I’m really starting to understand what they are writing about. From my perspective (and it’s the perspective of a startup CMO) CMO’s can get too caught up in the overall strategy and never get down to executing what needs to be done. I have been working on a strategy for months now in order to develop a marketing strategy that will brand Future Delivery but at the same time now fully expose us because we are in semi-stealth mode and are currently in the product development stage. The strategy I developed is to separate FD marketing into 4 distinct areas: FD Edge, Thought Leadership, Wikivault, and Business Development.

I have gathered a marketing team that is responsible for each area of FD marketing; therefore, I am free to work ON the company rather than IN the company. And this is where I feel that most CMO’s fail because they get caught up in the overall strategy and feel that it is not their place to get involved with the nitty gritty areas of marketing. David Meerman Scott writes about the New Rules of Marketing and how one can use blogs, ebooks, podcasts, and web 2.0 sites to cost-effectively market your company and get people to write about you. I completely agree with his teachings and I believe most CMO’s do not want to constantly write blogs, conduct podcasts, or expose themselves to the public eye because they think in the old way. I want to be transparent; the other CMOs want to be opaque.

So I must completely agree with David. The Millennial generation is all about connectivity and transparency. If you do not understand the web 2.0 sites out there and use them to their full potential to brand your company, then you will most likely be fired as well.

Thanks David. Your teachings have truly changed the way I view marketing.

Will brings up an excellent point in his blog post: You Dont Need to Have a Product to Sell a Product. This is the problem that I have faced as a young CMO and I’m sure it is a problem that many of you are facing.

“How do I sell something that I don’t have?” It’s a tough question to answer and Will writes up a great strategy for it. I will tell you exactly how I’m doing it in order to give you a more concrete answer to your question.

Make sure your potential client understands your product

Our product is FD World, which is a virtual world that makes THIS world more productive. What does that even mean? Well, I have found that the first rule of marketing is to make sure that your target market is able to completely understand what it is that you are selling them. In this case, we are creating a virtual world. It is very easy for me to describe what I am doing to someone in the Y Gen. All I have to say is, “In essence, we are building a 3D Facebook where students can network with other students and professionals.” My generation is able to easily understand this. However, the company representatives that I am pitching this to are not in my generation and have never experiences virtual worlds. I solve this problem by describing my product in terms that they are able to understand. I have effectively used our visual concepts that we have developed in order to create a concrete image in the minds of our target market.

Start from the bottom and work your way up

Big corporations have a lot of bureaucracy. If I waited to start selling my product once we built it, it would take another 6 months to get past all of the red tape that most corporations have. This is why selling early is crucial. The easiest way I have found to do this is approach the people at the bottom who are eager to jump at the chance to start something new and contribute to their company. Our product is very relevant for recruiters, so I go to many career fairs in order to meet recruiters and to tell them about our product. Once I get their contact information, I immediately follow up and push to schedule a meeting where I can delivery my pitch.

Persistence pays off

How long does it take you to reply back to your friends’ emails? These are your friends and you still sometimes take a while. Don’t be discouraged if your contact at a company never gets back to you. The best thing for you to do is to stay positive and email them a follow up email. As a general rule, I usually send 3 emails before I give them a call. All your emails must give the feeling that you’ve been emailing back and forth already. Don’t write “hey I haven’t heard back from you”; instead, you should write, “hey how was your weekend? Mine was amazing because I had lots of fun and was productive.” Marketing is a numbers game; the more people that you reach out to, the higher the chance of converting a lead.

I want to thank Will for blogging on such a great topic and you should definitely check out his site.

Its not all creativity and glamour.

Most people have the misconception that being in marketing means that you do the creative work and develop catchy advertisements or develop a brand new marketing campaign to reach more people and generate more sells. Well, that is only but a small fraction of what I am doing as the CMO of Future Delivery.

Now that I have my own company, people often ask me what it is that I actually do. So, this is what the CMO of a startup company does:

1. Market Research

Thats right. A big part of what I do is research the entire market. And when I say entire market I mean everything from industry trends and competitors, to surveys and TAM analysis. Its a dirty job but someone has to do it. The CEO is out there building the business plan and the CTO is building the product. It is my responsibility to figure out what kind of product the market is ready for and will accept as a solution to their problems.

2. Business Development

If you hate to cold call or cold email, then this is not the job for you. A startup company has no name, no reputation, and no clients or customers. It is my job to go out there (even right now with no product), and sell our product. I am dead serious here. I am making phone calls and setting up meeting where I am literally walking in with nothing but a laptop and few concept drawings of what the world will look like. Do we actually get some clients? Of course we do! If I weren’t able to convert leads, then I would be in the wrong business.

You will receive a lot of “No’s”, a lot of canceled meetings, and a lot of unreturned calls; however, the CMO must be persistent and must always remain positive. In essence, this is a numbers game. The more people I contact and the larger my network grows, the higher the chance that I will meet someone from a company that will listen to my pitch and like it.

3. Branding

Here comes the fun part. Like I said, we have no name; therefore, it is my job to go out there and develop the brand. I must develop a strategy to stick our company brand in the mind of our target market. There are many ways to do this and the fun part is finding the right ones that work. Here are a few strategies that I’m working on right now: blogging, facebook, linkedin, thought leadership, squidoo, youtube, and career development mavens. I will blog about my experience with each one and which ones work and which ones don’t.

4. Public Relations

Like David Meerman Scott, I do not believe that we should pay a lot of money to get journalists and other media to write about us. If we develop the right content, build thought leadership in the career development field, and attract users, then journalists and the media will come to us. And believe me, when they come to us, we’ll be ready. I am developing the Press Kit and the Media Page so that when the time comes that someone is researching Future Delivery to write an article, they’ll know right where to look to get all of the information that they could possibly need about Future Delivery.

5. Team Leadership

I do have a team that is working with me: Shin Kadota, Peter Suberlak, and Michael Wang. All of them studied at UCLA with me and all of them are very eager and bright young minds. From my experiences, I have learned that the best way to lead a team is to empower them and make sure that they are the right person in the right seat of the bus. Each person on my team is leading a specific project. I give them the opportunity to accomplish task B, but I do not tell them exactly how to get from A to B. It is completely up to them to decide what steps they should take to get to B, which gives them the feeling of ownership and freedom that motivates them to do an amazing job.

What are your experiences with being a young CMO? I would love to hear your stories and hopefully we can learn and grow from each other.