Over the last year, I have spent time and effort to build a network of diaspora Africans interested in taking an active part in developing Africa through social enterprise. Over that time, my primary lever for building a platform and spreading my message has been with social media.
I have also had the opportunity to serve on the board of a non-profit here in Denver. As a result of my exposure, I have come to the conclusion that leaders of non-profit start ups who adopt the methods and tools of for-profit businesses give their organizations the best chance of success.
While many non-profit founders are visionaries (almost by definition), they all too often are not strategists. While visionaries and strategists deal with managing the big picture, a strategist has the added competency of being able to translate a desired big picture outcome into strategic planning and tactical execution.
One trait that marks the strategists is their ability to recognize the core challenges they face, and to quickly identify resources to overcome those challenges. The most successful nonprofit founders turn out to be big picture dreamers, masters at every day bootstrapping and problem solving.
Social media represents one of the highest leverage tools for bootstrapping funds, followers and fame (publicity). Non-profits using tools like Ning Websites, Facebook fan pages, and other such platforms are able to meet their milestones while stretching very limited budgets.
In the video below, 4 nonprofit leaders discuss in detail some of their strategies for mobilizing a following using social media. It’s a bit long at 81 minutes, but very enlightening. I hope you enjoy.
A few days ago, my wife and I received our first child into the world (my little man above). Over the previous 3 months, I had carefully prayed and contemplated what his name would be. In many African and Semitic cultures, names given to newborn children are designed to tell a story that will (hopefully) positively inform or affect the life in front of them.
It is partly an act of faith, sometimes an act of sorrow (see the biblical story of Benjamin’s name) but most often an act of stubborn insistence that we will have a hand in shaping the future.
My last name for instance “Erekosima” ironically translates into “Don’t give him a name” – and tells the story of the first Erekosima about 6 generations before my time, who was such a feared, powerful and temperamental warlord that other members of the community declined to attach a nickname to him as was customary for other chieftains and kingmakers of his stature. As such things often go, it became his default nickname, and one of 3 surnames borne by his descendants.
Thinking about this whole issue of our traditional African names reminds me of a talk I delivered at a Men’s event in Colorado Springs a few months ago, entitled, “The Epic-Driven Life”.
In my conception, the epic-driven life is a complete philosophy of self-management through which you can ignite your noblest ambitions, douse your fears, and generally hold yourself accountable to live a more passionate life.
The word, “Epic” (ep.ic) is defined as
“…pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero in which a series of achievements or events is narrated in elevated style”
(See Dictionary for this and other related definitions).
The epic-driven life is a life lived intentionally. A life in which you intentionally choose the epics that excite you, write those epics down to the best detail that you can, and then proceed with purpose to “act out” the epics of your dreams.
Millions of people read the Purpose-Driven life and while I have never gotten around to reading beyond the first page of that book, I presume there may be parallels between the lessons in that book and those I’m sharing here.
However, “Purpose” is much bigger (and for some people, more elusive) than an “epic”. An epic starts as simply as sitting down and writing down an achievement that would tickle you to death if you went out and accomplished it just as you saw it while you were daydreaming.
About 10 years ago, I purposed in my mind that I would be time-flexible when my children came. I was neither a parent, nor married at the time. It would be another 8 years before marriage, and 10 years before this first child.
However, the epic I wrote in my head has directly or indirectly informed my decisions such that I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 9 years and self-employed for the last 5. While the journey itself had twists and turns that I couldn’t have anticipated, I find myself HERE…at home on a weekday…where I thought I would be.
In a previous post on “How To Prosper in 2010” I communicated another epic upon which I’m actively working as I speak: To go from a one-man consultancy to a Business consulting firm that grosses 7 figures in record time, while generating record growth and profits for my clients.
The beauty of the epic-driven mindset is that an epic is a valuable asset all by itself. My coaching clients at MarriageInspiration.com took their tears and turned them into gold.
I have seen people completely change how they handle setbacks when they realized that “it all works together for their good” by contributing to their epic. Any story that can be told can be sold if it’s dramatic, audacious, or otherwise interesting enough.
I’ve seen the epic-driven mindset cause formerly timid sales professionals to happily glide their way to the proverbial batter’s box, because they have connected the seemingly mundane events of their lives to something far more exciting…an epic with a living, breathing, hero smack in the middle of it.
If you’re reading this post, I choose to believe that it’s because the seeds of a great epic lie within you. Release yourself to the epic of your dreams, record your achievements, your setbacks, and your insights. And then please share them.
The idea age label borrows from the practice of naming periods according to the dominant technology used – so we have the “stone age”, the “bronze age”, the “iron age”, the “digital age”, and now…
The Idea age.
Mere access to information is no longer a big deal. Information is overwhelming today. Today people are running for refuge from the information avalanche. They are looking for ideas.
Ideas organize information into a value set. Ideas are the expression of information made useful. Ideas are what information looks like when it is packaged based on a preference and connected to a benefit or useful framework.
The idea is the dominant technology of our time. Software is composed merely of ideas. And that’s why I call our current era the idea age.
Here are some idea age trends that could seriously impact your business over the next few years.
1. Change is happening at the speed of thought – FAST!
2. The rate of change across the board is increasing!
3. The Idea Is The Primary Currency Of Today’s Marketplace!!
4. The Marketplace is innundated with Ideas!
5. People are increasingly stressed by the avalanche of ideas!
6. People are responding by either making very fast or very slow decisions!
In the next post, I’ll share some of the challenges of competing in business in this environment and how to design a business that can thrive BECAUSE of these conditions.
If you’re one of the many readers of this blog who resides in Denver, you might be able to help me.
Looking for Personal assistant…
Must live in SE (South east) Denver in the area about near the University of Denver.
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I found an excellent resource, chockful of small business planning tips that I think any business owner would benefit from. It’s over 250 pages designed to boost your profits.
It pays well to set aside a few hours a month to think about the design of your marketing and operations system.
Simply devoting 2-3 hours each month to asking a few questions can help you substantially increase your revenues and profits.
One of the simplest but most paradigm shifting questions you can ask yourself is,
“What is my business”?
My answer to this question is:
“A business is a moving matrix of relationships and abilities leveraging other portfolios of relationships and abilities.”
This definition is a variant of a definition given by Dr. Venkat Venkatraman, a leading business thinker, who instructs business leaders to…
“…look at a corporation as a portfolio of abilities leveraging a portfolio of relationships.”
In consulting with prospective clients, I’ve found that when I share this definition with them, it allows them to see all kinds of new profit centers and new permutations of their business that lead to “soft innovation” and increased profits.
As often as possible, you should ask yourself some of the following questions.
What business am I in?
The truth is that no matter what business or industry you’re in, you are first and foremost in the marketing business. Any business owner who doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t apply the lessons of this conclusion will fall victim to a market twist and turn (or an economic downturn) sooner or later.
Could I create a new category by adding or subtracting something?
The excellent book “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, takes a look at how some companies have managed to create businesses completely outside the “red ocean” (heavily competitive categories), by essentially creating their own category.
Cirque du soleil is a particularly memorable example of a business that has created a “competition-free” zone for itself for decades now by creating a category that is neither completely high performance art, or circus, but a hybrid of both. And so when businesses within both categories were competing each other to death, Cirque du Soleil just kept expanding to greater and greater heights.
In the Internet business systems niche, SiteSell is another such “Blue Ocean” company (in my opinion). Neither simply a web host, nor a website software provider, nor a membership-based internet education platform, but all those things and more at a very affordable price. (Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Sitesell, a company whose products I absolutely believe in).
Could I create new uniqueness or advantage by stripping something out?
There’s also the possibility of creating a unique company by stripping out most of what other competitors typically include so that you end up faster, leaner, more efficient and more affordable by giving the marketplace only what it wants and leaving the rest out.
To a certain extent, this is how Southwest rose to prominence during a time when airlines where offering full service and other amenities, Southwest came through with stripping out the decorations (i.e. meals on short flights) and amped up the customer service combined with more affordable flying.
Could I re-arrange my whole service delivery (operations) and communications (marketing) around what is currently only a small component or profit center in my business?
This is what I call the “Tail That Wags The Dog” Strategy.
In Seth Godin’s book “The Free Prize Inside”, he discusses the curious phenomenon of buyers often making their purchasing decision based on some seemingly tangential attribute of the product/service they eventually chose. The “soft innovations” (according to Seth), that constitute “the second reason to buy the thing”.
I can’t help but think about a spa within 10 minutes from my house. I first noticed it when a hot pink limousine full of screaming teenage girls (or what I presume to be screaming teenage girls…it could have been aliens), rolled past me… I later discovered they were coming from a sort of Spa where girls could really get their birthday treatment with all their closest friends.
As you might suspect, the limo ride has become the highlight of the day!!
Startup business marketing mistakes are easy to make and not necessarily world ending. However, some of them are so potentially catastrophic that they can result in a still-born business and destroy your entrepreneurial dream before it starts.
This weekend I consulted with an entrepreneur whose company creates floral arrangements for weddings. In our conversation, I discovered that this relatively sophisticated entrepreneur was making a seemingly small but potentially devastating startup business marketing mistake.
One of the most important strategic marketing decisions you make as an entrepreneur in the business start up stage is deciding your ideal target client.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that when you’re just starting out, there’s often a huge difference between your target market (the group of clients you want to serve and do business with), and your natural market (the group of potential clients who are most accessible to you).
Depending on your background you may approach this disparity in radically different ways…some of which may be quite harmful to your business in the long run.
Some people decide that they’re going to just take whatever business they can get, disregarding the danger that they may get locked in to a market they would rather not be dealing with. Others decide right from the start, that they will only work with prospects that are close to the range of their target client profile.
There’s no right or wrong answer that works for everyone all the time. Depending on your personality, you may not want to “compromise” by taking just any client. On the other hand, if you’re an easy going natural bootstrapper, you think it’s a no-brainer to just deal with any business you can get.
The entrepreneur I consulted for was actually overlooking tremendous lead generation opportunities because she didn’t want to deal with the some of the negatives of the people closest to her. She and her business partner also had not narrowly defined a target client profile, and as such they had no foundation for a client or customer conversion process that could qualify prospects, screen out the “dont wanters”, and magnetize the “must haves”.
Here’s how I helped her and her partner define a “middle ground” approach – Leveraging what they have (natural market/client) while moving steadily and strategically toward what they want (ideal target client/market). I shared 6 rules of engagement for marketing-centered business acceleration below:
6 rules of engagement:
Don’t Fence Out Prospects
Do Screen In Prospects
Find Your Uniqueness, Communicate it, Deliver it
Offer Clients Many Profitable Ways To Buy From You
Offer Clients Many Mutually Exciting Ways To Refer Others To You
Offer Clients Many Reasons To Keep Buying From You
If you think creatively about the rules above, you’ll discover that it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum proposition choosing between business in close proximity or business from the clients you most want to deal with.
Have you ever seen those “Fave 5 commercials” by T-Mobile?
Or the segment at half-time of every NBA basketball game where prominent players announce their favorite 5 players of all time?
It occurred to me that every small business owner should be asking themselves, “Who’s my fave 5?”
It continually appears, in a dizzying variety of instances, that 80% or results, derive from 20% of inputs.
This Pareto Principle (or 80/20 rule), as it is often referred to, is a statistical rule of thumb that shows up in a freaky amount of places, and most likely applies in your business as well.
In your business, the chances are good that roughly 20% of your clients (or less) account for about 80% or more of your revenues/profits. Now it may vary along the lines of “90/10″ or even “70/30″, but nonetheless it generally holds that the majority of business is done for a minority of clients.
One of the most effective ways for your small business to generate rapid growth in sales and profits is through knowing your “fave 5″ or your “valuable few”, and creating product/service offerings and marketing systems directed at cultivating a special relationship with this group and offering them more ways to do even more business with you.
Database marketing is a big sounding term for all the activities, systems and tools businesses like yours can use to plan for, target and communicate with a select group of prospect and clients.
Your customer or client database is simply an information storage system that contains as much information as possible about the your clients.
The more you know about your client base (or even about prospective clients), the better you can create segments of common demographics (age, gender, ethnic background, zip codes, income/wealth levels) and psychographics (interests, passions, hobbies, group affiliations, habits, likely concerns), the more you can craft your product and service offerings to their tastes.
Of course it goes without saying that you’ll also be able to align your marketing communications to their needs. Powerful and affordable database software now allows you to slice and dice your prospect and customer lists to personalize your marketing.
Nothing boosts response rates and conversions than personalization backed by solid business intelligence…
And just in case you think this is all stuff for the fortune 500 companies, customer relationship management software products such as ACT!, Goldmine and SAAS (Software as a Service) providers such as Salesforce.com allow small businesses to reap the benefits of managing customer lists and communicating consistently with their clients.
Many small and micro-businesses have successfully boosted sales and profits with addition of simple programs like frequent renter card clubs, premium client newsletter subscription packages and “Valued Customer Clubs”.
As soon as you Know your Fave 5, you’ll be on your way to increased profits with just a bit of creativity.
One of the most widely understood but scarcely practiced principles of modern business life is the principle of calculated risk-taking.
A month from now, I’ll be hosting a Tele-seminar with a man who lost $15 million dollars in 1 Day in 1998, and kept his head long enough to recover his investment and still make a fortune!
Here’s a video of an interview he did with BusinessDay:
If you’re interested in getting your questions in so that we can ask him everything, you’ll want to follow me on Twitter, and send in your questions.
It pays well to set aside a few hours a month to think about the design of your marketing and operations system. 
