Bad Entrepreneur

A couple of people have asked me about the naming of our “Punk Your SME” competition and one person went so far as to take the time to tell me that my “concept was ill-conceived”.

The guy who dropped me the message tells me that “pimp” is cool but “punk” is not so cool…

Hey feedback is feedback and I will take what comes but here’s the thinking behind the name.

Words and phrases linked with the word “punk” in slang context include:

- Aggressive
- Unconventional
- Bizarre
- Shocking
- distinguished by extremes of dress and socially defiant behavior
- A young person, especially a member of a rebellious counterculture group
- A type of rock ‘n’ roll with loud, energetic music and often harsh lyrics criticizing traditional society and culture.

Which I thought summed up entrepreneurs quite nicely – considering that this blog has used unconventional businesses like strip clubs to prove its point from time to time I think that can be called “unconventional”.

I also started looking for some quotes which I thought linked the words Punk and Entrepreneur so nicely. Here are a couple of them:

“If you looked different, people tried to intimidate you all the time. It was the same kind of crap you had to put up with as a hippie, when people started growing long hair. Only now it was the guys with the long hair yelling at you. You think they would have learned something. I had this extreme parrot red hair and I got hassled so much I carried a sign that said ‘FUCK YOU ASSHOLE.’ I got so tired of yelling it, I would just hold up the sign.” [Bobby Startup, Philadelphia punk DJ, "Philadelphia Weekly," Oct. 10, 2001] 

How many entrepreneurs have been intimidated because they went against the grain and tried something a little different?

“Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.” – Greil Marcus (b. 1945), U.S. rock journalist. “Punk and History,” Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture (eds. Russell Ferguson, et. al. (1990).

“At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they’ll be creative about it, and do something good besides.” – Lester Bangs – punk

My response to the person who e-mailed me:
Hi there

Thanks for your e-mail with your feedback. Sorry I am only getting back to you at 10pm on a Saturday night. Things have been a little crazy since we announced the launch of the competition.

What with entrepreneurs getting their entries in, venture capitalists and sponsors pledging their support and money, a TV producer phoning me up and asking me if we want to turn the concept into a TV show, a government department and a multi-national telecomms firm asking if they can partner with us for two international conferences they are putting together…. yip things have been quite busy.

Remind me again what it is that you did on Friday? Oh that’s right you took the time to compose an e-mail to tell me how “ill conceived” my concept was.

Do me a favour and go and crawl back into your hole or I’ll come drop-kick you into it.

Lot of love
Management

There are no strippers in this post, although I did chat to a stripper today on the subject of marketing and will probably be the subject of a follow-up post in the not too distant future…

I saw a really nice campaign today which I think small business marketers should take note of.

You can find the competition details here on Chris’ iMod blog. In a nutshell people need to collect World Cup cups on certain blogs and  follow the Twitter feeds and Facebook page for Springleap for clues about where the various cups are.

Once you’ve found all 4 cups, you’ll need to follow a website link and predict who you think will win the World Cup by dropping an e-mail to the Springleap team. (Not sure if this is one step too much but let’s see how this competition plays out)

The blogs involved are Ideate, Fred Roed and iGeek.

What I thought was really innovative about this campaign though was the idea of using a group of bloggers to promote the competition. What a brilliant way for the bloggers to score by attracting traffic to their blogs (as people seek clues) and for Springleap to get their brand out there.

I hope both marketers and bloggers – both on Bundublog and in general – take note of how you can use blogs as part of a marketing strategy for relatively low-cost and for potentially powerful returns.

Would love feedback from the bloggers involved as to the how they benefited by being involved in this particular promotion.

What I thought was quite innovative about this particular campaign is the use of blogs which would typically be very low-cost advertising plans. All parties can score from a relationship of this nature.

Yeah yeah I’m blogging about strip clubs again…

As far as small businesses go, strip clubs have their work cut out for them when it comes to marketing tastefully or at least intelligently enough to appeal to certain audiences.

I had a bad experience at the Lollipop Lounge (Read bachelors evening) so I’ve always been wary about going back there, but a (female) colleague invited me to join their Facebook group and I’ve been very impressed with the way they have used social media to market themselves.

For those with short memories you will remember that Gigi (of Lollipop Lounge fame) was the recent winner of the local “celebrity” edition of Survivor. The club has (excuse the pun) milked this exposure for all its worth and have kept up a very active social media presence on Facebook.

For example their latest competition says that every month, you can win yourself and a friend free entrance to the Lollipop Lounge and a cubicle dance with the girl of your choice. All you have to do is go into the club and get a photo of yourself taken with Gigi in a super “sexy” pose and you could be a winner.

Clever campaign because:

Read the rest of this entry »

Geez I am becoming a real whinger ….

This morning I received a phone call from “Keegan” representing a company called “Autocare” which I googled – you can find them at www.autocare.co.za

Anyway I have much sympathy for call-centre people because I have had to do the odd cold-calling and I am truly useless at it. But Keegan may have usurped even my pathetic skills - he didn’t wait for my answers – he simply carried on reading from the script trying to sell me something “that wasn’t a contract” but involved “a regular monthly payment”.

I couldn’t work out exactly what he was selling but it sounded like some car repair offering which I would pay for each month.

Eventually I said I was not interested but was curious to know where he got my cell number from. He said it was from a “legally acquired list”. When I asked where they “legally acquired” it from he said he did not have that information on hand.

“Oh ok – well have a nice day then Keegan and enjoy the soccer”

“Wait – Mr Ashton would it be possible for you to please give me the names and cellphone numbers of 5 people you think would be interested in this service?”

“Uh no”

You contrast that to the post we did below about Scott’s referral campaign for Brandhouse and you just see where people go so wrong in their marketing. It must have cost Autocare a fair whack of money to pull in a callcentre to do this campaign and based on this telephone call they have gone backwards for the money they have invested.

Yet ironically both companies are trying to get to the same point.

Dunno – didn’t leave a very good taste in my mouth.

—————————————————————————————–

Rather support an entrepreneurial South African company. Buy designer T-Shirts Online Click Here

I am always astounded by some of the ways that people make money. One of my colleagues recently brought me a news article about a husband and wife team who were making money selling a form of insurance to people who believed that Christ was coming back to earth to collect all the good souls. In return the non-believers would be left behind … as would the pets of the believers (don’t ask me!) and they’d obviously need somebody to look after them.

Why a believer would leave their adorable Fluffy with the heathens that are left behind, I’m also not totally sure but anyway these guys seem to have put together a business of sorts selling this insurance.

Anyway that is a bit of an aside, the main reason I wanted to blog today was on the subject of information and analytics.

The information that is out there for people is amazing.

If you run a website you can find out:

• Who is is visiting your website – often right down to the company IP address. A couple of times I’ve used this as astarting point to find open a sales discussion with a business. I see who is visiting the site and then approach them foradvertising or even just drop them a mail to find out what kind of content they like or are looking for
• What keywords did they use to get there? Chances are that if people are looking for a “lesser spotted, reticulated valve” then maybe this is what you need to keep in stock and highlight to potential visitors.

Analytics makes for interesting reading
We are quite lucky in that we can call on the analytics from various industry specific websites and our recently launched financial services product aggregator.

We know what brands people are clicking on, we know what type of product people are interested in and from that we can make some interesting deductions about the state of the SA consumer which we wouldn’t necessarily pick up from the mainstream media or “economist comment”.

So I guess my question for today is whether you as the entrepreneur are using the information that customers are giving you by their surfing habits to make informed decisions around the health of your business?

There was an article on the memeburn.com site by Sue Rutherford which caught my eye. It was entitled: “10 easy ways to fail as an entrepreneur”

According to the article these are 10 of the easiest ways to fail as an entrepreneur:

1. Poor market research
2. Inadequate planning
3. Lack of experience
4. Insufficient capital

At this point I’m a little puzzled – I have read to point four and the word “sales” has not yet appeared in the article.

Fortunately point 5 came along and it mentioned the “s” word.

5. Over projecting sales volumes…

… ok but that’s a given for pretty much any start-up I’ve seen. Points 6 – 10 you can read on the Memeburn article – Sue doesn’t mention the word “sales” again in the article.

Sales is EVERYTHING for the start-up
The real beaut for me in the article was number 10: “Fear of failure”.

Even better was something in the comments section which said: “Fear of Success, many entrepreneurs don’t take the decisions that would bring them success because they’re afraid of not being able to cope with increased demand”…

… SAY WHAT?!

With all due respect an entrepreneur does not fail because he or she is scared of failing – or for that matter scared of being too successful.

They fail because there is no enough money in the bank at the end of each month!

There are very few “new” ideas out there, so most entrepreneurs are doing something which has been done before in one format or another. The challenge for them is to make their brand stand out and get customer buy-in.
Irrespective of whether you start a publishing business, an engineering firm, a social media consultancy or a pizza parlour the idea has been proven to work in quite a few markets. Will it work in the one you are trying to target? Who knows … how

well can you sell the concept?

Sales is too much of an afterthought for many entrepreneurs. It’s too easy to pencil in a line item which says: “Sales rep” in the budget and then treat it as an afterthought.

My humble conclusion – the number 1 reason why entrepreneurs fail – they don’t sell enough.

Nothing complicated about that…. if you are busy now looking at your business plan and looking at this 10 reason list trying to work out whether you are going to sink or swim then I would suggest looking at point 11 which says: “How the $$@Fck am I going to sell my product or service to a client?!”

——————————–
In Crisis Markets only Companies that Sell Survive! Click here if you want to sell more online today and every day. Click Here

I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to publish this rant, but after seeing that “Ricky Gervais quits ‘pointless’ Twitter” is considered news for the Mail & Guardian I’m going to go hell for leather.

Yesterday one of South Africa’s more high profile social bloggers posted a rant slamming Sandwich Baron for failing to deliver her sandwich on time. “I’ve tweeted three times, DM’ed them and called them once” she writes on her blog. FFS (!) you don’t Tweet somebody after they’ve failed to deliver – you unleash absolute hellfire and brimstone on the first hapless person who picks up the phone and you repeat process until you get somebody senior enough to make your problem go away.

Since the start of the year I’ve come across six “social media experts / gurus” between the ages of 21 and 24 who have given me the story about how they could revolutionise a business using their knowledge of technology. For crying in a bucket you don’t look like you would be comfortable talking to a real living, breathing woman and yet you want to tell me about SOCIAL media?!

I’m sure there are many other social media experts in South Africa with the right credentials but I know of only one person who I would trust to run a “social media” campaign and that’s Melissa Attree.

Melissa has worked in an agency with real people, real clients and seen PR / marketing / media relations / communications from various different angles.  In your early 20’s you have not done that so go and get yourself a little experience and some contacts and a portfolio and then take it from there.

Don’t get me wrong – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,blogging etc – they’re all great tools and many have the capacity to be very handy business tools. They’re a big part of my business. But unless you are out there meeting real people and constantly talking to the industry in which you operate, how are you possibly going to understand what the major problems are?

I was reading a post the other day from one of these young guys and he was berating the way that companies “expect” employees to work from 9-5 when technology empowers them to be far more productive in that time. My response was that I’m in the process of looking for somebody for our business to fulfil a sales and marketing type role. I can tell you now that I’m probably not going to rush to give that person a PC with access to the internet… and I run an internet publishing business.

I would far rather that person be out meeting industry people with a higher profile and talking about some of the things we are doing and letting THEM build the social media hype around it.

If you are not comfortable with people, then force yourself to go out and interact with them. If necessary go extreme and go to a strip club and let the dancers hit on you all night and when you can finally walk away having had a conversation with them without emptying your wallet then you know you’re probably equipped to start talking about social media.

Said it before and I will say it again – one of the biggest mistakes I made when I started out in my small business is that I tried to conduct my business from behind a computer screen. I convinced myself I was “networking” or “building our profile”. The single biggest project we ever got came because my wife and her assistant bought tickets to go to listen to some speaker at a health conference. Over the tea and biscuits they were having at the interval she got chatting to one of the organisers and 24 hours later she was asked to put together a proposal that would prove to keep us in business for six months.

Makes you think doesn’t it….

… so endeth this rant.

The title of this blog is “The blog for the less than perfect entrepreneur” and the intention behind it was to highlight mistakes I made so that hopefully other entrepreneurs (and I) could learn from them.

The all-fall-down at Bundublog.com has to rate up there as a pretty sizeable mistake and it will take me and the company a while to live it down reputationally and financially.

It did however highlight again how important systems are for a small to medium sized enterprise and I bring it up because a lot of small businesses only worry about systems when they discover they are no longer there… ala me! 

When I was growing up and I first joined the family business, my dad would drum into me the importance of using the in-house contact management / CRM system. At the time I would see it as a chore and I never quite appreciated what its importance was.

It was drummed into me:

• Capture every business card as you get it
• Capture every business lead / enquiry as you get it
• Link every quote, e-mail or telephone conversation to the clients entry

Its value only became apparent a few years later when we were forced to take two big corporates to court after breach of contract. We impressed the judge sufficiently with our methodical record keeping that we won the cases and the damages. In contrast the corporates had maintained little if any internal records.

The same kind of things could be applied to tax where many businesses suffer unnecessary fines simply because they were unable to manage their systems. (Very familiar!)

Sales is another example – they are the lifeblood of an SME. Yet how many small businesses zero in on managing each and every lead and mining where it has come from?

Marketing - can you actually quantify what marketing is working for you?!

Administration – we all hate paperwork but if you don’t at least have some kind of system in place you are going to get burnt somewhere along the line.

Backups – this experience losing 90% of one of my business assets – Bundublog.com - says it all.