Liveblogging Entrepreneur Country event
Today I'm at the Entrepreneur Country event, and will be providing a live blog of the speeches and debates.
How to View
If you're reading this on the front page of my site, or on the RSS feed, you need to click the heading for this blog entry to go to the liveblog page.
If you're on the liveblog page you don't need to do anything, my updates will appear automagically below.
How to get in touch
I'm on Twitter @steveparks, so drop me a line if you want to make a point, or ask a question.
CBI Entrepreneurs' Summit
The CBI and Real Business Magazine are hosting a one day summit for SME's in London.
Their website is http://es.realbusiness.co.uk where you can see the agenda.
I'll be liveblogging the speeches, which include Stelios (of Easyjet fame) and Brent Hoberman (of Lastminute.com fame) on this page.
How to view
If you're on the front page of my blog, click on the title of this post to view the liveblog page.
If you're on the liveblog page, you don't need to do anything, it'll automatically refresh as I post updates.
How to contact me
I'll be on twitter @steveparks if you want to comment or post a question.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to SwineFlu
Swine Flu might seem an odd topic for an entrepreneurship blog, but stick with me.
One of my companies is a specialist communications consultancy, and for nearly 3 years we have been working with a group of extremely large global companies to help them share information and best practice to better prepare for a pandemic. A pandemic has long been expected by the World Health Organisation (WHO), and in fact they issued a statement a while back saying it was a case of 'when, not if'. The strain of virus they expected to mutate to be able to spread human-to-human was AH5N1 - a strain of Avian Influenza (commonly known as Bird Flu) - but the lessons learned and the plans put in place are the same as for this AH1N1 swine flu strain.
As well as our continuing best-practice-sharing project, last October my company was part of a simulation exercise testing the main executive team of a very large global company in executing their response plans to a pandemic.
The good news is that governments in developed countries, and the UK government in particular, are extremely well prepared for a pandemic. I've had insight into the plans, and found the level of thought and planning very reassuring. (As an aside, you may be excited to know that among many elements of the plans and supporting legislation, the UK government has given itself the powers to declare emergency bank holidays - not for fun, but to prevent the spread of disease by forcing businesses, schools etc to close)
Major global companies (especially those we've worked with of course!) are also well prepared, and employees of these companies can expect a measured and planned response from their executive teams and HR departments. They are ready with information and in many cases with supplies of anti-viral drugs.
So there really is no need to panic - let alone the fact that so far this virus doesn't seem deadly outside Mexico (for a reason that is not yet clear) - but there is every need for simple preparations to put yourself and your company in the best position.
However, smaller companies aren't at all prepared for this or any other emergency situation (fuel blockades, terrorist attacks in London, major industrial action, environmental emergencies such as floods, etc).
So as an entrepreneur, why not use the current situation as a spur to get proper business continuity plans in place for all sorts of situations - but for a pandemic in particular.
A Business Continuty Plan
The best business continuity plans are relatively generic, so that they can be used in any eventuality. So don't plan specifically for a flood at your building - plan for being generally unable to access your building, and then you'll also be ready for a fire or for the police sealing off the area because they found the bodies your accounts payable manager has been hiding there etc etc.
Work out: what are the crucial elements of your business, and what are your fallback plans for coping without them? Starting points are: Your premises, your key staff, your frontline staff, internet connection, telecoms, transport networks, key suppliers and so on.
In the event of pandemic one of the biggest impacts on business is predicted to be absenteeism. Some of this may be due to actual illness, some may be due to caring for dependents who are ill, and some may be simply through fear of catching the virus. But also it's expected that schools will be closed very early on in any crisis - so parents may have to stay at home to look after children, even if they're not ill. Perhaps 30%-50% of your staff could be absent at the peak of any pandemic. How would this impact your business? How can you mitigate that effect? What HR policies would you have for dealing with unauthorised absenteeism in such a situation?
Maybe a home-working backup plan is a good idea? What kind of internet connections do staff have? How will you keep in contact with each other? How will you manage the team?
The stay at home response will also have a knock-on effect for companies that rely on internet connectivity for themselves, or to actually deliver their service to customers. A concern is that with all the schools being closed, and parents not being keen to let kids out to play, they'll instead be at the computer downloading videos, watching the iPlayer, playing online games and putting a huge strain on the network infrastructure. The US Dept. of Homeland Security has identified this as a serious threat and actually developed a special report on the issue. Many of the questions raised in it have not yet been answered - will ISPs be instructed to ration connectivity for example.
You need a plan for the internet becoming incredibly slow, or unavailable to you or your customers because of the strain on internet service povider's infrastructure. It may be worth looking for business-focused ISPs with low contention ratios, getting a leased line if you can afford one, or otherwise making your internet access more resilient - and having back up plans.
Don't Panic
So, in conclusion, my message is simple. Don't panic, just prepare. Taking some time to think and plan now will help you to respond better in any emergency situation.
LiveBlogging: Geek n Rolla
Geek n Rolla is a day-long conference for entrepreneurs building web and IT businesses. It's organised by TechCrunch, and takes place between 10:30 and 18:00 on 21st April 2009.
I'll be live blogging from the event with details of key points from the speeches, my own views and other bits and pieces.
How to view the LiveBlog
If you're reading this on the front page of my site, or the RSS feed, click the title of this post to go to the full page for this blog post. If you're on the full page for this blog post you don't need to do anything, just leave it open and it will automagically update with the latest posts.
How to Talk to Me
I'll be monitoring Twitter, so send me messages @steveparks if you want to catch my attention with something. I'll also be viewing the comments for this post if you don't Twitter.
The Agenda
You can find out details about the event and the agenda by visiting this post on the TechCrunch blog.
The LiveBlog will start at approx 10:30am UK time on 21st April. Watch this space!
How to be an Entrepreneur - Summarised and Reviewed by an Entrepreneur
My book 'How to be an Entrepreneur' is being reviewed and summarised by a blogger at Business by Janice, and she's also adding some of her own experiences and ideas - which makes for interesting reading.
Janice Haywood now owns and runs a language school in Madrid after a career in retail management. She's experienced challenges and successes, and is frank about them on her blog. She also does some small business coaching.
In her first blog post mentioning my book she says:
I would like to recommend an excellent book I’ve just read. It’s called “How to be an Entrepreneur” by Steve Parks. The book suggests there are 6 factors which are necessary to become a successful entrepreneur.
* Attitude
* Opportunity
* Focus
* Talent
* Buliding
* CommunicationOver the next couple of posts I’ll be spending some time outling the main points that Parks in each of these categories and adding my own insights from the experiences I’ve had running my own business.
In her next post she looks at the first chapter of How to be an Entrepreneur, in which I talk about the attitudes of successful entrepreneurs, and she gives her own example about one characteristic I highlight - resilience:
I remember when we opened the extra classrooms to our academy 6 years ago. We did it quickly so as not to miss out on the start of the new academic year never thinking that we wouldn’t get the support of our bank. Unfortunately this move coincided with the scandal of the "Opening" chain of schools and for that reason(!) our actual bank wouldn’t give us any money to finance the project. It was only by negotiating wih our suppliers and employees, borrowing from our families and going without a salary until we signed agreements with additional banks that we avoided the business from grinding to a halt. If you have been conducting your business up until then with integrity, any action you decide to take is easier as people are prepared to collaborate to help solve the problem.
Thanks for the mention Janice, and good luck with your business!
How to be an Entrepreneur is published by Prentice Hall Business and is available at all good bookshops, and online book retailers.
Open Source Everything - Including Cars
The Open Source business model is an extremely interesting one - and I think it's going to become a key tool for startups in challenging large, entrenched, competitors.
In short, Open Source means that anyone can participate in the creation of something, and share in the benefit. But the organisation at the core of the project - and often other businesses that grow up through the community - profit by providing supporting services, premium versions and so on.
This website is built entirely on open source software - and you may well be viewing it in an open source web browser such as Firefox. If it weren't for these tools the web wouldn't have developed because it would have stayed too expensive.
The startups behind these technologies - such as MySql, Zend, Mozilla and more - have all been very successful, despite the fact that their main products are available free.
From that statement, you'd be right in thinking that it takes a bit of time to work out exactly how Open Source works, and how it can drive a successful business. To understand more about the ideas, read the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.
To date it is the software industry in which open source has been mainly used, but that is starting to change. And you know it really is gaining ground when the business model starts to be used in an industry like the automotive industry.
At the moment the car industry is dominated by badly run giants and founded on proprietary technologies. There's little innovation - and in fact innovation is stifled because the main players want to reap the rewards of their years of investment in legacy systems. But now the industry has hit the buffers - and that makes it the perfect time for brave entrepreneurs to enter the fray.
New, Entrepreneurial Car Companies
One of the key new innovators (but not open source) is Tesla Motors, setup by one of the founders of PayPal after selling up to eBay. Their mission is to build really cool, really fast, but environementally friendly, sports cars. That's one of their cars pictured above, and here's a video...
You can find out more about Tesla Motors on Wikipedia.
New, Open Source, Car Companies
Now a new Dutch startup has entered the market - with an Open Source business model. C,mm,n has an absolutely terrible brand name (it's pronounced Common) with those daft commas, but they have a great idea...
c,mm,n is an initiative of the Dutch society for nature and environment and the Dutch technical universities of Delft, Twente and Eindhoven. Together they have created c,mm,n; a sustainable automobility concept targeted at future urbanized western Europe.
c,mm,n is a new way of developing, manufacturing and using cars. By making the blueprint of c,mm,n publicly available under an open-source licence we are able to develop truly sustainable mobility. Just like open-source software, c,mm,n focuses on services around the product. You can use c,mm,n to offer people a lease car, rental car or other mobility services. It is allowed to sell c,mm,n too. Just as long as you make any derived work publicly available again.
Here's how the design has evolved so far...
Until now the community around the project have used a Developer's Wiki for the C,mm,n car where anyone can view the plans and contribute their ideas and designs - or get involved in many other ways. But now this has evolved into a full web platform for devloping the car in the community. You could register on the site now, and be viewing the full technical documents within minutes - and more importantly, contributing your own ideas.
Opportunities for You
The car industry is going to be rebuilt now, and it will be rebuilt by companies like these - some of them with an open source model - and perhaps companies like yours, making use of this open source community.
Just as the first car industry created many opportunities for entrepreneurs to build tyre companies, petrol station networks, in-car entertainment systems and more - the car industry 2.0 will offer similar opportunities for a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Look at the businesses and products that have built up around a closed system like the iPod - and imagine how that effect will be multiplied around an open product.
These cars will be electric - what opportunities are there for innovative charging points? What about better electric storage systems?
Is there a better business model for 'green' car ownership? What about a green car pool for appartment blocks? What about a green car hire company? Businesses all want to be seen to be green - is there a way to adapt this vehicle for the business market? Wouldn't they make better post-vans for teh royal mail than the diesel belchers they have now going very-innefficiently from house to house? Who is going to put together the fleet operation to supply contracts like that?
The opportunities are there. Are you the entrepreneur to take them?
If you're at all interested in being part of the Car Industry 2.0, then go and browse their development web portal to see how your company could become part of the network, and what ideas you could contribute.
To whet your appetite, and spark your imagination, here's a computer simulation of the their first car...
Going to Geek n Rolla, London
Next week I'll be at the TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event in London. It's a get together for web entrepreneurs from across Europe, to share experiences - and have a bit of fun.
Speakers I'm particularly looking forward to are:
- Andy McLoughlin, CEO of Huddle.net, on how to hire a team of peers. I'm guessing he means people on the same level as you, rather than staffing your company with members of the house of lords, which could get expensive :)
- William Reeve, serial entrepreneur and angel investor, on boot-strapping, scaling and cashflow. This guy really knows his stuff and has a fantastic track record.
- Lesley Eccles, of Hubdub, on how they launched their startup in the US - while they were actually in Scotland.
- Reshma Sohoni, from Seedcamp, on recession focused business models for tech startups.
I'll be live-blogging/twittering from the event on the day, with the key points - so watch this space!
Facing up to Facebook's Books
Are you on Facebook? Great - now, when was the last time you paid them any money?
The answer, of course, is never. As with many companies on the web they don't charge their customers for the service. Instead they have to try to find other sources of revenue, such as advertising - but that's a tough market at the moment.
However, Facebook has now reported the impressive news that it is now EBITDA positive (that is, it makes a profit before taking into account certain financing costs. It stands for Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation). In Facebook's case the key figure is depreciation - because it is making so much capital expenditure on the technology infrastructure to run such a rapidly growing network. Because of this it's still not cashflow positive.
TechCrunch reports:
The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly - we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake - earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.
Plus the company has the wage bill for 700 employees. So it's not cheap to run a web business on this scale.
So far the company has raised $516M in funding, and it's not clear whether it will need to raise more to see it through until it has positive cash flow - particularly with the downturn in the advertising market. They are forecasting internally that they will have sales of $300m this year - but the word is they are going to have to raise more funding to keep up with their growth rate.
So what might Facebook be worth? Here's another interesting TechCrunch article on what Facebook, and other social networks might be valued at.
In the last investment round, in which Microsoft took a stake, the company was valued at $15bn - not bad for a company that is only just 5 years old, founded by a guy who has just turned 25!
There's no doubt that founder Mark Zuckerberg has pulled off an amzazing entrepreneurial feat - creating a business of huge value from nothing.
So there's lots to learn from him. Here's the Wikipedia article on Mark Zuckerberg, and here's a video of an interview with him:
CBI Recession Update
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has released the results of its latest Access to Finance Survey.
The survey monitors the impact of the credit crunch, and the recession, on UK businesses of all sizes - and their attitude to the future.
The CBI say:
Fewer firms said in March that the availability of credit had got worse for them in the past three months than did so in February or January. The view that the pace of deterioration is easing correlates with what businesses are starting to tell us on the ground.
Firms are not saying that credit conditions are getting better, but the severity of the disruption is no longer worsening as sharply as it was three months ago. And the combination of easier monetary policy and the government's measures to support the banking sector may be starting to have an impact.
Here are some of the other key findings:
- Nearly half of firms (46%) say they have cut staff numbers over the past three months as a result of the credit crunch, a slight increase on February's figure (40%). Staff hours have stabilised, even though output is still coming down, and firms are cutting back on training budgets and capital investment.
- For the third month running, the very largest firms, employing over 5000 staff, were most widely affected. Most of the companies in this size bracket (86%) that had sought new finance said its availability had got worse in the last three months. This was the case for just 15% of large businesses and 54% of SMEs.
- In the next three months, just under a third of the very largest firms (29%) expect access to new credit will get worse, which is the case for just over a third of large firms (36%) and SMEs (38%).
- The cost of existing finance has become more of a concern in March. Just over a third of firms said the cost of existing finance had risen in the past three months compared with just over a quarter in February.
- Problems with the availability of trade credit insurance have intensified. Nearly half (48%) of firms surveyed said they use the insurance to cover the supply of goods to customers. Of these, nearly three-quarters (72%) said its availability had worsened in the past three months, hindering their ability to secure contracts.
So overall, the survey is pretty gloomy - but with a hint that the bottom of the curve may be in sight.
What we don't know is how long it'll be before there is some sign of recovery. With the level of job losses starting to come through the system, I think this could be a very long time.
Happy Birthday to the WWW
The World Wide Web is 20 years old today, and the event is being marked by Sir Tim Berners-Lee making a keynote speech in the very place where he developed the idea - the CERN laboratories, near Geneva. In fact, he's due to be speaking right now as I type this.
To mark the event on my blog, which of course only exists because of Sir Tim's idea, the video above is from a speech he gave at a TED conference. He talks about the origin of the web - but also its future.
In addition, here are some other interesting webpages to mark the day:
The world's first ever website has an article on how Sir Tim came to invent the web in March 1989. By clicking on the hyperlinks (it seems odd to think they had to be invented doesn't it?) in the document you can see some screenshots of how the site looked in its very first incarnation.
The website of CERN (Berners-Lee's employer at the time of his invention), has an article on how the web works.
I believe the web has done more to help entrepreneurs than any other development in history, so join me in wishing.... Happy 20th Birthday to the World Wide Web.
(and a big thanks to Tim!)
Twitter and the Evolution of a Business Idea
The images above trace the history of Twitter, the hugely successful (in terms of fame rather than profit at this stage) micro-blogging service.
I first heard about Twitter in early 2007, and opened an account (managing to get my name without any additional numbers etc at that stage!) - but never really got around to exploring it further.
As part of the upgrade to this blog I decided it'd be good to also be able to post regular, small updates - without cluttering up the main blog. So I decided to figure out how to Tweet, and you can now see my Tweets in the right hand sidebar of this blog.
In doing that I became interested, as always, in the genesis of the business behind the service - and here is the story...
The Idea
Everything starts with one person and their idea. In this case the person was Jack Dorsey [PHOTO 1], otherwise known as @jack to Twitter folk.
Here's how he describes coming up with the original idea:
On May 31st, 2000, I signed up with a new service called LiveJournal. I was user 4,136 which entitled me a permanent account and street cred in some alternate geeky universe which I have not yet visited. I was living in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland California and starting a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web.
One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more "live" LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand.
The Sketch
Jack likes doodling on yellow legal pads, and that's where Twitter first emerged from his head [PHOTO 2].
At this stage his name for the site was 'stat.us' using the '.us' domain suffix instead of '.com' because he thought that was cool! The evolution of the brand name is one of the interesting things about Twitter - morphing through a number of versions, just like the design of teh site itself and the feature set.
But Twitter today isn't that different from his original sketch.
The Detail
Jack worked for a company called Odeo (now called Obvious after it sold the website called Odeo.com). The company was run by Evan Williams, who is a great entrepreneur and may merit his own blog post sometime.
His masterstroke was creating a company that encouraged doodling, pet projects and trying out new ideas, even if it wasn't 'on focus'.
Jack toyed with the Twitter idea some more, and wrote out the list in [PHOTO 3] in early 2006. It's not very clear in the photo, so here's what it says:
casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"multiple entry point to set status
- web
- phone
- sms
- immultiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- phone
- sms
- im3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration
In a very simple list Jack set out what is still recognisable as the way Twitter works. It doesn't take a 50 page proposal. So far we've seen two sparsely covered pages of legal paper - and we get the idea.
Jack wrote at this time:
The 6th year; the idea has finally solidified (thanks to the massively creative environment my employer Odeo provides) and taken a novel form. We're calling it twttr. It's evolved a lot in the past few months. From an excited discussion and persuasion on the South Park playground to a recently approved application for a SMS shortcode. I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives. Some things are worth the wait.
The Prototype
Jack had persuaded Evan to give him the chance to create a prototype of the site, and with help from colleague Biz Stone they created what you see in [PHOTO 4]. It's very basic, but it does the job, allowing teh concept to be tested. In a future blog I want to write a little bit about 'Agile Development', but one of the key concepts is to test the idea as quickly as possible in the simplest way possible. This is what Twitter did.
The Launch
This user interface then evolved into [PHOTO 5] to gain a bit of design and colour (but it's still very basic) - and then into what you see in [PHOTO 6] which is my page on Twitter today.
You can see that it really is an evolution. They get it started as quickly as possible, and then constantly refine it. I really believe that is the best way to go.
But it's rare for entrepreneurs to let the actual brand name evolve, but I think they were right to do so. Talking further about this, Jack says in a recent interview with the LA Times:
The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on ... We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.
We wanted to capture that in the name -- we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
They started with the abbreviated form of this, with the vowels removed, which was 'twttr', but soon expanded it to avoid confusion.
The Future
So that's a quick overview of how the business has evolved so far - but what about the future? Well you may notice that there is one key thing missing. Twitter doesn't actually make any money. They don't charge customers, and they don't carry advertising. So they don't make any at all.
At the moment they rely completely on their venture capital funding, but the Twitter website has this statement:
Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.
My mind is split on the merits of this approach, as I don't really know what their strategy is. Normally I would say you have to look at generating some revenue from your customers immediately. But it may be that the product they are actually building to sell is Twitter itself - they just need to build a big enough community, with enough demand that a company like Facebook makes them an offer they can't refuse.
But Facebook has made offers, and they've all been rebuffed.
Whatever their plans, there's a lot to learn from Twitter, and I'll be following their progress with interest.
Photo Credits:
Photo of Jack Dorsey by Jai.
Other Images by Jack Dorsey.
Understanding the Credit Crunch
It's difficult to get to grips with exactly how those in charge of the main financial organisations have made such a mess - and also difficult for us to admit that nearly everybody has played a part (anyone who has bought a house in the boom, remortgaged their house, taken on debt to fuel simple consumption, etc etc).
In fact, it's come to light that the bankers didn't really understand it all at the time either!
So for those of us who want to understand why we're in the situation we're in I've gathered together some of the best explanations from across the web.
The video above is called 'The Crisis of Credit Visualised' and is a quickfire, well crafted explanation.
This one is more of an expert classroom overview:
And then if you want to delve in a bit deeper, here's an episode of the American radio programme This American Life, which delves into how banks created the mess - and how it might be solved. It's brilliant.
Why Customers & Colleagues (and You!) Make Bad Decisions
This is a video of an entertaining and enlightening talk by Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist.
He's conducted a number of experiments into how we handle making decisions, and why many of the shortcuts we use lead us into making sub-optimal decisions. So, presented with a number of options we often fail to choose the best, and regularly choose the worst.
Marketers of course have learned how to use these tricks. So watching this video will make you wise to their tactics. But you could (ethically) adapt some to help your customers and colleagues make the right decision.
If you don't see the video player above, here's a link to it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZv--sm9XXU
On Ilkley Moor... With a warm hat.
After a week in which I was frustrated at how a bit of snow could bring the country to a halt (Parcel Farce have been completely unable to deliver many of my company's shipments to our customers, despite me being able to drive easily wherever I needed to, and loads of other suppliers seem to be short staffed and unable to perform too), it was nice to round the week off enjoying the best of the snow.
I spent today walking on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire, my feet crunching through 2 to 3 feet of snow, with a couple of friends.
It was spectacularly beautiful. I didn't think to take a proper camera, so this picture was snapped on my PDA.
What Walt Disney Can Teach You About Business Plans
I've always believed that there are lots of techniques and ideas that business could do well to borrow from the arts.
And here's one of those - storyboarding. Developed by Walt Disney in the 1920's as a way of getting the movie as he wanted it before it actually went into production, storyboarding is now widely used in the movie industry. It's simply a case of drawing sketches of each scene on cards and pinning them up on the wall in the right order. They don't have to be brilliant drawings, they just have to communicate what is going on. Then they can be moved around, removed, new scenes can be inserted and so on - until it all feels right - then the expensive production work can begin, and will be done faster and more cheaply. Not only that, but it will be the best movie it could be because the creative juices were allowed to flow before changes became expensive - and then that creative vision was right in front of all the artists and technicians who had to actually make the movie happen.
The video above explains the background of storyboarding, and how it's used in the movie industry.
So how can you use the technique? This blog entry by presentation guru Garr Reynolds suggests using storyboarding as a technique to develop your presentations - but I think you can go a step further and use it to visualise the future of your business... otherwise known as a business plan.
Sketch out (you don't have to be a good artist), or cut and paste images from magazines or the web, to create pictures of the journey you're going to take. What are the milestones? Draw them. What will the products or services be? Draw them. How will you market it? Draw them. Where will you be in 5 years? Show us.
A visual story is so much easier to follow than a business plan (which generally gets put in a filing cabinet and forgotten about anyway) - and it's a great way to communicate it to, and enthuse, your team.
Economic Analysis from a top Entrepreneur and VC
Luke Johnson, the entrepreneur who made Pizza Express a hit (among other big success stories) and is now Chairman of Channel 4, has written a very gloomy column for the Financial Times.
Here are some excerpts:
...this downturn is very bad indeed. It will sear itself into a generation's memory and scar lives. It may well be the worst slump most of us have ever experienced.
Business must adjust to the idea that this stagnation could last for many years.
This vast reordering of our economic system has only just begun. We shall have to cancel all the self-indulgence of endless welfare spending and cultivate rather more of a work ethic and a sense of self-sufficiency. Expectations must be modified and attitudes altered profoundly. Expect years of negligible growth, permanent high unemployment, declining property prices, higher taxes, crumbling currencies and falling living standards.
We shall look back on the last decade and think: we never realised what we had until it was gone.
I interviewed Luke a few years ago and found him to be a very very smart man, and extremely financially astute. He's also been an optimist about the credit crunch until recently, so this change in heart is significant. It's well worth taking him seriously.
Read the full article at: Luke Johnson's FT column
Fresh for 2009
Although it's the end of January (already!) this is my first post for 2009, as I had most of January off work travelling in Asia. The last few years have been hectic work-wise, without a break, so I decided to take a full month off, see some of the world and get some thinking time.
It's so important to take time out to think, get some perspective, and get a better focus - especially with the mounting challenges in the economic climate - and yet it's so easy to keep putting it off.
It's been proven time and again that people who don't take time to relax at weekends and holidays become much less productive - so even though they work longer hours they get less done.
I found the rest hugely refreshing and I'm ready to tackle 2009 and whatever it brings! I'm bringing back a new focus to my businesses, and a new energy to my writing.
So prepare for a flurry of blog posts! :)
Happy new year, and do give yourself a break!
Happy New Year!
Wishing you all the best for 2009.
It'll be a challenging year for entrepreneurs - but remember that the best entrepreneurs spot the best opportunities and create the best businesses in even the worst of times.
While everyone else is running one way, you should run the other - make that your motto for the year! :)
That's what I'm doing. I'm travelling in Asia at the moment, so this message comes to you from a very warm Malacca in Malaysia, where I'm en-route to Kuala Lumpur to celebrate the new year. So far I've explored Thailand and Singapore. Next I'm off to Vietnam. The magic of the internet means I can still do enough of my work from here.
I recommend reading the inspiring book 'The Four Hour Work Week' by Tim Ferris to find out more. I made a few pledges to change my way of working and to travel more after reading it - and I'm now enacting those promises to myself. 2009 will be interesting!
The Mr Creosote Approach to Growing a Business
As we round off the year I think it's good to take stock for a moment, and try to learn from all that has happened.
One big issue I think we should consider is the obsession we have with creating the biggest companies possible. This is a particular pressure on listed companies, PLCs, who are expected to turn in higher and higher turnover and profits every quarter.
The expectations of the city-boy institutional investors simply can't be met through organic growth of established companies - so in recent times our largest and most solid institions have been pushed into a constant stream of mergers and acquistions - creating the illusion of growth by simply bolting on turnover from other companies.
This has led to a whole list of problems - just look at the HSBC acquisitions in the US, the RBS acquistion of ABN Amro, and so on.
Different companies have different cultures, different IT systems, different processes, different target customers and much more - and yet they have to somehow integrate. Added to this is the City's expectation of cost savings after the acquistion - so a round of damaging redundancies and cutbacks follows.
The result is a short term boost to the figures - but a string of long term problems are stored up. A number of studies have shown that little long term value is delivered to shareholders by these transactions (and actually you often find that 5 years later there is pressure on a new CEO to split up the company again!).
But now we have seen that the problem is worse than this. It doesn't just affect the company and it's shareholders. If the companies get big enough it affects the population as a whole. No CEO can keep control on a company so big, no regulator can effectively monitor it, no political party dare challenge them. We saw it in the collapse of Enron, and now in the global econimic crisis we've seen one PLC after another uncover some uncomfortable truths.
So what do we do about this? It clearly doesn't work for companies to get so big, but we can't restrict growth can we? Should there be some kind of limit on M&A activity - but that removes lucrative exit routes for savvy entrepreneurs? Should there be taxes on M&A - funding better oversight and regulation?
One commentator floated the idea that when a company reaches a certain size the management team should all get medals and some kind of recognition, but then the company gets split up into smaller companies.
This is a very interesting idea - as it backs up lots of expert research that found teams are hard to manage beyond 50 people, and companies should divide teams up if they get bigger than this - so why not do it for companies as a whole? It also reflects the way nature manages growth.
But at the moment we have a Mr Creosote (see Monty Python) approach to growing big public companies. They sit at the table and their waiter (professional adviser) just keeps bringing them more and more to eat. Finally they are so full they are struggling to keep it all down - but the waiter insists they finish off with just a 'wafer thin mint' - and they explode, leaving a mess for us all to clean up.
As we all make our own New Year's resoultions to eat more healthily, let's demand the same from our PLCs.
The Reality for Entrepreneurs
Ryan Carson has written a great blog post about his decision to make some of his staff redundant. He has a history of writing really open and honest blog posts about his company - which is a highly successful event company, behind some of the world's biggest web conferences.
But times are tough and he's been smart. He's cutting costs way back - swapping his company car for a bike, making staff redundant and more.
He also gives tips to staff everywhere about how to avoid being made redundant. Really solid advice.
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