Business Model & Growth Strategies

 

Bill Sahlman on Business Models & Growth Strategies at Week 3 of the GSV Bootcamp I from Global Silicon Valley on Vimeo.

Key Points:

 

Core Message from "The E-Myth Revisited", by Michael Gerber

 

"The E-Myth Revisited", by Michael Gerber

"If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world..." - Michael Gerber

An entrepreneur does not create a product or a service. An entrepreneur creates a system to produce great products or services., and remove themselves from the process.

"Build a system that allows ordinary people to produce extraordinary results."

Why entrepreneurs today need to WAKE UP and see the opportunities in front of them.

Vusi Thembekwayo

The role of the leader is nt to lead. The role of the leader is to facilitate decision making. That's all you do. You pull really good competent people around you,  And you inspire. You just spark.  You ask the probing questions. And then you let them run and you let them lead.

“The 90 Day Test” for entrepreneurs

13:36 - 20:40 Difference between an entrepreneur & self-employeed:

20:41 - 24:06 How do I know to scale?

24:07 - 30:37 A model to understand business - functional areas, people, process, technology

How to Plan and Execute Great Startup Marketing Programs

Being an Entrepreneur

Understanding Your Customer

Understanding Your Customer and Defining Progress - Interview with Bob Moesta
Excerpts:
"One of the basic premises I came up with is that when you ask people what they want, when you try to design a new product, they actually had no clue what they want. They know the outcome they want, or the desired outcome they are looking for.  But given the context they are in, things are different. ...So I came up with this framework called "Jobs To Be Done" that people don't buy products or services. They hire them to do a job in their life. So there are different candidates, there is hiring criteria, there is firing criteria. For the last 30 years, I've been crafting and  honing it as one of the 25 methods I have. I am literally: "How the market really work?" Clay Christensen and I have been friends for about 25 years and he wrote this book on the method that I have been working on forever and primarily because at some point, he thought it was powerful enough. I am a practitioner and Clay is a theorist. That book is called: " competing against luck". The basic premise is that we try to find what causes people to basically make progress? What is the situations people are in? What are the pathways they seek to be better? What are the hiring and firing criteria that they make for the products and  services they choose. that frame enables you to see what's next and allows you not to be biased by what the product is or the services is, but more where are they struggling? My key phrase is always "the struggling moment is the seed for all of the innovation because the moment the consumer or the customer struggles, they care about something, they want something better. The more you find struggling moments, you start to understand the progress they want to make, then I can design better products. But if there is no struggling moment, I've never been successful doing it that way, so it's really using that frame around how I look at the market.

Blogs I like

Seth Godin's Blog: https://seths.blog/
Michael J Skok's Blog on Entrepreneurship and Other Passions: https://mjskok.com/
Tina Roth Eisenberg's vitual blog: https://www.swiss-miss.com/

20 Ways To Be Entrepreneurial Without Starting a Company

20 Ways To Be Entrepreneurial Without Starting a Company

How to Work Together

Based on Dr. John Gottman's marriage research, he could predict with 85% accuracy whether a couple will be divorced in four years, only after watching them fight for 15 min. If he watches them for an hour and have them also share their hopes and dreams, his prediction rating goes up to 94%. With the same video,
It turned out that we all fight about the same things: money, kids, sex, time, jealousy, the in-laws and what we are going to do with free time. This is true for happily married couple as well as couples that eventually divorce. What's interesting is that all these map out to what we fight about in a company:

Money --> Fundraising / Runway
Kids --> Customers / Employees
Sex --> Performance
Time --> Roadmap
Jealousy --> Competition
In-Laws --> Partnerships

Kowinng that everyone fights, we can make a plan to figure out how to deal with the situation that will determine whether we will work together on the thing that we're so passionate about down the road.

Dr. John Gottman also figured out that  there are four major things we want to avoid when we are fighting: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling.

Listen to Kevin Hale's talk where he explains how entrepreneurs can leverage Dr. John Gottman's research to work better together.

Why You Shouldn't do What You're Told

Seth Godin talks about:
What it means to start small and start now
how do you know when to ship a project
how do you know how to market a product

starting a business “was never about how do I make money doing something. It was how do I find enough resources to do a project that I'm interested in. How do I be able to put on a show that I care about and if there's a business component to it that's fine, but for me the work has always been to do a project and sometimes those projects can be amplified by working for someone but even if you are working for someone you don't have to act as if it's a job. A job is where you try to please someone who tells you what to do and that person usually wants you to do what you did yesterday but a little faster and a little cheaper whereas impresarios and people who make projects are playing by a completely different set of rules.”

"...now that these platforms exist now that individuals like you and I can do the work we care about without a job and without a boss we shouldn't be teaching every single kid how to be normal we
should be teaching kids two things how to solve interesting problems and how to we're going to see our culture accelerate."

Three Stories of Local Eco-Entrepreneurship

What is Culture?

Start with Why

How to Succeed in Life

Design Thinking vs the Lean Startup

Starting Later

   Realizing the promise of older entrepreneurs in NYC

Entrepreneurs and VCs

Business Model

Additional Resources:
Business Model Canvas: https://strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas​

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