Keep With the Times or Your Business Will Die Trying

Today we live in a world where the products of today are likely to be outdated in just a few months time. We see this with things like the hard drive in your computer. Only a few short years ago the thought of having a relatively cheap computer with multi-terabyte storage was insane, and being able to have a laptop that ran all day was impossible. Now it's common practice. Back in the early 2000's we used to take pictures with dinky little plastic cameras like the one below. Now though, your camera is on your phone. Along with your music player, games, contact book, email, internet and a million other functions. The world moved on quickly from pictures on film to pictures in cyberspace.

Image from Amazon

This was not something which Kodak took action on. They stubbornly decided not to move with the trend and believed that their product was superior to that which was being developed. Rather than see the future, which was digital photography, they chose to invest and pursue other ways of making their films better. Lets not forget that digital photography was something that Kodak themselves invented and yet chose to ignore.

It wouldn't probably be surprising then to say that because Kodak chose not to pursue the new digital form of picture taking, they ended up going broke. While everyone else was moving forward with the new, Kodak stuck with the old and the results of doing so are clear to be seen. Kodak is now no more.

So what can we learn from this? Well its important that any company can not only develop and build new technology, but also adapt to it if they can see a shift in the market. A business should also always be open minded to the idea of changing their flagship product, or tossing it out in favour of the new and the 'better'. Any company should also encourage firm testing and analytics of not just its products, but those being developed for implementation in the future. This is so as to accurately gauge their market worth and potential to drive sales.

In short then don't be like Kodak. Embrace new technology and embrace change because in the fluid world that we now live in, keeping up with the pack is life or death for any business.

As always thanks for reading and if you have any thoughts on this, please post in the comments section below.

Why You Should Share Your Ideas

Time and again it had been made clear to me, by family and friends, that talking to people about your business ideas is a big mistake. In a world where information is so freely available and spread at light speed, we are protective of that which we can still keep secret.

For many entrepreneur and even business leaders, this is the case when it comes to business ideas. At first glance it does make sense to keep your next big product to yourself. Because somewhere out there someone is bound to take it and make it their own, right? And that's what I was told again and again until I no longer questioned it. However once you actually think about it, you will see that sharing your ideas can be one of the best things you can do for your business.

Image taken from 'Share To Make Ideas Happen' by Behance Team

In order to explain, I'll be using a Forbes article by Patrick Hull as a backdrop. Patrick has over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience to his name and his article works through some key points as to why you should be talking about your ideas.

"I’ve heard a lot of great concepts for startups. I try to work with and help the ones I really liked. I don’t try to take those ideas and make them my own. For starters, I’ve got too much else on my plate to worry about taking someone else’s idea. I think this is true for most people"

I can personally vouch for this. Through my own entrepreneurial journey I have met individuals who have the resources and know-how to take my idea and turn it into a business tomorrow. But they haven’t. Why? Because ideas are cheap and you are almost certainly more passionate and committed to you’re idea than 99.999% of the world. Talking about your idea is easy, but turning it into a real business is the truly hard part and something which most aren't prepared to do. So don't be afraid to speak to powerful and capable people about your idea. Often if these people like your idea they will want to help you to prosper and succeed, not steal it and show you the exit.

"I’ve found it incredibly helpful to bounce ideas off others and ask for their feedback. In return, I’ve gained valuable insight and perspective that I wouldn’t have otherwise received…In many cases, they might be able to connect you with someone else who can help turn your idea into reality”

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, having a strong network is essential. No one person can do everything and so we are constantly reliant on the knowledge and skill of others. This is where the value of speaking to other comes in. Just as Patrick says, some of the biggest realizations you will have in building your business will come from others. I know that some of the most drastic changes my business has already undergone in our short few months of development have come from people’s feedback. Meetings, pitching events and informal discussion have almost always yielded valuable feedback that have lead to a more refined idea and therefore end product. Also, by engaging in conversation about your idea, you can utilize and explore the networks of those around you. For instance, I have managed to find some of the key suppliers I will need from speaking to friends and family.

Image taken from 'Facebook and the Small World Experiment' by Winnie Hsia

It is said that we are all separated by only ‘6 degrees of separation’. So can you imagine how many people you could potentially get in touch with by asking just a few of the folks you know about who they know and who they could refer you too. There is certainly big potential in it. So get out there and get talking about your ideas, because there plenty more people out there to help, than there are to steal your idea.

Thanks as always for reading and if you have any thoughts please post them in the comments section below.

For more information on the article go to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickhull/2013/06/13/talk-about-your-idea-it-wont-get-stolen/

3 Ways To Be A Better Learner And Prepare For The Future

Thinking back to the year I was born, 1995, I can't imagine that half of the things we take for granted every day were even beginning to be thought of. Mobile phones with a million different functions, touch screens controlling the functions of your car, tablets, 4G mobile data, Bluetooth the list goes on. Every single one of these modern marvels requires a host of people to turn raw materials into the technological piece that they are.

If you had approached a electrical engineer at a major TV maker 20 years ago and told them that they would need to build a 4k screen, 3D imaging and Netflix into it they'd probably bend their head to the side and go 'huh'? What you can buy today is made using an entirely different rule book and instruction set to what was being built 20 years ago. can you imagine what the next 20 years will hold? To keep up with modern developments people have to re-skill and relearn to constantly stay up to date.

I can feel that some of you may be thinking 'well since we don't know whats coming how can we train for it?' and it' a fair point. But, and its a big fat juicy but, what if we could teach our children and ourselves to self educate, allowing us to be better poised to take on any new developments in the future and be better equipped to acquire the skills to take part in future industry. Here are 3 ways I think this can be done:

Image taken from Steli Efti of Quora.com

1. Instil a message that education does not end after you finish school or University. It's and ongoing process that never really ends. By doing this we can better inspire our kids to be life long learners and be open to new information later on in life.

2. Make sure that failure is seen as a positive thing because with new knowledge comes lots and lots of learning and forgetting and then relearning. Rarely do things go in the first time but need constant reinforcing and that's important to understand because it can be disheartening when you don't understand something the first few times

3. Be ready to be confused and challenge yourself. The whole reason that you learn new things is because you don't understand them. It can be quite uncomfortable feeling like you don't know something. But rather than it being a this to maybe be embarrassed about, turn it into a positive. You're going to learn something new today!

Hopefully this helps some of you in the future and I think that these 3 things are a good start towards better readying ourselves and those to come next for the future. As always comments and thoughts are always appreciated and thanks for reading!

Can Entrepreneurship be taught at University?

As part of my Uni degree we spend a year looking at things like  'what is an entrepreneur?' and 'what makes a person entrepreneurial?'. These are both valid questions and ones with not so simple answers. I think however, that an even harder question to answer is can entrepreneurship be taught at University? As someone who is trying to be entrepreneurial by developing a business to address an issue I have identified, I feel that the answer is no.

Lets stop for a second and consider what a university is. For a kick off its an educational institute that has units with guidelines and marking criteria. Completing a subject and progressing your degree requires you to hit certain standards and work towards a knowledge base that will allow you to answer questions in a test. This process is repeated again and again until you hit the right number of credit points to get your degree. The process as a whole is very linear, worlds away from unpredictability and uncertainty of an entrepreneurial lifestyle.

Last year Business News Daily spoke to 15 successful entrepreneurs and asked them what they thought it meant to be an entrepreneur. Sandra Ponce de Leon of Trunx said "An entrepreneur takes a giant leap of faith in the pursuit of a belief" and David Greenberg, CEO of Updater, said that "entrepreneurship is completely dedicating yourself to creating something out of nothing". Leaps of faith and creating ideas from nothing, are not what I would associate with a Uni degree. At its centre, entrepreneurship is about taking your own bright ideas and turning your vision into a reality. There's no one way of going about it and no set of steps that you must do to achieve your goals. Furthermore there isn't a set time frame that things will also be done in. It can take as long to make your first entrepreneurial steps as it will to complete an entire degree.

All of which brings me to a person who I feel has to deal with this paradigm every day, my unit co-ordinator/lecturer. He has experience in starting up his own business and has learnt what its like to do so. In working through this semester I have seen how he has tried to foster an atmosphere of creativity and encouraged everyone in the unit to try pursue their entrepreneurial passions. We must not forget though that he is also a lecturer who must come up with assessments that can accurately gauge the content we are taught. And so here is the issue. How do you create assessments that can accurately quantify the work of a student when each individual is on a different path? Each idea is different, and will require different amounts of time and resources to make it work. Therefore at any one time each person my be at different places along their path towards potentials success. Everyone isn't always going to be on the same page and yet we must all do so in order to hit those marking criteria. Its a frustrating situation for all involved.

So whats the solution or is there even one needed? I'd really love to hear your opinions in the comment section below. It amazing seeing the views go up on this blog but it's rewarding and thrilling to hear back from you, the reader, so I encourage you to do so.

Thanks for reading and for more articles that agree and disagree with me, I've put some links below.

Forbes - http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgedeeb/2014/06/19/can-entrepreneurship-be-taught-or-are-you-born-that-way/

Richard Branson - http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/can-entrepreneurship-be-taught

Wired - http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/yes-entrepreneurship-can-be-taught/

Hard Work is Everything

"Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.”- Unknown

There's no way of getting around it, hard work is one of the biggest keys to success.

It doesn't matter if it's Steve Jobs, Richard Branson or Serena Williams, they all worked as hard as they could to become what they are today. Putting in the hard yards doesn't just mean spending months or years working towards your goals. It's also about getting knocked down and getting back up, being put down but never loosing sight of your goal. It's about doing things that most wouldn't do to achieve their vision.

Thinking back to my previous post, or more specifically to Michelle More, I remember her saying that she spent the first 3 years of her career at ultimo working in her bedroom. Big things truly do come from humble beginnings. Jim Carrey, Sylvester Stallone and even Mr Bond himself Daniel Craig were at one point during their lives homeless. And yet today they are some of the most successful and well known people on earth. Why? Because they didn't give in at the first sign of hard work.

To give a more personal example I'd like to use my Dad. Today, along with a dedicated team, he runs a business called Coolkidz,which sells products for mothers, babies and young children. It's been a few years since its conception and I can tell you that today it looks a lot different to it did on day 1. I remember distinctly the afternoon when a 20ft container was lowered onto our driveway to be emptied into the garage. No warehouse, no employees and little to no orders. Thinking back I'm not sure if I could have turned a garages' worth of stock into enough to fill a warehouse that's over 16,000 square feet in size. But he did, and he did it because he pulled endless late nights and early starts. He made phone calls at cringe worthy times to overseas suppliers and spent countless hours on planes chasing new products. For every problem there was going to be a solution. Right there is (as I eluded to in my last post) the key to being an entrepreneur. Not taking no for an answer.

So the next time someone throws a spanner into the works of your big idea remember that being able to overcome those challenges is what will bring you more success than giving in will ever would.

Being an Entrepreneur Isn't About Being Smart, It's About Being Strong

I recently watched an episode of Peter Jones's 'How We Made Our Millions' which is essentially a TV show looking at successful entrepreneurs and how they have become what they are today. As someone who is aiming to be an entrepreneur and create their own wealth I was interested to see not just how effective some enterprise models can be, but also what it takes to drive it. I was frankly quite shocked. To help understand what I'm about to say it would be ideal to watch 20:45 to 21:10 of the episode or even the whole thing if possible.

Many of us would think that being an entrepreneur and becoming wealthy are very similar things and furthermore that its more about having a great idea than hard work. Of course its very important that if you want to be entrepreneurial, you put a lot of time into thinking about what idea you want to turn into a business and how you are going to do it. But the side of enterprising and driving your idea that isn't that well known is the side which takes the biggest toll. Let me explain.

They say that behind every great man is a great women. Behind (almost) every great entrepreneur is someone who is fastidious about being in control and doubts themselves at every step. In the episode I mentioned above at 42:20 Peter speaks to a former investor of one of the subjects, Michelle Mone, who started the lingerie company Ultimo. He mentions, quite powerfully, that under that rock hard exterior of determination and strength, Michelle is actually quite fragile. Many people trying to get a business of the ground find that their own worst enemy is themselves and fight this doubt, giving them the drive to get things done and make them work. So while the public sees these figures turning rags to riches, behind the scenes is a person who finds themselves fighting their own self doubt every day.

Really then, those entrepreneurs who succeed do so, not because they've got the best idea, but because they have the strength to carry on in the face of overwhelming risk and failure. There is a lesson in this. Often barriers standing between you and making it big are ones created not by external factors, but by yourself. Instead of saying I can't, people like Michelle simply don't take no for an answer. Any issues are just problems to be solved and deal breakers generally don't exist.

Really then, if you want to be an entrepreneur, be ready to challenge yourself on both a mental and physical level and get your mental hiking boots on because there's gonna be a big mountain to climb. But by chipping away at it every day and keeping your head up, you'll get there.

Video by Armando Macedo:

A Reflection On The Pitfalls Of Being Different In Business

For this blog I want to reflect on my experiences of trying to complete an assignment for my Uni degree. The assignment was basically to generate profit for charity with $5 seed funding in under 4 weeks. Now while I can feel already many of you are thinking right now of brilliant fast money enterprises, there's an issue with almost all of them.

What is that you may ask? Well being different doesn't always pay dividends.

Take for instance the first idea my group had. It was essentially to offer an errand/lunch/coffee service to lecturers and tutors who don't always have the time to get their own food. They give us $1 or $2 and we do a job for them. While this is by no means groundbreaking its definitely a little different to your lemonade stand or raffle. We felt that this model was easy to carry out, required $0 funding to get it started and could easily be managed by the 3 of us. And so we began speaking to customers and finding out what they wanted, got a fairly good response too..

So wheres the issue?

The issues lies in that we barely got any orders. While other groups were doing simple stuff like baking cookies or scones or organizing movie nights and bringing in revenue, we weren't. My group chose to try and do something that was not the norm when it comes to rapid fund raising. To be honest I felt a bit disheartened to see that trying to be a little different made nowhere near as much cash as doing what everyone else does.

So is it wrong to do something generic?

Not at all. Let's not forget that these models are so common because they consistently work well and are capable of bringing in revenue fast and in a relatively easy manner. It's just that when you're told on a weekly basis by your educators to be different, try new things and stand out, it all seems a little pointless. Will this stop me and my fellow students from trying outlandish ideas? Absolutely not, as failure and learning from failure is an essential component of entrepreneurship and business success.

So where does that leave us?

Yes it is true that the most common business models for fundraising are generally the most reliable and successful compared to more left-field ideas. But trying new things and testing out new models is truly the key to making bigger strides in the business world. Therefore I'd recommend using a common business model to get you started on your entrepreneurial path, but always be thinking outside the box when looking towards the future.

How Tech is Making Face-to-Face Relationships More Important Than Ever

Image Courtesy of IABC: https://www.iabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/iabc-articles-november-2010.jpg

It's so easy today to jump onto the Internet and get in touch with your friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even the humble Email. Right now you're reading this blog, which allows me to communicate and express opinions, which are accessible almost anywhere in the world. The power that we have today at our fingertips is truly breathtaking but raises a few issues. Having the ability to communicate via a screen or microphone negates the need, for many people, to meet in person. This is particularly detrimental in a business, where communication and customer relations are so paramount to success.

I think that Forbes contributor Alan Hall sums it up quite eloquently by saying that "Award-winning business builders know their customers as well as they know their own families". How are you going to get to know your customer, and more importantly, make a great impression, via pixels and speakers? Today its becoming more and more overlooked just how crucial it is to meet someone, shake their hand and sit down for a conversation. Making the time and effort to see your customers, even if its every now and then and even if its representative, gives a far stronger impression of care and concern for the customers needs than a Skype call ever could.

We as a species are a social group. We have senses refined for taking in our surroundings and languages designed to communicate with those around us. There is an intangible difference to meeting someone compared to speaking on the phone or the computer. Achieve Solutions have a brilliant article on this. Here's just a small excerpt:

When we laugh together, smile at one another, shake hands, or share a meal, we bond on a primal level that cannot be replaced by electronic communication. We literally take in many cues from our various senses—sight, sound, feel, taste and smell—when we interact face-to-face. There’s even scientific evidence that we react to and process the scent of others on a subconscious or unconscious chemical level.

In the past it used to be a given that if you wanted to have a meeting you'd sit down at a large table and talk face to face. Today however, with the advent of modern technology it may appear that this is a thing of the past. But I can't stress on stronger terms how important, and this goes out more to my generation than anyone else, meeting people in real life is to the success of your business. Don't be tempted by the speed of online communication. Yes, it will get things done potentially earlier but in the big picture long-lasting relationships melded by personal contact will always outweigh time savings.

For another great article on what I'm on about have a look at IABC's piece 'What’s So Great About Face-to-Face?'