Business Development Tips
Efficient Business Development strategies are essential for all businesses whether you are an early stage firm or an existing business. Many times, firms have not validated their sales and marketing channels, and so going back to the basics can help them find their way. Even if you have an online model, understanding the mechanics of the direct sale will be helpful. The following should be considered when planning on future growth: Relationship Management- Growing and managing the right relationships for the success of your business. Centers of Influence- Those entities who have a similar customer segment but are not competition; where you can create an exchange of customers. Project Lists– Creating a list of 200 customers to go to market on and onboard so that you can learn and better build out your sales process. The goal is to figure a way to automate this process so that you don’t spend so much time lead-generating but actually working the leads. Channels – What are the top marketing avenues to generate you the right leads and then prospects? Sales Process– Do you have one; if not hypothesize one, and then test it until you have confidence. Remember you cannot have a sales process without a sell. Financials– It’s tough to grow business/revenue and not understand what it will cost you and what it will generate you. Referrals– Until we have hit product market fit, referrals should be a major factor in your business; then you will have to decide if this
From Digi.City: Post Pandemic: Will Cities Reboot?
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of great uncertainty, but also an opportunity to reboot to build a solid, connected foundation by embracing technologies and especially Smart City infrastructures that create more resilient cities, communities, and businesses. Read up more in this article on Digi.City here: https://www.digi.city/articles/2020/8/31/post-pandemic-will-cities-choose-to-reboot
Debt Financing Tips
Introduction Most businesses will not qualify for equity based financing during the early and growth stages of their development. In fact less than 6% of all businesses are financed by equity investments such as angel investment or venture capital. Most small businesses are financed from business and personal loans. The Small Business Administration found that owner investment and bank credit are the two most widely used kinds of financing. More to the point, these small growing firms rely heavily on external debt, receiving about three-quarters of their funds from banks in the form of loans, credit cards, and lines of credit. Capital requirements for businesses vary widely depending on rate of growth, industry sector, working capital needs and many other factors, but it should be noted that a significant number of businesses use no outside financing. Below we outline more on debt based financing and how it is secured from third parties, but first a quick disclaimer: We are not lawyers, financial advisors, bankers or accountants. If anything sounds like legal, accounting, banking or financial advice, it’s not. We are entrepreneurs and are providing our knowledge as well as commonly available information in a form to give you an overview of the types of debt and the process we have used in our businesses to support debt based business growth. Types of Debt Financing Credit Cards are issued by financial institutions and allow the user to borrow pre-approved funds at a point of sale or to complete a purchase.
Alumni Spotlight: Lucky
One of the many joys of working at Start Co. is watching the progression of our program alumni. Their success exemplifies the power of hard-work and effective business strategies in the field of entrepreneurship. Today we wanted to highlight Lucky, one of our 2019 accelerator alums. As an eCommerce fulfillment company, they enable eCommerce brands to utilize retailers as distribution networks, so a consumer can buy directly from the brand and then conveniently pick-up the order from a consumer outlet closest to them. The consumer outlet receives increased foot traffic. The eCommerce brands improve their conversion rates and keep higher margins with same day fulfillment. This means Lucky’s service is a “win-win-win” scenario for everyone involved. We ask the founder and CEO, Sneh Parmar, more about his company and his startup experience in this interview. How did you come up with this new direction for the business? “The idea behind Lucky came when I started using a particular brand of toothpaste which took a week or more to receive. When speaking with a friend, I realized that I could have been picking up this toothpaste locally and without paying for shipping. That’s when Nafis, my co-founder, and I, began to think of the benefits of creating a solution that enables eCommerce brands to leverage pre-existing retailers and shops as distribution channels.” What’s the Future of Commerce in your view? “The current version of commerce is pretty binary: solely retail or eCommerce. Most brands only focus on one, whereas the brands
Risk Mitigation
At Start Co. we advise companies to think through risk before they launch and several times each year throughout the lifetime of the business. This ranges from covering specific threats through competitive analysis and planning how to mitigate risks that could be fatal to the business or put the business on the decline. Identify and Organize Risks The article, “The Startup Entrepreneur’s Guide to Risk Management,” posted by Business Insider by Nicholas Carlson does a great job outlining categories of risks — nuisance risks, ignorable risks, insurable risks, and the company killers. Follow their advice to organize your company killers into a table that displays clearly what you are up against and what specifically you’re going to do about it. Creating this table will help your business think through the following: Risk Factor What type of risk is it? Likelihood of the risk occurring The consequences of the risk occurring What are your mitigation tactics? What is it going to cost you to mitigate? Time, money, resources, opportunity… What is the current status of the situation Critical risks can come from a variety of areas that include: market, financial, technology and operational, competition, people, legal and regulatory, and systemic risk. For many businesses, their critical risks from multiple areas have shown up at the same time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now and for the future of your business, it’s imperative that you prioritize your critical risks. The obvious need today cannot blind side us to what is coming down
COVID-19 Sprint Program
The pandemic has forced businesses to reevaluate their fundamentals and reinvent themselves to overcome the new challenges that COVID-19 has brought forth. We are offering a Sprint Program for 10 selected minority owned businesses to run experiments and develop strategies for the future. The simple, 6 week, action-oriented program will ensure that the businesses will not be overly burdened and have new opportunities to grow. It starts March 1 and the application closes February 23rd. Learn more here: Here is a link to the application: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSehqNJz5udM2ZdyErDHPu7AgDUnUBGbQVe4a8ZkxpKENo_k6w/viewform?gxids=7628 Feel free to reach out to us here or on any of our social media if you have any questions. #NeverStop
COVID-19 Forcing Your Company to Revisit Everything
Overnight, COVID-19 put all businesses in a state of uncertainty, one where it is necessary to reflect and question everything. As a result, we must revisit the fundamentals of our businesses — the customers and markets that are critical to our success. We have defined four key areas that are imperative to talk about with your clients or potential clients as we work to build back our businesses stronger in 2021: Problem: Is the difficult problem you are solving for your customers relevant now and will it be in the future? Solution: Is your solution a fit for the current needs of your customers? Price: Does COVID-19 affect the difficulty of the problem you are solving? Can you charge a premium? Go to Market Strategy: Have you re-evaluated your marketing and engagement channels? Do these channels match the behaviors of your target clients in today’s environment? Getting Back to the Fundamentals Now is the time to check-in with your clients and discover any new priorities, behaviors, or challenges that have arisen from COVID-19. Reaching out to your clients during this period of uncertainty can help you mutually find comfort and hope in the future. Start Co. has made it a priority to reach out to hundreds of businesses since the beginning of the Pandemic, to find out how they are addressing challenges arising from COVID-19. The majority of them needed a process for addressing these challenges, real or perceived, and most faced these problems in a silo, alone. We recommend
The Digital City: Unpacking the Smart Entrepreneurship Engine
Bringing about change means bringing a theory of change to bare. One of the core strengths of Start Co. and our partners is working at the fringe of two disciplines to uncover insights and opportunities. For The Digital City, the Smart Entrepreneurship Engine is our key insight that has created a new opportunity for Memphis and beyond. The Smart Entrepreneurship Engine is our approach in combining and implementing Smart City thinking and our entrepreneurial processes (read about Zero Based Entrepreneurship and the Commercialization Framework). Smart City infrastructure and technology provide the solid foundation for innovation and entrepreneurship. If in the end, we are to scale insights into innovations, and talent into entrepreneurship, we’ll need a process and a framework to execute against. That’s the Smart Entrepreneurship Engine which we unpact more here. Infrastructure: Touched on in a recent post, the foundation for this entire project will be the Smart City infrastructure that includes advanced Fiber and WiFi capabilities. Access to high bandwidth and high fidelity internet is essential in powering the smart, IoT (Internet of Things) devices and the intelligent, connected buildings that collect the data. Devices: Devices will include the likes of cameras and sensors. Each device will be connected to the internet, allowing the Digital City to store the data in real-time in cloud and enterprise systems. There are many devices that can provide a beneficial service. For instance, a smart door that opens when a computer instructs it to do so or a parking sign that switches
The Commercialization Framework
The process of building a startup from a novel idea to a market competitor is difficult for sure but tracking the steps and the stages shouldn’t be. To gauge where a startup is in their lifecycle, Start Co. utilizes the Commercialization Framework which was first introduced to us by Mike Mozenter and his company BizLogix. Their system, now used in Cleveland and beyond, defines a business in terms of its technological and commercial capacities. The Commercialization Framework: What is it? The Commercialization Framework is made up of five phases: Imagining, Incubating, Demonstrating, Market Entry, and Growth & Sustainability. Each phase has a defining set of commercial and technological capabilities, goals, and objectives. Each phase’s unique sources of funding help a company move from idea, to proof of concept, to a working prototype, to paying customers, and beyond. Let’s explore each phase briefly: Imagining: The Imagining phase begins at the conception of a new idea. Entrepreneurs must estimate the potential viability of the idea as well as what resources may be needed to move to the next phase. After thorough customer and market discovery, creating an acceptable proof of concept is a major checkpoint in the Imagining phase. Capital is primarily either self-provided or acquired through corporate research and development efforts, university funding, or government funding. Incubating: During the Incubation Phase the skeleton idea moves into a prototype modeled after the proof of concept. The startup tests the functionality of their product in a controlled setting. The testing results in finding
Hi, I’m Carter
You might have noticed that an unfamiliar name has appeared as the author of the last few posts here at Start Co. That would be me, Carter King. I came onboard to help with sharing the stories of what Start Co. and our great community partners are doing to transform the Memphis community and beyond. These efforts go beyond helping to scale startup companies and include focusing on opportunities that advance our community and society. The work is about creating innovation, impact, inclusion, equity, and economic opportunity that will last beyond our lifetimes. In just the first three weeks on the job, I’ve found a wealth of business acumen, spirit, and definitive process among the Start Co. family that I hope to share with the world. Here’s a little more on my background. I am at Rhodes College majoring in Computer Science. You’re wondering why a CS major can write anything other than code. I can because of another passion, history, in which I am getting a minor at Rhodes. In history, we learn, we read, we summarize, and we write. It has honed my enjoyment of the writing process, one research paper at a time. It’s one of the reasons that I reach out to join the Start Co.: digging into the nuts and bolts of the projects and partnerships that Start Co. is involved and telling those stories sits at the corners of history and computer science, societal change and technology advancement. Beyond this passion and education, in