Over the last 8 years I have built two companies from scratch. Zero to greater than $1m AUD in annual turnover. Mind you both companies are not doing greater than $1m in annual turnover now but that is a different story! So what I intend to do over the next few weeks is build a business but instead of renting office space, hiring staff and carrying a lot of overheads I’m going to build a business with the following parameters in mind:

• Mostly online
• Build with virtual architecture that is transparent and cheap
• Use open source as much as possible
• Carry minimum inventory (strive to drop ship)
• Create an automated vehicle for generating revenue without spending a lot of time i.e. build a business that runs on autopilot
• Own a business but spend minimal time on it

Sound ambitious?

So off the top of my head it needs to be a product business. Avoid the services per-hour model as it doesn’t scale. To put a business on autopilot I need to avoid direct customer contact where possible – hence another reason to steer away from a service business. To narrow the field of potential products I’ll look to test a product that costs no more than $500. I’m not the type of guy that invests and hopes for the best. I will do smart testing, smart positioning and make sure my distribution is up-to scatch. Further I will limit wholesale distribution so as to maintain a consistent profit margin.

OK so I’m going to pick an affordable niche market and attack it. The order to start a business is 1) find a market, 2) define the customer 3) then I’ll find or develop a product for them. It is more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small undefined fish in a big pond.

Stay tuned for progress.

A recent short manifesto that intrigued me was The Six Invaluable Factors by Dave Crenshaw. Basically Dave outlines succinctly the 6 attributes that make one invaluable. The less valuable you are the more susceptible you are to being let go/fired and reduces your earning capacity. Worth a read. Check it out at http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/73.03.Invaluable

I came across what must be the ultimate multimedia educational tool – animation. This is a brilliant, 10 minute video of a talk by Dan Pink and illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. Check it out… it will amaze you.

More info at http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/2010/06/autonomy-mastery-purpose.html

www.theRSA.org

Some key highlights of the book to think over are below. Enjoy and thanks Po!

• Of our life we demand something deeper, or richer, or more substantive
• We will not have squandered our time here
• People who have unearthed their true calling fought with the seduction of money, intensity, and novelty, but overcame their allure
• attack on our freedom made life precious and weighty. People were reassessing what mattered to them
• Ordinary people – did not have available to them resources or character traits that gave them an uncommon advantage in pursuing a better life
• In hard times people usually changed the course of their life; in good times, they frequently only talked about change. Hard times forced them to overcome the doubts that normally give them pause.
• They spoke of fulfillment not happiness
• I became hyperaware of what mattered to me
• Very real stumbling blocks that prevent us from pursuing this question: not enough money, never enough time
• Many psychological stumbling blocks keep us from finding ourselves
• The quest for identity through ones labour – American phenomena
• Its so easy to let yourself be talked out of it
• Paradox of trying to make a “right” decision in the absence of experience
• Patience, long-term planning, resilience. Thats when you embrace your true identity, you will discover a productive power you never imagined having.
• I’d rather help than watch. I’d rather have a heart than a mind. I’d rather expose too much than too little. I’d rather say hello to strangers than be afraid of them. I’d rather know all of this about myself than have more money than I need. I’d rather have something to love than a way to impress you.
• They want to find work they are passionate about.
• We need to encourage people to find their sweet spot. Productivity explodes when people love what they do.
• The value in their companies came from the employees who were passionate about being there. The extra effort came from them. The new ideas come from them. They took it upon themselves to teach and lead others.
• Those who are lit by this passion will be the object of envy among their peers, and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship.
• turning point
• We are looking for an environment that nutures our soul
• Perhaps you identify yourself, by age, gender, race, where you live, number of kids you raise or your PROFESSION
• We are not identified by what we do – our identity is anchored in what we’ve had to overcome to get there
• pay attention and not sleepwalk through life
• Inevitably time will erode memory and I will be left with fading highlights, and then only fond feelings
• A calling is not something you know, its something you grow into, through trials and mistakes. Work should be like life-sometimes fun, sometimes moving, and defined by meaningful events.
• Freedom is the confidence that you can live within the means of something your passionate about. Failure’s hard, but success at the wrong thing can lock you in forever.
• Get your mind 80% of the way there, then go looking for a catalyst.

Shift Happens – Did you know?

Karls blog is here.

Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us

To some extent these planning days are structured with a framework generally followed so as to ensure that we arrive at the end of the planning days with outcomes. That said there is a high degree of free-form, as there has to be to engender a creative environment. The Strategy Session framework workbook is available at the link below albeit with confidential material removed.

Strategy Session Workbook here  [Word 166K]

Software companies have innovated in a variety of areas which have spurred other software companies to innovate further. The power of these software industry innovations results from their ability to innovate far beyond the product itself. Consider this list of innovations that an entrepreneur can use:

SaaS, Software-as-a-Service, is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet. The emergence of the on-demand, SaaS business model and the success of vendors like Salesforce.com makes it an increasingly prevalent delivery model for software vendors.

Open Source refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available.

SOA The days of proprietary architecture are falling to Service-Oriented Architecture which powers Web services-driven new releases, such as SAP’s NetWeaver and Oracle’s Fusion.  A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. In Service-Oriented Architecture autonomous, loosely-coupled and coarse-grained services with well-defined interfaces provide business functionality and can be discovered and accessed through a supportive infrastructure. This allows internal and external system integration as well as the flexible reuse of application logic through the composition of services.

Global Development. The power and efficiency of outsourced and offshore development services firms, particularly in India, has driven innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 has allowed the rapid adoption of new collaboration and workflow technologies, such as Socialtext’s wikis, to automate tacit interaction. The most common definition of Enterprise 2.0 has involved the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is the synergy of a new set of technologies, development models and delivery methods that are used to develop business software and deliver it to users. See http://sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=98

Web Delivery The ability to download, try-before-buying and pay online for software has drastically reduced sales cycles as well as sales and marketing costs.

Mashups. The arrival of the ability to merge applications together to achieve new functionality in a new application. A mixture of content or elements. For example, an application that was built from routines from multiple sources or a Web site that combines content and/or scripts from multiple sources is said to be a mashup.

Google Apps with the launch of new Web-based or open source, Microsoft Office-like applications. Google Apps is a service from Google for using custom domain names with several Google products. It features several known Web applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Page Creator, and Docs & Spreadsheets.

Pricing Models. The rise of subscriptions, ROI pricing, shared-savings pricing or other value-based pricing options

Hybrid Models. The usage of multiple pricing, delivery, marketing and development options in a single organization has allowed substantial differentiation.

What makes if very different from a serviced office is the large data center in the basement. There is plenty of rack space to put your gear in. The cabinets are locked and accessible by tenants of those cabinets. You can rent as much or as little cabinet space as you need and scale to your requirements. The previous tenant of the building had priority power off the grid so even in a brown-out mains supply is there. Being a data centre of course it has UPS. The perfect place for your SaaS start-up.

Check it out at PlugandPlayTechCenter.com