Winning Strategies for Emerging Businesses

Recessions Favor
Emerging Businesses!

It's a Great Time to Start a Business!

Six companies born during downturns

Think a recession is a bad time to start a company? Imagine if the founders of these major corporations had thought the same...

Procter & Gamble: Founded during the Panic of 1837
IBM: Founded during the Long Depression, 1873-1896
General Electric: Founded during the Panic of 1873
General Motors: Founded during the Panic of 1907
United Technologies Corp: Founded in 1929, amid the Great Depression
Fed Ex: Founded during the Oil Crisis of 1973

(Excerpted from CNN Small Business web site on 10 Feb 2009.)

Promote Your Emerging Business as...An Emerging Business!

Present your emerging business as what it is: A new business with innovative new product ideas seeking customers who can help to define the business and its products. Trying to look more established or more mature drives away the best prospective customers.

The best prospects at this stage of the business life cycle are the technology enthusiasts. Like the people in the startup themselves, those kinds of potential customers are also busy as bees creating something new.

Those prospects want to engage in meaningful discussions with the people in the emerging business, people they regard as peers who can help them to succeed in their own new ventures. They are not impressed by the organization structure, fancy titles, splendid facilities, etc. Remember That Bill Hewlett and David Packard made their first sales while HP consisted entirely of the two of them working in Dave's garage.

It's not a numbers game at this stage of the life cycle. A relatively few technology enthusiasts working anywhere are far more valuable as prospective customers to an emerging business than large numbers of people further along in the life cycle working in companies with names you respect and admire.

The Technology Enthusiasts Are Not Hard to Find

This is a common excuse for not looking for the right people. There may be a handful of them buried in the superstructures of companies with hundreds or thousands of people. But everyone knows them. If you have a contact in a big corporation, ask that person to help find the technology enthusiasts working to create new things that your potential products can uniquely address.

Put the Customers First

It's often hard for entrepeneurs in startups to see the importance of the customers. Think of it this way: Your startup cannot succeed without customers, but the customers can succeed without your startup. The customers come first on the importance scale, before the products.

Those same entrepeneurs too often believe that they can create products in their imaginations that will be far superior to products being bought by customers who also exist in their imaginations. The winners interact with some of the prospective customers beginning with the conceptual stage of product development. They identify the prospective customers first, well before investing in product development. The customers come first on the timescale, before the products.

We Can Help!

We train and coach clients to use teamwork across their emerging organizations and with their prospective customers. The focus of the teamwork is to connect the people creating the emerging business with their emerging customers to interdependently do things the way the customers really want things done.

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