Category: Strategic Planning
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Reducing The Risk Of New Product Failures: Vetting Your Idea Using Concept Testing
In today’s world, many new products and services fail when they follow the traditional method of development and introduction. This involves creating a business plan, pitching the plan to investors, launching the business, and starting to sell. According to Harvard Business School, about 95% of the approximately 30,000 new products launched each year fail following…
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Four Surprising Thoughts About Startups
Be sure to view the free micro-video “Roadmap For Starting Your Business“. Copyright ©John Trenary 2022. All rights reserved.
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Your Time-Focus Should Change While Starting A Business
Before I get into today’s thought, I would like to share some facts. Small businesses make up 99.9% of all US businesses and create 1.5 million jobs annually. There were 32.5 million small U.S. businesses in 2021, according to the SBA. Of those, 22 million were individually operated, meaning they have no other employees other…
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Business Scaling Strategy During Recession
Every startup wants to scale, and a lot of them start scaling, but then they realize that as their top line is growing, their bottom line is shrinking. At the same time, in today’s inflationary environment, many businesses are seeing increased costs and are forced to turn to cost-cutting strategies like bulk-buying and automation while…
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First, Define A Target Market
When I ask small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, “Who is your target market?”, many answer with one word…“everyone”. While many may think everyone could benefit from their product/service offering, they soon begin to realize that everyone is not their customer. Initially, it is critical that entrepreneurs identify a big market that has underserved customers.This…
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Business Model Canvas
A business model framework is a way to visually describe how an organization creates, delivers and captures value. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) usually consists of nine building blocks, each represented by a rectangle. The right side of the BMC focuses on the customer (external), while, the left side of the canvas focuses on the…
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Product Concept Landing Page Testing
There are many ways to test customer acceptance of a digital or physical product offering concept or service. Some marketers use focus groups while others use mailing lists and surveys. The internet has provided yet another platform for evaluating new product acceptance that involves landing pages. A product landing page is a web page designed…
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The Funding Paradox
You need to show you can make money to raise money, but you need to raise money to develop and sell the product/service offering to make the money to show the investors. This is not the first time this paradox has suddenly dropped into an entrepreneur’s lap. In fact, it’s a cycle that I have…
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Business Sale Pre-Planning Steps
A recent M&A Source study found that about 80 % of businesses on the market will never sell. This should be a huge wakeup call for all business owners. This means you have less than a 20% chance of success if you go to sell your company. One of the reasons for this is that…
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Business Values Analogy
In past videos, workshops and blogs, I have discussed a real-time strategic business planning process. It starts with a business concept vision that is overlaid upon SWOT analysis and typical business areas like values, goals and constraints to arrive at a unified plan. Today, I would like to focus on that tough-to-define word…values. Instead of asking…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Industry Fit
Vetting a business model concept requires critical thinking about how the it fits into the industry as a whole. One way to do think about this is by using SWOT analysis to provide a systematic view of the five industry components that affect your business model concept. Industry SWOT analysis helps you anticipate and adjust…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Pricing
In several recent thought posts on vetting a business model concept, I focused on defining the market size and positioning as key elements of a business model concept vetting feasibility analysis. Another key step in the vetting process is to critically think about how you can create/deliver the offered product/service to the identified customer target…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Market Positioning
In the recent post of this series on vetting your business model concept, I focused on defining the market size as one element in a business model concept vetting feasibility analysis. When discussing market strategy of a business model, it’s inevitable that positioning will be brought up. A company’s positioning strategy is affected by a…
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Business Startup Myths
Have you been tempted to start a business but don’t because you heard that the large majority of them fail? The biggest reality in business ownership is: about 1/2 (49%) of new businesses fail within the first 5 years. Actually, these are GREAT success results…far better than you get in Los Vegas. The four main…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Market Size
Many first time entrepreneurs make the mistake of going directly from idea to business plan and implementation. Without first “vetting” the business idea, entrepreneurs increase the chance of losing time and money. The vetting process may include validating the product/service value proposition by customer testing using the least costly modeling method (minimal viable product) to…
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Do You Have a Natural Disaster Plan?
Any good strategic plan should address how a disaster might affect employees, customers and the bottom line of the business. Now is not the time to lose site of how disasters like the pandemic can affect your business. An acronym to remember the scope of planning for a disaster is…AFECT…Anticipate Financial, Employee, Customer Threats caused…
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Thinking About Franchising Your Business?
Expanding your business can help you have a higher profit. Franchising and licensing are two ways to reach a broader audience to build your revenue. Franchising and licensing are two different ways to share your brand information in exchange for a fee. The distinctions between franchising and licensing center around control and operation: Franchise agreement:…
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Financial Questions For A Startup
One of the questions I get asked when mentoring startup entrepreneurs is “How much money do I need to start my business?” A Shopify survey of 300 small business owners and 150 aspirational entrepreneurs in the U.S. found that they spent, on average, $40,000 in the first year of business. While some businesses still require…
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How To Choose A Company Name
While mentoring a startup founder last month, I was asked to comment about using their personal name as the company name. I did not share what I thought about it, but instead offered thoughts on how to critically think about using their name. First, I asked if their name was well known in the industry…
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Validate Your Concept Without Spending A Fortune
Many studies show that businesses fail because they do not take the time to validate “vet” their business idea by building a minimum viable product and gathering feedback from potential customers. To expand on this thought, business failures happen not because the founder didn’t have money in the bank to invest or because they didn’t…
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Why Do Many Startups Fail?
For over four decades of starting and building businesses, and the last decade mentoring dozens of startup founders and CEOs, I have observed that there seems to be a set of reasons that startups struggle and fail. The US Department of Commerce has found that about 49% fail within the first 5 years. D&B found…
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Penetrate Target Markets Military Style
No matter how great your customer pain-point solution, as a business startup in an existing industry (see “Threat of Potential of Potential New Entrants” in the diagram above), the bigger challenge may be penetrating your target market. Many of you may not think of it this way, but penetrating a target market with your startup…
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Unique Selling Proposition & Business Core Values
While mentoring startups through the early business concept development stage, I have found that many entrepreneurs have a hard time articulating their business target market concept in terms of a unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is a statement of what makes your business standout from the competition. It might speak to a key UNIQUE…
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Steps To Selling Your Business
How to Sell Your Business You only sell your business once. That thought may be enough to keep you up at night when you decide it’s time to cash in on your years of hard work as if there isn’t enough pressure associated with every step of the sale of a business. But there’s much…
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You Don’t Have To Pivot In A Crisis
When COVID burst upon the scene in early 2020, startup ventures faced dramatic shifts in markets and the importance of agility became axiomatic: If you wanted your venture to survive, let alone thrive, pundits (including ourselves) almost universally advocated deep internal cuts accompanied by pivots to new markets and business models. Many business owners, however,…
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Lessons From A Business Exit Sale
Selling your company is a second, full-time job. Here’s how to do it right. If you lead a startup, there may come a day when it’s time to consider an exit…in my case, I knew and my investors knew that I would have some kind of equity event during year 5 of my startup. Therefore,…
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What Is Your Business Exit Strategy?
Whether retirement is 30 years away, just over the horizon or not in your game plan at all, a succession plan is vital to ensuring the continued success of your business. A good succession plan can help with the following: Transfer ownership when the time comes Maintain your lifestyle in retirement Provide for your heirs…
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How To Integrate Sales & Marketing Strategies
Your Sales and Marketing strategy is your plan for reaching, engaging, and converting target prospects into profitable customers. It’s the charter that guides Marketing and Sales in their daily activities, helping them clarify shared objectives and how to achieve them. Without a strategy, all your Marketing and Sales activities and tactics might be for nothing.…
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A Simple Business Plan Format
Almost always successfully starting a new business requires a written business plan. In the past, I have been asked for my business plan format I used to start and manage my companies. The following format helped me focus on the implementation of action plans that supported my business concepts. To start, the business plan should…
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What Is A Pivot?
A pivot is a structured course correction designed to test a new hypothesis about the product and business model. When we begin a new product or service, we make an assumption (or make a hypothesis) that this product and business model is something that customers will be delighted by and that the business can reach…
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Product Development Roadmap
The product roadmap can be broken down into three distinct phases, each one containing its own set of milestones and goals. From the bare-bones proof of concept models to first off the line finished products, the prototyping process represents a progression from idea to reality. PHASE ONE: CONCEPT This phase represents the first iteration of…
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Common Product Development Mistakes
Many first-time engineers make common mistakes when they approach the product development process. These typically include: Not accurately estimating the cost; Not showing their prototype/s to the end user soon enough, wanting instead to hide their ideas from their customers until it’s “perfect”; Not making enough prototypes to get into the hands of multiple users.…
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Pandemic Inflection Point Testing
Businesses begin with an idea that is tested to see who will buy, for how much, and whether the exercise can be repeated. Small businesses must retain this way of marketing, constantly testing new offerings to new segments while the company continues to market the things that make them revenue today. As the business collects new…
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What To Expect If You Sell Your Business
You may have heard of the process called, “due diligence.” But unless you’ve been through the process, you might be unclear about what it really means. At a basic level, it’s a process of de-risking the acquisition on the part of the buyer. Their goal is to check out and validate that what you say…
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Lifecycle S-Curve Of Your Business
Here is an uncomfortable truth: in time, everything in your life, as you know it, will perish. This is true of your relationships, your jobs, and, perhaps especially so, your business. In mathematics, it’s referred to as the S-curve. Essentially, the S-curve describes the predictable pattern of anything that develops over time: You’re born, you…
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Strategic HR Planning
Strategic HR planning links HR management directly to the strategic plan of your business. Even a small organization with a staff of 4 staff can develop a strategic plan to guide decisions about the future. Based on the strategic plan, your organization can develop a strategic HR plan that will allow you to make HR…
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Preparing For The 2022 Workplace
As businesses start into 2022, great uncertainty is hanging over the heads of many executives. Execs are faced with two different realities: a pre-vaccine world of remote work and a post vaccine world of figuring out how to safely engage with employees, job candidates, and customers. To help business leaders better prepare, here are some…
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Why Businesses Fail
The famous line from the film Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” is commonly used by business professionals and entrepreneurs to imply that if you have a business idea and put forth the effort to create it, people will come to it. In a perfect world, it probably happens. But we…
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Effective Elevator Pitch Basics
How to Effectively Describe Your Product in One Sentence Start crafting an elevator pitch by asking yourself a set of critical questions. Whether you’re an artist, service provider, or entrepreneur, you likely want to get your product/service in front of as many people as possible. You know that you need to market the product/service to…
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Business Growth Strategies
Most small companies have plans to grow their business and increase sales and profits. However, there are certain methods companies should use for implementing a growth strategy. The method a company uses to expand its business is largely contingent upon its financial situation, the competition and even government regulation. Some common growth strategies in business…
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Business Startup Steps
There are no limits on who can become a great entrepreneur…I am a good example. You don’t necessarily need a college degree, a bunch of money in the bank or even business experience to start something that could become the next major success. However, you do need a strong plan and the drive to see…
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Ransomware Attack Disaster Planning
When developing a business strategic plan in today’s new digital normal, make sure your SWOT outside environment threat analysis addresses the threats of ransomware attacks. Be sure to ask the following questions: It’s tempting to think the average cyber extortionist has bigger fish to fry than your small business. Small businesses may receive less attention…
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SMART Goal Setting
Many managers and leaders set out to improve without clearly defining how or what they hope to achieve. SMART goals, attributed to Peter Drucker’s management by objectives concept, are a time-tested way to measure a business objective. Before you start, you must decide what you want to accomplish and think about how you can apply…
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Don’t Overcomplicate Your Strategy
OK, I admit it. My first business plan was drawn on a napkin. Here’s how it looked: $ + $$$ = $$$$$$$$. Translation: Make a little money, put it back into the business, make more money and get rich. However, upon looking back, I wish I would have taken more time like I did with…
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Business Values
In past workshops and blogs, I have discussed a real-time strategic business planning process. It starts with a business concept vision that is overlaid upon SWOT analysis and typical business areas like values, goals and constraints to arrive at a unified plan. Today, I would like to expand on that tough-to-define word…values. Instead of asking…
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SWOT Analysis: Industry Profile
Doing SWOT analysis once each year provides a systematic look at the trends in each of the six components that affect your industry. It helps you anticipate and adjust your expectations and pressure points that may affect your company, i.e. new government policies might: encourage more regulation may cause barriers to innovation; raise taxes that…
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What Is A Business Concept Model
A business model is a conceptual structure that supports the viability of the business & explains who the business serves to, what it offers, how it offers it, and how it achieves its goals…Peter Drucker said that the business model is supposed to answer: The business model acts as the blueprint of the business and…
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Expansion Thoughts
The following issues should be considered prior to making any decisions about opening a second location: Determine if your business can be duplicated (for example, run without you). If your presence is critical to your business’ success, it cannot be expected to operate well without you. One way to test this is to ask yourself,…
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Understanding SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis key purpose is to identify the strategies that will create a firm specific business model that will best align an organization’s resources and capabilities to the requirements of the environment in which the firm operates.
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Planning During Uncertainty
DEFINE THE REAL GOAL OF YOUR BUSINESS …then make sure the activities in your business are aligned around that goal. Strategic planning during these changing times can be done by asking “What won’t change?”… then build & plan around that…like “stay customer obsessed”. Plans need to adapt in real-time to the ultimate vision or future…
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Startup Business Concept Refinement
Refine your business concept by researching available information/knowledge to see what works … try to duplicate those things that don’t affect your unique concept. Validate your product/service value proposition by customer testing using the least costly modeling method (minimal viable product) to find product-market fit & gather feedback from potential customers. SIMPLIFY your “vetting” research…
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SWOT: The Outside Environment Un-Controllable
Strategic inflection points—changes that alter the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying a business model—can feel sudden. In reality, however, they tend to build up slowly, gathering momentum until the transformative shift becomes clear. When these shifts occur companies tend to fall into three categories: The challenge for leaders is: how do they prepare to see an inflection…
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Planning After COVID
Covid-19 fundamentally changed not only how we work, but how we measure business performance. Today’s cautious business owners are operating with a ‘slow and steady’ mindset rather than ‘fast and furious.’ These are some key ways to assess the health of your business today compared to how you might have prior to the pandemic. Redefine…
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Business Startup Checklist
Register & Maintain a New Business Register your business with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office by filing online. Subscribe to email notifications to receive important reminders related to your new business. The Secretary’s office sends all business reminders electronically, so it’s important to keep an active email address on file. Maintain your record at…