Bundle: Entrepreneurship (Developing Your Edge... To Be A Cut Above!)

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Delivering new value takes a lot longer. You not only have to figure out what it might be, you also have to produce it.

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In an increasingly cluttered marketplace, everyone is hustling to give customers the next new thing. Services that win applause one minute are ho-hum the next. So poking your nose out from the pack, and then staying ahead, is a big challenge. Any company that ignores it is asking for trouble. So what is this hot new concept? What should you do about it? How can you make it a way of life in your business?

Begin with your business purpose. Your company is unlikely to be around for long. Other stakeholders matter, of course. Nor can you ignore the needs of the society in which you operate.

Every firm could improve its results just by thinking through what this means. If only that were true. In the real world, too many firms have a few enthusiastic people and a mass of frustrated conscripts. Imagination and spirit are sadly lacking. Value destruction happens in countless ways, every day. And always, the culprit is lousy management! You have to make it the central issue in your strategic conversation, you have to talk about it constantly, and you have to walk your talk.

Value management means just what the term says — managing for value. You must be logged in to post a comment Login.

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You must be logged in to post a comment. Before you can build a start-up that takes over your industry, you need to treat yourself as your own best client. In business, when you have a client, the relationship is formalised into a structured one where there are defined expectations and regular meetings. For example, if you are a consultancy and have a one-year contract to deliver services to a client, the relationship will be formalised, structured and possibly include monthly status meetings.

Some may be report-back meetings while others may be briefing meetings. Your client will receive a monthly invoice and there may be quarterly reviews of the work you have done. Your general mindset is one of service to the client because they are important and worthy of the effort. Crudely speaking, most service-provider arrangements work in a similar way because the structured model works. My contention is that it is also much less effective. When I work with SMEs, one of the first things I do is encourage the entrepreneur to treat his or her own business as a client by formalising meetings, ensuring that there is a feedback loop and having a service-provider mindset.

By making these philosophical and structural changes, you will create a far more efficient and well-run business. It still astounds me how informal the meetings are between partners in SMEs, especially when they operate from the same office. There are no set times, no agendas and no outputs required. Casual chats do not ensure that all the requisite items or issues are being properly discussed and dealt with.

And so non-rhythmic meetings are occasionally inserted into the gaps in between the chaos.

The discipline that I try to imbed in the SMEs I work with is to hold rhythmic meetings at a certain time and day every week, month or quarter. Should there be a need to cancel this meeting for whatever reason, it should be rescheduled. Agendas are often seen by entrepreneurs as an icon of the structure of the corporate world. They smack of rigidity, stuffiness and boredom so they are often discarded and replaced with warm and fuzzy chats. In reality, in order for it to be an effective use of time, every meeting requires a structure, outline or agenda.

This can be a comprehensive agenda similar to that used by corporates or as simple as each person in the meeting talking about their three top-of-mind issues. When last did you, as an entrepreneur, formally ask yourself if your products are still relevant and effective in the market? One of the greatest oversights made by SMEs is not regularly reviewing the appropriateness of their existing products or services.

In a high-growth, chaotic environment that is attuned to constantly producing new products, existing products soon become the ugly stepchild, only getting attention when the client cancels the contract because your competitor has a faster, shinier and cheaper iteration of your product. An incredibly important discipline in any business is the regular and formalised review of products and services. We resist structure as entrepreneurs and the price of that resistance is ineffective and inefficient businesses.

By simply treating ourselves as we would our clients, we are able to imbed a level of structure to our businesses that will create a far more effective and enduring business. Whether a shareholder brings capital to the business, experience or connections, you need to ensure everyone has the same vision and values. While we often hear that it can be bad to have a silent shareholder that does not want to play ball, it is not often that we make enquiries about how the governance of a company can be hindered by a disgruntled shareholder.

This is not true: What is set out below highlights, among others, why it is so important to give shares in a company to prospective shareholders over a period of time, rather than from the outset. This allows for shareholders to prove their worth without you potentially placing your company in a position where it could be held at ransom for many years. Accordingly, it is always best when starting a venture to vest your shares over a period of time. This means that, for example, shareholders are only entitled to have their shares allocated to them after a certain period of time to avoid a situation where you have a dead-weight equity shareholder hindering the governing of your company, and requiring possible litigation to remove them.

Giving them job security, taking them seriously and treating them with respect, will go a long way in enhancing loyalty and productivity. All of these things determine your profitability and how competitive your business becomes. How do you ensure that everyone is on the same side and helping you to make profits? At work everyone believes that they are getting something such as money and are giving something in return such as time and effort. In a smaller business you sometimes cannot afford to pay more or provide the sort of benefits pensions, medical aid, bursaries etc.

It had been the Silicon Valley of its day—an innovation hub, the fount of a global industry, a kingdom. Now it is a refuge for techies looking to tackle real problems. Detroit is big, covering square miles, enough to hold Boston, Manhattan, and San Francisco. Yet over the past 60 years, its population has shrunk from 1.

As a result, thousands of foreclosed, government-owned lots go up for auction for as little as a few hundred dollars. Identifying those properties is a labyrinth for anyone without a real estate license. Renters, too, can learn if a building is on the verge of foreclosure. Detroit is in such bad shape that in March, Michigan governor Rick Snyder declared that the state would install an emergency financial manager to tackle the mess, a move that could culminate in bankruptcy.

This past December, Mayor Dave Bing announced the latest round of layoffs: Public school enrollment is a third of what it was 10 years ago, and last year the city lost 21 schools through closings and district changes; 21 more are scheduled to close by The decline started well before the infamous race riots that are often cited as the trigger.

In the s, fire companies covered the city. With so much abandoned property, arson is common. One hour span in September saw 31 fires. The firefighters, whose wages had been cut, replenished it with their own money. Detroit has often sought salvation in big solutions: And opportunity lures entrepreneurs. The startup types, like Paffendorf. With slicked-back hair and a perpetual poker face, Gilbert has just gotten started on his plan to transform the area. Because I was born in Detroit and my father was born in Detroit and my grandfather was born in Detroit, I had this idea that the company could have an impact on the city, help lead the change here once and for all.

We want to make our mark on the entire area. Just telling them to go figure it out with a typical broker was not enough. Since we needed space, we went on a buying spree.

Can entrepreneurs save the city? Nothing else seems to be working.

The more people come in, the more difficult it is for skeptics and pessimists to have a credible position. We offer a lot of internships— interns from across the country. You can intern in Chicago or New York and do fine. But if you come here, you have an opportunity to affect the outcome. That is a big selling point for this generation. You can do good for Detroit and do well at the same time. More than 60 companies have moved into his buildings downtown. His gleaming headquarters teem with modern conveniences. You can see retailers testing the market, young workers lunching in a park, residents jogging and pushing strollers.

Detroit, which was rebuilt after a devastating fire in , is once again like a forest after a fire, in such ruin that anything is possible.

Get The Edge Through Value Management | Entrepreneur

Growing up in the suburbs, Didorosi, who favors black T-shirts and aqua sneakers, thought Detroit was dead. But now, at age 26, he finds it irresistible—the only place where he could have created something like his truly unusual business, the Detroit Bus Co. But there was a proposal for something called M-1 Rail, a train down Woodward Avenue, the most important street in Detroit. It was the first paved road in the world. The train was finally going to connect parts of the city in a way that made sense. Even so, it seemed there was money for it, from the federal government.

We were all waiting on it. I thought, I need to do something myself. But what can I afford? I bought some old school buses. What would people like on the buses? Well, people would like music. So we put good sound systems in. And I thought people would like to know where the buses were at any moment, so we found some free apps that allow you to see where the bus is.

What is it going to take for me to start a bus company? You want to start a public bus company yourself? Why is the insurance that much? In addition to the buses, he has an incubator, a liquidation business, a Wi-Fi service, and a motorcycle-race series at an abandoned velodrome. All this is cool and fun. Didorosi, like so many of the young entrepreneurs and artists who have descended on the city in the last few years, is white, which heightens the undercurrent of racial tension.

In Brightmoor, just about the best thing that can happen is that a huge hole in the ground appears on your block. The hole means that an abandoned building has been scrapped, demolished—often by the not-for-profit Motor City Blight Busters , a fixture run by the enterprising John George.

When Dave Bing became mayor, he vowed to tear down 10, empty houses within four years. To date, the city has taken down nearly 7, The organization demolishes abandoned houses, but when a house can be saved, we renovate it and sell it or rent it to the community. It would be a place that would also contribute to economic development on the northwest side of Detroit.

I wanted to offer open-mike poetry night, jazz, art shows, galleries, a little bit of everything. But I had worked for Marriott and learned hospitality, and I took college courses, I went to roasting plants, I visited every coffee shop that I possibly could. I talked to folks in the restaurant business. And John and I tried to figure out how we were going to finance this coffee shop. We rented out a space and sold candy, dinners, water—whatever it took to raise the dollars.

It was going to be cozy and comfortable, a place where everybody can hang out.

Get The Edge Through Value Management

We were all set to do the landscaping. But a lot of things happen in Detroit, and shortly after we discovered this place, it burned to the ground, and I was just devastated.

I had worked so hard. God had placed that vision and that dream in me, and we were going to make it a reality.

Here’s the good news, value management is:

We spent about a quarter of a million dollars in total. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into this place.

It has a courtyard, a studio, two apartments, and a community garden. There have been payless paydays, and the city once made a permit mistake and shut us down for 23 days.

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