Helping Values-Driven Leaders With the Hard Stuff
The Physics of Business Growth introduces a new approach to business growth for mature businesses. That approach effectively combines the principles of Lean Startup with portfolio management. It counters the traditional approach of betting on one potential home run and instead starting with many ideas, testing the hypotheses behind each, and then managing a portfolio of potential growth drivers.
Book Brief: The Physics of Business Growth Read More »
A couple of weeks ago I shared with you the Customer Profile I’d developed for the initial target customer persona for SDG Games. Kelly Jo is a (fictional) homeschooling mom with a couple of kids. I developed some hypotheses about the jobs, pains, and gains for this persona. How could I test these hypotheses?
Steve Blank says that the number one goal of customer discovery is “turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts.” And the phrase he’s famous for saying in how to do customer discovery is “get out of the building.” Customer discovery is all about spending time with potential customers to deeply understand how they live and work so that your offers truly fit their needs.
For customer discovery to test my hypotheses for SDG Games, I pursued three approaches: an online survey, interviews, and participating in Facebook groups.
Read the full article here to see how each approach worked and what I learned.
Customer Discovery for SDG Games Read More »
I started my career as a software engineer — you know the type that cranks out code in a quiet place away from people. I moved onto strategy roles — isolated in the ivory tower far from the company’s front lines. So perhaps it’s not surprising that early in my entrepreneurial journey my solo startups suffered from a lack of customer engagement.
Building things is my comfort zone and interacting with strangers was well outside that comfort zone. I could always find more to build, so I “never had time” to actually talk to people. That was a problem. In fact, it could be a fatal problem for a startup, if left unaddressed.
Each of us has our comfort zone. Maybe I haven’t described yours, but you know what it is. That’s where you spend all your time and you “never have time” to do the other things critical for the success of your startup. And it just might be fatal for your business.
So, how can we escape this comfort trap? How did I do it?
Once you recognize that you’re in this comfort trap, I’ve found two approaches that have worked for me. The first is to make adjustments in how you operate to force yourself out of your comfort zone. The second is to complement your strengths and preferences with a partner that can fill in your gaps.
Escaping the Comfort Trap Read More »
One of the most important early decisions that a startup can make is who they are setting out to serve. A startup generally is built upon a key hypothesis that someone needs something. Clearly identifying that “someone” sets the stage for testing that hypothesis and eventually being very focused in marketing to the right audience.
Since a key focus for SDG Games is that our games be educational, perhaps our initial target market should be Christian Homeschooling Families. By my estimate, there’s somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 1 million Christian homeschooling households. That’s a big enough market to go after, but a focused enough market to deeply understand and target.
Identifying the target market is good, but to deeply understand the needs of this market, we need to take our thinking down to the level of the individual decision maker and how she will value what we have to offer. We start by creating a persona for our target buyer and then identify the jobs, gains, and pains that drive her decision making. We put it all together in a Customer Profile.
Of course, all of these are hypotheses which will be tested. More about that in my next article in this series.
The SDG Games Customer Profile Read More »
The Great Game of Business is an enjoyable book with ideas that any manager can implement to some extent. And for the subset of businesses that look a lot like Springfield Remanufacturing Corp., the entire Great Game of Business model could drive impressive results.
My biggest issue with the book, though, is with its focus on managing a business entirely based on the financials. I appreciate the authors’ argument that if a company isn’t making money and generating cash, nothing else matters, but I still think, at least in many industries, focusing on strategy and differentiation is much more important than the authors are willing to acknowledge.
But overall I enjoyed the book. I liked the authors’ folksy writing style. I felt like I was having a conversation with Jack Stack about his business. I really enjoy reading the stories of businesses as they work through critical moments and The Great Game of Business is full of those stories. I also like frameworks and lists that provide structure to the lessons being shared and that help make those lessons applicable to other companies. There are two main frameworks used in parallel throughout the book: a list of “Higher Laws of Business” and a set of five tools that make up the GGOB model.
Book Brief: The Great Game of Business Read More »
Modern startups recognize that the path from initial concept to successful launch is not a straight line. In fact, it involves almost literally going in circles.
The lean startup methodology replaces the lengthy business plan phase with a period of rapid iteration and learning. For any given hypothesis, the team builds a test, runs an experiment, evaluates the results, modifies the hypothesis, and then repeats the whole process over again until they know what is true. This is called the “build-measure-learn” loop.
While this lean startup methodology is best understood in terms of product development, I believe that it also applies to strategy.
When I work with startups, I encourage them, very early in their life, to develop what I call the Startup Strategy Strawman.
The Startup Strategy Strawman captures the key initial hypotheses behind the startup concept, with the expectation and hope that flaws will be found and the overall strategy significantly strengthened before actual business launch.
For this SDG Games startup business idea, the Startup Strategy Strawman is:
In the spirit of lean startup and strawman proposals, please let me know your reaction to these hypotheses!
You can read the full article here.
The SDG Games Startup Strategy Strawman Read More »
What good are metrics if they don’t help you make decisions?
I’m currently working with two clients on developing strategy maps to help translate their strategies into tangible plans. Identifying metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) is an important part of the strategy mapping process.
Like many aspects of strategic planning, coming up with a list of metrics that looks good on paper is easy, but developing a management framework that actually helps you make hard decisions takes deep understanding, research, and careful consideration.
Most financial metrics are by nature “lagging” indicators — meaning that they tell you what has already happened. Ultimately, most businesses are looking for profitable revenue growth so it is natural to track revenue, margins, and the underlying key drivers (e.g. volume, price, expenses) over time. Similarly, most companies will track key lagging indicators like customer satisfaction and churn to indicate whether or not your business is creating value for customers. These lagging KPIs can give you a good sense for how healthy your business is today, and trends in these metrics are a good indication of what the future might hold.
But what you really need are “leading” indicators — ones that predict in advance of what is coming. Even better are indicators that can help you make specific decisions to improve future customer and owner value creation.
How does that work?
Read the full article to learn how.
Who Cares About KPIs? Read More »
My family really enjoys playing games. Game night is a fun tradition that we all look forward to. Some of our favorite games are those that involve world geography.
So, it was in the course of playing these games that I started to get the idea for a game (or games) that would help give me a sense for Biblical geography.
When I read the Bible, I come across names of places like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth. Capernaum, Cana, Gadara. I read stories of Jesus or Abraham or Paul traveling from place to place, and I have very little sense for what those journeys might be like.
How would I design a game that would be fun to play, that would teach me about the geography of the places I read about in the Bible, and that would be faithful to God’s Word?
Thus began the concept that is becoming SDG Games (the business) and Journeys with Jesus (the first product of that business).
Read the full article here to learn more, and if you’re interested in the game, sign up at http://sdggames.fun for updates.
The SDG Games Origin Story Read More »
I just completed a total redesign of my website, so it seems like a good opportunity to discuss the linkage from strategy to execution. I believe that everything in your business should start with the strategy. If you have a well formulated and understood business strategy, then you have a framework to easily make the decisions necessary to develop your messaging strategy. And if you have a crisp and coherent messaging strategy, you have a framework for easily making the execution decisions in positioning your business in the marketplace.
You can read the full article here where I walk through that process from business strategy to messaging strategy to web site implementation. I hope it’s helpful to you!
From Strategy to Messaging to Web Site Read More »
Thanks to new research published by professors at USC and UTSA in the Journal of Marketing, business leaders have a new way of thinking about the adoption of new disruptive technologies and therefore making critical strategic decisions about how they choose to compete.
In the early 1960s, Everett Rogers codified decades of research into the Diffusion of Innovations curve, which tremendously helped business leaders understand market adoption of disruptive technologies. In the early 1990s, Geoffrey Moore advanced this work with his Technology Adoption Life Cycle, which helped innovative business leaders better understand what they can do to manage through these transitions. Now, another 30 years on, Chandrasekaran et al are developing a new Successive Technology Diffusion Model which, I believe, will help both incumbent and disruptive business leaders make the most important strategic decisions for the survival of their companies.
How Disruptive Technologies Impact Your Company Read More »