Blog, Motivation Techniques

Direction or Momentum?

I listening to Gordon Lord at a breakfast talk at Birmingham Science Park, he asked the question : Is it more important to have Direction or Momentum? He stated in his view it was momentum, and as a coach he could develop someone’s direction if they was moving forward. However no momentum is hard to direct.

This got me thinking about business and my own startups. Sometimes its difficult to see if we have any direction and the momentum is all but gone from our sails. Being in a start-up is about getting thousands of things done to achieve one step forward. Sometimes in the dark.

I have always looked at developing businesses which could be faster than others in the market. Software is very hard to patent and therefore the fastest product to market with an innovation gains some market share, do this over an over again and this generates a loyalty, a brand loyalty which many companies would only dream of. It also forces me and my business, to constantly innovate the technology, business model and also the customer proposition. This also ensure we are lean and mindful of our competition.

To do this, I think of my products as they were t-shirts, when every T-shirt is made of the same cloth, but its about the design and how that design gains empathy with the buyer. Why would want to sell only one t-shirt to a person? No one (very little people, anyway) buys the same t-shirt twice, so you must be constantly designing new designs, understanding you target demographic, the up coming trends and hype which you can use to ensure your products benefit from the free marketing and attraction. The portfolio of design capture a market presence which attract browsers, then buyers who virally market your products by simply wearing your t-shirts.

No business knows the direction these trends will take them. Being on trend with a large enough market is the only important factor that ensures growth and success in the t-shirt business.  It’s a design numbers game.

So I have spent the first six months of 2012, getting a business with no direction and no momentum (a bootstrapped start-up) to a place where it has we have 10 brilliant people creating, new game titles, new brands, building associated products and services which people throughout the world will play, interact and engage with for many years to come.

Now all I need is a little more momentum towards the direction of launching one of our titles for me to say we finally have true business momentum. I guess then we can look at the direction travelled and ask if we need to pivot.

Blog, Motivation Techniques

Playing the Enterprise Game

I was recently reading about the Spanish explorers looking for El Dorado, heading for a place, which no one had come back from.  Also this week seeing NASA landing a one tonne vehicle on Mars, saying we will one day land a real person.  Both are achievements of amazing people.

Explorers were and are entrepreneurs.

The successful entrepreneurs understand the rules of the game (Being in favour with the King of Spain or maintaining USA government funding during an election year), play the game to the desired conclusion and manage the risk on their terms. Not much has changed in over 500 years.

However, today we can test our “entrepreneur game play” like no other has ever done. Learning through game play is well established and re-connecting the real-virtual world learning is important in this case. It is important when and what to learn in games.

When you start playing your latest xbox game, the first five or ten minutes are spent learning the rules, controls, physical aspects, tasks and goals of games. Once these are understood you proceed to managing the risks (bullets, baddies, obstacles..etc).

The management of risk is also well established for seasoned entrepreneurs and gamers. They have both tuned this to ensure a higher probability of success. In both cases, time is their only currency traded for a higher risk in their new venture.

Based on previous games, you may have a play strategy that will be continuously modified during the play. This is very much the the case with entrepreneurs. Their business plan will be a strategy or series of best-case scenarios which the entrepreneur will know works for them and their skill set (the same as the gamer). A series of personalized moves or short cuts which provides you the advantage on your opponent has always (since Rules of War) been one of the core tactics for success.

Once in the game/ business, the strategy and management of the risks will be altered in real time to ensure the current goals are achieved. You can never forecast when a surprise attack will occur and therefore you must always have enough ammunition and resources to overcome these random events. These tactics are often overlooked in start-up businesses, yet seasoned gamers and entrepreneurs understand them very well.

The partnering with other players is also an important aspect of today’s games (World of War Craft). Without this you cannot build greater resources and achieve higher rewards. Again this is a skill you will see with successful entrepreneurs, why do something that someone else is better at, find you core strength and maximize your rewards on this. So you find t-shirt businesses who don’t make, print and sometimes even retail their products. This is also the case when funding a business, investors are partners in your business.

The physical controls (keyboard, mouse, joystick, controllers) used and implemented in a game allow us to manage the game. In business these controllers can be just as simple, such as people skills, presentation and setting SMART goals.

Games have had their score board’s for years and forum to look and exchange comments.

The whiteboard is in everyone’s office, putting targets, status and issues in one place for everyone to see, discuss and develop solution is just the best business tool developed by the human race.

So the next time you sit down for the entire weekend to play your console, you are entirely justified in saying you are developing your entrepreneurial skills. Go and enjoy, cus ….

Gamers can be entrepreneurs too..

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Time Management Tips for the Self-Employed

Tired, itchy eyes?  Then you’re probably self-employed.  More of us than ever are making this particular lifestyle choice, when it comes to employment.  Lack of opportunities in the job market, sudden and only half-expected redundancies or even the simple desire to be free from the nine to five routine are all reasons that the UK is seeing a rapid growth in the self-employed sector.  Certainly the opportunity to be rid of the nine to five routine will quickly become a reality for anybody working for themselves.  Here are a few tips on time management to ensure that it doesn’t morph into the six till midnight routine.

Priorities, Routines and Tools

  • Prioritising tasks is essential to managing your work load effectively.  Traditional wisdom suggests that you should put the most important tasks at the top of your day.  Traditional wisdom also suggests that if you want to find out if a woman is a witch you should tie her to a chair, throw her in a pond and see if she sinks.  So much for traditional wisdom.  In many cases getting the most important jobs out of the way first is a good idea but schedule these tasks for when you are at your best.  I schedule my first coffee for six am as a priority as it’s the time at which I’m best at drinking my first coffee.  I’m no good at emails at that time of day so I fit them in elsewhere.   I’m at my most productive between four pm and seven, that’s when I schedule the really important stuff.  The trick is to balance what works for you and what works for clients.
  • Create a routine; focus on the “create” here.  Routines don’t have to be boring but they can be incredibly useful at ensuring you get your work done.  There’s a lot of talk about ‘work life balance’ these days and for the self-employed it can often be nothing more than talk.  By setting a routine you can at least hope to introduce some of this balance into your life.  You can create a routine that you can slot in around many other commitments, depending on your circumstances.  A standard nine to five may work for many people, while a much less standard variety may work for some.  Find what suits you and stick to it; a regular start time can help to get you in the mood for work and keep things on target.  Don’t be afraid to break your own rules from time to time; breaking rules is fun and can end up being more productive than you can imagine.
  • For the self-employed it doesn’t matter what the day job is, there will always be several other jobs to do.  The biggest additional workload for many self-employees comes in the form of the accounting requirements of running your own business.  There are two reasons for the time consuming nature of these task; one, you’ll probably not be an accountant and two, there’s a lot to understand, record and administer.  Bookkeeping software and an accountant will make all the difference when it comes to saving time on these tasks.  Online varieties of the software are increasingly available at very competitive costs and these can minimise time for your accountant (cost for you) making the whole tortuous process much more straightforward.

Time management is often about common sense.  Examining the demands on your time, listing them, and working out how to balance them all will help.  Using appropriate and affordable tools to manage administrative task and understanding the ways in which (and when) you work best will also make time mismanagement a thing of the past.  Self-employment can, at times, be very hard work indeed, but it can also offer the most freedom in your working life, and the chance to be creative with how you work and how you manage your life.

Author bio
Carlo Pandian is a freelance writer and blogs about business, entrepreneurs and technology covering everything from QuickBooks Online accounting software to social media management tools. He loves reading great entrepreneurs biographies and speaking at conferences about how the internet can help small businesses.

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Change is the only constant, education isn’t

When I left school in 1979, I knew there was not such thing as a job for life. With un-employment at 25%++, it was obvious.  So every time I meet one of these people who still believe its their human right to stay in the same job and expect my fellow tax payers to keep them, I try and find out as much as I can from these people. How did they get this mindset? How do they deal with every day problems and issues? How do they see the future? What are their real life expectations?  Just as you would if you had the opportunity to spent time with Elvis, Marlyn or Mr Hughes.

I seem to have come up with four groups:

  • Some people are very good at dealing with multiple issues, variable and accepting(no thriving) on change. Change is their fuel, their life blood.
  • Some people don’t like risk, so reducing the variables in their life to those they can deal with, tea or coffee, catch the 5.30 or 5.45 train home.
  • Those who are extremely happy with their status, power and empire. They will do anything to stop anything changing.
  • And then you get those who are just lazy.

The more and more I deal with our educators, those people who are developing our young, I fear we are recruiting the wrong people to teach the next generation of world leaders. These educators are some of the most risk adverse people, cannot accept change and more importantly did not understand what happened in 1979.

We still run courses which educators ‘can’ and want to teach. Just take a quick look at reed.co.uk and look at the jobs available and then go to UCAS and try and spot how many courses would lead to one these jobs. Over 25% of jobs are sales related, yet there are no courses. Then we wonder why UK industry is not selling to other countries.

We are not competitive in our education system and then don’t understand why our young are not successful in a competitive global job market.  Every person in this country is competing with over 6,000,000,000 other people for their job. Even if you want to work in the local corner shop, over 340,000,000 in Europe can just as easily work for that shop. At other levels of industry, software can be developed and used anywhere, manufacturing can be transferred within weeks to any part of the world. Its all competitive, even education (oops! sorry maybe that’s just too radical for 2012).

Someone this week told me we still use an education system developed for the industrial revolution and he was right. We should be able to create an education system which fits everyone, what ever age, what ever mental, physical capability and most importantly their aptitude. This also mean allowing people to finish full time education at 12, allowing 50 year olds to gain new skills, allowing university/college students to develop their own business whilst studying.  We live in a highly competitive portfolio working, global market place.

Education is all about the experience, (see: Morrison’s, Walmart, Google) and not about the quality, content or having the biggest building. It about the industrial relevance, networking opportunities and space utilization.

Lets go back and think about how we are going to lead the world and re-define what education is and how our society interfaces with it throughout their enterprising lives.

Talking About Entrepreneurship