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The CEO and EntrepreneurBoot CampThe Art and Science of Business Design This intensive seminar provides a complete framework for business design and operations with 12 separate tools that are used regularly to optimize any business from the moment of creation to over $100 million in sales. From The "Secrets Of A Serial Entrepreneur" Series
Seminar Outline Vision
Marketing
Product Sales
Finance Operations
Hiring Using Outside Services
This course includes a complete 300+ page manual with a CD ROM containing key tools and forms that can save you thousands of dollars. Lecture and Workshop - In many cases sessions will include both a lecture and an interactive workshop, to experience and apply what is taught and burn it into your mind on several levels. This experiential learning approach increases retention and understanding and will help you actually use this information after the seminar. You will make lots of progress developing your own business during the session and will also learn through others using their real business models too. A good place to start, but you can also start with a product or service in mind. This is a roadmap to a vision that covers all the bases of your identity and messaging development from company name, tag line and mission statement to a full-business plan. A step-by-step, fill in the blanks framework will help you design your business identity, personality and market position. How to verify it can work in the real-world and design a business model around it that makes economic sense. How to enhance and adjust as you go. When can/should it change and when should you stand your ground? Who do you need, with what skills at what level? How can you limit risk and reduce the capital required to optimize your ownership? The business plan - Necessary Or Optional? Management, advisors and employees. Identifying the skills you need using our framework makes it simple. This will help you avoid costly mistakes, which can even be deadly to early-stage companies.. Modes of Management: The Development Stage of Your Company Should Determine Many Things! Raw startup mentality versus Early Revenue, Growth, Established, and mature companies should be operating very differently. Executive decisions have very different context at each stage of development. Your speed of decisions, risk profile, management systems, employee selection and many other things should be adjusted through each stage of development. You will be given a complete framework to determine how, when and why. How to Develop a "Dashboard" For Your Business This tool will help you get a better handle on your business and improve your projections and results constantly. This tool can even mean the difference between life and death in rapidly changing markets. How to carve out your niche and develop your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Avoiding direct competition with larger companies and leveraging what they know through competitive intelligence. Using market maps and differentiation. Market research and understanding your market, competition, key success factors and your target customer. When do you listen to potential customers and when do you totally ignore what they say? Developing Your Market Entry & Launch Strategy Market entry can be, and often should be, very different from your long-term market position, plan and objectives. How do you access risks? How do you minimize capital usage, avoid competition and attention from big players and many other insights on launching new products. How do you pick the low fruit while NOT attracting too much attention from big players? Not all companies should have a FT marketing employee or department. What about yours? How do you know if it is optional or a critical requirement for success? When? Why? How? Who? When and how should you use consultants? How do you know you have enough market research? How do you sell, or soften the beach, while doing your research? Will doing focus groups, surveys and one-on-one interviews with the right people provide the answers? How do you decide how to weight your budget for marketing? How much for PR, direct market, sales channels, commissions, sales reps and much more. Some of this is industry specific, some is not and you will learn how to separate the two and exceed your marketing goals. How do you insure that your product or service has a market? What steps do you take to verify and test the product? When do you take what customers say as gospel and when do you ignore them completely? The time will come for both reactions - so how do you know the difference? Breaking a paradigm, changing behavior and other pioneering takes longer, and costs more. When is it worth it and how do you know? senior executives sometimes have little product development involvement and knowledge. It can even be a mysterious process protected by the product wizards. Intrapreneurship is required. How do you get involved, help form the product and see that it is delivered in a way that gets customers excited and guarantees success. there often begins a transition to a real product development process with lots more overhead, investment and process development. Usually this is painful and reduces the efficiency and creativity of the team by driving out some of the best creative people who do not want to work in a highly structured environment. How to avoid this trap is what you will learn here. Depending on your industry the product development process needs to be treated differently during this transition. most founders know their product area or industry well, that's how they got the idea for their business, but rarely do they have all the other business knowledge and experience to get a product to market successfully. You need a plan to insure product development stays on budget, on time and on track to provide superior value to the target customer. You need a team with several disciplines to go from product to company. You need this system t insure your development productivity stays high and focused on the things that matter to customers, not product designers. Sales is what makes and breaks most companies. Ultimately every failure can say we did not have enough sales (or cash/revenue) and every success can say they did. Few companies, even bad ones, die if they have good sales. We will have two guest speakers with tremendous sales and sales management expertise to help you avoid the many deadly traps in setting up a sales department. When do you use direct sales, versus reps or other channels? How do you test this and know it will work without waiting six months for results. This session is about setting up your sales department to succeed. Breaking through sales barriers and log jams. Knowing the right kind of sales personality to hire. Setting up a compensation system that works. Getting the most from your selling resources. Selecting the right target customer, sales process, systems, sales people and sales managers will make or break virtually every organization. How to hire the best people at all levels using proven methods and systems to match jobs to people, personalities and critical needs.. Branding, Image, Advertising, Direct Marketing Do you need any of them to sell? Finding the answer is actually a simple process - come learn it. How do you know? A simple step-by-step framework to develop the ones you need and not get distracted by the ones you do not. Financing and the Financial Plan Financing your business and understanding its sensitivity to financial factors. Verifying key assumptions and developing what if scenarios? Profit margins? What are the key metrics for your business that should be monitored and pursued? What milestones should you set and monitor closely to know when to make adjustments? Pricing your product or service? A what if tool you need to understand and adjust your business as you go, do sensitivity analysis, tune your business and see the future before it hits you. Should you hire anyone before proving your business works on paper? Is this a Catch-22? No come find out why. Bootstrapping and/or Raising Capital Various capital strategies and options. The current financing environment. Raising money, valuations, the elevator pitch and presentation. Angels, venture capital, corporations and other sources of money that are better in this environment. A framework that works for setting up and monitoring customer interactions, satisfaction and results. What type of person will do the best job for you long term and deliver service with a smile to your customer. The answers might surprise you! Communications, Culture and Delivering Hiring smart people you don't have to "untrain". Programming in the right "culture". Measuring results and improving your operations and your business and financial leverage daily. Managing Growth - Modes of Management (shifting gears) Revenue hurdles that begin changes. Developing and growing your management team and employees. Organizational Development. Common founder traps. Consultants and other experts. Handling professional service personalities. When do you change and how fast? When do you add layers of management and more senior level team members. How do you build an advisory board and board of directors that will really help. Hiring The Best - Nothing can kill your company like bad hires. Here is how to avoid this 95% of the time with a step-by-step process to filter and select the best candidates for ANY role in the company from sales to executive. So few people know how to do this today and depend on their gut and opinion from others when there are better ways to screen and test people. The new buzz phrase, but it is just another name for something we have been doing for many, many years. Identifying the skills we need, finding exceptional people with those skills and getting them on board and properly motivated. Hiring the best people is the one skill that has built many good companies. Even people lacking management skills, vision and a great idea have generated huge success by knowing how to hire the best people to fill these holes. We will provide a skills set matrix that will change the way you think about your hiring and your corporate needs. This will lay out a step-by-step framework for define what skills you need in your organization, when and how much. The we will look at the hiring process and how to guarantee successful hires almost every time (there is no such thing as perfect). This session will include a discussion on using personality profiles, testing and other techniques that are proven to impact key hiring decisions. Outside and Professional Services You Will Need - Lawyers, Accountants and Consultants Oh My! Virtual companies have been a trend for many years. Recently they are common because many people are unemployed and willing to work for equity instead of for nothing - but this is not a sustainable strategy and needs to be used with care and good timing. What areas do you only need a small slice of a full-time person and should use an outside consultant anyway? How do you identify the best and not spend your life interviewing? How do you maintain a relationship that prevents your competitors from using the same person and getting access to your best ideas? Short Talk On Forming Your Company That Will Save You Money Types of entities, stock agreements, founders ownership. This is relatively simple decision for most people, though many will be happy to charge you thousands of dollars to answer this question. Here are the things you need to do to decide and set yourself up to be flexible in the future too. Go To Summary Page And Registration Information
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