Category: Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life

Tips for Business Start Ups: why skills and knowledge are hugely overrated attributes in your potential workforce.

Alfie confided in me that the beauty of running a taxi business was that you didn’t need to know many things at all to make it succeed.

You didn’t need to be able to speak – many customers preferred you not to speak in fact; you didn’t need to be able to listen as your customers could either write down or text you their destination; you didn’t need to be able to add up as the meter did all the calculations and you certainly didn’t need to know where you were or where you were going as the Satnav would do that for you.

His next business challenge was to find a way of employing drivers who didn’t know how to drive or indeed recognise a motor vehicle in the first place.

He will find a rich vein of potential employees from the job centres or universities who will only too happily join his business and apply their lack of skills of driving and knowledge about taxis to great effect. They will join the growing band of aspirant Robert de Niro brothers who are only missing the obligatory Glock which would entitle them to call themselves fully paid up members of the taxi driving profession.

The notion that a complete absence of skill and knowledge in your workforce can benefit your business is a useful one which many other start up businesses – or even longstanding corporates – would do well to learn from.

Alfie has in fact recently left a telecoms giant where the inability to communicate with human beings was a real asset. His taxi business is clearly set to go far (just make sure you don’t get in one of his cabs if you want to make it home safely).

Like, snog, shag, marry, avoid? The relationship guide for would be business mentors.

Business mentoring has been getting a great press recently and for lots of good reasons: having a mentor is a great life choice for anyone in any stage of their life, not just when they’re in the process of starting up their business. But what does being a mentor actually entail? How can you become an effective one and ensure that your mentoring skills and knowledge are applied for their maximum effect?

Many mentors will tell you that the heart of a good mentor – mentee relationship is exactly that: it’s a relationship. It’s all about you and them. Simples, as the meerkat relationship managers might put it.

Well, yes, in one very important sense the process is based on a relationship between two people, rather than a person and a tree or a person and a pet budgie. On the other hand, just waving it away as merely a matter of ‘relationship’ as if that explained everything isn’t quite enough.

Assessing potential relationships along the ‘Like, snog, shag, marry, avoid?’ paradigm is one way of planning a mentoring relationship but opens itself up to all sorts of misunderstandings, walks of shame and life long regrets.

We might start by seeing the mentor – mentee relationship as a dialogue between two people whilst understanding that there are at least a further two people sat on the shoulders of each party whispering into the ear of that party. This ‘dialogue’ is really between four parents and their two children who are still wrestling out their own voice in the world.

We might also recognise that both the mentor and mentee (does anyone else squirm at that word, ‘mentee?”) exist in all kinds of contexts, the economic being just one. They are both rooted into complex soil systems of other relationships, networks, practices and habits: all these affect the ‘relationship’ between the two parties and need exploring to ensure a healthy relationship between the two of them.

And finally, we need to recognise that if a mentor mentee relationship has undercurrents of power surging under the surface – if the mentor is driven by the need to ‘do good’ or ‘help people’ for example – then there is a real risk that the ‘Like, snog, shag, marry, avoid?’ paradigm becomes the modus operandi of that relationship. And whilst that might be fun for a few star filled nights on far flung beaches, the hangovers of the morning after might not be what the business needs in the long term.

What is a SuperBusiness? 9 questions which will help shape the answer.

Spark Up in Liverpool makes much of creating 500 SuperBusinesses in 5 years across the Liverpool City Region. In a region whose business support services have generated many types of business and entrepreneurial activity, what is it that will make a SuperBusiness?

On one very straight forward level it has to mean starting up businesses which generate super levels of employment, turnover and profitability; businesses which can make a major contribution to the regional business economy. But being a SuperBusiness is much, much more than the bottom line metrics and measurable outputs.

SuperBusinesses will not merely operate in the Liverpool City region: they will have an acutely developed moral compass which which help shape it for the better: This means for the social and cultural ‘better’ as well as the economic ‘better’.

SuperBusinesses could shape either the region from hell – much like Tokyo in Bladerunners – or they could shape an en-nobled, ennobling, civilised and civilising space in which people’s entrepreneurial behaviour is directed towards the greater good. A region with 500 SuperBusinesses could either be filled with wide boys, hoods and spivs – or it could be like Venice. Or both. The choice is ours.

So what will tell us whether we’re seeing a SuperBusiness emerge in the next 5 years? And what might be the defining characteristics of those ventures? There will be several indicators which tell us whether we’re dealing with a SuperBusiness or just a bunch of charlatans out to make a fast buck and they’ll be seen in their responses to the following questions:

How are you engaging with the poor, excluded and disillusioned?
How are you giving air time and political influence to individual spirits?
How are you connecting nano-, micro- and mini- SMEs with the larger corporate players?
How are you recognising and responding to local culture – not just traditional, mainstream arts and museums but the myriad of ways in which people go about things and create value, difference and impact?
How are you valuing diversity and difference?
How are you not only tolerating dissent but appreciating it?
How are regulating yourselves and your public behaviours?
How are you valuing risk, challenge and uncertainty?
How are you engaging with the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” (Wikipedia)

This is not just a job for the entrepreneurs and eager business men and women. If we want our SuperBusinesses to shape our city region we’re probably best starting at home. Our own businesses, whether super or not, could also begin to address those questions. If we want those SuperBusinesses to emerge from the gloom of the recent recession and spark up our region, we will all need to become at least a little bit ‘super’ in our own businesses for once in a while too.

For more information about Spark Up, please visit the website here.

Tips for Business Start Ups: 7 ways to engage Generation Y-ers in business

Time Magazine printed an article in 1967 to worried parents across the USA that Baby Boomers “seem more like dangerously deluded dropouts, candidates for a very sound spanking and a cram course in civics.” Time was following in a well worn tradition of media frenzy. The Dallas Morning News in the 1920s described its young people “as not caring about people and not having any sense of shame , honor or duty.”

So, we need to be careful about any predictive process when it comes to basing economic or social policy on the stereotypes of young people (or indeed anyone else). Bearing that in mind, what might the stereotypes of the Millenial – the Generation Y-er – suggest about how they may or may not get involved in the messy business of business start ups?

Well, the stereotypes fly thick and fast when it comes to trying to assess what constitutes the typical Generation Y-er. According to Psychology Today, they include:

being the toughest generation to manage;
growing up in a culturally diverse school and play environment;
being tech-savvy, enthusiastic, self-centred, confident, well networked and achievement-oriented;
one of the best educated generations in history;
confident with a constant need for variety, challenge and instant gratification;
Represented by the “Prizes for All ” generation.

At work, Generation Y-ers are said to:

expect their opinions to be heard and considered and are not usually shy;
want to know that what they are doing is valuable to the company and/or environment, as well as valuable to them and their career;
have a strong desire for rewarding opportunities – for them and their company.
are driven less by money and more by accomplishment;
Want to express their creativity and be able to complete tasks on their own – using their own methods;
want to know they have access to an open door to ask questions;
want to engage in work relevant to them and important to them and the company.

So if we expect Generation Y-ers to blindly follow career or vocational paths that have been laid for them, and which have been paved with rewards that may have been acceptable to Gen X-ers or Baby Boomers, we’re going to have a few surprises.

We may need to think less of how do Generation Y-ers fit into business, and more about how the business world can be shaped by a Generation Y culture.  Perhaps we might even see some of the Baby Boomer and Generation  X orthodoxies of business being challenged.

So, here’s a guide on how to engage sterotypical Generation Y-ers in business: by changing business practice around them, rather than trying to fit them into your business.

1. Be aware of the boot camp and other military metaphors

Enthusiastic entrepreneurs all over the UK are currently being inundated with all types of business support programmes from every conceivable source: their local council, their friendly bank and the taxi driver who’s trying to take them to their next networking opportunity but who has of course lost his way to name but three.

These support programmes are being promoted through a variety of metaphors which express the spirit of growth and enthusiasm which drives the people behind the programmes: everything from growing an allotment through to levitation systems (getting your idea ‘off the ground’) hothouses, hatcheries, nests and even the occasional business meeting womb.

The most insidious of these however is the military metaphor which describes the process of starting up in the starkest of terms: entrepreneurs are encouraged to attend boot camps: they are persuaded to ‘put their bodies on the line’; they have to ‘go over the top’, ‘batten down the hatches’ and ‘take one for the team’. Whilst this may be of use to some entrepreneurs who are thinking about setting up a private army which will compete of course with the publicly funded armed forces when larging it around the world’s hotspots, the military metaphor is a pretty hopeless way of describing activity whose moral compass is guided more by the desire to create jobs, improve the economy and do good in the world.

2. Engage more sorcerers than apprentices.

A new business start up is not a mature business and not necessarily a reasonable place to work. It is fragile, uncertain of its place in the world and whether it is likely to survive out in the wilds of the market place beyond the first year is open to a lot of doubt. There’s a forest load of wild animals, poison ivy and bear traps to face if you’re setting up a new business and the last thing you want is a co-pioneer complaining about their employment contract.

A new start doesn’t need solutions imported to it from mature businesses with notions such as ‘employing staff’ driving its thinking. It needs new solutions which confront the needs of its newness. The new start up doesn’t need staff at all – people who will honour contracts and deliver a job to the best of their ability in return for a negotiated remuneration – but generators: people who can not only deliver the business core activity but who can also generate more activity, more income and emulate the entrepreneur who has brought them to the party.

New businesses need people who have the ability to generate something from nothing, to make value from where there was none before, to act as alchemists rather than as commi-chefs who can follow recipes to the letter but who don’t have the inspirational touch which invents, creates and conjures further opportunities from thin air. They need to engage a lot more sorcerers – not more apprentices- in the kitchen that is the new business.

3. Work in, on and under the business

Perhaps what’s more important than working in and on a business, is an understanding of what was going on under the business: the stuff which tells you why a business is important to other people and why it matters. Working in the business is important; working on the business is essential; but working under the business will provide Generation Y-ers with the energy and motivation to sustain their businesses through the long dark nights of recession and economic challenge.

4. Cash may be king but even royalty needs a moral compass

Business is frequently portrayed as a moral free zone with no rights or wrongs other than can it sell? Can it make a profit? What are the loop holes? and is exemplified in Milo Minderbinder’s moral code of ‘there will always be trade‘ as he cleaned up after organising the bombing of his own squadron at Pianosa by the Luftwaffe in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

5. If in doubt, use the C word

Dropping the ‘c’ word into any business venture is bound to galvanise the Generation Y-er and the wider workforce, impress investors and stoke up the heat of admiration upon you. It doesn’t matter what the ‘something something something’ is (you could have equally said blahdy blahdy blah): the fact that you’ve introduced the ‘c’ word to your proposal is what’s fired up the meeting.

In the olden days we would have used the words ‘magic’ and the effect would have been the same. These days, ‘creativity’ has replaced the word for ‘magic’ (and ‘alchemy’ and ‘smoke and mirrors’ and ‘snake oil’ for that matter) and the world and it’s business offices have become far happier places as a result.

So, if in future you’re stuck in a turgid negotiation, CRM update or monitoring moment, just drop the word ‘creative’ into proceedings and see your Generation Y-er grow wings and fly to the heavens. He or she may not last long up there as they get too close to the sun, but your colleagues and customers will thank you for liberating them from their non-magical daily grinds.

6. Join a movement – Slow, Guerilla or Digital

If your Generation Y-er has got bored with your business then you could do a lot worse to align it to one of the many movements out there which in their own way are crying out for new forms of activist engagement. Just add ‘slow’, ‘guerrilla’ or ‘digital’ and your business will discover new legs and give you added oomph when you wake up in the morning. Failing that, you can always make your own movement: try ‘Independent’ ‘messy’ or ‘chaotic’ when it comes to rejuvenating your business and watch those customers come flocking.

7. Write your own business language

Like many people who want to set up a business, the following language fills the Generation Y-er with dread, suspicion and horror:

* Connect with your customers confidentially
* Identify your USP intelligently
* Optimise your Search Engines efficiently
* Motivate your employees easily
* Maximise your value added effortlessly
* Shake your booty heartlessly
* Strut your stuff engagingly
* Wedge your bling tellingly
* Fluff your tail provocatively

Don’t worry: lots of potential entrepreneurs and business start ups look aghast at the terminology they are expected to use as they hunker on down in the depths of business speak land. Many of them throw away perfectly respectable business ideas just because of the language they are expected to subscribe to.

But fear not: if your idea stands a chance of surviving the challenges of that language, it will survive anything: and it may turn you into a guru in your own right which will allow you to coin your own aphorisms, cliches and incontestable business jargon.

A great way to start is to generate four columns: in the first, write a list of verbs which might be used in any military, medical or porn movie context. In the second, write a list of personal connectives: my, your, our – that sort of thing. In the third, write a list of any part of your body and in the fourth, write any adjective that might describe a boxing match.

Before you know it, your business lexicon will blow away your competitors and you’ll be calling the shots, imperiously.

One thing that is guaranteed is that the Generation Y-er will engage with your business with all their usual, stereotypical intelligence, panache and style – and may well help you innovate and radically reshape your tired business propositions and orthodoxies.

Maybe, just maybe: the role of the artist entrepreneur.

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could answer the question of how the fuck are we going to manage when public sector funding has dried up? When audiences are becoming more conservative? When the corporates are opting for the safe and secure? When the cliches are running rings around new thinking opportunities?

Maybe, just maybe the artistic entrepreneur can see opportunities for new productions and new services…

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur can carve out new marketplaces rather than be beholden to preconceived ideas of what constitutes the marketplace…

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could ignore boundaries of professional, amateur and community and facilitate engagement processes which work with the power of the artistic vision rather than the pragmatism of the cultural realpolitik.

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could reimagine a future which is based on vision, critical engagement and personal and social transformation.

Maybe, just maybe the artist entrepreneur could galvanise the artist to wake up to what their power and possibilities are, and to quell their worries and anxieties.

Want to start a business in Wirral? Why not start right here, right now?

We’re coming out of recession. The banks aren’t lending. Its nearly winter. There’s a million and one reasons why there’s never a right time to start up a business. And a million and one why it’s the right time.

You get to shape your own future, rather than have it shaped for you by distant beaurocrats. You get to develop your own ideas, unhindered by the pressures and politics of more noisier colleagues who are always putting you down. You get to shape the culture of your workplace rather than being the unwitting object of other peoples cultural outdated cultural habits. You get to employ people, create jobs and make a difference to others around you.

Sure, none of this easy, and none of this makes for sleepless nights and a stress-lite existence. For a sleep-full and stress-empty life, you might be better retiring to the hills, writing your memoirs and feel comforted in what could have been, what would have been, and what should have been.

But if you have an idea which is itching to get out, which will contribute to your community, your society and the people around you, then now is absolutely the right time to set up your new business.

Aspire Trust is now offering business start up services for all Wirral residents (or those who want to set up a business in Wirral). We offer:

Advice and guidance on income generation and funding
Structured 1:1 support and group based programmes
Cross trading opportunities with other new businesses
National and International trading links
Customised programmes for your own business requirements.

We work across all business sectors – creative, digital, retail, manufacturing, you name it – our advisors are there to help.

The service is not free – but its absence of public funding means that you don’t waste your valuable business time filling in pointless forms and ticking boxes for the sheer hell of it!  It also means that you won’t be working with advisors who’s interests are more on hitting their funding targets than on supporting your business interests.

Your time is the most precious asset you have – and our work with you recognises that.

Just drop me an email at nick@aspire-trust.org if you require further information.

Tips for Business Start Ups: how working with the grain of the wood can combat institutional fungal infection.

Many start up business men and women start up precisely because their current employer has an innate ability to shut down the burgeoning entrepreneur’s energy, vision and appetite for the work in hand.

Ray has been working in the public sector on and off for over 20 years: more off than on in recent times as he sees his employer become increasingly wooden in its response to the economic challenges it faces. It obsesses about targets, forgets about quality, treats it staff with ever increasing forgetfulness and takes on the appearance of an ash tree suffering from the later stages of ash dieback.

Whilst Ray has loved his work, he realises increasingly that this is not shared by the battalion of administrators who have taken root in the work place and who are trying to save the stricken fraxinus excelsior. Where once his work was concerned with public service, it now is increasingly preoccupied with spin, counter spin and presenting itself for maximum impact in terms which aim to woo venture capitalists from sunnier shores rather than reassure its local citizens of how it will enable them navigate the social service storms which are on the horizon over the next five years.

Ray is faced with a conundrum. He has been seduced by the vision of plotting his own destiny as an independent trader through the economic squalls which batter his home city’s frontiers. But he knows too that a lowly carpenter in a large public sector organ is not going to find it easy to persuade the wider world to buy his skills and products which are increasingly being squandered by the infected tree at the bottom of the allotment.

Whilst he’s been adept at knocking out things from his shed in a remote part of the organ’s empire, he’s worried about his ability to sell anything and scale up his production line which would enable him to pay the bills. The organisational fear he’s been fending off for years is in danger of infiltrating the grain of his carpenter’s soul.

However, his skills on the lathe, plane and jigsaw; his knowledge of the many grades of sand paper and different types of lacquer means that he knows intuitively how to erase any obtuse pieces of bark, wear away any unsightly stains and polish a seemingly dull veneer into something resembling mahogany. He knows too that working with the grain of the wood, rather than against it, is likely to produce a much more satisfying working environment for himself – as well as higher quality finished artefacts.

Ray may have honed his carpentry skills in the workshop by applying them to unprepossessing lumps of 2 be 4 – but he’ll find that they can be transferred to dealing with customers, estate agents and bankers. All he needs to do is look hard inside his own woody workshop soul, make an inventory of his tools, skills, knowledge and experience and start to make his skills work for himself, rather than for the infected lump of organisational driftwood he is currently wasting his time in.

Ray may have worked in wood for years and worked with wood in the work place for even longer: but his future now depends on his carpentry skills being applied to his life outside his workshop. If he doesn’t get out now, the fungus infecting his current employer is likely to infect the young sapling of a business he is currently nurturing in the potting shed at the bottom of the allotment.

Tips for Business Start Ups: Hang out the laundry!

Business start ups can get so engrossed in the daily nitty gritty of survival, plotting the next step and welcoming the first clink of cash in the bank account that they can often forget to mark the very special moments of achievement they bring about as their business gathers pace and starts ruffling a few feathers down at the business allotment.

They plough on and on, tweaking websites, signing bank mandates and ordering shed loads of stationery ignoring the significant moments of the first sale, the first press review, the first glowing testimonial on TripAdvisor which wasn’t written by their mum or dad.

Whilst they don’t want to get carried away at every milestone by opening up a bottle of Moët, the new self found fledging entrepreneur does need to value those special moments with some out-of-the-ordinary action.

Hanging out the laundry would be one special way to mark a special day if you don’t have a collection of Union Jacks to run up your office flag pole; treat yourself to a frothy coffee using your own milk whisker if a lunch table at the Savoy is out of reach at the moment: or if needs must, dance a little jig on the edge of the station platform when you’re headed off to meet your next customer. It won’t be exactly like an out-take of Riverdance but it will give you added oomph for the day and help mark those special start up moments.

Tips for Business Start Ups: 9 questions which will tell you whether to do it or not.

The recession in the UK is generating several bizarre phenomena, not least being the fashion to encourage many more people to start their own businesses irrespective of their abilities, wishes or state of mind.

Many reasons are wheeled out as justifications for this life changing activity: you can be your own boss, you can turn up to work any time you like, you can turn a hobby into an income generator, you can play a game of golf whenever it suits. The fact you may come off the unemployment register is also a bonus to statisticians and politicians, massaging as it does the figures on the unemployment register.

But the notion that setting up a business is a realistic and achievable option for everyone, especially if they have just completed 30 years service for the same employer is a mirage.

Setting up your business isn’t an easy option which you can blithely dive into, with keys to your new premises and golden clock in hand, which will provide you with an easy route out of employment or a bit of diversionary relief to a retirement which is becoming riddled with boredom and inertia.

There are several questions to ask yourself before taking that plunge:

1. Are you prepared to wake up every morning of every day of every week of the year, preoccupied with the challenges you will face that day – and for which you will take the ultimate rap?

2. Are you comfortable with scary levels of risk? The occasional feeling that you are standing on a precipice, not knowing where the next weeks income is going to come from or how you’re going to fend off your increasingly noisy creditors?

3. Do you have any knowledge of the stuff of the business you want to set up? If you want to set up a restaurant for example, do you know anything at all about the restaurant trade apart from knowing what your favourite pizza topping is?

4. Can you add up and / or write in coherent sentences?

5. Are you handling the transition to Internet shopping, e-commerce and social networking with aplomb?

6. If the answer to any of the above is ‘no’, are you bringing in other expertise and voices to your dream which will turn the ‘no’ into a ‘yes’?

7. Is your motivation for setting up a business explained in terms of days off, visits to golf clubs or any other type of diversionary activity?

8. Is this business opportunity you’re dreaming of a great way of getting out of the house and avoiding the imminent marriage disaster you’ve seen coming for years?

9. If the answer to questions 7 and 8 is ‘yes’; and if you answer question 6 with a ‘no’, then stop hallucinating, pack the business plan back in the attic and don’t give up the day job. You will save yourself and your nearest and dearest a whole load of heartbreak – and may even enjoy your retirement to boot.