Category: Tips for Business Start Ups, Lessons for Life

Tips for Business Start Ups: sort out the marriage guidance issues pronto

Business start ups come in all shapes and sizes, and frequently not with one entrepreneur leading them but with two bright eyed and bushy tailed zealots expecting to change the business world over night.

Like their mono-counterparts, the entrepreneurial duo have their sights set high, their ambitions unbridled and their expectations off the scale. This is all great material to work with and has the added advantage of two forces working on the challenge that is the start up journey.

However, the problem that the entrepreneurial duo present is that as well as striving together to bring about catalytic economic transformation, they can also get in each others way.  They talk at odds with each other about what the business is actually about; they throw agonised looks at each other when one of them mentions a brand that the other one has never heard of; and they bicker and squabble and nit and pick with the best of all married couples.

For that is what they are fast becoming, these entrepreneurial duos: young marrieds who are storming over who takes out the rubbish, whose job it is to change TV channels and why one of them always seems to be worrying about the accounts. And when it comes to meeting their business mentor, the young marrieds haven’t yet learnt enough decorum to keep their underwear clean in public, their shirts tucked in and to speak with one voice: not as a monotone, but as a couple in harmony, working to each others strengths, supporting each others weaknesses and providing interesting contrapuntal harmonies to each others contributions.

If you are going into business together boys and girls, then please make sure your wedding vows are something you both agree with: articles signed up to as statements of pragmatic intent as well as of romantic delusion.

Questions by Business Start Ups: how do I know if I’m flogging a dead horse?

There comes a time in every young business when the cold light of day suddenly comes peeping through the windows of the illustrious entrepreneur who has been tending their new business with the love and care that befits the bright young thing of their imaginations.

The sunshine -welcomed in the real world of cash flows and budgets – is not of the warming variety though; it’s rays don’t contain the healing properties of ultraviolet light or the emotional buzz of the infrared. Instead, this sunshine shows the business up for all its deficiencies. The cash flow doesn’t flow; the market place is saturated with lookalikee businesses who are all struggling against the wind that blows down their alleyways; the business idea is just that – an idea which is not a business but just a bit of a wizard wheeze, dreamt up after too much Stella Artois, Indian takeaways or other toxic dream makers.

The bright young entrepreneur will say to themselves, after this cold shower of sunlight, so, what’s it all about Alfie? Is this a dead horse I’m flogging? An ex parrot I’m trying to resurrect? Or just a business idea that had a short but sweet life and has now outlived its usefulness and purpose in life? Does it matter any more?

And the bright young entrepreneur will recognise that there are just two questions which will provide the answer to that dilemma. Simply, is there any cash in the system? And do I have enough desire in my bones to make this work? If the answer to either of these questions is a resounding Yes, then there is still a possibility that all will come good.

A business without desire but plenty of cash will last for some time, but like the Titanic, will sink slowly and inexorably to the bottom of the ocean. But a business built on desire but without short term cash is not completely impossible; your desire will make up for that shortfall and there will always be a better, golden tomorrow when the cash flows to meet your febrile desires.

But If the answer to both these is no – ‘no cash, no desire’ then the BYE needs to throw back the curtains, let the cold light of day flood their apartment, pack their bags and get the hell out of town. Any further energies on the idea will be a waste of good time, sense, money, relations and sanity.

Read more on the desires of new businesses here: https://drnicko.com/2013/01/20/tips-for-business-start-ups-what-do-you-want-really-really-want/

Tips for Business Start Ups: 3 blindingly obvious things about the arts business: ideas, experiences and immortality.

What do you actually do, many people ask of Aspire. Do you provide products or services? Services or products? What do you sell? someone asked insistently this week when we were part of a trade mission to Skopje in Macedonia.

After some spinning around of the options – tickets? consultancies? projects? It occurred to me that we do all and none of things. No, what we sell are ideas. As simple and complex as that: ideas.

And we sell them to audiences, participants, staff, funders, project holders and stakeholders, past present and future. it’s not even as something as structured and regulated as knowledge or know-how although that’s part of the picture. No, It’s ideas. Widgets we are not.

The difficulty in selling ideas is that they’re difficult to demonstrate to people and say, there you are, there’s an idea. Would you like to buy it? We have neither have catalogues nor a website which advertises stuff we can sell on in a clear unambiguous way. An idea may as frequently be present on the back of a fag packet as it is in a business plan. Many of the better ones don’t even make it onto the fag packet.

Annoyingly for the accountants amongst us, ideas cannot be pinned down, measured or assessed with much confidence about their economic viability. Ideas are a bit like thought bubbles which lead to further thoughts, which lead to actions which lead to consequences –some beneficial and worthwhile, others unexpected and unwelcome.

We may –and do –produce many things over a year – but given the nature of the arts, these are frequently ephemeral, may just last for a few minutes or hours and may have taken many weeks or months of preparation for that big moment of arts production – when whoof! Its all gone in the flash of an eye, the curtain has come down, the houselights gone up and you’re left looking at a bare stage going, is that all there is?

The notion of arts as service is equally unreliable. Good arts activities will lead to personal experiences which are memorable, transferrable and irreversible. Once you participate in a workshop for example, you may not like it – but you can’t un-do the experience and you can’t take it back to the retailer complaining that you don’t like the colour, that it doesn’t fit or that you were given it by mistake by your grand-aunt. An arts workshop is for life, not just for Christmas. It’s a service you don’t always know what you’re going to be getting from it.

So, the products fade quickly and cost a small fortune to put together; the services may be modest and last for a few hours on a wet Tuesday afternoon in a school in Ellesmere Port.

But what they alll have in common is that the ideas that drives this economy lead to fundamental and vital experiences – learning, fun, play, entertainment, reflection, friendship, connection, love, humour and bewonderment.

Oh, and perhaps even immortality on a good day: a big claim for any business, to be sure, but one which ranks up there with the best of all human aspirational activity.

Give Us This Day: a Toast to Reincarnation.

At a recent education conference, our presenter talked about the value of the green curriculum, stressing its importance in Eco-viability, sustainability and all good things in general.  Ironically sponsored by Pepsi Cola, she added that as we only had one life we best make the best of it, that we only had one life on this planet and that it was our moral duty to be good guardians of it.

In an important nod to her audience however she also recognised that there was more than one way of looking at our lives on the planet: “to those of you who believe in reincarnation” she finished, “ the greening of the curriculum is not so much about saving the planet now, but making it a better place for you when you return”.

Reincarnation is a particularly handy idea to deal with common sense notions that we only have one life; that life is not a dress rehearsal; that death is a foregone conclusion and like taxes, we best face up to the giant tax collector in the sky and pay what’s due on time, with no argument and with good grace. Reincarnation allows us to plan for the second, third, fourth and who knows how many times around, hopefully securing a better deal on the next visit unless we have been particularly obnoxious on this occasion.

Planning for reincarnation would be a useful addition to funding applications as it would be a tacit acknowledgement that our cultural efforts are always flawed, no matter how many business plans we write. A box which asks us how we intend to produce the production, deliver the curriculum or save the world when we are reincarnated either a) as a lizard or b) as a superhero would make writing and reading funding applications a lot more of an entertaining process for everyone.

My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen and Members of the Jury, please raise a toast to Reincarnation.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Toast: read all about toasting here.