This week we are going to review a new U.S. Government initiative you may not be aware of: The Department of Commerce’s new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.  These new programs are designed to help entrepreneurs launch and/or grow their businesses and help lead the economic and jobs recovery. 

Why is this important?  According to a study by the Kauffman Foundation, the world’s largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurism, “More than half of Fortune 500 companies were founded in recession or bear market.”  The current economic challenges have lead many Americans to look at starting their own business and for many these budding entrepreneurs, they need to understand where and from whom they can get reliable advice.  According to a Department of Commerce spokesperson, this is exactly what the new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurism is designed to accomplish.

Here are some of the key takeaways regarding these new programs:

1. The home page for the new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurism can be found at http://www.entrepreneurship.gov/
2. The National Advisory Council will advise the Secretary of Commerce and the Administration on issues relating to innovation and entrepreneurism and they are taking statements of interest from anyone who is interested in serving on the council.  More information is below:
3. Entrepreneurship.gov is designed to streamline the process entrepreneurs need to go through in order to find and get access to U.S. government assistance.

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“The narrower you focus your initial market, really really narrow, the larger your market actually is!!“  Barry James Folsom, CEO, Twirl TV 

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs and product managers about the steps they took to grow their businesses/products and how they were able to create, penetrate, and/or dominate their niche.  This week we interview Barry James Folsom and we’ll come to understand how he has “focused” his companies in order to grow more quickly:

Interviewee:  Barry James Folsom, serial entrepreneur. 

Why Selected:  Barry James has over 37 years of executive management and strategic marketing experience with a successful track record of growing divisions and companies rapidly into category leaders. He has played pivotal roles in the creation of 4 major market categories: PCs, Workstations, Internet Data Centers and Web Conferencing.

As a respected company leader, Barry James was Frost & Sullivan’s 2002 CEO of the Year.  He is also a frequent speaker, e.g. Ad:Tech, Media Summit, Digital Hollywood, & Digital Connections.

Barry James is CEO of Twirl TV. Twirl TV is a Social TV gateway experience to online TV for the 30M 16-to-24 year old YouTube on-demand Generation whose PC is their TV.  Twirl TV viewers have choice – from over 400 shows/6000 episodes –  as well as camaraderie with their Twirl TV friends, including chatting and watching together on their respective PCs.

I had the pleasure of partnering and working with Barry James when he was the CEO of PlaceWare (now known as Microsoft Live Meeting) which he sold to Microsoft for $200M. 

In the following interview, Barry James provides you with some insights on how he was able to come into PlaceWare and implement some changes and processes that enabled them to grow faster.  In addition, he gives us a look inside his new company, Twirl TV, and how it is changing the way young adults access, watch and interact with their favorite TV shows.  During the interview, Barry James brought up several points and ideas about what it takes to solidly grow your company.  The key points you’ll take away include:

1.  Look for the pain points of your target market and how your solution can solve them.

2.  If your target market is already in the customer base of an established business, leverage that business to reach and gain customer acceptance.

3.  Know what your adoption cycle is and look for ways to decrease the time it takes to get a “sold” client using your service/product.  This will have an impact on everything from customer satisfaction to cash flow!

4.  Focus, focus, focus…by being narrowly focused you can get to know your prospect’s and client’s needs better and deliver a product/service they highly value.

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Following up on last week’s blog – we received several questions about the “Understanding Financials” section of the blog and more so about how to put together workable financial projections for a start-up/small business - this week’s blog entry is by Thanasis Delistathis, Managing Partner of the early-stage information technology venture capital firm  New Atlantic Ventures, and is reprinted with permission.

When pitching your business to venture investors, sharing a well designed financial model is very important!  Why?  Because how a financial model is designed helps investors learn some things about you and your business:  it provides insights into how you think about your business, helps clarify what are the main assumptions that drive it and also implicitly sends messages about how you are approaching the business.  Is this obvious?  Not if you look at the inconsistent quality of financial models we see every day.  For some entrepreneurs, it is almost like an afterthought.   So I thought about creating a list of things that entrepreneurs and managers need to keep in mind as they design a model for their business.  This advice applies to young startups as well as established or even public companies.

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“As a small business leader, what skills should I possess in order to better serve our clients, partners and employees?” – Karen Y., 1st-time entrepreneur

This week we are taking a break from the normal interview of an entrepreneur to answer a question we frequently get at The Rich Niche Group.  While there are several ways to answer this question, we have boiled it down to 5 skills which we have seen lead to a more effective leader and company.  The 5 skills are:

1. A passion for providing an extraordinary customer experience and an understanding of your client’s and prospect’s problems.
2. An unwavering focus on your core strengths and using those to solve your client’s and prospect’s problems.
3. Being a source of innovation for your clients and partners and a leading innovator in your market.
4. An understanding of finance and financial statements. 
5. Company culture plays a very important role in the success of your business.

Let’s examine each of these and look at some examples how possessing these skills have aided in a company’s growth.

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“The ability to acquire the skills to be an effective CEO is as difficult as an average singer becoming a great recording artist.  Unfortunately many entrepreneurs as their companies become more and more successful fail to acquire the next level of skill sets…”  Roy Cammarano, former leader of three INC. 500 companies and author of Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers and the award-winning book, Entrepreneurial Transitions.

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs and product managers about the steps they took to grow their businesses/products and how they were able to create, penetrate, and/or dominate their niche.  In addition, we also interview those that provide services entrepreneurs and small businesses need in order to help them build their companies.  This week we interview Roy Cammarano:

Interviewee:  Roy Cammarano, former President of three INC. 500 companies, business consultant, public speaker and author of Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers and the award-winning book, Entrepreneurial Transitions.

Why Selected:  Having had the pleasure of working with Roy at two different companies, I can attest to the fact that Roy’s perspectives and insights into helping entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial organizations and businesses of all sizes grow themselves and their companies is invaluable.  I would encourage every entrepreneur to read Entrepreneurial Transitions, it is one of the very few books that can help you move from being an entrepreneur to a leader.

In the following interview, Roy discusses how starting and running a business is analogous to starting a family, helping it grow and some of the mistakes to avoid along the way.  As you read the full interview, here are some points that stood out to me:

1.  As a company grows, the founder and/or leader of the company must transition from being the “entrepreneurial genius” to visionary leader.  One key to this relies on the leader of the company building a strong executive team and then enabling them to run their departments.

2.  Entrepreneurs need to realize that at some point in order for their company to reach its full potential, they may need to bring in someone to run the business.

3.  When times get tough, focus everyone on a common goal and use that to rally the troops by celebrating small wins and build positive momentum. 

4.  When hiring outside consultants, only hire those that provides the skills the company needs and does not already possess.

5.  Companies that continually dominate their niche are always asking themselves, “how would I compete with me” and then building the barriers to keep them competition at bay.

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