“Most services have little impact – if you can push the client to use the results you go beyond the standard company that moves onto the next customer and seldom looks back.“

 John Goodman, Co-Founder & Vice Chairman of TARP Worldwide and Author

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs, product managers, venture capitalists and others 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 John Goodman.

Interviewee:  John Goodman, Vice Chairman and co-founder of TARP World­wide. 

Why Selected: As a pioneer in the science of quantifying, managing, and optimizing the customer experience, John (and his company TARP Worldwide) gives us the opportunity to glean a little bit of his knowledge on how a start-up, small business or any business can perfect their customer’s experience.  It is not often we have the chance to hear from someone running a company referred to by renowned author and consultant Tom Peters as “(TARP is) perhaps America’s premier customer service research firm.”  John is also an author, and in his new book Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty and Maximize Profits, he shows how successful companies use customer service as a “catalyst,…making the organization more proactive, accelerating responsiveness, and boosting its effectiveness.”  John also points out the financial impact good and/or bad/no customer service can have on an organization.

In the following interview, John takes us through how TARP got started and how the importance of moving customer service from a complaint department to one that can have a positive financial impact on your organization.  The key points you’ll take away include:

1.  The impact of great service on your financials is ten to twenty times the cost. 

2.  Many companies that hire a market research firm to conduct a study read their final reports then put them up on a shelf.  Find ways to make sure your clients use information and the advantages you bring to them.  This will lead to repeat business.

3.  When clients and prospects want to negotiate on price make sure you take out work/services/product accordingly.  Just reducing prices can lessen the perceived value of your offering. 

4.  In order to gain traction in a market dominated by one or few companies , look for ways you can out innovate them and find the one or two people at some of their clients who are the most unhappy and then deliver outstanding service to them.

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“One of the common mistakes that marketers make is to believe that their customers are different than they are.  They’re not.  Just like us, our prospects hate cold calls, throw away junk mail, and ignore most advertising.“ 

Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO of HubSpot, Serial Software Entrepreneur and Startup Blogger 

The Rich Niche Group blog interviews and enables you to hear directly from successful entrepreneurs, product managers, venture capitalists and others 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 Dharmesh Shah.

Interviewee:  Dharmesh Shah, serial entrepreneur, author and startup blogger. 

Why Selected:  Dharmesh is the founder and CTO of HubSpot.  HubSpot provides marketing software for small businesses.  The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has raised over $30 million in venture capital, and has over 1,700 customers. 

He developed grader.com – a free suite of online tools for marketing measurement.  These tools, including WebsiteGrader.com and TwitterGrader.com have won numerous awards and have been used by millions.

Dharmesh is the co-author of the new book “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs,” published by Wiley in October, 2009.  The book has been consistently ranked in the top 100 business books on Amazon.

He also authors OnStartups.com, a top-ranking startup blog with over 15,000 subscribers and 100,000 members in its online community.  He is an active member of the Boston area entrepreneurial community and a frequent speaker on the topic of startups and internet marketing.

Dharmesh has a B.S. in Computer Science from UAB and an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT.

In the following interview, Dharmesh discusses how he used inbound marketing techniques to help his company’s grow and how any business regardless of the sector it is in can use these same techniques to reach its customer base.  During the interview, Dharmesh provided some great insights on what it takes to launch, grow and sustain a company in today’s market.  The key points you’ll take away include:

1. It is critical for entrepreneurs to figure out a way to efficiently gain access to customers and to really reach people, you need to give them something that is valuable and compelling. 
2. As your company grows, one of the challenges you needed to be prepared for is how to stay on top of rapid growth and ensure that the organization shares a common vision and maintains the culture that has made it successful thus far.
3. Successful companies that enter a niche have a good understanding of how the existing players are failing to deliver sufficient customer value.
4. Companies that dominate a niche find some sort of “network effect” whereby each additional customer adds value to the remaining ones.

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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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“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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“Today, we have an unprecedented opportunity for entrepreneurship.   With the advent of the Internet and all of the technologies that are associated, an idea can become a business quickly and efficiently.”  Ara Bagdasarian, CEO and Co-founder of Omnilert, LLC. 

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 Ara Bagdasarian:

Interviewee:  Ara Bagdasarian, this is Ara’s second start-up. 

Why Selected:  Omnilert (www.omnilert.com) was one of the first companies in the unified mass notification systems business (urgent text messages) for colleges and universities.  Ara and his partner started Omnilert in 2003 and have since become a leader in the space.  I had the pleasure of working with Ara in the past and he is one of the most innovative and customer-focus individuals I know.  In addition, he is very active in his community of Leesburg, Virginia serving on many non-profit boards and as the Chairman of the Town of Leesburg’s Economic Development Commission.

In the following interview, Ara takes us through the concept for Omnilert, how it changed based on feedback, and then managed the hyper-growth caused by the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007.  As you read the full interview, here are some points that stood out to me:

1.  If your initial concept does not resonate with your target audience look for others where it might

2.  Innovate in all areas of your company, not just with technology

3.  Publicize every new client you get and get existing clients to tell your company story  

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