Fishbone's Blog

I recently made a presentation on Creative Approaches to Entrepreneurship to the St. Charles, MO Chamber of Commerce.  They were a very open and receptive audience, genuinely looking for ways to improve their businesses.  After the talk, I followed up with fourteen entrepreneurship tips:

•••Love your Crazy Ideas, be fearless

•••Hang with positive people

•••Embrace risk taking throughout your whole organization; learn from mistakes, don’t punish bravery

•••Be prepared for the unknown, plan for success

•••Don’t be afraid to evolve with the the changing times and changing market landscape

•••Network constantly, especially with people outside of your familiar field

•••Use social media as a way to contribute to the discussion; this will help to establish you as an expert thus driving traffic to your content rich web site; inquiries and sales will more likely follow this methodology

•••Does your business look open and inviting? Open extends to all the ways the public comes in contact with you: actual place of business, ads, business card, PR & marketing literature, networking meetings, social media

•••Is it easy to understand what you do, what you offer?  Keep it simple

***Does your business target a niche?  Is it too limiting…does your public image unknowingly restrict who may want to buy your products or services?  Can you reach other clients by changing, adding or subtracting something simple?

•••Look for alternative meanings and uses for things that have become familiar; read your old marketing literature for ideas

•••Look for ways to reinvent, rename and reposition your established products and services for new niche markets; using the web, a new niche market can be tens of thousands of potential new customers

•••Break patterns to unleash creativity and innovation; start with something as simple as rearranging your work space, and most importantly,

•••Have FUN!

This is not a comprehensive list to start, run or grow a business, nor does it follow a set order, but it does inject some creativity into the process of evaluating your current state and moving forward. Remember, it’s often the obvious stuff that gets overlooked.  And if something seems way too complicated, you got it, there is likely a simpler way to proceed.  When in doubt, pause and ask for help. You’ll be glad you did.

When visiting a new city, I like to sit in the front seat of my cab or shuttle on the ride from  the airport to the hotel.  Not only do I get a great view, but I sometimes have conversations with the driver.  A couple of weeks ago I was traveling from Houston’s airport to my downtown hotel when I began to tell my driver why I was there: “I am a speaker on creative ways of being an entrepreneur and I’m going to be making two presentations to a conference of University Professors who teach Entrepreneurship”.  I mentioned that I was an artist-entrepreneur and a musician and used those skills to make my talks really interesting.  I also proudly told him that I had just finished a book on the subject.

Though he was from Columbia, South America, and had a pretty heavy accent, he had an excellent command of English and understood a lot of the terminology associated with entrepreneurship. As he was telling me about his own experiences starting and running a series of businesses, unsuccessfully, he suddenly turned to me and asked, “So, what can you do for me?”, to which I replied, “Now that IS the question isn’t it.”

You see, I am paid to work with companies, universities and arts organizations to raise the level of creativity within their ranks, to inspire them to look in new ways at the things they take for granted. But here I was being put to the test, a real life situation, just two guys talking in a cab…and how could I help him?

I had him tell me more about the nature of his business ventures and why he thought they failed.  What he seemed to be lacking were two things, an advisor or mentor, and some kind of plan, like, a business plan.  I then wrote down resources for help: SCORE for mentors, Community Colleges for classes in basic business and entrepreneurship, suggested he speak with the Chamber of Commerce, suggested he look at local business journals, and I gave him a copy of my book which has several pages of web sites that could also help him.

I then asked if he wrote at all; his experience in the U.S. and his way with words lent itself to at least a blog or an occasional article, maybe even a book of his own.  He said that he did submit comments to other blogs, and he did fantasize about doing a book.  I encouraged him to keep that goal in mind and to just keep writing.

Once he asked that question about what I could do for him, I made sure to stop being the Speaker, and start being the Listener, and am taking that as a lesson for me.  If being a so called expert in something means all I can do is speak to rooms of people, I am not doing my job.  To really make a difference, I have to step off of the stage, making myself vulnerable, and be willing to hear an individual’s needs before my own.  Then my advice may have some value.

Not only did my driver take me to my destination, he helped clarify my path.

Advice: learn a few words in many languages…you never know when it will help.

I’ve always been interested in languages and pride myself in being able to say Hello, Thank You and Please to people from many different countries.

When I first started my product business in 1991 it was all phonecalls, faxes and even, yes, believe it or not, hand written letters.  Whether I wrote or called, people often complemented me on my few words in their tongue.  I certainly was not fluent in anything but French, and that marginally so.  It was more a thing of respect and courtesy, it shows you are paying attention, that the interaction is important, that you are invested.

When I visited one of my inflatable factories in Taiwan, it so happened that many of the workers were women from Thailand.  As I passed them I put my hands together, bowed slightly and said “sa-wat-dii, khráp”, basically hello.  Their faces exploded into beautiful smiles and they giggled and answered back, and were looking at each other and at me, pleasantly surprised that I knew any Thai at all.  Later that day, my trading partner who was hosting my visit kept remarking about how impressive it was that I spoke Thai!  I honestly told him that  the only other thing I knew in Thai is a tongue twister that if said properly means “new wood doesn’t burn, does it?”…

When I was at a trade show in Paris in 1998, 1999 and 2000, held in the Louvre, I prepared by finding a tutor and working on the types of conversations I might actually have with new clients.  I knew that I couldn’t learn too much more new grammar, like proper verb tenses, but I could keep refining my accent (already decent), and memorizing facts about my product line, like where we got our ideas, and terms of sale, like pricing and shipping conditions….For instance:

“Nous avons creé quelque choses inspireé par l’histoire de l’art, comme les gonflables de le Cri, le Sacophage, Les Garguilles de Notre Dame… (We have created several items inspired by the history of art, like inflatables of the  Scream, a Sarcophogus (mummy), Gargoyles from Notre Dame…)

As long as the conversation was kept at a basic level, it got to where we could understand each other in French…it was Fantastique!

It turns out that they all spoke some English and they didn’t expect me to actually speak French.  But after we conversed for a while I was often given the compliment:  “Vous parlez francais tres bien pour un Americain”,  ”You speak French well for an American”, which I came to understand referred to my accent.  The French especially get ill when they hear foreigners, yup, usually Americans, butcher their language.  So when they hear someone actually pronouncing things pretty close to what they are familiar with, they are quite pleased, and will forgive a lot of grammar and vocabulary.  And how do you nail an accent, or at least get close? You have to practice with a native speaker, and frankly, be willing to sound stupid, almost like you are doing a caricature of the accent. Then your tutor can help you scale it back for acceptability. Remember, your overseas associates will see that you are trying to honor their culture, that you are showing respect, which is the groundwork for a good relationship, and as many of us already know:

ALL BUSINESS IS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS !

…as is most anything else that involves two or more people.  Going even further, it is in our relationships with everything in the world, people and otherwise, that determine our character and how we are perceived by others.  Respect the world and the world will respect you…nuff said.

I had the pleasure of meeting recently with Professor John Rollins who teaches business and entrepreneurship at The George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC.  John has a long history of successful entrepreneurial ventures and several years ago decided to share his experience by entering academia.  Though our particular business experience is markedly different, we have some cultural history in common (like being at Woodstock and seeing the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, etc, at The Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco), as well as strong feelings about the value of knowing how to think like an entrepreneur.

An important component of his program is the development of a business plan competition where teams of students present their business ideas to a distinguished panel of successful entrepreneurs and business leaders in a “real world” presentation format modeled after venture capital presentations.  Four separate awards are given to the ‘winning’ teams, totaling $30,000.

The reason this can happen at GW is that healthcare entrepreneur Richard Scott and Annette Scott have generously funded this innovative program for ten years with a donation of $300,000, ensuring a decade of innovation from some of the brightest and most creative minds in Washington, D.C.

Similar programs also take place on many other US College campuses, with Rice University and The Wharton School a U Penn being two notable examples.  The size of the competition though is less important  though than its raison d’etre.

John and I are in solid agreement that innovation, the backbone of American enterprise, can only occur in environments that embrace risk taking, that learn from mistakes, that share in the rewards of success.

We also favor cross campus entrepreneurialism.  This means encouraging all types of students, not just those following a traditional business program, but artists, engineers, philosophy majors and linguists to immerse themselves in an entrepreneurial mindset.  There are two reasons for this:

1) No matter what you do for work, you will be in business, dealing with others who are in business, sharing a language and processes for what is ideally your mutual benefit.  This will help establish a common ground on which to communicate and will equip you with basic business skills: like finding mentors, making a business plan, identifying funding sources and the all important, Marketing. And many people will just plain find themselves in the situation of needing to creatively come up with a way to make money, like in questionable economies, like now.

2) Perhaps even more important, by mixing up student types you support the sharing of radically different outlooks on the world; and it is this intimate sharing that will identify new problems, that will uncover non-obvious solutions to those problems, that will keep ingenuity on an equal par with all of that business knowledge as a means of starting, running and growing a business.