I was in a session with the ‘School of thinking’ founder Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson on Friday. (he co-founded this organization with guru Edward De Bono)
The session was amazing. I wrote down a particular quote which resonated with me:
“The perfect pitch being worked on at your desk can send you out of business. The imperfect pitch being presented to a customer can keep you in business.”
Get out there.
The latest trick of many airlines is to segregate elements of their product cost
– Introducing the “Fuel Surcharge”
Apparently this provides pricing transparency. Thanks Mr Airline, but we know the price of oil is rising.
Isn’t fuel a fundamental input cost for airlines? (30%)
Do they think we care what their input costs are?
Do they realize that we’d rather the total price – no tricks?
Do they know it reduces ‘trust’ in their brand and industry?
And just to show my total disdain for fragmented and aggregated pricing here’s a few questions I’d like to propose to the airline Industry:
Does Nike have a shoe lace surcharge?
Does Ford charge extra for the steering wheel?
Does Coke have an aluminum can surcharge?
Does Nokia charge extra for the buttons on the cell phone?
Fuel is not an ‘optional extra’. So work it out, include it and charge us a price. That’s what business is…. Businesses are meant to be working this stuff out to reduce the complexity in our lives. That’s what business does.
No wonder airlines have the highest business failure rate of any industry, and the worst profitability of any Industry in history. (which by the way is a net negative over the past 100 years)
Start up blog says: Consumers hate ‘Oh, by the way’ charges. Avoid them at all costs.
Here’s a list of business bubbles you may / may not have heard of:
Tulip bubble – 1630’s tulip’s sold for more than houses!
South Sea Bubble – 1720
Bull market of 1920’s – resulted in the great depression
Japanese asset price bubble – Commercial real estate selling for US$1.5m per square meter!
Real estate bubble every 10 years or so… You’ve just lived through one!
Tech wreck (dot com)– Companies with negative cash flow valued over 1 billion!
Sub prime / hedge fund bubble 2008 – We’re yet to see all of this…
Green Marketing bubble ? – This one’s coming watch out!
Many business bubbles are focused in new industries where startups are abound.
Here’s when to get nervous. When you hear the words ’it’s different this time’, or people are overly focused on industry growth and the so called – revolution.
Here’s when there is no need to get nervous. When your business model based on basic business fundamentals like cashflow and growth in your net cash position. Startups take heed.
For 1000’s of years business and industries never grown much over 10% p.a. once compounded. Yes, there’ll be exceptions like Microsoft in the early 1980’s. But generally speaking when things are predicted to grow at rates above 20%, and valuations are more than 20 time earnings….get suspicious, very suspicious.
The good news about Google is that it rewards hard workers. That’s good news for all the genuine marketers, startups and bloggers out there
Here’s proof.
I decided that startup blog might be a good name, given it was all about – yep start ups and entrepreneurship. But unbeknownst to me the inexperienced blogger there was already a zillion blogs with this title, or one very similar. The dot come was long gone.
I didn’t even exist in Google… I was more than 20 pages deep. I was also blogging to about 3 friends and my mother. I never did any marketing of my blog, just registered it on technorati. That’s it.
Now after consisting writing, sharing my ideas, almost 500 posts and providing some reasonable insights, this blog is clear number one on Google. Just type in any permutations of the words start up blog and you’ll see. I also have over 20,000 readers a month now.
Word of mouth is slow, but effort equals reward.
Circa 1992 on MTV across 4 big, no 4 massive TV screens U2 lead singer Bono was asked what ‘Zoo TV’ was all about. His reply:
“It’s about the chaos of choice.” Poignant.
Start ups ought listen to Bono – and avoid the chaos.
All twitter users know that it’s not the most reliable website out there. At the time of this post, it’s currently ‘down’ and gives you the message below:
2 things:
1. They told us about it before hand.
2. We forgive it, because we love it.
If you’re a ‘me too’, chances are your customers would be less forgiving. If you’re a new killer app, service or widget then the lesson is simple: Innovation is quite forgiving.
Launch now – improve later.
I once said that “investors only ever get married with divorce in mind”. In fact, it’s often the most popular question at most start up events. “What’s your exit strategy?”
At the Hive event last week, local entrepreneur Simon Crowe of Grill’d had a refreshingly alternative view: He doesn’t have one.
What Simon wants to do is build a profitable business which grows beyond him. One which can operate without him. Simon gets it.
Here’s some advice all young entrepreneurs should heed. Because when you can achieve the above you don’t need an ‘exit’, you have ‘options’.
