This is an interesting project – Google have pulled together all their entrepreneurial resources into one page at Google For Entrepreneurs.
As well as being a handy resource for anyone building a business, it’s a great overview of the various programs Google and their partners are running around the world.
If you are looking at setting up a business or have a fast growing enterprise it might be worthwhile having a look at the resources Google have pulled together.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur which means I failed with one company at a time” says Steve Blank in a terrific interview with Mark Suster.
Both Steve and Mark are experienced entrepreneurs conversation is one of these raps between two experienced and intelligent individuals where the questions are as smart as the answers.
One of the key take aways from the interview is that our customers are smarter than us. If they aren’t buying from us, they know something we don’t.
Whether we’re talking about startups or big business, listening to the customer is the core thing we have to be doing and everything else is noise.
Doctor John Bradfield shaped modern Sydney. His program of public works, such as building the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the city’s railway network served the city for nearly a century.
The picture of him from the NSW State Records archives riding the first train across the Harbour Bridge shows him swelling with pride. And so it should.
What we need to ask ourselves is whether our works could survive a century of massive change and become an international icon as the Sydney Harbour Bridge did.
If we can just strive toward that – even though most of us will fail – we can be proud of our works as Dr Bradfield was when he rode that train across the Harbour Bridge.
ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing has a terrific story on the struggles of the Fairfax newspaper empire during the early days of the Internet.
One of the major themes that jumps out is how Fairfax, like many media and retail organisations, squandered the opportunity presented by the tech wreck.
The tech wreck was an opportunity for incumbents to claim their spaces in the online world, instead they saw the failure of many of the dot com boom’s over-hyped online businesses as vindication of their view the Internet was all hype.
As former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray said “In florid moments you could even think this internet webby thing would go away”.
For Fairfax the profits from the traditional print based business were compelling. According to Greg Hywood the current CEO, for every dollar earned by the company, 70c were profits – a profit margin of 233%.
The Internet threatened those “rivers of gold” and media companies, understandably, did nothing to jeopardise those returns.
Another problem for Fairfax was the massive investment in digital printing presses in the 1990s. These behemoths revolutionised the way newspapers were printed as pages could be laid out on computer screens and sent directly from the newsroom to the press itself which printed out pages in glorious colour rather than with smudgy black and white images.
Moreover these machines were fantastic for printing glossy coloured supplements and the advertising revenue from those high end inserts kept the dollars rolling in.
When the tech wreck happened, the massive investments in printing presses were vindicated as the rivers of gold continued to flow while the smart Internet kids went broke.
Fairfax’s management weren’t alone in this hubris – most media companies around the world made the same missteps while retail companies continued to build stores catering for the last echos of the 20th Century consumer boom.
In 2008, the hubris caught up with the retailers and newspapers. As the great credit boom came to an end, the wheels fell off the established business models and the cost of not experimenting with online models is costing them dearly.
Value still lies in those mastheads though as more people are reading Fairfax’s publications than ever before.
Readers still want to read these publications, one loyal reader is quoted in the story that Sydney Morning Herald should aspire to “being a serious international paper.”
That isn’t going to happen while management is focused on cutting costs to their core business instead of focusing on new revenue streams.
Somebody will find that model, had the incumbent retail and media organisations explored and invested in online businesses a decade ago they may well have found that secret sauce.
Now many of them won’t survive with their horse and buggy ways of doing business.
“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” describes showing up hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand.
Two recent conferences, the massive Dreamforce in San Francisco and the smaller, but still fascinating, Australian Xerocon in Melbourne illustrate just how radically the commercial world is changing and how many business leaders are poorly equipped for today’s times.
In July, the Melbourne Xero Convention bought together 400 Australian partners of the cloud accounting service which showed how how one New Zealand based company is building it’s business through engaging other suppliers who add features to the basic service.
Vend, a Point Of Sale cloud service provider, was one of the companies exhibiting at XeroCon. In the past POS systems have been a pain for retail businesses with most suppliers’ business models being about locking customers into expensive contracts.
With cloud services, the old vendor lock in model dies as stores can use any device they like such as a PC, tablet computer or a smartphone so a business is no longer locked into using an overpriced and often antiquated piece of equipment.
Making the cloud offering even more attractive is that Vend, and many of their competitors, also take advantage of APIs – Application Program Interfaces – built into other services so they can seamlessly change records.
So a shop can make a sale in their physical store and inventory levels will automatically change in the online stores and on services like eBay. If an item is now of stock, the websites are automatically updated to reflect this.
This business automation makes it easier and cheaper to run a business. It’s everything that computer have promised for the last thirty years and is now being delivered through cloud computing services.
At Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff showed the 90,000 attendees how these services work on a corporate level with demonstrations from companies as diverse as General Electric, ski company Rossignol, and Australia’s own Commonwealth Bank.
What really stood out with all of these presentations was how each business had made major technology investments that in turn allowed them to deploy modern tools.
The Virgin America Dreamforce presentation was particularly telling. Having just endured a 13 hour United Airlines flight in a plane that had been barely refurbished since 1988 it was clear that the older airline simply didn’t have the hardware to compete with the upstart even if management and staff wanted to.
From both Dreamforce and XeroCon the message has been clear, those legacy managers who won’t invest in new technologies or re-organise their businesses to meet the realities of the 21st Century are simply doomed.
In Australia this sense of doom in the business community is confirmed when MYOB and Google missed their target of giving away 50,000 free business websites as part of their Getting Aussie Business Online program.
Depending on whose figures you use, between 50 and 65 percent of Australia’s 1.7 million small businesses don’t have a website – and websites are last decade’s technology.
Business has moved onto mobile and social platforms, those 800,000 businesses who are yet to move into the new century are roadkill – the competition are just going to run over them.
If you are still struggling with the idea of a website – let alone a mobile site, mobile phone app or social media strategy – then you haven’t bought a knife to a gunfight, you’ve bought a sharpened stick. It’s time to figure out whether you still want to be in business.
Disclaimer: Paul travelled to XeroCon in Melbourne courtesy of Xero and to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com