Starting My First Business With Invisible Fencing Taught Me the Tough Realities of Creating a New Market. In This Piece, I Share the Challenges, Lessons, and Strategies I Learned to Help You Navigate Category Creation.
The Gartner Hype Cycle Is a Graphical Depiction of The Expectations of The Market’s Perceived Value of a New Technology or Innovation Over Time and Is Closely Linked to The Five Categories of Adopters.
How to Apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to Small Business Read More »
Inside every small business owner, there are 3 personas, each competing for time as the leader. The three personas are the technical person (work-focused), the President (inwardly-focused), and the Chief Executive Officer or CEO (outwardly focused). To succeed, a business must possess all three personas.
The Anatomy of a Business Owner Read More »
Every day, entrepreneurs invest huge amounts of time and money to build a business that they think will be better than the competition. However, all too often entrepreneurs struggle to articulate how their value proposition is fundamentally different from their competition. These businesses are what I call clone businesses.
How to Transform your Clone Business and Stand Out Read More »
When it comes to content marketing there are three primary goals, search engine optimization, customer retention, and authority. In this post, we explore the three content marketing goals as well as review the content marketing strategy types so you can develop a solid content marketing strategy that will pay dividends for your business.
How to Define Your Content Marketing Goals to Pay Dividends Read More »
Guest post by: Christopher Ryan CEO or Fusion Marketing Partners and Center for Business Modeling. Chris is a SCORE colleague and a marketing and sales maven. We are super fans of each others work. The following post was published by Chris on his blog is February of 2016 and is chock full of valuable advice.
The Evolving Journey of the B2B Buyer Read More »
When he was watching the 2012 London Olympics, Steven Marx felt disappointed with the television coverage offered by NBC. Since he was an intermittent Twitter user with only about 20 followers at the time, Marx tweeted his frustration and used the hashtag #NBCFail. That single post catapulted Marx to fame and put an unfavorable light
Creating and Using Hashtags Read More »
The other day I was in a meeting with Debbie Segan, Vice President – workforce development at Pikes Peak Community College. She was talking about a successful program at a community college she had visited. She started by saying, “I’m a big believer in R&D.” Debbie then went on to define R&D as “rip-off and
Rip-Off and Duplicate Read More »
How Do You Create Instant Credibility in Your Service or Informational Product at No Cost? Give Your Solution a Name!
Why You Need To Give Your Solution A Name? Read More »
When completing a Business Model Canvas, it is helpful to guide the discussion through the use of questions. When it comes to looking at macroeconomic forces that will affect your business model, the following set of questions should help you in thinking more critically about your business model. These questions are broken into four categories:
Critical Thinking About Macroeconomic Forces Read More »
When completing a Business Model Canvas, it is helpful to guide the discussion through the use of questions. When it comes to looking at industry forces that will affect your business model, the following set of questions should help you in thinking more critically about your business model. These questions are broken into three categories:
Critical Thinking About Industry Forces Read More »
When completing a Business Model Canvas, it is helpful to guide the discussion through the use of questions. When it comes to looking at key trends that will affect your business model, the following set of questions should help you in thinking more critically about your business model. These questions are broken into four trends:
Critical Thinking About Key Trends Read More »
More and more products can be produced and assembled by robotic assembly lines. Even services, such as those offered by CPAs and stock brokers, can now be performed by software tools or applications such as TurboTax or e-Trade. Recently, I read an article that said that with the threat of a monumental rise in the
The Robot/Application Arbitrage Read More »
“The year was 1998 and eBay was little more than a glorified flea market with 6 million in sales,” recalls Meg Whitman when she became eBay’s CEO. Three years later eBay had $748 million in sales and 62 million registered users, becoming the envy of the dot-com world. Whitman attributes this growth to persistence and
The Meg Whitman School of Business Read More »
The next and final environmental forces block is “Macroeconomic Forces.” This section is used to determine if your business model can adjust to macroeconomic shifts. This is where keeping up with current events is important. In addition to watching the world and local news programs each day, I use an internet news aggregator that searches
Macroeconomic Forces and the Business Model Canvas Read More »
The next environmental forces block is related to key trends. The “Key Trends” block is used to evaluate if your Business Model Canvas takes advantage of emerging market trends. Are there any new technologies on the horizon that may undercut your business model? Don’t just look at the advances in your industry that may affect
Key Trends and the Business Model Canvas Read More »
The first environmental forces block is related to the market forces of the customer segments in your Business Model Canvas. The purpose of the “Market Forces” block is to verify that your model is in line with the evolving needs of your chosen customer segment. When you are looking at market forces, you should start
Market Forces and the Business Model Canvas Read More »
When you have completed the 9 blocks of the Business Model Canvas, you may have a well thought out business model. However, will it stand up in the real world? In the real world, your business will compete for market share and fight for survival every day. For the most part, the 9 blocks that
Four Environmental Forces Affecting Your Business Model Canvas Design Read More »
A few weeks ago my wife handed me a simple battery operated candle that had stopped working in spite of the fact that she had replaced the batteries. Although the candle was designed as a sealed unit I managed to remove some of the wax coatings and dismantled it, only to discover that the wire
Are We Losing Our Inventive Edge? Read More »
We all know that at the Battle of Waterloo Napoleon was defeated by the British. The British victory would have a dramatic effect on the financial world. News in the early 1800’s traveled slowly by today’s standards. Baron Rothschild headed up a large financial empire, and news of a French or British victory would have
Speed of Trending Information Can be Critical to Success Read More »
Several years ago I attended a presentation by Daniel Burris, the author of the book “Techno-Trends.” The opening line of a presentation that still resonates in my head to this day is “The future is already invented”. After a long pause to allow the line to sink in, Mr. Burris began talking about technology life
Is Your Business On A Path To Extinction? Read More »
One nice thing about mathematics is that it is the same in every language and has only one solution to a problem. Wouldn’t it be nice if every problem had only one correct answer and, so long as you knew the rules, you could find that one true answer to every question? Successful entrepreneurs understand
The Path To Success Is Paved By Math Read More »
