awesome

There are 2 posts tagged awesome (this is page 1 of 1).

#80/111: Built To Sell

What is it about?

It took me fifteen years to build this service company, now I want to retire and spend more time with my kids. But how? Even if you aren’t going to sell your company immediately, John Warrillow will show you how to make your company sellable and your job as a CEO more comfortable. I will focus a bit more on service companies because for most products companies these things are obvious.

What can I learn?

Recurring revenue and a repeatable sales process: A main key to increase the value of your company is to create recurring revenue. It could be subscriptions, consumer goods or long-term contracts. This helps you to create a more consistent cash flow and less short-term liabilities. Furthermore, your sales process should be repeatable. Try to create a product which could be sold without (much) customization and hire at least two sales people. Why two? Because they love competition! In the book, the owner of a creative agency, created a simple five step process to sell and create logos.

Hire managers: If you created your product, you are probably going to scale your business a bit. Besides the two sales people, you may want to focus more on your product and hire more people how are awesome at creating your product. After some time you may increase your sales force and the amount of creators. Instead of managing them by yourself, hire/promote people to managers. Your goal is to sell this company or at least make you dispensable. 

Sell big: If you finally decided to sell your company, you should look for brokers which help your sell your company. Later when talking to the future owners you should emphasize on the possibilities your company offers. You created a great management team, a repeatable sales process and product and it could be scaled to the unlimited. Sell big and sell a superb vision of what could be.

Conclusion

Built To Sell is an awesome book! I love the story about the agency owner who wants to sell his company. It reminded me of the E-Myth but here’s the story is a bit deeper and more interesting. The second part of the book explains each principle again in detail. Awesome book and clear recommendation!

#53/111: Running Lean

What is it about?

Ash Maurya takes Customer Development & the Business Model Canvas and applies them onto web development. He shows step for step how to find a viable market.

What can I learn?

Test hypotheses: Building your business model is about iteration, i.e. you test something, if it doesn’t work, you are going to try something different. To actually reject assumptions, you have to write these as hypotheses. For example, instead of “my blog will be a useful marketing device”, you should write: “my blog will lead to 20 conversions by the end of the month”. This allows you to actually reject your hypotheses and move to the next ones.

Talk to your customers: Do they think that you solve an important problem? Are they ready to pay for it? It’s better to know these things as soon as possible because you can easily change things at this level.

The Lean Canvas®: Above you see the Lean Canvas which will probably remind you of the Business Model Canvas. Each of these panels should be tested. You begin with the Problem and Customer Segment. Which problem of whom could be solved? And then slowly focus on the other panels. If you tested each panel successfully, you have build a sustainable business model.

Conclusion

After reading The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, I was pretty impressed by Running Lean because it achieved presenting a similar topic much better. Ash Maurya took the time to show you how to go from one step to another and he supports each steps with tips. If you are interested in building a market-driven company this is definitely a book you should read. Recommendation!