In the “another good idea I got from reemer department” comes a post about http://www.kiva.org. Simply put, kiva links up capital with entrepreneurs that need it.

Many moons ago I took a course with Reuven Brenner called “Creating Wealth and Prosperity”. It was filled with big picture thinking and I loved it. Professor Brenner is one of the most staunch free market advocates anywhere and has piles of data to back up his assertions. His course can largely be summed up by this quote from his book The Force of Finance:

“Prosperity is the result of matching brains with capital and holding both sides accountable…”

That accountability has traditionally come from a solid legal and regulatory framework. For instance, let’s say a company wants to borrow money to purchase a new factory. In Canada this business can purchase a factory with little fear that it will be expropriated by the government. If expropriation was even a remote possibility, lenders would require a much higher rate of interest on the capital that the company borrowed — to compensate for the higher risk. There are many other potential risks as well: currency fluctuations, corruption and inflation to name just a few. So in high risk countries only projects that can compensate for this risk through profit potential are funded.

Kiva.org eliminates this problem for entrepreneurs whose projects don’t have the profit potential to compensate for the high perceived risk of traditional investors. The projects on kiva.org are small but can have a big impact on the communities they serve. They can create products, services and livelihoods. Choose the project that most speaks to you and distribute a little capital.

Technorati Tags: kiva.org, microfinance, loans, Reuven Brenner

As an Entrepreneur, I’m fascinated with the concepts that have come to be known as Business Intelligence. Fundamentally business intelligence refers to a data-warehouse filled with information from all areas of the company. The data can then be presented in reports tying previously disparate information together. Take it a step further and you can mine the data looking for relationships not yet uncovered. Pretty awesome.

The Analytic in me thinks this is a dream come true. After all, one should be able to focus clearly in on what metrics drive performance then monitor, manage and reward based on them. It takes the complex process of managing a company and simplifies it. It removes the messiness of human folly. What you’re left with is clean, gorgeous graphs, delicious drill-downs and sublime dashboards. It’s every executive’s dream come true, isn’t it?

Here’s the thing: Before you can develop any meaningful B.I. implementation, you have to know where you want to go. So start by developing a strategy. Then you’ve got to work on determining what really is going to drive that strategy. So one must work with one’s management team to determine the core measures that will determine success. Then comes the daunting task of getting everybody on board. One has to manage internal politics, expectations, fear and misunderstanding. All of a sudden, this B.I. implementation has turned rather messy.

My point is that, as hard as you try, there’s no simple way to run a company. The technology is only a tool to help you stay on track and support you in your decision making. It’s your job to get the right people headed in the right direction, quickly. Don’t look to B.I. to do that for you.

Technorati Tags: business intelligence, KPIs, dashboards

I had a friend visiting from Oxford this weekend and so we decided to head over to Toronto Island. After a hotdog, we went to check out the Frisbee golf course. As n00bs we brought a regular frisbee expecting to have our run of the course. Little did we know, but we were about to stumble upon the PDGA’s (Professional Disc Golf Association) Canadian Open. It’s a world I didn’t know existed.

For instance, did you know that they use these special discs? Most competitors carry at least three discs. A driver, midrange and putting disc. Each disc has a speed, glide, turn and fade rating. This site explains it as follows:

Speed - Speed is the ability of the disc to cut through the air. Speed ratings are listed from 1 to 11.

Glide - Is the ability to maintain altitude. Higher numbers mean more glide. Rated 1 to 7.

Turn - Tendency to turn at high speeds. Negative numbers are easier for beginners, rollers, and tailwinds.

Fade - Every disc will fade off in the same direction if allowed to decelerate. Higher numbers fade more than lower numbers.

They even have bags! Like regular golf bags but for discs!

As you can probably tell, I’m fascinated by this. And that’s just from 30 minutes of watching people play. Most fascinating was the total lack of irony out there. (Like the clip below.) This is a growth sport — mark my words: this is going to be huge.

Last week my business partner Reg and I decided to shut down our consulting firm 3Simple.

So I’m unemployed and exploring my options. A new adventure begins.

Technorati Tags: 3Simple, consulting, entrepreneur

For all of you out there interested in entrepreneurship and venture capital there comes iinnovate, a really excellent podcast hosted by my friend Matt and someone whom I’ve never met (but am certain is an excellent person) named Julio. Their first episode features Andy Rachleff and is full of good, solid DIY content.

My favourite part is when Andy states that entrepreneurs are born, not made. Enjoy. And congrats to Matt and Julio. Oh and thanks to Andrew for the link.

Technorati Tags: iinnovate, innovate, entrepreneurship, vc, venturecapital

How is it that some people can update their blog daily with interesting bits of information? I just don’t have the time right now to write about much other than what’s going in this business.

I’m in the process of cold calling potential clients. It’s often thankless work that can be tough on the soul. If you’ve never done it before, the first five calls will be very painful and then you’ll start to develop a groove. Here’s the little I’ve learned about the process in the last two weeks:

• celebrate your little victories because otherwise you may get discouraged
• try to learn as much as you can about the person you’re calling before you talk to them (most importantly, find out what pains them)
• set reasonable goals and hold yourself to them
• get a pitch that resonates with you — something that makes you excited — that genuine enthusiasm will go further than a perfectly worded but uninspired pitch
• get it out of your head that you’re bothering people — if you can’t make their business better, then why call?
• do your research ahead of time so you can get in a rhythm of making calls

That’s all the advice I’ve got so far. I’m no expert at this — in fact — I’m not even that good at it. But, I’m taking the advice of my last post and doing what has to be done and not doing what I want to do.

Technorati Tags: coldcall, coldcalling, pitch, sales

I was chatting with Josh, the creator of Feeling Bullish, a community site for investors and arm-chair stock analysts. Check it out. Anyhoo, he went to see one of the Entrepreneurs in Residence at the University of Toronto who had this advice for those of us starting a business (paraphrasing):

Don’t do what you want to do. Do what you have to get done.

For someone who is supposed to be cold-calling all the time, that’s exactly what I needed to hear. I’m totally knackered and can’t write much more now.

Random bits: Josh pointed me to dojo — which is a comprehensive Javascript toolkit. Good tutorial here.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, feelingbullish, investment

Good evening.

Tonight was another excellent edition of the phenomenon known as democamp. For those of you too lazy to click the link, democamp is basically a bunch of software (and occasionally hardware) geeks gathering in a room. Five people volunteer to demo their latest creations. Each volunteer gets about 15 minutes and, at the end, everyone has drinks and mingles.

domainer.com

First up was domainer.com which is a custom web server and content management app designed specifically for managing a whole lotta domains. To paraphrase the presenter, domainer treats domain names as the atomic units of web development. It’s pretty basic right now but has a solid user interface. One interesting feature is how it deals with themes. The programmers have chosen to decouple structure from look and feel which is tough to explain in words so I won’t even try. In sum, it’s a solid app that will become more intriguing as more functional components are added.

feelingbullish.com

Feelingbullish.com is a site for investors seeking honest user-generated financial information. The Internet is littered with messageboards and forums containing low-quality information from unknown sources. Feelingbullish attempts to solve this problem by providing a community where all users become stock analysts. Users then develop a reputation based on the votes of other users and an analysis of their success. I think it’s a great idea — and one that I wish I had thought of.

paruba.com

Paruba.com is pretty much the exact site that my business partner Reg talked about building last year. (Check it out Reg.) It’s a place where you can create lists of products that you like from around the Internet. (Think del.icio.us and flickr for e-commerce.) The theory is that these products say something about you. You can browse other lists or grab items off any site on the Internet. The UI is slick and the whole thing looks really easy to use.

Two interesting insights from the presenter about taking on a project that is outside of your core business: (1) if you try to do things in your spare time — things don’t happen — you have to invest in a project to make it go and (2) you won’t get things done until you feel the pain — turning down paying contracts will motivate you to complete your pet project.

the glove

An excellent presentation injecting a little hardware into the ol’ democamp. Cameron Browning demostrated a 3-D visualization tool for file structures. It was entertaining — check out the link for more details.

Damian Conway and Perl 6

The final presenter was Damian Conway. For those of you who don’t know Mr. Conway check this from his bio:

Currently he runs an international IT training company – Thoughtstream – which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry’s design decisions.

Damian was great. First of all, he got around the whole no PPT rule by tweaking VIM to act as his presentation software. Very clever indeed. Next he lead us through a brief tour of Perl 6. I understood about 32% of what he was talking about at the time, but failed to write any of it down. Just put “Perl 6″ into your Google alerts or something.

For those in Toronto, I encourage you to go check out Damian tomorrow July 5th. He’s speaking at 6:30 pm at 40 St. George and the topic will be “Fun with dead languages”. Should be a hoot.

This post is long enough. But lastly I just wanted to say again that meeting people is the best part of democamp. For some reason the vibe is so relaxed that it just makes for good conversation. Thanks to the organizers.

Technorati Tags: democamp, torcamp

I got some interesting advice tonight from a friend who’s started two businesses. He thinks that one of the most important things to have going into a new venture is a rough financial plan. He articulated it this way.

Let’s say you’re starting a one person consulting company. One way to approach the problem is to start backwards from how much money you need to survive in the first year:

Amount you need = (profit/customer) x (# of customers)

Or you can go about it the other way:

# of customers you need = (Amount you need) / (profit/customer)

This is no substitution for the financials section in your business plan but it gives you a quick way of determining how things are going. That way you know ahead of time where you are in relation to your goals. My friend used this calculation when he decided to abort his last project because he realized that the number of customers needed was completely unreasonable in the given time frame. He credits this formula for the extra $50,000 in his pocket.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, financial, businessplan

I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of weeks. One of the first lessons of business communications is that you’ve got to differentiate yourself. Even if you can do a lot a different things, you’ve got to design your communications around one that your intended audience will find most compelling. This is a bit of a gamble. A calculated gamble, but a gamble nonetheless.

Trying to be everything to everyone severely reduces the impact of your message. Ask anyone in communications — it’s a big no no. People will find it hard to relate your product/service to something going on in their lives. People relate to specifics. Details are important.

For example, we’re providing all sorts of technology implementations but when I talk to SME owners I tell them the following:

We’re technology consultants specializing in systems integration. We focus on helping companies growth profits through a better understanding of their data. Typically when we deal with companies, they’re frustrated and disappointed by how hard it is to manage day-to-day operations because the data sits in different programs OR they’re concerned that they’re falling behind their competitors because they don’t have the processes in place to measure their performance.

Again, that’s not all we do — but that’s what we hang our hat on because we think SMB owners can relate to these problems. So when you’re meeting a potential client for the first time, you’ve got to take a bit of a gamble. Throw something out there that’s specific, something that they can relate to and, with any luck, it will resonate.

Technorati Tags: communications, differentiation, entrepreneur