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Turn Your Weaknesses into Strengths: Five Jiu-Jitsu Principles that can benefit an Entrepreneur

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By Andrew Filev

For more than five years I’ve been training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I’d say it’s not just a self-defense system, but a whole art that is based on the concept that even a smaller, weaker person can defeat a stronger opponent if he uses the right technique. For me, Jiu-Jitsu is much more than physical training; it’s a philosophy. It teaches you things that can be applied not only on the mat but in your personal and professional life as well. Here are just a few of the lessons it can teach you in business:

1. The size is irrelevant if you master the technique

‘If size mattered, the elephant would be the king of the jungle,’ Rickson Gracie, black belt in JJ and heir of BJJ founders, justly noted. Likewise, in business, nimble start-ups manage to disrupt markets dominated by ‘elephants’ or even create a market of their own. All such start-ups have one thing in common– the ability to act creatively. You can’t win by simply replicating a big company’s game that’s already been polished. A small company needs to use its own advantages, like agility, being closer to customers, and, of course, being different in some aspect that is important to customers.

For instance, there’s an interesting case study about how Bulldog, a small UK company producing male grooming products, found a way to compete against giants like L’Oreal and Nivea. First, instead of using generic skincare product formulas Bulldog developed its own recipes using all natural ingredients. They also decided to use an unorthodox marketing strategy and teamed up with comedian David Mitchell to sponsor a series of comedy monologues. These videos collected more than 8 million views and grew Bulldog’s retail sales in UK by 65.4%.

When Wrike came to the project management space seven years ago, most of the solutions were built for industrial business models. Instead of entering the market as ‘just another company’, we decided to develop our own market: we specialize in helping creative workers collaborate online. Wrike brought something new ‘real-time collaboration’ and, thanks to delivering the solution via cloud, made it considerably cheaper. This made Wrike one of the fastest growing companies in the project management and collaboration space.

2. “A black belt is a white belt that never quits”

Renzo Gracie, a world famous Jiu-Jitsu coach, phrased the secret of jiu-jitsu champions pretty cleverly in the quote above. They train harder, day after day, year after year. They find ways to organize their life around this tough schedule, and think about improving their skill even when they’re not training.

It may look like Silicon Valley is built on stories of ‘overnight success.’ However, it is determination and persistence that make this success happen. Of course, luck helps, too. But it’s the luck of being persistent enough to find numerous opportunities, and being smart and disciplined enough to make those opportunities work.

3. Dojo is a place to learn

In jiu-jitsu a dojo is a training place where you can share knowledge and try new moves without risk and fear. Often it’s something you’re not supposed to do in competition, where you go with a well-developed game.

In business, the same can be achieved by ‘inducing learning.’ Instead of making a big ‘all in’ move right away, you can run a test project and study the results. If it works well, you can quickly scale it. Prototyping, A/B tests, crowd funded pre-orders in consumer space, you name it. The toolset of techniques grows quickly and becomes more and more sophisticated; all you need to do is to integrate them into your company’s daily processes.

4. Never stop moving

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu once you stop moving you get caught in a submission hold. In business, no matter how big you are, once you stop moving forward the competition will pass you. Andy Grove, famous ex-CEO of Intel, and Clayton Christensen, who came up with the concept of disruptive innovation, developed this point in their books Only the Paranoid Survive and The Innovator’s Dilemma.

There are many examples of successful companies which became complacent and then when disruptive innovation happened turned into dinosaurs, such as Blockbuster and Kodak. Apple, on the other hand, is a testimony of a ‘paranoid mentality.’ When developing the iPhone, the company expected its sales of iPod to decline; and in developing the iPad, its Mac computer line to be negatively affected. But Apple chooses to constantly one-up itself. In fact, Steve Jobs famously said: ‘If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.’ It is exactly this mentality that allows the company to beat the ‘innovators’ dilemma.’

5. If you want to be a blue belt, make Jiu-jitsu your hobby. If you want to be a black belt, make it your life

Both in Jiu-Jitsu training and in business, genuine love for what you do and what you want to accomplish is, at the end of the day, what keeps you going. There are, of course rough patches, but when someone says that they have no idea how they would function day-to-day without your company (as our customer recently did), you know you must be doing something right. As Steve Jobs once stated, ‘Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.’ So, savor good moments, keep your eye on the goals you want to achieve, and enjoy the ride.

Are there any lessons that you can take from your hobby into your professional life?

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Author’s Bio: Andrew Filev is the founder and CEO of Wrike, a leading provider of task management software. He is a seasoned software entrepreneur, project and product manager with 10+ years of experience and advisor to several fast-growing ventures. Apart from business, Andrew is interested in human and artificial intelligence – from cognitive psychology to neuroscience to machine learning. He also trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You can find Andrew on Twitter as @andrewsthoughts or @wrike (Wrike).

Managing to Expectations: A Primer

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By Dipti Parmar

The best advice I received during my career in corporate America can be summed up in these four words; inspect what you expect. These four words that can provide focus for managing a business, a staff, a team, and even your children.

When it comes to business, the only metrics you should concern yourself with gathering are those that will help you make the right decisions. Most analytical software tends to emphasize metrics that might make you feel good about your business but do not really provide any useful guidance for making decisions.

For example, a report that reveals you have a total of 20,000 “hits” to your website may make you feel good, but the report tells you absolutely nothing about how you achieved those hits. In this sense, such statistics aren’t terribly useful.

You may have seen this in your business. You launch a new feature or product and a few days later sales and revenue are up. Everyone pats themselves on the back. The product guys think it is the result of the feature, the sales guy thinks it’s the new promotion and the customer service people think it’s the customer-friendly policies. The fact is, you don’t really know what caused the up-tick, but when sales and revenues drop back to baseline … no one wants to accept the blame!

Compare this to what I would describe as an actionable metric. For example, by adding a new feature to your website but allowing only every other customer to see it, you would be able to examine both sets of revenue streams a week later and make some meaningful conclusions. This metric is designed to allow you to ascertain the effectiveness of the new feature based on revenue differences. If the new feature increased sales, then you obviously want to implement that feature for all your customers. If you see that it didn’t move the needle for either group, you could scrap it. The important take-away here is that these types of metrics are actionable. It is data from which a conclusion can be readily made and acted upon.

How to Achieve Actionable Metrics:

Split tests—such as the one I described above, will allow you to take the right course of action on anything from minor copy tweaks to major product changes. These tests are widely known as A/B tests and you can get more information and background from this whitepaper titled “Controlled Experiments on the Web: Survey and Practical Guide” (PDF).

Per Customer Metrics—because people are metrics! Ordinary metrics can fog our focus on reality by diverting attention to unreal groups and pseudo concepts. It is significantly advantageous to examine data from a per customer or per segment perspective. Try focusing, for example, on the number of page views per new or repeat customer rather than just the total number of page views. Per customer data can indicate that you are increasing the level of engagement with your customer. Looking at aggregate data will not reveal this trend. There are several analytical packages that offer a business the ability to reduce aggregate data to per customer and/or per segment analyses. One is Google Analytics, which in combination with Google’s goal tracking feature will allow you to see which web referrers are driving the most conversions. Armed with this information, you can make decisions on which referrers are worth your time and money. This allows your business to maximize its return on investment.

Group analysis and funnel metrics—can be among the most useful metrics for forward decision making. For purposes of illustration, let’s say you have an e-commerce product with a few life-cycle events. These may include registering for the product, signing up for a free trial, using the product and, ultimately, buying the product. A simple report can be created to show these metrics for groups in a defined time period. For example, you might create a weekly report which shows what percentage of customers registering in that week went on to take each life-cycle step. If these numbers reflect no changes from group to group, then we have learned that nothing significant is happening. If one spikes up or tumbles down, then we have an unmistakable reason to investigate. Using funnel metrics to consolidate this data into a few useful numbers is easy to do manually, even if you have a large number of registrants. Simply break out the old fashioned index cards and record the number of customers registering each day. Then for each conversion (sale), make a tally mark on the index card corresponding to the date that customer registered (not the date they bought). Then on a weekly or monthly basis, you can compute conversion rates for the customers registering in that time period. Obviously, it is this number you want to focus on driving up!

What I have shared here today has been focused on the e-commerce business but the theme of managing to expectations is equally applicable to brick and mortar businesses. The idea of inspecting what you expect is applicable to all business enterprises, from invoice financing companies like CBAC Funding to the mom and pop dry cleaning store in your neighborhood.

If you expect to achieve a goal, measuring your progress is essential; otherwise, how will you know you reached it?

Author’s Bio: Dipti Parmar, a digital marketing wiz is associated with E2M Solutions. She’s been journeying through the world of digital marketing for 6 years and is a blogger and networker. She’s also a movie buff and loves taking long walks by the seashore. She is @dipTparmar on Twitter.

How to Avoid Taking Out Large Loans to Fund Your Business

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By Bill Fay

Family, friends and even his college professors told Aidan Augustin he had a business idea worth pursuing, even if meant dropping out of college.

Augustin and his roommate, Neal Ormsbe, designed a smartphone application that would allow anyone attending a business conference to get connected to and stay connected with the speakers and other attendees at the conference.

The two were juniors majoring in engineering at the University of Florida, but everyone said the idea couldn’t wait, so they dropped out of school, gave the business a name, Feathr, and opened shop.

There was just one little obstacle left to overcome.

“Money,” Augustin said, citing the one little obstacle nearly every small business owner must overcome.

Augustin and Ormsbe figured they needed $50,000 to get started. That’s not big money, unless you happen to be 20-year-old college dropouts with meager savings and no assets.

“We knew banks wouldn’t want anything to do with us,” Augustin said.

Getting Started

Fortunately, family, friends and their college professors got them started. Their parents agreed to send the same money they would have sent if the two had stayed in school. Friends agreed to work for what amounted to minimum-wage salaries. Professors put some of their own money in the pot, and a small business was born.

It didn’t take Augustin long to learn why more than half of start-up businesses fail the first year.

“We needed a lot more money than we thought we would,” Augustin said. “We didn’t understand the realities of what it takes to run a business. We underestimated costs on everything.”

That includes the relationship costs when you take loans from people you know, with no guarantee you can pay them back.

“The conversations with our parents and friends got a little awkward because we couldn’t really show clear signs of progress,” Augustin said. “Professional investors know the risks involved so it’s a little easier to deal with them when you’re starting out.”

Making Gains

Augustin let Ormsbe and a couple of part-time employees do the development work the next year and devoted more of his time to fundraising. He started with the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, where he found $21,000 worth of backing.

Then he won a lottery that provided free tickets to a conference in Silicon Valley for software startups called the “Largest Hack-A-Thon In History.” It was sponsored by Barracuda Networks, which offered winners $25,000 and a seemingly endless supply of business contacts.

Augustin’s group beat 130 teams from all over the country and claimed the top prize. That led to a front-page article in his hometown paper, the Orlando Sentinel, and suddenly Feathr had some status.

“That article created a buzz about our company,” Augustin said.

Feathr picked up a $150,000 award from TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) and contacts from the Barracuda Networks conference resulted in the first product sales. The 2014 budget is up to $450,000, most of which will go to pay salaries for the 12 full-time employees now working at Feathr’s offices in Gainesville, Fla.

“We don’t having the living expenses they have in Silicon Valley or New York City or places like that, which is a huge advantage for us,” Augustin said. “We can use our money more efficiently to hire more people and pay them actual salaries they can live on.”

The best news is that Feathr, now in its third year of operation, still hasn’t needed a bank loan to stay in business.

“We sort of hopped and skipped from one funding source to another, but we’ve made it so far,” Augustin said. “We’re working to keep it going that way.”

In addition to the crowdfunding, and loans from friends and families that helped jumpstart Augustin’s small business, another option to consider is tapping an annuity. Entrepreneurs who have annuities could use those investments to finance their budding enterprises instead of taking out loans.

The great thing about an annuity is that it’s your money. It’s already there, and you are not borrowing from a lender; however, since the annuity operates as retirement income, there are penalties to taking cash out before retirement.

When you take funds out of your annuity early you can expect the following:

  • A 10 percent penalty on the taxable portion of the annuity is forfeited if you are under the age of 59 ½.
  • The tax deferral benefits are in place to encourage long-term retirement savings, so the fee is similar to what you would pay on an early withdrawal from an IRA.
  • In most cases, if you cash out early, you will have to pay surrender charges. If your annuity carries a surrender fee, you should try to wait until the fee no longer applies. Surrender charges generally start at 7 percent and decrease incrementally, usually by 1 or 2 percentage points each year, until they reach zero.
  • Earnings on annuities are considered ordinary income, so you must pay taxes on any earnings when you cash out your annuity. This is in addition to the 10 percent early withdrawal penalty.
Author’s Bio: Bill Fay is a writer for Annuity.org, focused mainly on news stories about the spending habits of families and government. He spent 21 years in the newspaper business and eight more in television and radio, dealing with college and professional sports, then seven forgettable years writing speeches and marketing materials for a government agency.

4 Fear Busters To Jumpstart Your Business

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By Kevin Kelly

In my latest book, DO! The Pursuit of Xceptional Execution, I interviewed entrepreneurs from around the world. They lead some of the world’s most compelling brands and companies, ranging from one to 3,000 employees, with turnovers from $100,000 to $130 million. I call them the Xceptionalists. They hail from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Bologna, Italy; from Des Moines, Iowa to Galway, Ireland. They run app companies, consultancies, clinics and sprawling technology corporations.

Given that half of all new business fail in the first five years, how did they deal with fear and survive their early failures?

1. Stop fearing feedback

Xceptionalists treat failures as feedback and a prelude to future success. Ben Milne of Dwolla said, “… I have failed in making adaptations to the product… I have failed at selecting business partners. I nearly went out of business three times in my career. When you are failing the key point is to just admit it. … The longer you drag it out the less chance you have.”

According to Peldi from Balsamiq. “Mistakes don’t really matter that much as long as you fix them straight away and put your hand up. … It is very much the lean start-up way: throw it out there and listen.”

Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it’s bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals. If you want to find the next big success, failure comes with the territory.

2. Face and floor it

In the early 1970’s, during the height of the political turmoil that rocked Northern Ireland, Agnes McCourt, owner of Unislim had a very frightening encounter with an armed and masked gunman, Agnes’s husband wanted to cease all business links in Northern Ireland and relocate to Southern Ireland. Agnes agreed to the house move but continued to develop the her business. Why? “In business, one has to be fearless and do what one’s inner voice tells you is the right thing,” she told me.

Devon Brooks co-founder of the unique women’s personal care business Blo Blow Dry Bars, was sexually assaulted and went through the ensuing harrowing judicial process. She made a personal commitment that she would never let her past get in the way of taking action. Devon told me, “Sometimes you live life, and sometimes life happens to you. But you always get to choose what you do about it.”

3. Find the source of the fear

Like many Xceptionalists, when fear raises its head, Patrick McKeown of Asthmacare had a strategy that works for him. He asks three questions:

  • What is the best possible outcome?
  • What is the worst possible outcome?
  • What outcome falls between the above two?

McKeown says entrepreneurs who survive in the long term take calculated risks, and tend not to take monumental courses of action with their head stuck in the sand. So the fear has no gone away, they just understand it a little better.

4. Flow floors fear

For our Xceptionalists from Brazil, WeDemand.com, fear was never an issue. They have been so immersed in an industry they love, they haven’t had the time or the inclination to be afraid. “I would tell entrepreneurs not to be afraid. If you sit around and just wish about your idea, nothing will happen. All you can lose is money and there is no shame in trying,” said cofounder Bruno Natal.

So in essence, there is nothing to fear. The challenge for you the entrepreneur is to find your passion and make fear history.

See more extracts from Kevin Kelly’s new book “Do! The pursuit of Xceptional Execution”

Author’s Bio: Kevin is an internationally acclaimed leadership and motivational speaker and best selling author. For more information: http://www.kevinkellyunlimited.com.

When’s the Right Time to Expand Your Small Business?

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By Ben Thomas

Your first few steady customers are finally paying all your bills – and as celebration-worthy as that is, it also raises new questions in need of executive answers. Where are the next few customers or clients going to come from? What’s a reasonable advertising budget – and how much is too much? How will hiring a new employee (or three) or renting some new space impact your rate of expansion?

Questions like these can make your small business’s first expansion feel at least as stressful as your initial launch – but a little intuitive knowledge of your expansion’s objectives, boundaries and processes can reduce even the most complex decisions down to simple “yes” or “no” analyses. Here, three small-business experts share the analytical strategies that have become second nature to them as they’ve progressed through their own business expansions.

Flow like water

There’s an old saying that water is stronger than rock, because water never cracks – it just reshapes itself to fit whatever surroundings it’s in. The exact same principle holds true in business: The more your expansions – and shrinkages, if and when those come – all follow naturally from the size and shape of your market, the less likely you’ll be to overextend yourself and fragment your team.

In other words, the clearest signs that it’s time to expand are those that make it harder and harder not to: When you’ve got so many customers that sales are slowing you down; when products are selling out too quickly for your space to hold onto stock; when you find yourself giving a lot of referrals for a service you could be providing – and so on. In cases like these, there’s probably no reason to delay an expansion, even if it feels a little intimidating.

“When we started, we only had a small space and we only had one room,” says Donna Alexander, founder and president of Anger Room. “But we started getting so much publicity, and so many customers coming in, that we actually had to start turning people away. And that was like a big neon sign: ‘OK, it’s time to get a bigger space.’”

By the same token, the clearest signs that you’ve overextended your business are those that feel like hitting some kind of wall: When the money you’re pouring into new ads and/or spaces isn’t correlating with any return; when training a new employee is slowing down sales; when you find yourself starting to give referrals simply because you can’t handle the volume – and so on. Although these signs don’t necessarily mean that you can’t expand, they do point to the fact that you’ve got some bugs that need to be worked out.

Scan for indicators

Even if you’re not drowning in customers, your interactions with the customers you do have can serve as strong indicators about whether it’s time for an expansion – and if so, what direction that expansion should take.

“You’ve got to listen to your market, because with every sale – or lack of a sale – those people are telling you what you do for them, and if you could be doing more, or doing something differently,” says Carolyn Andrews, a certified business and executive coach with Actioncoach. “One of the most important things about timing your expansion is looking at how your market perceives you.”

It doesn’t take a market research firm to find out how your customers feel – it just takes some mutually honest conversations.

Those conversations will come in handy as you analyze the shape your sales are taking, and the reasons why. Which products or services are you selling more or less of than usual? What changes in your market could account for those shifts in sales? What’s your competition doing in response? Does their response leave a new vacuum into which you can expand? “Having a really solid handle on what’s happening in your market is crucial,” Andrews says, “and it’s so much easier to get personal insight into your market’s behavior when you listen to what customers are saying to you.”

Andrews advises looking for “green lights” on all three indicators – positive customer conversations, promising sales analysis and under-adaptive competitor behavior – before you make the leap into your expansion. “When you analyze your potential for expansion in terms of those three indicators,” she says, “you end up with one simple answer: a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’”

Jump straight in

Leaping into your expansion isn’t just a figure of speech – the only way to be sure your expansion will succeed is to throw everything you’ve got (yourself included) into it.

“In the end, there’s no such thing as a perfect time to expand,” says Stacy Deprey-Purper, founder and CEO of Better Business Together. “But you and your staff still have to jump in with a ‘whatever-it-takes’ attitude, because that’s where your reputation, your customer need and your buzz ultimately come from.”

Still, jumping in doesn’t mean jumping blind. So take as much time as you can afford and draw up a clear plan for your expansion, including employee roles, steps of the expansion, timing projections and so on. “I say that everybody needs a plan… so they can deviate from it,” Deprey-Purper says. “You don’t need a detailed long-term plan, but you need to have some idea of what you’ll be spending and where it’s going to go. I had a client the other day who spent $50,000 on decorations for his restaurant, which ate up 99 percent of his marketing budget.” In short, check that your plan makes sense as a whole before you start throwing money at specific parts of it.

A trusted group of advisers can help on that front – and that can mean a business coach, other successful entrepreneurs, consumers in your market or even a lawyer. “We were once approached by a group of investors who seemed very kind and polite in person, but who actually wanted to take over our company,” Alexander recalls. “When we sat down to sign the paperwork, they suddenly told us, ‘We want 90 percent of the company, and you’ll get the other 10.’ Luckily we’d hired a lawyer to look over the papers for us.” It’s situations like this that demonstrate why it’s vital to have some professional second-guessers in your corner.

At the same time, though, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re the boss, and that the decision depends on your instincts in the end. “If you’ve got too much thinking and not enough doing,” Deprey-Purper says, “you can overthink yourself out of taking action. No matter how much planning you do, you’ll always get some curveballs – and you have to take those as opportunities to learn about your business and plow forward.”

Author’s Bio: Ben Thomas writes about careers in marketing, among other business career fields, for The Riley Guide.

Book Review: Insightful Knowledge, by Stephen Monaco

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Book review: Insightful Knowledge: An Enlightened View of Social Media Strategy & Marketing By Stephen Monaco

“When it comes to creating a social media marketing strategy companies must get their head around a simple concept. The objective is not to excel at social media per se. The objective is to effectively utilize social media to help your business excel.” Stephen Monaco, Insightful Knowledge

Let me start this book review by stating that this is not a how-to book.

Insightful knowledge offers a foundation for anyone who aspires to be a “champion” for integrating social media with their marketing mix.

Valuable lessons, statistics, and examples abound in this high level look at social media strategy. Stephen Monaco’s roots in traditional marketing run deep, as he was one of the early pioneers in the tech industry.

The first third of the book is groundwork, carefully laying out how we arrived at this crazy point in time where the power has shifted from the big brands to the consumers. It’s necessary to absorb this history if you want any chance of leveraging the forces at work.

Who should read this book? I’d recommend it for anyone who needs to convince colleagues that social media will support their business strategy, for anyone who wants a coherent explanation of why social media is not a fad but a major shift, or for those who have just started putting together a social media strategy for their organization.

My only criticism is that the “voice” of the book is pretty dry and statistical, but it’s exactly the type of unemotional, hard-core information that will appeal if you’re trying to convince the C-suite to do something, so perhaps that’s a necessary evil.

Key Lessons for Aspiring Social Media Champions

  • Obsess about your customers’ needs, and shift your thinking from sales to marketing
  • Look for ways that social media can enhance all areas of your business, not just marketing
  • Be methodical about creating a social media strategy, but leave room for tactical adjustments
  • Put listening at the top of your list, and use what you learn to serve customers better
  • Pay attention to which tactics are resulting in conversions, however you define conversion
  • Don’t be afraid to experiment, iterate on your plan continually
  • Don’t ever lose sight of your business goals, and make sure your social media efforts always tie back to your Key Performance Indicators.

If you’re looking for a compelling case for including social media in your business strategy, pick up this insightful book and start taking notes.

Disclosure: I received a free digital copy of the book for review purposes, however, this did not in any way impact the content of my review, which represents my own honest opinion.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee