Aspiring entrepreneurs / Entrepreneurs in UK, StreetEntrepreneurs is a place where you can come, share and learn about entrepreneurship. I attended the street entrepreneurs meet twice and it was really informative. Thanks to Alan, Bruce, David and Jo-Anne for organising meet ups. The meet will happen every second Wednesday of the month. The next meeting will happen on 11th of August 2010 at All-Bar-One, St Vincent Street at West Nile Street, Glasgow, you can contact jo-anne@  suzy@  alan@  bruce@  david@streetentrepreneurs.com to register with opt-in mailing list.

Yesterday, I attended a session about protecting your idea in the pre-patent phase. Thanks to Alan who taught us an unconventional way without investing any enough money to protect the idea which was really helpful. Though it was not foolproof idea, but it was an idea that can worth try.

Finally, I found some interesting thing yesterday, the majority of participants were females. It was really interesting and surprising for me that more females are taking their career path as entrepreneurship.

eMetrics marketing optimization summit London has been announced the event date is 17-18 May 2010 and the venue is Grand Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden. The main theme of the event is “How to optimize your value of online marketing?“. A lot marketing managers, web analysts and business intelligence experts will be participating. This event will be very valuable for companies and individuals who are looking on the online marketing opportunities. You can expect following from the events.

• Meet the industry thought leaders and experts
• Discover the basics in WAA Workshops
• Explore advanced topics in Post Summit Workshops
• Compare insights with industry leaders, consultants, and peers
• Identify and realise your desired outcomes from this event
• See hands-on demonstrations of the latest tools in action
• Walk away with specific answers to your specific questions and specific solutions to your specific problems

As we are the blog partner of the event all the iamaceo readers will get a 15% discount, you can provide discount code of “IAMA010” while registration.

From my own personal experience “only cash can make cash”. So it is important to have eye on your business cash flow, whether it is a small scale or large business. Some years ago I read the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. He mentioned about cash flow and how to handle cash in the book. But initially I was not ready to admire his words “only cash can make cash” but sooner or later I realized that the key to success relies how effectively you manage your cash flows. Even if you are making profit from your business if you are not generating enough cash flows at the end of the day the business will flunk. If you are able to manage your cash inflow > cash outflow you are in positive cash flow, obviously this means the company is profitable.

Look at this picture they are trying to make the cash flow positive but you can see that the obligation of previous month is still there then how can they make cash flow positive?

1) Negotiate with your supplier for delayed payment. For instance piggyback your this month payment to next month ending so that you can get time to collect money from your customer.

2) Cut unnecessary operational cost. Don’t purchase any items which are not critical for the business. For example your company need transportation it is not a good idea to buy vehicle, instead hire it. Once you hire a vehicle you don’t need to worry about its maintenance, tax insurance etc.

3) Be selective about customers. Try to get customers with good credit history. You can buy those reports from credit agencies where in you will get the full details of payments, credit ratings etc. You can also select customers without good credit history by availing a deposit for using the service.

4) Accurately raise the invoices. Poor administration and handling of invoices delays payment.

5) Re-arrange customer payment cycle. This is very effective if you are doing some service business with a monthly payment. A simple example is if you can re-arrange the cycle and raise the invoice by 20th of every month with a due date on next month beginning collection can be very effective because most of the customers will get salaries at the end of the month so can pay money easily.

6) Offer early settlement discounts. Offer discounts for early settlements, but the downside is it will affect the profitability. Remember one penny today is not one penny tomorrow it is much more depends upon the interest rate. In this case we have to take net present value of the payment into consideration.

7) Compel customer to avail direct debit by offering some difference in transaction charges.

8 ) Diversify your customer base. It is not good to have a 2 or 3 service contract to run a business. Payment delay in any client will affect your cash flow there might be chance for the business to meet financial obligation.

9) Payment reminders, this is very effective sending reminders to the customer compels for payment.

10) Use a third party to collect your debts, make sure that the agency is reputable and recommended by people.

11) Consolidate your loans, if your business have multiple loans consolidate the loan with a single bank and negotiate the interest rates.

Remind Cash is the life blood  of business, so if you are not able to manage cash inflows and outflows don’t do business.

Outbound marketing is dead whether its a product or it is a service, that is applicable for job hunting also. You are sending your resume to companies for a particular job where 1000 of millions of people send their resumes, it is really hard to get an entry. Moreover 60% of the whole jobs are not advertised and they employ mostly through personal references.

The best way to find entrance is to identify your sneezer’s.  Sneezer’s are people who can help refer you to the right place at the right time, also they can market you. They might have the right commanding power to recommend you to the place.  By identifying your sneezer’s you are essentially converting yourself as a inbound marketing product.

Where can you find your sneezer’s?

1. Go to different networking Events and network with people who are in the same segment you are interested in. Pitch yourself to them and get in touch with them regularly make him/her as a friend.
2. Join different LinkedIn groups which you are interested in and contribute your thoughts in various discussions. Try to be a “purple cow” answering questions in the discussion(s). Not like I second this point that guy and all.
3. Finally create your own portfolio and brand yourself in professional social networks.

The most important thing when you are at starting up a business is to find a mentor who will advocate for you. The mentor means someone who can help you to grow and act as a business advocate and introduce you to business community. One more important thing is that this mentor can be your investor in future or he can refer you to the right investor. We can name these kind of people who invest in your business initially with reference from the mentor or the mentor itself an “Angel Investor”.

Potentially angel investor can be a family investor (parents or relatives), relationship investor (co-workers or friends who knows your potential of idea and you as a person), reference investor (those who don’t know you or your idea but they know the people who referred you they convert the trust in the person who refer into business) or idea investor (investor who may works in the same sector which your business targets).

Things to be keep in mind while approaching angel investor from my personal experience

1) Due diligence: The investor should be take care of the business from big harm that may affect the business. The potential harm can be financial loss, legal problems, business risks etc.

2) Experience: It is better to select “idea investor” as your angel because investor can help you to grow by giving strategic advice to the business situations and also able to provide industry insights.

3) Make Investor a active participator:  This will give double effects for the business to grow.

4) Negotiate proper terms and regulation: This is very important to agree with pre-defined terms and regulation before agreeing to the investments. The terms should include the working policies, lock in periods, share transfer policies etc. Lock in periods are very important because of the uncertainty about the idea or business and effort the innovator should put through for a certain period of time.

5) Share transfer: Agree upon the investment and share transfer periods. It is not a good decision to get entire investment and transfer the entire stake agreed initially, because there is no sense in getting the money and depositing it in the bank. Make the investment and period wise (say for eg monthly or quarterly) according to your requirements and transfer shares accordingly upon the money invested in the business.This will also gives a good cash flow in the business. If the business doesn’t require capital to go ahead stop getting money from the investor, this will give you a better liquidity of share.

6) Second round investments: If the business want more money to grow, it is not a good idea to get money from the same investor because your % shares will severely be affected.

7) CA firms: Keep another CA firm rather than using the same chartered accountant firm of the angel investor.

And finally the best way to get an angel investor is to approach the best chartered accountancy firm at your place. The truth behind this is chartered accountants know who has the real money to invest and their background experience.

This seems to be funny right, but this is one way to retain employees in start-up companies. May be the way is not ethical but somehow if your intention is good this is a simple way. This is advisable if the founder have the vision to achieve the objective but he is not able to make the employees happy during the maturity cycle.

Scenario planning is one of the effective tool to analyze future prospective of your business. But that doesn’t mean that forecasting the future,  it is looking at all the possibilities of the future.

Your requirement to conduct Scenario planning

• Good team (5 – 8 members) who can think diversely
• Get 2 different colored of “Post It” notes (For instance Yellow & light blue)
• White board

Stage 1

Appoint a Facilitator, if possible make it external facilitator so that he can have neutral opinion about the problems.

Identifying knowledge gaps.

Knowledge gaps are likely to be in strategic nature in organizational level. This is the identification of issue in the organization or the project which may create critical impact on the organization or for the project, which is an uncertainty which may have severe impact over time. If you can categorize and create uncertainties according to social, technological, economic, ecological, political, legal it will be really great.

Note down all the uncertainties in yellow post it. This is basically the brainstorming process, wherein all the team members identify uncertainties. The most important thing while identifying uncertainties is be clear about the uncertainty, that means don’t write an ambiguous uncertainty.

Stage 2

Exploring the scenario context

First thing to do in this stage is interviewing the team members. Ask questions about the problems in the order of Future, Present & Past. Record their feedback, this should be comprehensive and accurate. Collate and analyze the result of interview process prepare a good report, set your agenda and circulate it. The next process is very critical, invite remarkable people to see the report and check the validity of the assumptions and criteria’s which taken into consideration.

Stage 3

Developing the scenario scripts

In this stage team should identify the driving forces and test its outcome. Driving forces are major source of change that impact future it can be  either predictable or unpredictable. Individual members in the team records those driving forces in “postits” and also for each driving forces, record 2 polar outcomes. The driving forces and outcomes should be numbered in such a way so that we can easily be clustered later. The fundamental thing to be take care while identifying driving forces is the ambiguity of the driving forces it should be unambiguous, that means anyone can understand the uncertainty in a single reading and make a sense of single meaning.

The next process is to clutter the related driving forces from the driving forces that are contributed by the team member. Name the clusters using short titles, again make sure that it should be unambiguous and also the title should encapsulate the full content of the cluster. The next process is to draw “cause and effect” relationships between the driving forces inside each clusters. If any of the uncertainty cannot be linked with any “cause and effect” relationships, then it does not belongs to the particular cluster.

The next process is to rank the cluster headings in a high / low impact and high / low predictability in a 2 dimensional space. This should be done asking everyone in the team to rank according to them. A simple debate can be done to identify the positions of cluster name in the 2×2 dimensional matrix space. After the ranking, select 2 (A & B) cluster name which is believed to have a highest impact on the business problem and also highest level of uncertainty over the potential outcome.

After selecting two scenario dimension A & B do a brainstorm and name all 4 possible futures according to the scenario dimension selected and record it in a 2×2 dimensional matrix space. Include all the polar outcomes we recorded for all the driving force in appropriate 4 future space. This require some brainstorming and agreement between team members.

Split the team into four groups and each group design any of the story line. The task is to produce logical “cause and effect” relationship using the outcomes and design the future of the business problem, the outcomes should be interlinked with cause and effect relationship. Present the story line to other team members and argue and test the logic.

Stage 4

Do Stakeholder Analysis

Test the understanding of the business problem with the stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who are interlinked with the business problem. For eg: If we are doing a scenario planning for the growth of the country, stakeholders includes Ministers, common people, professionals, scientists economist etc. Describe the story line to them and check the logic of the story lines. Refine the story line if there is any logical mistakes or go ahead to the next stage.

Stage 5

Iceberg analysis

The iceberg analysis is a three level analysis of the events. At the top level the event itself and at the second level which are the trends and pattern which may cause the event and the bottom level shapes the trends and pattern with a high level of consistency.

Stage 6

Impact organizational thinking and acting

Execute the different strategies according to the scenario designed by the team in the organization. Change management is very important in implementing strategies in the organization. Employees might not welcome all the changes imparted to them. It is easy for the companies that follow agile operations strategy to implement change management.

The scenario planning process cannot be explained from a blog post, but I think this post will be useful to start off. You can use this report also. For more reference read the book “The Sixth Sense” by Kees van der Heijden, Ron Bradfield, George Burt, George Cairns & George Wright.

London Heathrow airport is one of the world’s business airport in terms of international passengers traffic in second in the world in total passengers traffic. This airport is an example for efficient utilization of resources, terrific operational strategy.

This is an operation strategy used to achieve high level of performance and quality. The three principal of TQM are

1) Customer satisfaction
2) Employee involvement
3) Continuous improvement in performance

The TQM Wheel

Ref