Barry W Thornton Blog

Over the last 6-month I have witnessed some of the worst pitches and presentations I have seen in 40-years of starting and pitching companies.

At a session at Tech Ranch late last year, I watched some poor guy do his best to pitch his invention (software) and dream, he hit the listeners like gelatin thrown on a Teflon© wall; stopped dead, slide off. In the critique afterward, I spoke up and we discussed where and why the connection failed, and how to effect change so that the connection would be made.

He asked me if I was a coach, I said “No, I am a Do-er”. Everyone laughed, I got Kudos, etc.

What a frick’n fool I was. Hello? Opportunity knocking?

Those of you the know me well see the perhaps misanthropic, cynical at least, side of my vision of us, the people. You also know my success at pitching an idea or product; I like to think of it as theatrical intelligence spawned by that cynicism. In fact, I really understand that it is magic in the strictness sense of the word, that is attraction at a distance, the casting of a spell, or glamour. Some can do it all the time, those who are good at it are called thought leaders and they change other people’s life-course to align with theirs. Is that what you want to do or be?

I can do that with any topic because I understand human nature (happens as you get old) and have the emotional empathy to inhale my fellow man, you could say ‘I was born this way’, but I know I learned it.

Anyway, I did the guy who flopped a great disservice. I should have said YES and changed his life.

I read his human interfacing strengths and flaws in a heartbeat (OK, in maybe a few dozen heartbeats). I’ve seen his movie a couple of times before, I knew how and what small changes were needed to get him past this self-imposed hurdle. In a little more time I could get him to be an effective persuader, and to get from zero to plus one in his plan. Then only happy customers and some imparted wisdom about spreading power can help him from there.

All that I needed to do was spend a little time and focus on him and his thoughts, do some guiding and provisioning, and the rest is just theatrically coaching him to produce his show through practice and disciple. And yes, you can teach improv. Heck, we do improvisation just about every time we talk to each other.-

To the guy I described, if you happen to read this and remember, forgive me, I apologize, I could have made your life a lot easier with few personal and intense hours instead of a flippant shortsighted remark. I was a schmuck. “Sometimes to learn you must feel the fool,” so one of my colleagues tells me!

What about you? Are you at that point, adrift and blocked by yourself, or you got it moving and now are going to be run over by or strangled by inertia? If it is real for you, you are doing it and this stage is overwhelming maybe I can help. I can show you to stop pitching and start persuading…with theater and magic. Just maybe. . . for it depends on you.

Thanks, Barry

I received a note from James on my blog about fighting the price battle in a salesman’s mind, he notes:

“What if the problem is the inability to listen and the urge to react without thinking it through? Sometimes I think that’s why we are going downhill.”

Thank you James, good insights and I agree with you.  I don’t think I can find many who will argue that the school system stopped teaching critical and analytical thinking as well as listening a long time ago so the problem is not recent.

But the sales process is designed to handle this.  Given that the basic sales dance consists of:

1 - Introduction - establish credibly and trust

2 - Define the problem you are addressing to get everyone clear on the terms and on the same page

3 - Present a solution that has value to the customer, explain that value proposition, answer clarifying questions

4 - Do a ground clearing Close (push the customer to a start making choices).

5 - Objections - Listen to the objections from the customer, go back to #2 with a modified presentation. Loop through #2 through #5 until until there is either a close, you progress to the next Gate Keeper, you agree to meet again with more data, or they carry your broken body out the door.

Built into this process is the ability to handle James’ issues if you instead have ‘the ability to listen and the personal power to think it through” (thanks James).

This means you must be clever and devious in many ways.  It all falls on the salesman’s brain, dummies don’t sell well.  In fact sales is one of the highest mental arts there is.  All that stuff about rocket scientists, mathematician, etc. is a load of snow (I know, I am one).  They don’t require 1/10 the mental effort as does a good salesman.  In science you have years to figure out the truth of a matter - in sales you have only minutes, maybe only seconds to figure it out, make a plan, and act on that plan.  I find sales infinitely more fun and exhilarating than sitting my office working on epiphanies, which goes to the heart of the matter - nothing ever happens until a  sale is made!

Great ideas happen all the time (and most have little or no value), great closes are as rare as flowers in a snowstorm and even more valuable because they make the world work.

Just about every Sunday I race my sailboat in a fleet out on the lake I live by. We try to go for just over 2 hours, depending on the wind and that means a course of 5 to 15 miles. I have a big boat and race other folks with big boats, we all depend on our crews to make the boat work right, to squeeze the best possible speed at all times on all tacks. We have a strategist, a tactician, guys who make the motor perform (in this case the motor is the sails), and some who drives the boat. We have a management team. For those of you who care, the driver is not in charge (more about that in a later blog).

After 2 and half hours and miles of water on a nice sunny day you can win or lose by an inch, which in that sense is no different that a foot, a yard, a furlong, or a league; you lose and that’s it. It means that every second of the race is critical and any mistakes can be fatal in terms of getting to the finish line first. Because we all make mistakes the general rule is that the guy who makes the fewest mistakes that day wins. Sure you can be second, or third, and still get iron (a trophy at the end of the event), but, well, you understand. Oh yea, there’s nothing for fourth place.

I depend on a team, skill and communication are critical, mistakes happen and they suck, there is no time off, once you cross the start line you are in the on mode for every second until you cross the finish. Let your attention drift on for a minute and you pay the bill.

Martin Luther King used to talk about keeping your eye on the prize, don’t get distracted or diverted, always focus on why you are there.

Does that sound anything like business?

Welcome to shared realities.

Over the last couple of years the mantra FREE has become a big deal in software and web stuff, the idea has attracted my attention but couldn’t see an application. I always looked at it as attracting bottom feeders. How do you build revenues when you give it away? (I know, you get them later or with more features or threaten to cut them off when they get used to it or some other scheme, but it was always about incremental cheap stuff.)

What do you do when your product cost $40k+, can you make that free too?

In some cases, yes. I made us one of those cases so we did it.  We give the hardware free at our dealers. Oh, and by the way, I make more income this way than I ever could selling it. In fact I raised the price to make sure no one buys it so they have to go the free route.

Confused, OK, mine is a special case. I have a product that renders a billable service.  Too expensive to sell easily and without a major marketing effort.

It dawned on me that since the word DISCOUNT sucks when you are on the selling side of the equation that the opposite of MSRP had to be FREE.   I simply said, let me put  it into your place for nothing and let’s split the revenues it generates.  You never buy it, I always own it, you sell the service, and collect the money which we split. Simple, not necessarily a new idea, but one I had never tried. All my life I have sold products as in it becomes yours and you do with it what you want, with it.  I go on to fine a new customer,

Anyway, some folks call it the ATM or Vending machine model.

It is great new world for me.  Now your customer is my customer too because we both get money from them. Turns out there are other benefits too. I now get to see inside a bunch of different ‘retailers” and since it’s in my best interest for the retailer to be very very good at selling and delivering our now shared service, and because of this relationship I have a say in how they do it (if they don’t do well I can take my unit back and get someone else to make money with it), I can make them better even against their will, or perhaps awareness. I learn best practices by watching the good ones and make the poor one learn how to do it right, they have no choice, they make great money with me and that is the glue. If ego gets in the way, if they are dorks, if they are screwing up the market, whatever it is that makes them a poor performer or a pain, I can now fix or flee but I don’t have to suffer. And the revenue flows literally forever.

So I say “Thank You to FREE”, it works in ways I had never imagined.

That’s why we must always learn and adapt.

I have found that most really good closers while highly applauded also frequently scare the you know what out of sales management. They are not dependent thus essentially uncontrollable, mess with them and they go on to greener pastures.

There is an old tome that goes ‘feed the winners, starve the losers (the idea behind commission sales). If you can figure out a way to scale the salesman’s volume then there is no problem then you get the best of all worlds. But typically scaling sales requires time and time is a fixed resource. 60 to 80 hours a week means that the salesman has no life left, eventually this will cause them to move on and you will have a giant hole to try to fill.

Raise the reward for what you get to get more (efficiency)? The fact is that there is only so much margin in a product. Add to this the problem is that management’s ego can only handle so much difference in pay, when the managed guy makes a lot more than the manager a whole new set of problems occur.

So how to you as a manager scale sales people?

Offer enough reward and they will put up with you?

Do that silly team training and motivation thing? Makes you as a manager feel good, but wastes their time, after all salesmen are hunters of other men’s souls in a way, they do it alone, you bring them together for your benefit, not theirs.

So how do you scale?

Brutal answer is you fire people to do it, you filter, get rid of the losers, try and try again to find winners. I call it voluntary turnover, you volunteer to turn over the poor ones to get good ones. What is makes it all harder is rarely can you tell what a salesman can do from his past record. He may have been good at the last place he worked but that says little about your place, it only suggests, it doesn’t guarantee. You have to be ready to turn them as fast as you get them until you hit gold. Hard but real.

I have commented in the past on the fact that most sales people are clerks, they take orders, kiss the appropriate places on the customer’s body, and really don’t bring home the bacon. In many ways this is good from some business’s viewpoint, it assures that the sales folks essentially MRs (thanks to the Firesign Theater*, MRs are Multiple-Revendables as in disposables). Replace them frequently.

Can you scale sales this way? Two answers, only without competition is one, the other is that Marketing does the closing so Marketing becomes the salesman. Remember, clerks don’t take business away from others, salesmen do.

So in the competitive environment of the 21^st Century how do you scale? Differentiation in the offering, Value Proposition, pricing, messaging or the like? Some or all of that works for a while but unless the completion is brain-dead it is only a short-term solution. The fact is that you need two things, differentiation to kick start and closers to take business away from someone else and finish. Both say that you will always moving, changing what you have to offer and taking someone else’s customer to offer it to. In essence, doing and seeking.

That’s why I call it foraging. How long do think mankind has been foraging for the next meal?  Have we figured it out yet?

*If you have never listened to the FireSign Theater of 40 years ago you are spending time learning what the past could have thought you about today, Their deadly accurate prediction of the then future culture that we live in today has saved me a lot of time. It’s that old ‘I’ve seen this movie before’ forward looking hindsight that is one of the visions that let’s me cut to the chase and reality check with such ease.

I have a friend who used to be a great salesman and is now a virtual failure. He has confidence, will charge in, will persist, has energy, can say the right things, and still fails. I used to think the problem was an issue of fear, now closer observation and consideration makes me think the problem is more one of the misplaced need for acceptance. Needs and wants are very different drives. Emotions can drive needs, wants are intellect driven. The passion of need leads to comprise, the passion of want leads to structure. Needs limit perception, wants expand them.

Assuming that what I offer you has value to you, if I need to sell it to you and you won’t buy it, the need emotion overwhelms and generates desperation that stinks, you will smell it and dominate the situation thus control me.

If I want to sell you something and you won’t buy then I will likely go away, you will have to call me back thus we have parity, neither of us will dominate the situation and there is no control, just a transaction.

My friend’s need for acceptance has swamped out his wants, try as he might, he is a victim when he should be a participant. No sale is made.

Needs are irrational, wants aren’t.

One character issue we assume in good sales people is confidence, there is a whole industry of consultants that claim to be masters of this. Let me offer another view that is what we think of as confidence can in fact be indifference, indifference to rejection, fear, opinion, and the word no. Confidence is a state-of-mind wrapped in emotion, indifference is a state-of-mind wrapped in logic. Emotions are ephemeral, logic is eternal.

Indifference is cold, thoughtful, analytic, and liberating. Without the personal emotional attributes of confidence one appears to be confident in action yet free to be highly perceptive of the reality of a situation and thus its master. Confidence is a projection, frequently competitive in nature. Indifference to confidence is the root of power over a situation. Ever watch to confident sales people with opposing views clash, one must win by overpowering the other. Confidence and indifference is like a jujitsu match, the indifferent party takes the confident one’s energy and uses it to convert thoughts. Let me remind you that the assumption here is that both parties want to win and that is defined as one changing the other mind. Both are equally driven, both have the same goal.

Let me remind you that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Love and hate are both passions, both emotions which blind the user. If you are indifferent to the passions they are easy to manipulate and dominate. If you are indifferent to the passions then they are easy to embrace with control and become part of the tool box that makes you flexible to the situation. This kind of truth lets you use passions as needed without your own passions getting in the way. This kind of knowledge mixed with action is real power, which is what is really about to make a sale.

Does this sound strange; I hope you think so, because the point of this wordjive was to make you think about it.

Welcome to Hard Times, not a town in a Henry Fonda Western but your front door. Everyone wants a discount, times are tough, they are special, everyone knows that you make too much anyway.

Your salesman are weakening, they don’t have a clue about selling the value of the product or service even though they read all the books, watch the CDs and you bring in ‘Experts” to prop them up.

I always felt that in general there are three weak spots in sales people that no one wants to deal with:

First, your salesmen are nice people. To be blunt you don’t necessarily want nice people, you want people who can be nice. You want people who have an almost vicious determination to get the sale at the terms they want; nice is one of the many tools they use to do. A good high-value closer is, just below the surface, well, not a nice person. That is cool, most of us deep inside know we may not be the nicest folks in that what we will do to someone else’s head to achieve our goal has limited bounds.

Was that a distasteful thought we just went through, feel that I am being insensitive and maybe even hurtful in what I advocate. If so you really don’t want to go any further with me in the realities I will be exploring in this series, go find a more sunshiny blog to read, one about kittens and puppies perhaps.

Second, your salesmen don’t have the faith. They don’t have the faith that they can close the deal the way you want them to. The suffer from the ‘Stockholm Syndrome”, they sympathize with the customer and surrendered their own will. Lacking willpower means no Force-Of-Will. It is Force-Of-Will that keeps the good salesman working on the customers head until the customer believes the value proposition that justifies the cost of the product. The good salesman instills faith about him, the company, and the products in the customer’s mind. Only then is the value of the product or service well enough established that the discount is not the winning issue, faith drives the discount aside. It’s called a Value Proposition for a darn good reason.

Third, is Cohunes – Brass Balls. Some look at this as a lack of pride, the willingness to interact with people to n-th degree with a sole purpose. Don’t confuse this with Force-Of-Will, there is a fine and important difference. Force-Of-Will is about drive, Cohunes is about welding that Willpower without being bothered what people think of you. It is about using that drive, which is beyond having it.

Point of it all is that good sales people are animals inside, mental animals with few external signs of what is really going on inside themselves. True stealth creatures, how cool!

Let’s talk about salesmen for a bit.

First thought. It is said with confidence that 45% of salesmen don’t close. Personally I think this number is low, but I will run with the convention for this Blog.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t bring home the order, it simply means that in most cases they take the order, not develop it, THEY DON’T CLOSE! They function as clerks, not sales people, but of course they claim all the credit. In fact they will claim more credit for the sale because they know their weakness and will lie to cover it.

Because we managers are only interested in results we generally don’t seek to understand the difference. The problem is that this means we are out of control, our salesman’s performance is capricious, based on luck and Marketing in many ways. Is this bad? After all, we got the sale.

It is terrible for several reasons:

1 – We don’t know which of our efforts (marketing or sales) made the event happen, so where do we pour our limited resources, more marketing or more commissions?

2 – We loose predictability, the data about our sales pipeline is false or weak at best. If the salesman is really clerking then he in fact is doing three things.

A – Operating in the blind, most likely deceiving himself in the process.

B – Deceiving us, in essence selling us, most likely lying to us.

C – Not developing the customer meaning that customer retention is going to be harder and we are not getting maximum yield for that customer.

This lack of clear vision means that the actual effectiveness of our Marketing is not really understood, without this feedback Marketing cannot better tune itself, understand the success of that they are doing, get better at it.

Most important, we have a B or C player working for us in a time when A-players are on the market. If we understood the truth we could replace him with an A-player thus future-proof our company by increasing our overall quality of the process, moral, and power of our selling force.

I hope you like your clerks.

Hi there, I have been off-line for about two months doing the 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week thing bringing life to a bootstrap start-up I started, fitting the family in has left no time to think or write about anything not related to product development and then sales of my stuff. But this is not about me; it’s about customers and sales.

My product caters to the contemporary Carriage Trade. What’s that you say (I heard that you know, these blogs are two-way . . . sometimes, depends on if I a listening, and I have selective hearing)? Carriage Trade refers to the retailers of old who had no front door; you could only get in by having your carriage enter through a portal to a vestibule. That’s class-

Prices are very high, margins are, well, GREAT. But it is an emotional sale that deals with vanity. The point is that after all this work anyone in my company that even mentions the word ‘discount’ is looking for a pink slip. A killer value prop, and oh yea, we don’t even advertise and sales are, well, justifying it all.

High price, niche market with almost universal appeal, lots of pull. How do you do it?

First of all most other entrepreneurs I run across are thinking in old (10 years ago, how long is that . . . let me tell you, a long f**king time ago!) models, too much internet, failure to really understand the tribal approach, lousy sensitivity to customers, too much sensitivity to people like themselves thinking they are the customer, incremental product, and most fundamentally little or no transformational qualities (see Pine and Gillmore, it’s all about the leading edge of the new-old economy).

Thus you now have all the clues to figure it out. Am I going to tell you how to think to find your own version of my path.

Hell No!

I can’t. Like the old crazy Werner Erhard dude said, even if I tell you, you won’t get IT. It’s not intellectual, it’s emotional, you have to feel it, and there is no way that I tell you how to feel something, you learn to feel it by picking up the bread crumbs such as those I have dropped above, fill in the blank spaces, “feel the Force Luke”, your intuition will tell you. Then you do something entirely crazy, you take the leap, ignore all those SOBs that try to tell you what is right, commit, go crazy, and win the day.

Welcome to the new-old world. Go kick your bankers butt.

Adaos Amigos.

Barry the Curmudgeon

Thank you David Farragut, yes, forget the torpedoes, open up the throttle and kick your life into gear.

We may be looking at the great but final age of the Entrepreneur as we know it. I have a theory that I call the “moo-cow” society. It has nothing to do with politics, or economics, it has to do with society in general and the political/economic reality that drives. I see a world 40 years from now (2 generations that is) where we Type-A characters are, well, lets just say there are a lot fewer of us, and our “A-ism” has an entirely different focus. A society of forced equals where everybody has pretty much the same and conformal. We get a handle on poverty at the cost of the general wealth of the top-end and diversity at the cost of uniqueness. I see this not because of any social justice or morality issue, but simply because that’s the way you put 13 billion people on this planet without them all trying to kill each other. We practice a form of husbandry on the herd of mankind to get predictable and controllable results. Fortunately I will be dead because I find this repugnant, but this is only an opinion and oh, by the way, I am not asking you to believe my theory.

But if I am even close to right, for all this to happen, we really need to be the last generation of unconstrained go-getters. The entrepreneur way of life as we know it needs to change so as to be less unpredictable, less disruptive, less individual. The values in such a society will be aesthetic rather than material. Spiritualism, art and internal reflection will be the basis of the value system; I doubt the dollar, as we understand it now, will be in circulation

Now the political part. Our current new government is adjusting us to this new society. It doesn’t know that it is doing this because our political heroes are just seeking power in the old and ususal way, don’t think that far ahead regardless of what they say.

I tell you this not to get into an argument with you (don’t send me any emails with your opinions, they will go unread and unanswered). I tell you this so you will understand that this is the last great gasp of entrepreneurship as we now know it, 10 years from now it will be, well, different . . . and you won’t like it. So now is the time to make the push to follow your dream. About the time you succeed the rules will be changing in such a way as to assure that no one will be following you. It will be time to take the money and run.

I have always said that the entrepreneur state of mind is lonely; in the future it will be socially unacceptable too. So bask in the glow now, do your ‘thing’ and love it. Welcome to the new reality.

While I don’t do enough of it, every so often it is a good idea to take a short break and ponder who knows what? Here it is, midnight on Sunday evening, or is it Monday morning, and usually I would be in bed reading while the rest of the family slept. As usual I am reading three books at the concurrently, a cute Bob Heinlein novel called Job: a comedy of Justice, a collection of essays called Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think, and a neat little book on humor called Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar . . . . but tonight I am out on the porch looking at the lake lit by a full moon though broken clouds, wind blowing at a good 20 knots, a drink, a cigar, and my industrial strength cat Squeaky whom I sometimes refer to as ‘Squeakal-matter’ (like he cares). We are engaged in a year and a half long drought and is it supposed to rain tonight and oh joy, so far just some drizzle.

I have been working on fund raising for a business I started and was looking for a big chunk of change to get it going. I haven’t had much luck, the financial market has scared most folks, I am tired of the control freaks wanting 51%, VCs are out of the question, and on Thursday I fired my fundraiser. All he could find were people who ultimately wanted a piece of the action for finding someone else.

While I talk a lot about bootstrapping I haven’t done it in a while but a couple of days ago I finally said “F**k it, time to go back to my roots” and I devised a way to get going without playing the investor game. Gawd I feel better, this way I have some control over the process and will be dealing with the only people I really like, my customers. I put together a program, my two guys (COO and CMO) agreed, I got on the phone and found resources to make it happen, and we are off to the races. It’s about time I woke up and took my own advice, boy does it feel good! Trying to please investors can be a pain, their pompous attitude laced with fear stinks the room up. Trying to please customers is a joy, their honesty and happiness with getting a solution is a breath of spring air. As the singing lady Joni Mitchell said, “I’m a free man in Pairs, unfettered and alive!” Damn, it’s nice. It’s what Aristotle said is man’s essential property, his telos. Well the drinks done, the cigar is finished, the cat just squeaked at me that he is bored, and I feel great, time to write some literature.

When was the last time you felt like that?

The other day I was involved in an email thread about bulk mailing. While we on the thread generally agreed that bulk mailing was a bulk waste of time I had brought up a process I had used with some degree of success.  This process involved sending out post-cards with only one word on them.  My theory for doing this was that a post card with one word on it can not be denied, that someone can’t pick the card up and not read the one word as they throw it into the trash.  With this action I have gained brain-space, even if only for a fraction of a second, I got in through the noise, my “word” was in their brain.

“So what?” you might ask.  What does this do for you?

Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point.   One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word.  Maybe you don’t know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening.  But it comes with a question.   What is it?

Remember the book/movie “The Manchurian Candidate”? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word.  Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.

So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the “word” in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up.   Could this stop them from closing their mind?   Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in?  Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means?   Could you have a dialog as a result?  Could it lead to a sale?

One word.  What word would you choose?

A little while back I wrote that the real job of marketing is to make the potential customer unhappy with what they have.  I caught some interesting flack about that thought, got accused of being to simplistic naive, and crude.  So to torture those minds I would like to drop the other shoe. . . . good marketers are good Propagandists, the “P”-word in this age of political correctness and propriety.

Propaganda.  What a neat concept.  We use it all the time, daily in fact!  I like Jowett and O’Donnell’s definition.

“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”

Typically this is an emotional effort; after all, dissatisfaction has a lot of emotional content.  And yes, it is the overt manipulation of an individual or individuals.

Does that bother you?  If it does then you should take some time off and figure out why.  If you are comfortable with it then the real question is how can we get better at it?

The seeds of dissatisfaction, in essence fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD) should be woven into every message and communication you make to your potential customer, and it should be done purely out of habit.  Happy people rarely change, and selling someone something is all about change.

Propaganda is not evil in and of itself.  Like all tools of mankind, it is the intended use that possess good or evil values (compare its use by Joseph Goebbels’ opposed to Billy Graham’s).  Your values are good if your product or service makes someone’s life better in some way.  Be proud of that.  Propaganda is a powerful tool, use it.

I would like to offer some supporting thoughts as to the value of the bootstrap process, the wisdom of your choice to follow it, and the ultimate practicality of it today.  First a couple of quotes:

Forbes this month (Jan 2009 ) “The venture capital industry is staring at the most vicious shakeout in its  history . . . Returns are pathetic for most funds, [and] the public offering pipeline on which venture depends for its exit strategy is clamped shut.”

Bloomberg.com, “IPOs historically dry up at the end of a bear market and don’t begin to recover for months after a  rally as issuers and investors wait for signs of stability.”

During the last quarter, 38 companies withdrew or postponed their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Bloomberg says “it may take until 2011 for the number of companies going public to return to their 2007 level, according to data compiled by the University of Florida. While the S&P 500 rose an average of 24 percent in the first year after a market plunge, the data show, it takes 34 months on average for underwriting to return to its rate at the start of a slowdown.”

Companies pursuing the traditional VC or investor routes are running into brick walls or valuations that are ridiculous

Yet this is one of the best times to start a business.

We are in a world rich with new technologies, applications of those technologies, services that can be based on those technologies, and perceptions based on those technologies that open unimaginable doors.

Even better, established businesses whose inertia, that is inability to change and adapt, and whose debt or commitment (financial, political, or social) are now untenable are thus going on the rocks and leaving unsatisfied customers with unfulfilled appetites looking for solutions.

This is possibly one of the best times in recent history to apply the bootstrap techniques creating your fortune.  I wish you well and in these stormy times expect to see good results for you on your journey down a good path, stick to it.

Happy New Year and New Era, Barry

Yo-Ho-Ho!

It’s the end of the year and everything is supposed to change, reset, fire-up, get going . . .  you know, improve.  Doesn’t that happen every year?  Like the Nile flooding and rejuvenating Egypt, rebirth!

It is funny how easy it is to imagine time as big circle (couldn’t be something about planetary rotation could it?).  Well, I typically think of a year as a big loop with repeated energy patterns around it.  The ‘Holidays” is one such pattern or block of time that we have all traditionaly thought of a ’slow’ for everything but retrial.  It is symbolically the End. . .  and Start, of another turn on the helix, a continuing next loop through time.

There is always the calm before the storm, things are going to take off right after the New Year and there we go.  It was part of the cycle of life.

Well, the wheel hit a bump this year.  While the clock may be advancing the cycle isn’t.  It’s stuck, in fact it may be slipping backwards a bit in some places.

Fortunately a Bailout is going to get it going again (drum roll and high-hat hit).  But guess what?  That cycle can slip too (it’s part of the cycle now because it exists in our minds, more about that some later blog).

How can you plan ahead to be safe?  Can you foretell the future?

Well, yes . . . and then of course, no.  The probability of this calamity happening was very high, so it did happen and in that it was predictable.  Could you predict when and how?  Only if you believe in Issac Asimov stories.  Our whole system is so artificial that it floats by itself, but just every so often, because it is possible to do,  it does a bit of a reality check.  Welcome to that moment, it happened in your life-time, probability became reality.

Right now History isn’t working too well as a guild to the future so you are just going to have to fake it.

Please, oh Please, remember this.  The best, I mean the very best of the guys are supposed to and claim to be able to tell what will be going on tomorrow didn’t have a clue when it happened.  Don’t feel bad or guilty about being in the same place they are.  We, collectively as a culture, were wrapped in the warm cocoon of that special fabric, Disillusion and Denial(TM) , and loving it.

Now my friend is the time to move fast, maximize you agility, take action, and be cool

As Lord Byron said, “Adversity is the first path to truth.”

You can’t get on the path unless you engage the world

Copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved 2009

The big kid on the block, the monopoly that many criticize, has been pushed again by the lowly customer.  From BBC news this morning:

“Windows XP allowed to live again

Microsoft has given yet another reprieve to its seasoned Windows XP operating system.

But now Microsoft has put in place a scheme that will allow the hardware firms to get hold of XP licences until 30 May 2009.

Previously Microsoft extended XP’s life until 2010 - provided it was installed on netbooks and low-cost laptops.

Windows XP was originally due to disappear off shop shelves on 30 January 2008. It was to be removed so as to make way for Windows Vista which went on sale to consumers early in 2007.

Despite Microsoft’s claims that Vista has sold well, consumers have reacted badly to its release.

Microsoft granted the reprieve largely because of customer’s preference for XP.”

Never, ever, underestimate the power of the customer.  And never, ever, think you control the customer.

Last year I got smart and followed Bill Gates, we both left microsoft, he went on his way and I went to Ubuntu.

Oh my gawd!, look at my in-box. Given hard times everyone is trying to fill it. The spam level has exploded and I am getting bombarded with more promotions that ever. The result is of course I spend a bit more time killing this stuff and don’t look at any of it. These folks are getting desperate and the only solution to their very limited marketing imaginations is to turn up the throttle, which is increase, the volume of their customer communications. A simple answer, send more e-mails to your customers with more offers.

Does this really work? A Does it make sense?

Heck no!

I am so busy getting rid of junk communications from people I have done business with and expect to in the future that I don’t even read them anymore. I find myself hitting the UNSUBSCRIBE button more just out of spite for their stupidity.

I have my own stresses, don’t add yours to the pile. There must be a better way. And of course there is.

First, as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy says, in friendly letters, DON’T PANIC!

This is the time to create stronger bonds, not alienate the customer. Here are some thoughts on how to do that.

1 – Don’t Broadcast Your Panic. It stinks. The customer can smell it and is repulsed, usually permanently. Control yourself, the big push isn’t going to save the day so get smart, stop and think . . don’t stampede with knee-jerk reactions. Calm down.

2 – It is all changing, the market and your customers. Define the change so you can adapt your approaches to fit it. In theory the ultimate skill of mankind is to adapt and evolve quickly so try to be a good functional human. This means the first thing is to find out the new rules. Take time to ask the customer what is going on and where they are going. Get feedback, answer questions, be useful and maintain those good relations you worked so hard to get.

3 - You are scared, they are scared, get above it even if you think the ship is sinking, get their input and project your wisdom. Be strong, not overbearing, show wisdom and strength. Become a bastion of hope, it’s what Obama did and worked for him, you still don’t hear a plan but the belief that one is coming keeps people tuned in and listening. Follow that path.

4 – Dialog with your customers. Engage them. Write content that encourages dialog, get their ideas and publish them to other customers. Timely, entertaining, relevant, hopeful content shows that you are on top of it, experts with strength. Listening shows you care, spreading the word, answer to questions and smart advise, all show that you are responsible, trustworthy, and concerned for them.

5 - If there ever was time to be social, this is it! Don’t run off into the ‘WEB.2” illusion, get real. Your customer’s have a desire to do well for others, figure out how you can get into that flow. If it is sales, give some of the cash flow to charity and make a point of it, it is really your customer who is helping out, make sure he knows it and can be proud that when the chips are down what is good for him (your stuff or service) is also good for the community. There a thousand variations on this, find one that works for you.

6 – If you have a local presence, partner with local companies to make an event. Simple things, take your internal expertise, your Financial, HR, Ops, Procurement, even Execs public. Set up a simple “ask the expert’ table top in a bookstore, supermarket, where ever, and offer up their experience and knowledge to those who want to learn or need knowledge. Take those dialogs, now questions from the common man, and use them as content for your email. Practical stuff that can get you newspaper and radio exposure as well as tell you customers you really care.

Use your imagination; push out with who you are, not just your “deals”. Build trust and show concern. It is cheap to do, just open your heart and show you have one.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reseved

The other day I again ran across a major manager, in this case a CEO but this thought is not limited to the CEO class, who is a bully. I was reminded of something that Halibuton* said:

“A brave man is sometimes a desperado; but a bully is always a coward.”

When you meet and observe driven individuals that you will have to interact with it is important to learn early which kind you are dealing with. In business there is a strong lead and/or follow relationship issue in when two or more personalities work toward a transaction or common goal. Fundamental to the relationship is the issue of personal faith, that is in theory you both put faith in each other as an assumptive basis for the furtherance of your activity. It takes a brave person to deal with the truths frequently necessary to succeed, a bit of the desperado is not uncommon for part of the definition of desperado it to be bold enough to cast a fear aside, in this case to do what is right.

This is not the domain of the bully for he is a coward. The bully will use bluster to camouflage that character flaw, most commonly in the form of misleading you with their supposed fame. Bragging, name-dropping, innuendo, implying relationships, generally claiming what is not theirs are the tools they use and that you must watch out for.

As you build your business you are exercising bravery. For the faint of heart do not pick up the responsibility for their lives and the lives of others, they do not follow their dreams. They steal and claim dreams from others.

You will be besieged by bullies who will try to impress you with their skill, power, and virtue. This is always done with the intent of getting their hand into your pocket, to acquire your power and resources, and to leverage you in the launch on to their next victim.

This guy I met the other day reminded me that constant vigilance is the key to survival and success. Thus again, Andy Grove’s motto, “only the paranoid survive” comes home.

Have a prosperous New Year in these trying times.

Barry Thornton, a part-time follower of Socrates

*Thomas Haliburton (1796-1867) Scottish Humorist