Week 5 -- Marketing Plans

Skills Focus This Week:  

• Learn the three M's of marketing.
• Identify your ideal customer and "super fans" to spread your message.
• Craft a message targeted to reach your ideal customer; pack it with the right emotion. 
• Select the best media to reach your ideal customers.

Challenge:   Create a thorough marketing plan around your market, media, and message. 

Summary of Pillars Perspective:  

Skills Focus Discussion Material:  

This week our Entrepreneurs are diving deep into their marketing plans.  To launch this segment, we watched and discussed some videos, including Reg Gupton's on the "3 Ms of Marketing."  Our Entrepreneurs appreciated the simplicity of his approach, and we used it to create a model to work from:

• Market:  identify your ideal customer, considering specific demographic, psychographic, and geographic characteristics.  Also analyze your competition and key differentiating elements.
• Media:  identify at least four different marketing channels you will implement.  Remember that everyone has some type of face-to-face marketing opportunity, which is the most effective alternative.  Consider phone calls, events, email, websites, social media, etc.  Create a strategy with specific actions and goal dates.
• Message:  What is the overall message you are using to connect with your ideal customer?  How can you harness the power of a slogan, imagery, and emotion to connect with your ideal customer and his/her "tribe"?

Our Entrepreneurs also discussed ideas presented by Seth Godin, in his classic presentation, "The Tribes We Lead."  We learned several important principles: 

• Our goal: "to change everything."
• We are at a key moment in social development, transitioning from the factory, big-budget advertisers dominating the world.  
• Leadership is finding "disconnected people who have a yearning."
• Find a few "true believers" for your product and movement, and they will drive the marketing for you.  

Activities:  

We explored how well-funded marketers combine the elements of an effective message, when emotion, visual elements, and slogans are combined in a powerful and memorable way.  Our examples included a McDonald's "Love" ad, (for contrast) Burger King's funny "Eat Like Snake" ad, and Nike's 25th anniversary "Just Do It" ad.  

Guest / Field Trip:  

Neal Staker, Founder of Collaborant.  Neal's entrepreneurial journey started in third grade.  Frequently finding himself in detention for bucking the status quo, he became proficient at writing out "I will not . . ." sentence lists.  He soon discovered there was an underground market for pre-written lists, 50 deep.  Later he became the school's "walking vending machine," selling pencils, combs, and other items vital for school life.  

Later ventures included a flag-pole installation company and a medical testing laboratory.  He learned early on that need creates the fire of motivation.

Neal became a highly successful business consultant and corporate trainer.   A few years ago, he sold his company, PeopleSmart, to the VitalSmarts group.  He recently started Collaborant to help business leaders train their teams in conflict resolution, collaboration, and leadership.  

Neal shared several key messages:  

• You can't be an entrepreneur in any field if you aren't willing to sell. 
• Marketing messages should be as comfortable as a conversation between two friends walking down the beach.  
• Listen carefully to your target audience, and use their language.  
• Good ideas and solutions to problems sell better than products and services. 

Week 4 -- Gathering Resources

Skills Focus This Week:  

• Identifying needs, next-steps, and resources. 
• Finding mentors to help.  
• Creating an A-Z plan. 

Challenge:  Develop a complete, written need/resource analysis and start executing.  

Skills Focus Discussion Material:  

To lay the groundwork for identifying needs and resources, we opened our week watching and discussing two videos:  

Resourcefulness Mindset.  The first was a segment of Tony Robbins' TED Talk on resourcefulness.  Our key to success, Tony argues, is not having the right resources, the right boss, the right investors, the right weather, or even right Supreme Court decision, rather it is in being resourceful, having that quality of human spirit and character to get past any challenge:  "you find a way, if you want it enough," and "decisions shape destiny."

Mentors are Vital.  The second video was Tai Lopez's TEDx talk (yes, Tai is a bit cheesy, but his message about mentors is spot on) on finding mentors to teach skills and help work through specific challenges.  Tai had a few special mentors that were key to his journey.  "Don't be afraid to go to the top," Tai advised, encouraging his listeners to get help from people at least "ten times ahead of you."  He also suggests culling the wisdom of the greatest minds by reading books voraciously and applying the lessons learned.  

Our Entrepreneurs synthesized their discussion on these principles with the idea that a knowledgeable mentor may be the most important resource of all.  

Resource List:  We explored conducting an effective need/resource analysis in running teams, the key elements of which might include these:  

1. Consider you plan from A to Z.
2. Point A is wherever you are right now in developing your business. 
3. Point Z is where you want to be, having a market-ready product or service offering by Nov. 14. 
4. Now ask: what do I need to get or do to move from A to Z?  Write everything down. 
5. Consider specific task needs to be done next to move this item along?  And ask:
6. Is there someone you know who could help with this item?  A mentor.
7. When will you do it?  A goal date.  
8. What is the priority of this task relative to getting the overall business rolling?
9. If there are many items (and there are), a spreadsheet can be helpful to sort dates, categories, priorities, etc. 

We worked together to create an example spreadsheet.

After finishing this analysis, identify your grenade pin (or linchpin), that one relatively small thing you can do next that will net huge effects and momentum.  For several of our Entrepreneurs, this vital pin was reaching out to someone they know, a potential mentor, for a little coaching.  

Summary of Pillars Perspective:  

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to the other with no loss of enthusiasm”. Winston Churchill.

 Failure is the price of the entrepreneur.  As we look through history and look at great men and women of the past we have to look and see how failure can be one of the greatest teachers.  It can teach us how we can make things better and help shift our ideas and mindset.  The question for this week is, how can we keep going in spite of our failures?  We can see how many people quit when faced with failure.  The greatest mindset of the entrepreneur is to keep pursuing no matter what. We used Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, which gives a unique and inspirational way of helping those who are struggling to express their creativity, and shows that “resistance” is the greatest enemy.  But is it?  

Project: Look at an experience you have had in the past, and see how it was beneficial to help you see the experience differently.  

 

Guest / Field Trip:

Field trip to Utah Museum of Cultural Art.  As we end our course on culture we attended the Museum of Cultural Art in downtown Salt Lake city.  Nothing shows the direction of a society's culture like the music, arts, literature, and poetry of the time.  This is why as a class we focused on the contemporary arts.  The themes showed social themes  themes that our popular today.  The project:

Today’s project was to ask the question, as an entrepreneur do you like the way society is headed?  How as a leader can you change the trends of what is popular in a culture?   And finally how can you inspire action in your company to create the culture that you would like to see in your lifetime?

Week 3 -- Business Planning

Skills Focus This Week:  

• Learn the essentials of business planning. 
• Prepare basic business plan.  
• Understand basic cash-flow planning (include your labor!).

Challenge:   Draft a 1-2 page business plan, one that will guide your actions through the rest of the trimester.  

Skills Focus Discussion Material:  

“Plans are worthless.  Planning is essential.”  Dwight D. Eisenhower.  

“Everyone has a plan . . . until they get punched in the face!”  Mike Tyson.  

Mere ideas do NOT = $$

We studied the primary elements of a business plan and helped each other with the planning process.  Two videos helped us understand basic planning, one from Startupdaddy.com and the other from the SBA.

We dove deep into the key elements of a basic plan, and we practiced creating a simple cash-flow spreadsheet to get our Entrepreneurs started on their own pro forma cash-flow statements:

1. Executive Summary
1. Summary of what you are up to and how your offering is distinct.
2. High-level pitch, making a strong case for success.  
3. Usually you want to write this part last.

2. Company Overview
1. Mission statement.
2. Location.
3. Who is involved in this adventure with you?
4. What are your / their qualifications?

3. Market Research
1. Detail the research you have done on the industry you’re looking into.
2. Detail your research on the competition and similar offerings already out there.
3. What are the legal requirements that will impact you, and how will you address them?

4. Product / Service Description
1. What are you selling?  Describe it in detail.
2. What makes it better than the competitors’ offerings?
3. Describe your present state of development and what your plan is to get it finished and ready for market (design phase, prototype phase, etc.)

5. Marketing / Sales Plans
1. Include your detailed marketing plan
2. Direct marketing and sales (person to person)
3. Online marketing and sales

6. Financials
1. Create a spreadsheet showing all your known costs (equipment, materials, and other stuff you need to buy)
2. Factor in your time as an expense item
3. Show your anticipated income over time (in weeks, months, or phases)

Summary of Pillars Perspective:  

This week we are looking at what makes certain individuals stand out from the masses. As we look at great entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, PT Barnum, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Ray Kroc, Tesla to see what they have in common.  We want to look at the threads of their success and who they are and how they continued to push forward through opposition and resistance.  

Project: Choose an entrepreneur and see what drives them and sets them apart.     

Guest / Field Trip:

Visit to Spingo! We met with the amazing Spingo team, thanks to founder and CEO, Kreg Peeler. Kreg shared stories from his lifetime of adventures, tinkering with his grandfather's railroad equipment as a boy, selling avocados from the "neighborhood witch's" field, and running backstage operations for school productions. Kreg's key advice to our young entrepreneurs from his own experiences: Don't worry too much about inborn talents, just work to develop skills around what you enjoy doing (and let the opportunities evolve from that). Also: be nimble and on the move: "you can't steer a parked car." We got to hear from various members of the Spingo team. All had wonderful words of wisdom. Thanks Spingo!!