Jack and I met in February, when he was part of a group of innovators that took a two-day workshop I led on “Finding Your Customer.” Eight months later, he called me.
“Bob,” he said. “You told me to find my customer. I’ve found more customer opportunities than I know what to do with. All of them are exciting, but I’m worried. I’m afraid that one or two of them are like black holes – if I go into them, I’ll vanish from the known universe. Can you help me sort this out?”
Jack flew to Boston on Wednesday evening. We had dinner, caught up a bit, and dug in for a hard day on Thursday. It was just Jack and me in a conference room with a white board and a pot of coffee.
A hybrid process
Over dinner, I listened as Jack talked about his family, the charitable foundation that he started, and the ways he’d built his business. The next morning, I suggested that we split the day into two parts:
1. What do you want to do with this business of yours?
2. How will these opportunities you’re looking at help (or hurt) your chances of doing what you want to do with your business?
He took a deep breath and agreed. It took us all morning to shake down what he wanted to do with his business. When you start the company and build it as the founder and CEO, it’s tough to untangle yourself from the enterprise. But without clearly understanding your goals, you’re guaranteed to flounder.
What he wants
Many entrepreneurs try to follow a similar path:
· Develop and validate an idea
· Raise money from investors
· Build your business
· Sell the business, make a little money for your investors (and yourself)
· Repeat
When we started our conversation, those were Jack’s goals. But after a while, he realized that he wasn’t excited about the end game of selling the business and making a pile of money. Odd, but true.
It turns out that Jack has built his business without raising capital from anyone. [He’s done a great job of building it on customer financing – subject for another post.] Consequently, he doesn’t have anyone pushing him toward an exit so they can get their money back.
His company is in a corner of the healthcare business. The better they get at meeting their customers’ needs, the more places he finds where he can help other customers. When he’d talk about that, he’d light up. Eventually, what became clear was:
His goal is to build a great company. The exit will happen when it happens.
With that established, we began evaluating the opportunities he’d uncovered – but looking through the lens of “what he wants to do.”
Five questions
We asked five questions:
1. What’s it worth to you if you succeed?
2. How will that success help you get the next success? (For example, “They’re a marquee client and working for them will cause a lot of other prospects to sign up with us.”)
3. What will it take you to succeed [time, money, resources, etc.]?
4. What will it take away from your other opportunities?
5. Is it worth pursuing? Now? Later?
This made for a busy afternoon, as we asked those five questions of each of his opportunities. We wrote all over the white board (and erased almost as much as we wrote).
The result
In hindsight, both the questions and the answers seem kind of obvious. But maybe that’s the hallmark of a sensible analysis – it makes intuitive sense when the dust settles.
His opportunities ended up arrayed across a spectrum. Two endpoints:
· The marquee client will be worth a lot of money, but they’re going to need a year of pampering before they sign up, and there’s precious little Jack can do to alter their timing
· On the other side, the oddball idea can be implemented almost immediately, and is very much under Jack’s control; once it’s set up with a decent manager in place, it will generate steady revenues with excellent margins, and will operate without requiring much from him
The others fell across the spectrum in their various locations.
This turned into the basis of a Marketing Plan: we had prospects, expected values, resource requirements and timing expectations. Two days later, Jack sent me a note thanking me for the clarity and support. I think it was a good day’s work.
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