Monthly Archives: February 2009

Does your market buzz sound like a squeal?

As a follow-up to my involvement in the FastTrac – TechVenture series co-hosted by St. Pete College & the STARTEC Accelerator, I am re-posting one of my all time favorites by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing “Stop Perfuming the Pig“.

Every exec team or wannabe tech founder needs to read this post and ask themselves some tough questions about the role of marketing in their company.

One of the slides in my presentation on Thursday night echoed a quote in Steve’s post “…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” If more exec teams took this approach earlier in their planning and development efforts, they would avoid a lot of frustration and save a lot of cash.

Business Plans… Just Say No!

I recently read a post on LinkedIn asking for opinions on the value of formal business plans for pre-venture backed start-ups. I guess technically all start-ups are pre-venture, it’s just that most never have a prayer of actually raising any venture backing or even talking to a real VC. It reminds me of most of the job postings and executive summaries I read back in ’98 – ’00 timeframe that boasted that they were a pre-IPO company. Well duh, everyone is right up until the point when they IPO or die.

Enough about that, on with the rant…

The preconceived notions about business plans, what they are, who they are for and what value they hold is one of the biggest problems I deal with when speaking to early stage founders. I applaud the various resources such as S.C.O.R.E and the numerous university or Economic Development-backed Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) that have sprung up to help the cause of small business education, but the bottom line is that for venture-backed start-up candidates, traditional business plans are a huge waste of time.