For some people, boldness is not a character trait but a function of need..

Someone once told me that, for some people, boldness is not a character trait but a function of need...

..I am one of those people.

I spent years wondering why everything I did only came together at the last moment; why vital assignments were always submitted minutes before a deadline, why I only found high paid consultancy work when I was down to my last £10, why supporters, funders, mentors only appeared in my life as I was giving up and not in the agonising months prior while I was searching high and low for help...

It’s incongruous to the way I’d like to view myself but the truth is
it takes an extraordinary amount of pressure to displace me from my comfort zone.

If I am under no pressure, why should I do the arduous / complex / scary things?
Only when the deadline is looming, big and scary on the horizon, does the fear of failure even begin to overcome the fear of the actions required to succeed. Then, and only then, will I do the things I ought to have done from the outset. The things I knew in my heart were right but was fearful of.

Excelling at a subject, pushing your boundaries, upselling yourself to make new connections requires moving out of what is comfortable. Not merely working harder or smarter but moving out of your emotional comfort zone. It requires courage (because it’s nerve wracking) it requires confidence (because it’s intimidating) it requires faith (or why would you even try?)

99% of the time I haven’t achieved my goals it has had nothing to do with my level of competence. It has everything to do with indulging hesitance and fear.

Maybe if I worried more about *that* and less about making a prat of myself, we'd have something other than a last-second-success?!

'Twelve Lessons' - the run down

... Obligation,
commitment, brevity, advisers, business plans, delegating, tenacity and faith, actions, flexibility, people, priorities, caution and providence ...


I have my favourites, both to have learnt and to have written, but I would love to hear your thoughts on the series. So, if you've been reading, drop me a comment below and let me know your thoughts - whatever form they may take

All the best,
Amanda.x

#1: A favour given isn’t necessarily a favour owed.
#2: You can’t half-ride a bike.
#3: Brevity is good.
#4: Too much love will kill you.
#5: Schrödinger's cat.
#6: If you want a job done well..
#7: Be an emotional starfish.
#8: A speaker of words and a doer of deeds.
#9: Scrap that...
#10: Net-works
#11: The Cobbler's children
#12: Caution caution

#12: Caution caution.

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Throughout Jan-Mar I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11

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This post is a big concept, which is a pleasing fit for the grand finale of a series I, at times, wondered if I'd even see to completion. Big concepts tend towards long concepts without supervision, however, and I've been sufficient in violating lesson three as it stands. So, you'll have to come dashing through with me and I trust it will resonate no less for it..

From the moment I was born, a ceaseless string of people have endeavored to teach me to curb my predilection towards impulsiveness. From my immediate family up to the government, from two days old through to two decades, one message held consistent: you ought to look before you leap, try a little bit first, wait for the second release (once the bugs are out), sleep on it, keep your options open, plan ahead, leave bridges unburnt, lines uncrossed and marks understepped..

It was Benjamin Franklin who said that “distrust and caution are the parents of security". Well, who in their right mind daren't aspire to security above all else?
Everybody understands that wanton, indiscriminate, risk taking is a recipe for destruction. Thoughtlessness in the face of danger will surely lead to disaster.. but what about indiscriminate caution?
How wasteful is thoughtless caution in the face of opportunity?

How often do chances of brilliance pass us by because we weren't 100% ready, 100% sure. Well here's something I proved in 2009, as strictly speaking I didn't learn it. I've always known it...

You'll NEVER be ready,
You'll NEVER be sure,
and if you try to hang on until you are..
You'll NEVER make a difference.

Only when you begin will you truly see what you've undertaken. Only then can you beg, steal, borrow or divine all that you need to make it work. To fail to plan may be to plan to fail, but you can't properly prepare for what you cannot know.

Goethe is over-quoted in his shortened form, far more beautiful in full, and I cannot resist..

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."

'The moment one definitely commits oneself' - not before.

Caution and security are luxuries we can't always be treated to. Someone has to take a chance, brave the risk and leap anyway, because sometimes risk and fear are the only things powerful enough to overcome inertia.

And with society and planet close to bearing right down a dead end path, I only hope there are enough 'someones' remaining, and enough 'sometime' to realise that while only the former is government endorsed, indiscriminate caution is just as dangerous a thread in humanity as indiscriminate risk taking..

#11: The Cobbler's children.

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Throughout Jan-Mar I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10

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We're edging towards the end of the series, so I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that those of you running an enterprise started doing so because you believe you have a particular combination of knowledge and skills which make your business idea both conceptually accessible and practically achievable to you.

Great stuff. The world would be a better place if more of us could be clear and honest about the skills we have, and create ourselves a space where we are able to do that which we are best at.

And as you can tell from my last post, I'm a big fan of the mantra 'make yourself useful'. Such that it sometimes feels as if it can answer all things; that the best we can do to advance as people, entrepreneurs and small businesses alike, is to share our knowledge, utilise our skills for others, and provide a genuinely helpful product/service.

But as with all things, even the great ones, there's a natural limit above which this behavior does no one any good at all.
So the saying goes "The Cobbler's children go unshod".

Admit it. We're all guilty of this one: expending our greatest talents on others, solving their problems rather than our own.

I can't tell you the number of times I've volunteered to help out a friend with a task identical to one sitting patiently on my own 'to-do' list. I'm not blind to the irony that this blog is hosted on blogger when I advocate wordpress, or that it has an old ready-made theme I am not happy with when, in the last month, I have launched and re-designed 3 custom wordpress sites for other people. It's a ridiculous contradiction but a common one. So why..?

As far as I can make out, there are a thousand excuses but no reasons.

I'll do a better job for you than I would for myself because my positive and negative incentives are different. I both seek your approval (who doesn't want to do a good job?) and I am fearful of your judgement (we hate letting people down). Yet, I neither fear my own disapproval nor particularly feel a drive to try and exceed my own expectations.
There are countless excuses not to act. The only difference is, my excuses to myself are always acceptable.

One of the things that changed last year when Red Button Design began to take on minority shareholders, establish expected delivery dates and accept in-kind investment, was that my excuses to myself ceased to .. well .. 'hold water' with the rest of the team. It became clear that I needed to readdress my priorities. My time and skills needed to be expended on my venture, first.

Sometimes the last people we help are ourselves, but it makes no more sense to be utterly selfless than it does to be utterly selfish. We need to take care of ourselves and our own in order to retain the capacity to help others. So next time you're about to step in and do that favour, check that you're only making yourself useful and not making excuses to displace an ulterior task. You started this because you believed you had the skills and knowledge, so be your own incentive. You owe it to yourself and your team to utilise your talent close to home before you make yourself useful to the rest of the world..

Birthday Wishes..

12 lessons series will be back after this brief birthday interlude..

This time next week will be my birthday! As I figure it, this means I am entitled to ask you all for favours.. or is that only if you're 'The Don' and it's the day of his daughter's wedding? ..I forget.

Anyway, I am going to be 26 on March 12th.

..And for my birthday, I would like it very much if 26 of my twitter followers^* were to register as organ donors.

Now, I have absolutely no interest in changing your views on the subject. So if, for religious or personal reasons, you're uncomfortable with the idea of organ donation^** that's fine; my Amazon wishlist is here ;-)

No, this is more for all of you who really don't mind, or perhaps agree it's a good thing to do and just haven't done it yet. Do it now, please. Before you, or someone you know, needs to use the service; before it becomes trite, or before it's too late. It is easy and it wont take long.

And if you do sign up, *please* tweet or comment below so I know how many people have given me this birthday present!
Thank-you muchly.

~ Amanda

*(or more! more would be good too!)
** I assume you'd also be uncomfortable with the idea of receiving a donation if you needed one then *ahem*

#10: Net-works

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Throughout Jan-Mar I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9

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Everyone's heard it, some of you will have said it:
"It's not what you know, but who you know".
Whether you believe it's that simple or not, it is hard to deny that knowing the right people can put a good entrepreneur on the fast track to success. I do mean exactly that, though, knowing the right people can put a good entrepreneur on the fast track to success.

A really good entrepreneur can almost certainly make it without much outside support, it'll just take longer, and if you're a bad entrepreneur, well, all the who-you-knows in the world aren't going to help you. But for most startups, securing pertinent, influential contacts within our sector or customer base is an important part of our development.

And the way to get to know the right people in your industry is to build a network.. and when it comes to building a targeted international network, cheaply and effectively - the 'net works.*

There are a lot of doubters when it comes to online networking, and a lot of online networking platforms to have doubts about. There are also a lot of blog posts out there dedicated to; why you should care, which sites to choose and how best to use them. So I'm simply going to remind you that 80% of the UK use some sort of social network and I suggest that, unless you're certain both your influential industry mentors, product/service evangalists and your competitors and pissed off contacts/customers are all in the 20% not using soical media, you might want to do a little strategising in this area. That's all. ;-)

3 tips on building and nurturing a business network online:

1) Target

Very simple maths. There's one of you, there are lots of social networking sites; any one of which could easily consume several hours of your day, everyday. Target the right sites, target users who log in frequently, share good content and have a strong following themselves, and ration your time there.

If you're hiring and you want to see CV's you'll be better on Linked In than Livejounal, which would suit you better if you're an aspiring writer. Bands looking for signing head to MySpace: to quickly spread documents and links try Twitter, to build a fan base start a Facebook Group, to get the attention of an industry leader comment thoughtfully on their blog. If they don't blog, comment thoughtfully on your blog and send them the link.

You can't make a play on all the networking sites out there. Spend a little time deciding on your aim and audience, and pick the one that suits you best. Use your time there productively. Which leads me to my next tip..

2) Make yourself useful

Once you've picked your target site, settle in and make yourself useful.

The most common mistake I hear from newbies is asking what is the benefit they'll receive from online networking. To paraphrase an old one, "ask not what the network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network". Make yourself useful to others. It'll earn you friends, respect from the community, it could accrue you favours and it will showcase your knowledge. Explaining this to a freind the other day, they then likened Twitter to a gift economy. I couldn't have said it better. Make it your mission to be useful, the rest will follow.

3) Seal the deal, respectfully

Approaching someone online is a very different skill to walking up to them at a networking session. One of the deceptive things about the internet is how it distances you from the other person. You're socialising or collaborating but not face to face, not necessarily in real time, they can't see you, and you lose the 93% of communicative clues we use that are non verbal. Accordingly, it is more important than ever to be respectful when writing emails, messages, and forum posts to possible contacts. Always be polite. Always get to your point in the minimum number of lines, and you must double check spelling, punctuation and grammar, it's the online equivalent of ironing your shirt and polishing your shoes!

Many social networks try to account for the lack of non verbal cues by allowing avatars, font and colour customisation. All I can say is that these don't fully compensate for the complexities of body language and vocal tone but they do still count. Suffice to say people who email me in Coloured Comic Sans have a special place in my inbox. Oh and one more thing, get a sensible email address. No one is going to take "tinkerbell84" or "racerboy1" very seriously.

Treat your online network with no less care than you would treat someone you were meeting face to face. In fact, treat online contacts with greater care. There is often a temptation to hide behind the web and allow the distance and relative anonymity to fool us into become louder, brasher or more pushy than we would be in person. Dont.
No, really - don't!
Everyone has bad days and everyone misjudges situations sometimes but If you're a little pushy or rude to someone in person, only you and they know about it, and the moment (hopefully) passes. If you're throwing your weight around on a blog or forum .. the world knows and it becomes public property, out there to be re-lived ceaselessly.


Creating and nurturing a network is difficult! It is a high level skill which takes a huge amount of perception and social bandwidth, but your business needs someone who can do this just as surely as it needs someone to balance the books; and if you're a start up short on time & budget, using the net to broaden your reach is ideal.

Lesson No.10: When it comes to networks.. the net does indeed, work.


*Anyone who thought i'd get through these 12 blog posts without a bad pun, grab your things & move down to the front of the class where I can keep an eye on you. You've obviously not been paying enough attention.

#9: Scrap that...

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Throughout Jan/Feb I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8

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So here's the thing;
my original idea for this ninth lesson .. isn't working out.

I'm getting frustrated, losing enthusiasm for the message and tangling my trains of thought. Deadlines for other tasks are looming as I tweak and re-write, yet I don't feel like I'm getting any closer to a breakthrough.

I figure I have two (arguably three) choices; I could persevere with the original idea and hope that a bit more time and effort will yield something I am happy with, (I could just post what I have in a form I'm dissatisfied with) or I could acknowledge that it is simply not going to work out this time and move on to something else.

We're often reluctant to move on from our original ideas.
Not completing something you set out to do can sometimes feel like failure, so we we resolutely stick at it until the bitter end; stubbornly meeting the goals we said we would no matter that the match is now being played on the adjacent pitch.

Stopping mid way through a novel you don't like, turning the car around as soon as you know you're lost, abandoning the initial idea for this blog post, moving on from a business idea which has proved non-viable.. Whatever the scenario, where there is time and effort to be lost in pushing through but little or nothing to gain, the way to fail isn't by productively moving on but by either: wasting your time seeing the unnecessary activity to completion or wasting the time you saved having wisely decided to move on.

There is frankly no benefit to expending resources, be that time, effort or money, on activities that will bring you no reward. Knowing when to cut your losses and roll with a new idea is vital. I decided not to continue working on my draft post because I'd tied my arguments into knots and it would have taken me hours to work though it. This has taken 15 mins and left me free to attack my ever growing flagged email list.

I recognise that it isn't always as simple as putting down a book or re-writing a blog post but, hard as it may be, sometimes the only good decision is to "scrap that" and move on.

#8: A speaker of words and a doer of deeds.

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Throughout Jan/Feb I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7

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It is very easy to possess intent.

I, for example, intended to post this installment on Friday 5th. I intended to learn Hindi last year, and I intend to get 8 hours sleep tonight. For all that it matters I may also intend to run a marathon next year despite being, at best, a 10k kinda girl. That's the great thing about our day to day goals and decisions, as long as they sit clogging up our mental 'to do' lists, they needn't obey the pesky rules of time and space.

Our aims can be unreasonable, unachievable, you may wholeheartedly intend to do the impossible. It's for exactly that reason that good intentions can, all too easily, become a dangerous form of self deception holding us back. Intention protects us from dealing with the action and most of us 'intend' too freely.

Intent doesn't climb mountains or build businesses. Actions do.

An entrepreneur is a do-er above all else. Even the word "entrepreneur" derives from the French 'entreprendre' which means 'to undertake'. Everybody has ideas, lots of people talk abut them, entrepreneurs act on them.

I'm not saying it's simple, despite my intentions the facts are: I'm uploading this on Thurs 11th of Feb, meri Hindi kucch khaas nahi hai and I haven't come close to 8 hours sleep in a single block in... well.. a while. My actions mismatch my intent. It's something I am actively working on, but it is still, literally, 'easier said than done'.

The hardest thing to do is to bridge that gap between intent and action. Harder still if you're setting yourself unreasonable goals.

Setting realistic goals and acting on them is a far more satisfying and worthy endeavor than perpetually speaking about achieving the near-impossible. Just look at some of the most admired people on the planet; people who achieved magnificent, heroic acts of justice, triumph and overcoming adversity but did so day by day, action upon action. I doubt they set out intending to become heroes, rather that each small action was simply heroic.

I defer to Homer on this one (no, not the yellow one) and the 3rd Pillar of the Heroic Code as told to Achilles by his Father In the Iliad:
“be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds."

Don't just tell me you're an entrepreneurial superhero. Show me.

#7: Be an emotional starfish.

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Throughout Jan/Feb I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6

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Almost needfully, most people starting a business vastly underestimate how much it will cost, how long it will take and (assuming you make it that far) how audaciously difficult and achingly lonely the path to success is going to be.

It's an exercise in trial and error, which means you've got to try & you’re going to fail and it's going to happen a lot.

On a fairly regular basis people are going to tell you that you're wrong. You are wasting your time. All the sleepless nights, skint months, anxiety attacks and nerve wracking pitches are for nothing. At times it'll seem, and probably be true, that you work harder, for longer, and for less material reward than your peers. Moreover, when they switch off on a Friday evening, or for two weeks in August, you'll still have half a mind on work and one hand on the smartphone. You'll begin to wonder if your passion for the project has clouded your judgement and maybe the rational thing to do is wind it down. You may even, god forbid, consider making that antipodean step into .. ‘traditional’ employment.

And I admit, I do have moments, whole minutes even, where I wish I had taken a more conventional option; gotten a stable job with regular hours and a wage that arrived, in my bank account, each month. Found a nice house with a manageable mortgage, taken yearly holidays to destinations you can buy guide books for..

Enter the casual supporter. Worse, perhaps, than the doubters - the casual supporter will appear every so often to get your hopes up, tell you your enterprise has promise, a product that will fly off the shelves, and though they cannot personally help (though they'd love to of course) you've got to 'just hang in there.' Which, as we all know, is easier said than done.

Meanwhile, you've got to retain critical faculties, keep working on and, no, you're not allowed to let it drag you down.

Blessedly, one of the things which distinguish entrepreneurs from the rest of the working world is their wonderful ability to tie a neat tourniquet around each wounding disappointment and ride right back into battle as if unscathed. It never ceases to amaze me, the strength we can find and the odd places we find it, how often we'll lose it, stress-test it to breaking point and (seemingly irreparable) find it intact again when we need it most.

True entrepreneurs are emotional starfish, seemingly endlessly regenerative.

#6: If you want a job done well..

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Throughout Jan I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5

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        "If you want a job done well, do it yourself."

I have heard this maxim uttered by some of the smartest self-starters I've had the pleasure and good fortune to meet. All to rarely have I had the freedom, and lets face it, the guts, to tell them they're talking utter tosh.

It is a glamourous fallacy that those who can conceive of great things necessarily have the skills to execute them.

In a former incarnation I worked as a professional choreographer, and I can tell you first hand that I was far better at that than I was a dancer. It is all well and good for me to have a notion for the way a body can move, to picture the lines of the movement in my mind. It is an unrelated matter to command my body to make those forms.

But I wanted a great performance, so did I 'do it myself'? No! I hired great dancers! It's a surprisingly simple notion. Just give the task in question to the best person you can lay your hands on who's skilled at that particular activity. If you can't lay your hands on them, stalk them! After all as far as I can ascertain, that's what Twitter was invented for!

I accept that the commonly accepted counter argument to this idea usually lands between "they dont care as much about my business as I do" and "I will work harder than anyone else because I stand to benefit the most".

Well and enough. I accept that I probably care about my business more than anyone else in the world; this makes sense, it's my business! Yet I am still not convinced that I care enough about Red Button Design to render me magically better at our accounts than our accountant, our sourcing than our procurement team or our appropriate design strategy than James. Infact, I'm certain that no amount of caring can make me more than merely competant at those tasks. It's just not my skill set. Therefore it is my job to make it worth someone else's while to care, either about my enterprise or presumably they care about their job? And working on the assumption that it is their job to do whatever it is you hired them to do, they're looking for you to be a happy customer and therefore their own self interest is in parallel to your self interest. As I have said before, when it comes to my business, linking their personal gain to my aims is the most comfortable I'm going to get.

So rather than a job done well being a job done yourself, it's ok to admit that you can't do it all. More than that, it's vital. An inability to accurately evaluate your talents might be embarrassing at a karaoke bar, but it's fatal in business. Hence, lesson #6:

If you want a job done well, learn to delegate

#5: Schrödinger's cat

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Throughout Jan I will be posting installments of the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series

So far: Introduction, Lesson #1, Lesson #2, Lesson #3, Lesson #4

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Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment which was devised by Erwin Schrödinger to highlight the absurdity of quantum mechanics.
It'll do just the same, however, to highlight the absurdity of business plans.

Business plans are, at best, a guestimation of what might occur if a particular set of variables fall out in a particular manner. At worst, they're a work of fanciful fiction.

Either way, they represent an attempt to model the future which often spans into a delightful set of parallel universes because, well .. it's unlikely you're in the business of predicting the future. So, you'll probably have the version where you barely get by, the one where you'll have your own private island before you're 30 and the one in the middle where you've averaged out all of the highs and lows to reach reason. Most people tend to go with the one in the middle.

In Schrödinger's thought experiment he envisages a box into which you sadistically put a cat and some poison before closing and sealing the lid. You would them head off for an hour, (presumably to work on your business plan!) and after 60 minutes the following question is posed:
Is the cat alive or dead?

Now, without looking in the box, you cannot tell. The cat could be alive but equally it could be dead, having succumbed to the poison. So, one version of the experimental outcome states that as long as you cannot tell which is true, the cat is both simultaneously alive and dead. However, we know rationally that when we do open the box, this is the one outcome that cannot actually be evidenced.

I would argue that business plans are like Schrödinger's cat. While on the one hand the only way to predict the future is to assume a mixture of good and bad outcomes, this does create a tendency for startups to write business plans around impossible averages; forgetting that 'in the real world' cats are either alive or dead, not both.

An example: We're in for two funding bids where, in each, there is a 50% chance we're going to win £10,000.
Odds are, we'll get £10,000 in one or the other. My fantasy business plan says we get £20,000, my worst case scenario says we get zip, nada, niente.
My "most likely scenario" business plan would model this as a £5,000 income in each case. Despite the fact that getting £5,000 is the one truly impossible condition. We'll win £10k or nothing, alive or dead.

...Yes it seems simple now! but #5 was truly a lesson learnt the hard way:

Is Schrödinger's cat in your business plan?

#4: Too much love will kill you.

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Throughout Jan I will be posting installments of the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series

So far: Introduction, Lesson #1, Lesson #2, Lesson #3

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The thrill of starting a business arrives packaged with a rather daunting number of peripheral and unexpected tasks. Between the innocuous and the merely burdensome, there will be a few which invariably require new knowledge and the development of completely new skills.

For any entrepreneur, the natural response to discovering a task that you cannot easily complete is either to get someone else to do it, or learn to do it yourself. Unfortunately the natural state of being for any startup is dead broke, more often than not therefore ruling out the first option! Thankfully, knowledge (or at the very least the perception of it) is fairly easy to come across and frequently free.

Local authority support agencies, peers, Government advice publications, enterprise seminars, consultants, online forums, networking events, meet up groups and countless websites and blogs are waiting, eager to give you the answer that will propel you to success faster than you can say "the next Google" and if you really are a novel business with genuine growth potential they'll be clamouring over themselves to give you their opinion on your product & projections.

Is it altruism?
Is it heck! There's personal gain in the equation somewhere. The question is: where, how does this drive their motivation, and will it compromise the impartiality of their advice to you? I mean, is it really fair to ask a cash-strapped patent attorney their advice on whether you ought to engage in a world-wide patent or if UK & USA will suffice, when the differential is tens of thousands of pounds worth of business?

And all other things being equal would you rather take advice from a business advisor:
    - paid by the hour
    - paid in relation to the positivity of their client feedback forms
    - paid according to the number of cases they get through in a day
    - paid in relation to the number of companies they coached that reach tax threshold within 2 years

I’ve blogged before about how crucial good advice and support is to guide a promising startup through the tough transitions to healthy business. What I didn't say was, like so many things in this life: some is essential, too much can seriously set you back and the wrong kind will destroy you entirely. Brian May had it right as far as I'm concerned, “Too much love will kill you, just as sure as none at all”

You see the thing is, having 5 pieces of conflicting advice serving 5 different agendas, when you're uncertain .. well, it's not a great deal more helpful than having no advice at all, at least not in any practical sense.

Last year, after far too many months running around in circles, Red Button Design was lucky enough to get an introduction to The Ketchup Group who now provide us with support both tailored specifically to our business, and targeted only to the gaps in our knowledge. This creates minimum overlap and encourages us to confidently take the lead where we know best. Most favourably of all, due to the flexibility they afforded us in choosing a structure for our relationship, Red Button Design's success will directly benefit each of the companies in the group. And sod altruism, when deciding to trust someone to share my business decisions, linking their personal gain to my aims is the most comfortable I'm going to get!

Advice is essential. Take it where you need it and by all means give it where you can, but pick you advice sources carefully, examine their motives* and most of all, know when to stop asking and trust your own instinct.

Lesson #4

Too much love will kill you, just as sure as none at all

* I'm writing these blogs sharing my lessons of 2009 because I hope to increase readership and raise the profile of this blog. If you like them or find them useful (and I really hope you do!) please comment, subscribe by RSS or consider sharing the link on Twitter.

#3: Brevity is good.

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Throughout Jan I will be posting installments of the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series

So far: Introduction, Lesson #1, Lesson #2

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It's generally the case that the more important the person you're contacting:
    a) the more valuable their time is
    b) the greater your desire to make a good impression

Quite often getting directly to the 'ask' or using bullet points is portrayed as rude. Real rudeness is writing a 500 word email when 50 words will do.

    - it wastes their time
    - it wastes yours
    - it lowers the chance they'll read and/or reply to you

Lesson #3:
Brevity is good

#2: You can’t half-ride a bike.

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Throughout Jan I will be posting installments of the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series

So far: Introduction , Lesson #1

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While it may be official that you’ll never forget how to ride a bike, the chances are good you'll forget the mindset which allowed you to learn to ride it in the first place.

On a bike, there are two points of safety. Just two.
The first involves having both feet on the ground, your hands on the handlebars and a stationary bike. The second is ... well, riding the bike. As any kid knows, you can’t half-ride a bike. You can’t keep one foot skirting the ground just-in-case (you’re going to need both feet to pedal), you can’t very well run along the road Fred Flintstone style, and as for riding a bike very, very, slowly … well, you just try that.
No? Well trust me, it doesn’t work either.

It’s a momentum issue.
When you’re 7 or 8 you get this, there’s no middle ground. You have to commit to the act of riding the bike and accept that you may fall, or bail on the activity completely. Thankfully most 8 year olds think they’re Evel Knievel and don’t know the meaning of ‘caution’... Sadly, most Entrepreneurs aren’t 8 years old.

This time last year I was splitting my energy between freelancing as a marketing consultant, a PT sales role, speaking at business events and careers fairs, acting as a course-mentor to three entrepreneurs and participating in a couple of Enterprise UK focus groups, amongst other ephemeral opportunities (!) We’d just returned from The Earth Awards in New York and James was entering the final 6 months of a full time Masters Degree with curricular split between two Universities..

We clearly hadn’t fully committed to our business. Despite believing I was giving it my all, Red Button Design was at best a side project for the first few months of 2009. Yet, we hadn’t bailed on it either and at the time I truly thought I was making progress. As it turns out, I was standing over a stationary bike making ‘vrooom’ noises.

If you’re working to start a scalable business, you’re attempting to do something extraordinary. You’re doing something new, something better, more efficient or more attractive. How many of us, if we're honest with ourselves, can say we'll be better than established competitors in our spare time?

Of course, there are excuses. Damn good excuses for the most part. I'm not even going to start on the things I either haven't had, or have had to do, since I shunned paid employment to work full time on Red Button Design. It shouldn't be possible to survive indefinitely without a wage, yet making the impossible, possible, is only the first in the set of daredevil skills an entrepreneur needs. No matter how much effort and focus you devote to your enterprise, you're still putting yourself at risk of bumps, scrapes and that word that scares us Brits so deeply, 'failure'. I don't know how many times you skinned your knees learning to cycle.. I recall a fair few topples myself, but just take a quick look at your knees today, to see that the scars of failure heal.

So take a step back and if it's clear you haven't already decided, decide today. Commit or Bail?
...and if you're not going to give up that easily, then take a deep breath and pedal as fast as you can because it's my second lesson for 2010:

Commit or Bail. You can’t half ride a bike.

#1: A favour given isn’t necessarily a favour owed.

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Throughout Jan I will be posting installments of the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series I introduced last Friday

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Let’s picture a reality in which you wrote a lovely blog piece about me.
Yeah, I know.. but imagine you had found a few kind words to say and strung them together into some elegant and witty prose; perhaps you linked to my blog, my twitter, the company site, even my Amazon wishlist* all entirely unprompted and of your own volition. That’d be nice of you, wouldn’t it?
And let’s say I even got a few customers from your efforts. That’d be really nice.

Now imagine you get in touch with me a few months later, you know how successful your post has been in driving me valuable traffic and you suspect you’ve helped increase my sales. You approach me at an event and ask me to endorse your new product on my, now pretty well eyeballed, site because.. y’know, you wrote that post a while back and it’d be kind of me to return the favour. You heavily imply that I owe you and speak as if my agreement is a given. As it happens however, as nice as you might be and as kind as you may have been, I don’t rate your product at all. Worse than that, I've actually only ever had negative experiences of it.

You’ve put me in a pretty tough position, torn between feeling indebted to return the gesture and my own integrity.

Will your previous kind actions weigh it into the balance of my decision? Of course! I’m nice like that. Do I consider a tacit agreement to have been made? No I do not. If you’re doing me a favour with the underlying motive of receiving something in return, you need to be upfront about it. State your proposition! If what you can offer is beneficial to me, and if what you want in return is agreeable to me, I’ll most likely agree to the trade. If what you want in return isn’t something I am comfortable to give then I’m not going to be swayed by a series of kind gestures impressing a sense of obligation onto my shoulders. That sounds... well, a little like bribery to me.

This lesson, of course, goes both ways. If you simply can't give me what I am asking for, no amount of me being lovely to you will, or should, persuade you to make that compromise for me.

More than once last year did I find myself going uncomfortably out of my way to help someone, motivated simply by a feeling of obligation to ‘hold up my end of the bargain’ when no such bargain has been made. Hence the first lesson I’ll be carrying into 2010:

A favour given isn’t necessarily a favour owed.


* Lesson #1b, it never hurts to try ;-)

No Regrets, Only Lessons From Another Year at the Fair

"New Years Resolutions" ..I've not checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if a week into 2010 this is still trending on Twitter. Come Jan 1st most of us make them, break them, then forget them. Starting with the infamous groan on New Year's Day "I'm never drinking again!" and rapidly cycling through a series of health & well being promises, visions of prolificacy, of rediscovering your work ethic, keeping better control of your finances and acquiring new skills.. every year the same core aims make our lists.

I duly made mine last year, 10 in total, which took pride of place pinned to my office wall all year. I managed to succeed at an impressive 5 of them, very nearly achieved a further 2, and made epic failures of the remaining three, (and no, I shall not tell you what they were!)

But between you, me, and the little thing they call t'interweb: 2009 was nothing short of an utterly rampageous year for me.

People seem to like to describe the lives of young entrepreneurs and their nascent businesses as if we were on a roller-coaster, and I get that, really I do! The highs, the lows, the thrills and anxieties undeniably come to permeate every aspect of your life. Yet last year, if proof was even required, served to deftly illustrate quite how over simplified this analogy is. There's not only a roller coaster in the entrepreneurial fairground, there’s the spiraling helter-skelter, a haunted house, a shooting gallery (always rigged) and a candy stand where we can prove, yet again, that entrepreneurs have 'eyes bigger than our stomachs'.. and don't even get me started on the caged-in cycle of the carousel, or the dodge ‘ems with at least one driver who thinks he’s in a bumper-car.. It's all at once exhausting and dazzling.

Through 2009 I struggled at times between being so goal orientated I became inflexible and unresponsive, and so open minded and eager to learn that I was led astray by every bandwagon and exciting new idea. A lot is made of the 'art' to keeping resolutions, very little do we consider the art of allowing ourselves not to achieve our set goals if the goals are no longer appropriate. There are so many things from 2009 I might respond to differently should they recur in 2010, certainly too many to list and keep on my wall. So I have only one resolution for 2010:
'Carry no regrets, only lessons'.

And in a series beginning next week I will blog 'The 12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009'.

WARNING! Disconnection Will Cause Adverse Side Effects..

Happy New Year, I’m sure many of you have amongst your resolutions a commitment to learn something new? Well let’s start January off with a little bit of science*.

Here’s a little psychological experiment but do remember, kids, don’t try this at home!

Our participant for this particular experiment is called Amanda, like me. And, oddly, in almost every way imaginable, Amanda is like me.

Amanda has just moved into a new flat. She likes it a great deal but it’s not yet hooked up with a landline or broadband and all her neighbours have sensibly passworded their connections with unguessable passwords. That’s ok, however, because we have provided her with a Blackberry and a Dongle for her Mac.

For 6 days we leave Amanda alone to settle in and simply observe her routine. On the 7th day, at 9pm, we inexplicably stop the Blackberry’s data package, bar outgoing calls & texts, and disable the dongle.

What happens next?

A) Our participant fusses, half heartedly, for a few minutes with the devices before breathing a sign of relief, running herself a bath and getting an early night.

B) Our participant systematically troubleshoots the Blackberry, Dongle and the Mac to no avail before giving up and settling on the sofa with a book and some wine, breaking periodically to check and re-check all devices.

C) Our participant displays mild signs of distress and spends an entire hour shutting down all devices, trying to restart them in different combinations, checking and double checking all phone lines and connections as well as trying to call the relevant customer care lines only to remember the phone is non-functional before finally resorting to working on her flagged email list offline, queuing the completed emails to send, presumably from her regular Starbucks the next day.

D) Our participant displays signs of severe anxiety, continually checking all three devices, repeatedly turning them on and off again and futilely attempting to channel Angelina Jolie’s character from Hackers and connect to local protected networks. Resorting to distraction techniques fails as she attempts to stream The Big Bang Theory on 4OD, search for podcasts on iTunes and discover new music on Spotify. Disoriented, she wanders from room to room with the dongle and the Blackberry seeking a connection, apparently unable to set the devices aside and work offline productively. Finally she attempts to look for local 24 hour internet café’s, or a pub with wifi, by using Google before realising her mistake and lapsing into a catatonic state.

Answers on a postcard ;-)

All in all, the experience was a little too like the time my business partner attempted to discover if my caffeine addiction was psychological or physiological by switching everything I had to decaf without me knowing. When, by mid afternoon, I excused myself to head home ill citing my symptoms as migraine, nausea, mental fugue, inability to concentrate and unbearable lethargy, then he sought pity on me and confessed. A couple of medicinal venti, extra-shot, skinny cappuccinos later (his shout, obviously) and we were able to definitively conclude that the experiment did not need repeating. I didn’t quite get it legislated in the shareholders agreement but be warned, it doesn’t say “caffeine addict” on my business card for no reason and, after yesterday, “net addict” may be appearing beside it with the next print run..

Is there a moral to this rambling story? Perhaps a final thought about the increasing over-dependence of society on online and digital communication? Or perhaps an argument towards internet access as a human right?

I don't know, or care, I don't have time to think about that now I have the internet back in all its glory!


* If you really do fancy learning some creative-entrepreneur friendly science go check out the fabulous boys and girls of Prism Magazine

Thank-you & Happy Holidays

In the course of this year I have been deeply fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet a huge number of amazing and inspiring individuals from all over the world: entrepreneurs, business people, world leaders, designers, humanitarians, activists, scientists, engineers, free-thinkers, change-makers ... overwhelmingly smart, determined & formidable souls who rendered almost insignificant, the naysayers, bullies and worse.

So to everyone who inspired me in 2009; those who listened, shared their advice and their experience, to any who encouraged and all who spent their time, I'd like to let you to know that I'll be thanking each of you quietly by making every effort to spend 2010 mindful of whatever lesson you had to share.

Thank-you for your support. We, truly, couldn't do without you.

“Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us. Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game”
- Will Durant

Happy Holidays everyone. x

A little "Wisdom" for the weekend.

"You don't have to be rich & you don't have to be an army... If you find yourself in a situation that needs to be changed, if you're willing to offer your life for it - you might actually get something done."

- Bernice Johnson Reagon. (3m40s)

“Inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman interviewed, photographed and filmed 50 of the world's great writers, actors, artists, designers, politicians, musicians and religious and business leaders of our time. He posed seven questions to each of his subjects - all over 65 years of age”

I got the Book / DVD combination of this project for Christmas and can thoroughly reccommend it. It is certainly worth 5 minutes of your morning to watch the video below. If you like it, go buy it!


Wisdom - Introduction from SLNSW on Vimeo.

"you can't get to 'wonderful' without passing through 'alright'"
- Bill Whithers (1m58s)

"Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and work"
- Chuck Cose (2m30s)

What Keeps You Awake At Night?

One of the themes of last week's World Entrepreneur Society 2009 Summit was “What keeps you awake at night?”

A lot of varied and interesting discussions have sprung up around this theme and, inevitably, the answers are very personal to individuals and specific to their businesses. It is interesting, however, to notice both the common threads in people's answers and acknowledge how few of us are getting any rest being kept awake, as it seems we all are, by one thing or another.

Just to join the bandwagon:
In no particular order, here's my Top 10 :

1) Wondering if there is really a specific place in the economy for 'Social Enterprise' or whether all Enterprise must become inherently more social?

2) Fear of missed opportunities (for me, much more frightening than 'fear of failure')

3) The dissonance between what I think is the bravest, boldest and best course of action vs. that which I feel I have the confidence and skills to pursue

4) Reading my RSS feeds

5) A constant string of 'To Do Tomorrows' popping into my head

6) Wondering what action I'll take if the recession makes raising this additional funding impossible / Wondering if I would recognise when it was time to give up and move on

7) A near obsessive checking of Social Networking sites

8) A veracious appetite for personal study. Distance courses, factual books, language studies, how-to websites, things which I can't make space during the day for but really want to spend time on

9) Deadlines / late nights / early flights which mean I just miss getting to bed altogether

10) Though truly disturbing how little it now affects me, occasionally I'm kept awake by the obscene amount of caffeine I like to consume during the day

Although if i'm honest, 9 times out of 10, it's No.3.