Questioning planning is only natural. After all planning takes time, the output is ‘soft’ and generally slows down building the business. I find entrepreneurs to be passionate and impatient and generally more focused on getting things done – I speak from experience because I built, ran and sold two online businesses and neither of them had a business plan!

Nonetheless, I now know that planning is an essential component of a successful business. Planning forces one to clarify three key points:

Extracting many ideas out of our minds is valuable, and so is structuring them under some type of business logic. It forces us to structure our thinking and doing so provides clarity, purpose and focus all of which save time and money. After all, why bother running if you are heading in the wrong direction?

How much business planning needs to be done?

It depends! It depends on how much uncertainty your startup faces. Eric Ries, in his Lean Startup presentation, discussed the different problem, opportunity and solution scenarios a startup may face. These include:

This is a great starting point to identifying the degrees of certainty/uncertainty your business may face and the flexible/ focused approach your business may require. Perhaps the table below can assist.

If a startup knows the problem it is addressing and its solution, business planning should be comprehensive enough to articulate the strategy of getting from A to B followed by a clear plan of action.

However, if the level of uncertainty is High or Very High, planning might be limited to providing direction and clarifying overall intent. There is no point in planning in excruciating level of detail when we just don’t know. This is where Steve Blank’s focus on customer development is key.

In any case, the table above is not an exact science. Nonetheless, it does point out that different circumstances (high uncertainty/ low uncertainty) will require different approaches to planning, methodology and measuring progress.

What if you don’t plan?

Planning does not guarantee success, nor does not-planning guarantee failure. Without planning your business can succeed, however, fortune will play a bigger role than required. Most importantly, lack of foresight and business planning doesn’t guarantee failure, but could lead to missing valuable opportunities – which is just as bad.

So to conclude, plan ahead to manage risk and uncertainty, plan ahead to foresee and avoid unnecessary challenges and most importantly plan not for the plan, but for the exercise of planning.

What do you think?

I’m happy to include some planning resources in a next post if there is interest.

Eduardo

Note from Mick -> Eduardo joined Pollenizer in November as a contractor jumping straight into Blurb and Live In Australia. He did an amazing job picking them up quickly and running them so well for three months. Eduardo helps businesses grow by providing sales and marketing activities. He is part of the Pollenizer family and can be contacted via his blog: www.eduardochavez.com

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I’m running a Web Business Focus workshop for $80 on March 17.

I’ve done more than 35 focus workshops for clients over the past two years and I love doing them. We take a big vision and find out where our starting focus is and it lets us get started in a lean, agile way with a reasonable budget.

A lot of smaller startups haven’t had the budget to pay for one on one workshops, so some suggested a multi-person workshop. I’ve done these at BarCamps and BootupCamps and got good feedback, so I thought we’d do it. Here is the details;

Web Business Focus with Mick Liubinskas

Get 2010 in focus!

Do you run a start up that needs focus or have a great web business idea that you want to explore – then register for Pollenizer’s Focus Workshop run by Mick ‘Mr Focus’ Luibinskas, Pollenizer Co-founder, Chief Marketing Officer and serial entrepreneur.

What we’ll cover:

1. Why is focus and agility so important?
2. What is your core value and driver?
3. How to find your customer?
4. How to make the experience valuable, fast?
5. How to get people to your site?
6. How to make sure people come back?
7. How to get people to bring their friends or refer more business?
8. How to get people to share your content to the world?
9. How to build a roadmap?

What’s your investment?

• Three hours for one night
• Pre-workshop: complete a one page strategy summary
• $80 per person

In this interactive workshop you will find your busines focus. The purpose of the workshop is to help every participant find and/or refine their business focus for 2010. Over two hours we will cover the business, the product, the market, the customer acquisition strategy and communications using Pollenizer’s focus methodology.

In the last hour, you can ask questions and share your ideas with other participants.

Pollenizer’s marketing team will assist you with planning, to bounce ideas and support you in this process. We have helped over 30 web businesses find their marketing focus.

Join us for a enjoyable and challenging evening and kick off 2010 with brutal focus!

About Mick: http://www.pollenizer.com/about/our-team/mick-liubinskas/

Register Here for April

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It was a little bit opportunistic with Eric Ries, the key proponent of the concept, in town and a little bit of ‘about time, we need this in Sydney’. We only confirmed that the event was less than two weeks ago so we had to move fast.

In fact, we had to be lean. So we ran it like a lean startup.

Openly, with a pregnant wife, moving house, 8 live projects at Pollenizer and catching up after a recent flu, I knew I didn’t have the time to do a good job on the event. I wasn’t aiming for perfection, we just wanted to get started. So I tweeted out for help.

I got about 10 offers of help, including from Michelle Williams who I knew had been doing some great work in the community and a bit of that around events. I reached out to her and she said yes to helping organise. So our lean team was coming together.

Customer Development for Customer Development

Again, we wanted to be lean, and one of the principles I believe is a part of lean is to charge people money to see if they are really interested. This was important to me. I know that communities need love and I was only prepared to put the effort needed to get it going if there was enough real interest. Charging money is a great way to guage that. I would have been very happy if we only had 20 good people who cared enough to fork out $50. I really had no idea of what the price should be, but I thought if 20 people paid, at least we’d cover our costs. My goal with the two tiers was partly so that the big company people or the PR/Marketing providers could pay a bit extra (I thought they’d have it) and the startups and students could get a cheaper price. It was also a good way to see what type of people were interested.

Action Stations

We also had to move fast. We had just over one week to organise it, promote it, and make it work. Again, we weren’t aiming for the Oscars, just a solid first event. I put the event details on Amiando the day Eric confirmed he could make it. Even before Michelle found a venue. And I just tweeted it out.  Launch early! Within an hour I got some emails and DM’s with things I’d missed out. I got the hashtag wrong, a URL and more, but most of it was there. The best thing was that we got sign ups and re-promotions straight away. People were keen and keen to tell their colleagues. Good start. And the good thing was that with the event set up, the promotional machine could just start building while we worked to actually set up the event.

Monday with one week to go, Michelle go moving on a venue. She looked at a bunch of them, but at that point we had no idea how much money we’d have so we were aiming for super cheap. But we also needed a projector and a mic for Eric. And probably food since it would go on. With me running off-site workshops for much of the week, Michelle and I were SMS’ing and emailing until we settled on Bar 333. Basically we didn’t have any more time to find a better venue or better deal. It was Thursday and we needed to finalise it and tell people before Friday. It wasn’t perfect, but we’d make it work.

By Thursday I think we had about 40 people signed up – great, we had a big enough group to cover the costs and have an interesting event. Eric was currently at Webstock and communication channels were not great, but we managed to work most of it out, if very slowly, over the week. Remembering that Michelle and I have day jobs, so we were squeezing this into busy schedules.

Monday we met up a few hours before the event, Michelle arrived with the hired projector and screen, and we printed the audience lists, grabbed some pens and labels and took off to the city. We still hadn’t heard from Eric yet, though we were pretty sure he was deep in the bowels of Google working with the Google Wave team.

Arriving at the venue it was packed with chairs as if we were having a massive hens night. After furniture removal, Eric arrived with a very sore throat after a day of constant talking. A cup of tea and two Vicks Vapour Drops and we were going to make it through, though he wasn’t sure if he’d finish his full deck of slides.

Then the night took off;

• People turned up, grabbed a free drink (Though some people who were late missed out. Sorry, that’s the way it goes. Come earlier next time.)
• Most people were actively running a startup which was great.
• Eric gave an excellent talk doing a full hour on Lean Startups and telling some good background stories to make the point.
• I won’t try and paraphrase Eric, instead you can see the presentation and full deck of slides below.
• A few questions from the audience before I let Eric’s voice rest and everyone else mill about and chat.

Eric Ries Lean Startup Lessons Learned Presentation

Eric’s Slides

Some Photos

Eric Ries espousing some home truths about startups

The crowd of founders at lean startup sydney

Mick Liubinskas intro at Lean Startup Sydney

Lessons From This Lean Event

So we did it quickly, cheaply and with a big goal if really seeing if enough good people were really interested in this. After talking to people after the event I think we definitely showed this was true.

For a quick sprint, we also learned a lot;

• Pricing is ok for corporates and service providers ($90), and $45 probably ok for startups. Should have a $20 option for students. If you’re not willing to part for one night out drinking money, then you’re probably not that interested.
• Honesty is interesting since we don’t check what category you’re in. 99% of people paid into what I’d guess was the right category.
• The venue was pretty, but chairs could have been laid out a lot better and a second mic for questions would be nice. I’m not sure Sydney has enough good venues for events like this.
• Food was ok, but not spectacular. We didn’t spend a lot of money on it, and compared to other events I think it was reasonable.

So what’s next?

• Join up to the global group – Lean Startup Circle
• Join the Sydney group for event updates – Sydney Lean Startup Circle. We have some money left over from last night to run the next event.
• Check out the Lean Startup Wiki
• Eric is hosting a talk in San Francisco and will be streaming it out. Pollenizer will aim to host a Jelly at our office on the day to watch and hang out. More details to come.

Thanks to everyone for turning up and being positive. Very exciting to be a part of a growing, energetic community.

Thanks to Eric for giving up his time to give such a useful talk and for really driving some new learnings into the starutp space.

Big, big, big thank to Michelle Williams who got stuck into this quickly and did a great job in such a small space of time with a terrible brief from me.

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2. Sydney Festival: Lessons in Simplicity
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As difficult as it may seem, you need to know this if you make consumer web products. Especially if you want to make revenue.

My question to you: Can we design authenticity and depth into digital product design or will it always be one-step removed? I like to think that we can.

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Wow, amongst a flat-out, full-on week I’m poking my head up for a brief second to say;

“Hey, Pollenizer is two years old today!”

And I’m so proud. Proud of the team and crazy hard work they’ve put into building the more than dozens of great web businesses.They are fantastic and I can’t say enough to thank them for their volunteered creativity, energy and care.

Proud of the community to come together and even make a company like Pollenizer possible – really, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Very proud of Phil, my business partner, for riding this crazy rollercoaster of getting started, working it out, building the team, financial crises, clients being great, clients being awful, going to Europe, really growing Australia and still walking in each day with a smile and a big ball of energy. Plus, doing all of that while being high integrity and a rock-solid belief in what we are and what we do.

I’m also proud of myself. Pollenizer didn’t exist two years ago and now it does. And it was hard. Hard to do the work, hard to work it out, hard to really try and look after customers. Hard to run the business, grow the business, administrate the business. I say that I’m my own boss – I get to choose when I do my 80 hours a week.

I’m also proud of our failures. Failed systems. Failed ideas. Failed projects. People we thought would be fantastic but we didn’t fit each other. I’m certain most of my learnings have come from them so all I need to do is increase my failure rate and make sure I don’t make the same mistakes twice.

A special thank you to Karen, my wife, for putting up with me saying “Honey, I think this is going to be a big week at work” for about 93 out of 104 weeks.  I think she knows I love what I do and would be more painful any other way, but I still appreciate the support.

That thanks goes out to all the partners of the Pollenizer team who have put up with late night calls with Pollenizer India and Europe, long days, weekend work, and other assorted madness.

Another thanks to the companies, founders, and teams who gave us a chance to show what we could do. A company that preaches agile, says we can’t give you even an estimate, asks you to trust us and gives you lots of homework is not an easy proposition to buy in to. But, you did, and we did our darndest to do a fantastic job each time. We certainly couldn’t have done it without you and we’re so proud of what you’ve built with sweat, toil and care.

The next two years…. I’m so excited. We’re getting better and better, bigger and bigger, faster and faster. I’m loving it and can’t wait to see the things we build with you.

Thank you!

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I’ve bolded some of my favourite bits.

Verne Harnish:
Routine sets you free

Read read read:

• Bill Gates – Think week – read 18 hours a day for 7 days.
• Eric Smidth “Time to Read”
• Tom Peters – “Outread your competition”

Leadership traits

• Listen more, talk less
• Less statements, more questions.

Are you playing not to lose? Play to win.

4 decisions

• People
• Strategy
• Execution
• Cash

People
Books -> Keith Ferrazzi – never eat alone, who’s got your back. top 250 relationships.
Google alerts following top 50 monthly, 100 quaterly, 100 per year.

Books -> Ooops -Aubrey Daniels – management waste of time and money

Strategy – One phrase strategic plan.

Pollenizer – A great services business with a portfolio of web businesses.

Books – > Reality Marketing Revolution
- do you say us or we more than you or your?

Execution

Books -> Atul Gawande – The checklist manifesto

Cash

Books ->Built to Sell – John Warrillow
- is everything you’re doing adding value to be bought out.

Average age;
India 24
China 32

1 billion in middle class by 2020

Hermann Simon – Hidden Champions

Ogilvy – four ps. Four es

• Product – Experience
• Price – Exchange – value
• Place – Everyplace
• Promotion – Evangelism

David Meerman Scott

7 bloggers for Harry Potters ride led to 350 million views.
Private showing.
Webinar.

Buyer personas;
Startup founders – looking for help to build it.
SME Directors – looking for growth, ready for investment.

On the web, you are what you publish.

Most over used phrases -

innovate
please to
unique
focused on
leading privier
commitment
partnership
new and improved
leverge
120 percent
cost effective
next generation
flexible
world class

One of the top 3 buttons used when web browsing is the back button.

Email marketing metrics
mailer mailer

1. talk about customers, not you and your products.
2. Lose control
3. Put down roots
4. Point people to your site at all times.

Guy Parsons

Lean Transformation

• Maximise value
• Minimise waste
• Delighting customers
• Growing people

• Flow production
• Flexible, capable processes
• Bullet proof processes
• Organisation by group.

What is your companies operating system?

Make sure you measure the success

Eliminate waste:
- salesforce
- proposals
- reporting
- blockages
- meetings
- doing things multiple times.
- having less optimal people doing the work.
- project switching “No, I’m working on this now”
- Unfinished work.

Look for when nothing is happening or things going backwards.

- leveraging existing templates.
- Internal training

Toyota Processes:

1. Correction/rework
2. Overproduction
3. Material movement
4. Motion
5. Waiting
6. Invetory
7. Process
8. People

Waste is a symptom of the root cause;

Value of Pollenizer;
- Lowering risk
- Faster results
- Bigger results
- More enjoyable

Look at time

Understanding demand;
- how many startups – controlling it.

Value statements from customers;

“My idea will blossom at Pollenizer.”

“I won’t be able to do this by myself.”

“I’m looking to grow a business and it will be bigger with Pollenizer.”

“I don’t know who to trust with this. You guys have great references.”

“I don’t understand the technology side.”

Flow

Level production – level selling.

• Kaikaku – revolutionary change
• Kazien – gradual change

NPS – Net Promoter Score

• Would they recommend you to friends or family?
• 9 or a 10 is positive. 7-8 is neutral. 1-6 is negative.

Value from the Customer/s point of view:

Must incorporate all stakeholders – shareholders, customers, suppliers, team.

“Plans will not survive the first contact with the customer.”

3 Statements;

1. Go see – go on floor and spend time with the work.
2. Ask why why why why why why why?
3. Show respect

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Great news. We’ve been talking to Eric since we were on the same startup mentor group at Seedcamp in London last year. We wanted to try and get him to Australia to talk to the startup crew and kickstart lean startup circle.

Luck has gone our way and Eric has leveraged off his keynote at Webstock in Wellington to drop by Sydney for a few days.

I love focus and Eric is the master of telling great stories on what works and what doesn’t work with starting up a startup. And he’s no academic – he’s been through the good, bad and ugly to learn his lessons the hard way.

We’re also going to use this as a way to kick start the Sydney circle of Lean Startups. I hope you can make it.

Register here

Future Workshops

Mick Liubinskas – Web Focus Workshop
– learn how to apply focus to your startup or web business. A practical program with a small amount of participants.

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We’re at Growth Summit this week and thought it would be useful to share one of our most valuable tools: Pollenizer’s Site Page Strategic Plan Template

We are big fans of Verne Harnish and the Rockefeller Habits. One of his most powerful contributions to our business has been the idea of a one page strategic plan to focus the company. Each quarter, we gather together to review our core values and objectives and to plan where our focus lies for the next quarter. All startups should have one of these.

Verne has a ton of stuff online, including templates, that you can use to build one for your business.

• Resources to roll your own strategic plan

We love it because it is simple and it keeps us focused. It doesn’t take a long time to do or become a burden for the team in the daily rhythm of the business.

We’ve remixed it a bit so that it works for our business and we have moved it into the form of a mini website. We use Google Sites so that our global team can view and update a single source of truth easily. We thought you may like to use it as a template.

• Pollenizer One Site Strategic Plan Template

Let us know what you think and if you use it.

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The National Broadband Network in Australia is an opportunity to throw the genius, energy and passion of the Australian innovation community at a context for changing the world. I think it is a once-in-a-century chance for Australia to build, and then refine with real customers, next generation internet products that will compete on a world stage. We can’t imagine what new, multi-billion dollar companies are going to emerge from the this platform for innovation.

So let’s get started! Let’s show the world what we can do! Let me get my hands on a population with 100 MBps connectivity.

Well, so far, its all been rather under-whelming. Lot’s a of politics (thank you Telstra), lot’s of bureaucracy and a big focus on the hardware. There is practically no company, large or small, (that I have spoken to) that is exploring what it is going to do with this network.

Now look what’s happening. The US is coming, with Google at the helm, doing what we should be doing.

Official Google Blog: Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network.

Below are three things that Google is focussed on. Here’s what I want to know. Who has even identified these issues in Australia, let alone started work on exploring them?

• Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
• New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
• Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Oh, and Google is trialling connection speeds 10 times faster than the ones NBN is still making policy on.

If you know of some cool stuff going on in Australia around the NBN that will cheer me up, please let me know.  In the meantime, I’ll initiate my 5 year plan to leave the country and go to live somewhere that I can stretch my legs.

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Remedy Tea Test tubes (by storyvillegirl)

The only way to be fantastic at creating products that customers love and keep on loving (which is a core tenant of marketing) is to have a culture of testing in your company.

When a product is young it’s easy to have ideas about how to improve them. It’s easy. There is low hanging fruit everywhere and everyone has an opinion – from your mother through to investors.

But which ideas do you pursue? That’s where leadership comes in, to prioritise and (dare I say it) focus. However, having a priority for implementation is not even half the challenge. How do you know the idea made a difference? Did your mother or the investor now low it 100 times more? Does that matter? The only way you know is by testing.

The ability for a company to be able to implement something quickly is pointless without the ability to see if it made a difference. To begin with it is easier, since things may have been broken and now they work at all, but just because something wasn’t there before and now it is doesn’t mean the overall product is better. In fact most the time more is a lot, lot, lot less.

Testing Culture

Having a culture of testing starts with the mindset and the commitment. You have to want it, because it’s not fun. It takes the inspiration down a peg or two and makes it work for it’s money. It means you spend more time looking at numbers, graphs and spreadsheets and less time working on what’s next. An big failure of many young businesses is that they move onto ‘next’ before ‘just added’ is working. Be careful about the term ‘working’ too. Functioning doesn’t mean that it actually makes the product better and that people care about it. Take Dave’s advice and try removing a feature and see if people kick up a stink. (see the slideshare below). This takes guts and that means strong leadership which forms strong culture.

Testing Structure

You also have to want it enough to make some changes. A culture of testing without the right tools is pointless. Everyone at least uses Google Analytics, but it’s not enough. You need to be able to quickly see if people are talking about the change and loving it. See if it’s changing other behaviour. If more people are coming back.  More people are converting. More paying. Paying more. Telling their friends more. Measure everything that is actually really important. Again, see the slideshare below for more on what to measure.

Testing (Your) Patience

One of the hardest things about testing is that it takes time which can frustrate the 1,000 kms per hour entrepreneur. The anal retentive team member needs to step in and pull on the hand brake. Testing takes time. You have to think about it, implement it, let it run live, analyse the results and then you learn whether it worked or not. If you’re agile and making changes every week or two, this is still 3-4 weeks.

Testing Rhythm

The great news is that once you’re team is into testing, the tools are in place and you’ve done a couple of laps/iterations  of it, you’ll start to get in the groove. You’ll start to to talk like testers. It goes something like this:

Co-Founder A “Hey, I think if we made the ’sign up’ button bigger we’d get more sales?”

Co-Founder B “Good idea, let’s test it! Create 3 versions, AB test it, and check conversions.”

Instead of how it used to go:

Co-Founder A “Hey, I think we should make the ’sign up’ button bigger?”

Co-Founder B “Good idea. Team, stop what you’re doing and make the button bigger.” A day goes by…. “Wow, that new button looks good. OK, what’s the next feature we should add?”

Absolutely no idea whether the idea was any good. Just lots of untested guesses. In fact one thing that a testing culture does is adds a little more discipline to ideas. When people know they will be tested, they really think ideas through instead of throwing them out there.

What to Test

I’d like to write the definitive piece on what to test, but it’s been written. Dave McClure, the dude of startup dudes, has put this together which is worth studying. Don’t just flick through it. Print it out and make notes. Crosses and ticks for what you don’t and do measure.

Tell me how you test

If you’re doing some testing, I’d love to hear what you test, how you test it and how it changes the way you think / run your business. Add a comment below.

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