For every 10 entrepreneurs or executives, who use the refrain “we are gaining great traction with [investors, buyers, customers]”, I find 9 have nothing meaningful to show for it yet [committed capital, signed agreements, cash in the bank]. Fact.
Let’s be clear, you cannot feed the family on popularity or acceptances of your idea, product or investment. It reminds me of the silly game social media influencers play in justifying their success by the number of “likes”.
To then use that as an excuse, as some do to withhold investment in improving their own skills in attracting and converting potential investors into actual investors, leads into buyers, and interest into cash is dumb. What are you “saving up for”, when your skills deficiency is such that you need to be spending now? Longer suffering?
Lawyers always advise clients if you cannot win on “fact”, you must try to win on the “law”.
If you are an enterprise technology or “enabling” business, seeking growth capital fast, you may not “win” immediately in convincing the investor but there is no reason you cannot show investors why you are a “winner” in your ideal customer’s eyes. We are talking about “leverage”, and applying tremendous “normative or peer pressure” to the investor’s thinking. The more impressive the customers (BMW), and the scale of the future opportunities (global markets), the more power you have to exert.
Customer Opportunity Assessment (“COA”):
Grid A: How much will the opportunity cost to implement (set up, training, operation, licence fees, lease space, new hires, new expertise) vs. How much potential benefit does the opportunity provide (tangible improvements for customers, new products or services offered, self-financing or not, is the risk worth the benefit, how long until we see expected results and so on)?
Grid B: How difficult is it to implement your technology (customer understanding, reliability, dependence on support staff, physical space, users’ connectivity ease and experience etc) vs. How close is the improvement to your ideal customer’s current corporate strategy (building a stronger brand, faster innovation, stronger business model, current systems, procedures and methods, faster new customer acquisition, quicker new product/services offered etc.)
You are ideally seeking to be positioned as “low” implementation cost/”high” potential benefit on Grid A, and “low” difficulty in implementing/”high” proximity to your ideal customers’ strategy, on Grid B.
If your attitude is the investor must find this out for themselves or you are wary of asking your own customers, you are dramatically reducing the odds of a prospective investor partnership and committed capital.
Businesses don’t become insular, their leaders do. When leaders are so focused managing “in” their business that they overlook or are increasingly disinterested in the changes taking place around them (clients, markets, products, technology), they’ve made a deadly choice. Defending what they have is a bigger priority than embracing new ideas and new ways to evolve. No surprise then that the “inwards thinking” permeates down to middle managers, who see little or no incentive in promoting experimentation on the front line. Faced with more effective alternatives, clients walk, and the brightest employees walk. By the time, the “alarm bell” is sounded, all too often it is too late, particularly in small businesses.
