SustainableWork

Last evening our Iowa County area entrepreneur club participated in a great presentation by Wendy Soucie.

Wendy Soucie Consulting is a Wisconsin firm specializing in innovative social media applications. Wendy is an engineer who is also a creative marketing professional specializing in social media for business.

Here's a Twitter post I picked up from Wendy's site today:

"Iowa County Entrepreneurs are a great bunch - New community kitchen to provide outlet for tasty new products. I heard the word chocolate."

We greatly enjoyed Wendy's presentation!


Visit Wendy Soucie Consulting LLC


Wendy's presentation she shared last evening with our Iowa County area entrepreneur's club. As time passes, search for Wendy's March 24, 2010 to the Iowa County area entrepreneurs.

Labels: marketing, Practice, Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen

I like thinking about new and emerging enterprises as practices.

Think of orthopedic practices, or law practices, or tax, accounting, or consulting practices, among many other professional examples.

As a startup or emerging business you will benefit in this new economy by holding yourself to this level of professionalism no matter the kind of enterprise you're involved in.

These people (practitioners) practice their craft long and hard but they DO continually practice. They get better. They innovate. They continue to grow. They continue to find new ways to add value to their customers. Or they fail.

Embedded in that growth is permission to start. If you have identified your enterprise as a 'practice' you've implicitly given yourself permission to start and (importantly!) to practice.

What's also implied is that you must plan strategies and business processes that make you increasingly proficient in the professional practice you are creating. It is vital that you learn, capture and improve with every transaction.

Building a successful practice in any field means establishing a professional business model as well as a subject expertise.

I'm going to stress this approach to new and emerging food entrepreneurs coming into the world of the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen.

Truly professional local foods practices can emerge if they plan and practice. New systems will create new opportunities and new jobs.

What cool work to develop in to a professional practice. Why not think about creating a local foods practice in your life? There are a lot of opportunities. Not only in growing, but in retailing and processing and distribution and many other points along of the food chain.

There are opportunities for creating new small-scale but highly-professional practices not just in foods, but in manufacturing and services and health care and on and on.

Whatever your field, no matter how small you think your enterprise is, treat it as your professional practice. Grow your practice and it will grow you.

My core foundations for small business job creation: permission, planning and practice.

Labels: artisan food processing, entrepreneurship, Practice, slow startups

Entrepreneurship is a game plagued with a lot of myths.

Those assumptions can often lead new entrepreneurs and untested small business people over a cliff and into failure.

Malcom Gladwell had a good article in the Jan. 18, 2010 New Yorker called "The Sure Thing. How entrepreneurs really succeed."

This is a good article that upends many assumptions about entrepreneurship . It's largely an analysis of the commercial behavior of high-roller entrepreneurs but there is much good for startups and new entrepreneurs to glean.

A standout among those assumptions is that successful entrepreneurs are risk-takers. Malcolm Gladwell's piece posits that most successful entrepreneurs are risk-avoiders.

Quoting from the economist Scott Shane's book, The Illusions of Entrepreneurship, "Yes, he says, many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks - but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories. The failures violate all kinds of established principles of new-business formation."

These would include how much money you have available to start, organizing as a corporation, business planning, types of startups and the always-popular, "Ninety percent of the fastest-growing companies in the country sell to other businesses; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and rather than serving customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do."

These are key areas to focus on when starting an enterprise of any kind. I think there are many ways in this economy for starting sustainable new ventures. You just need to align expectations with reality. That said, there has never been a better time to try your own business.

Here is perhaps the most telling 'vote-with-their-feet' story to emerge from Malcom Gladwell's article on entrepreneurs: "This is consistent with the one undisputed finding in all the research on entrepreneurship: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself. "

Shane goes on to describe an experiment in which entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs were asked to choose among outcomes that would net them $5 million with a 25% chance of success or one that would net them $2 million with a 55% chance of success or a profit of $1.25 million with an eighty-per-cent chance of success. The entrepreneurs overwhelmingly chose the last, safest option.

"They were drawn to the eighty-per-cent chance of getting to do what they love doing."

Your enterprise needs to continuously create value and profit to be sustainable. If you do what you love, you can't help but create value. To put that love into action requires that you build your professional practice appropriately, which means planning that minimizes stupid risk so you get to keep doing what you love.

Sounds like a risk worth taking.


Malcolm Gladwell article abstract in the New Yorker. Subscription required for full article.

Photo is of a Cocoa bean, the basis of chocolate.

Labels: business plans, entrepreneurship, Practice, slow startups