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96 pages

English

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Why is it that a founder often turns into their own business's worst enemy? What is one of the worst things you can do when trying to tell the world about your new venture?In this insightful book, full of practical ideas, advice, and a little of his dogma, Garry Mansell, a long-time entrepreneur and business advisor, reveals answers to these and many of the other common questions he has been asked in his career advising boards.Known for plain speaking, being a hater of 'management speak', and for distilling problems and situations down to their fundamental causes and solutions, the author helps you realise that business is simple. That life doesn't have to be complicated and that awards dinners can leave you and your clients with a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach, and not just because the caterers didn't know how to run their own business.

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Gestion et management

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	10 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839524547
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published 2022
Copyright © Garry Mansell 2022
The right of Garry Mansell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-453-0
ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-454-7
Cover design by Kevin Rylands
Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper
I want to dedicate this book to my wife, Margaret. Not only has she spent over 40 years supporting me by doing far more of the stuff I should have been helping her with in our life together, but she has also been a sounding board and a provider of great insights as I struggled with decisions in my working life. When I left corporate life to go it alone she told me, ‘When we were first together, we had very little, if we have to go back to that, such is life.’ I can only hope that any of you who buy this book and dream of starting your own business have the kind of unwavering support that she has given me .
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1 – ON Starting up
What is a business strategy good for?
Presenting to potential investors
Funding your business
The benefits of ‘smart money’
Crowdfunding your business
Venture Capital, should you take it?
Sweat equity is the answer
Last mover advantage
Chapter 2 – ON Marketing
How to market your start-up
Feeding the marketing sausage machine
Marketing at exhibitions and shows
Marketing, a way to guarantee your coverage
How to get free publicity
We have won an award!
Chapter 3 – ON Sales
It’s only sales
Is value-based pricing the answer?
Selling to sceptical buyers
Reflect your prospect’s needs
Why didn’t that negotiation work out?
Some thoughts on sales approaches
Consultative selling
Why it’s important to be a good loser
I invented account management
Chapter 4 – ON Building and leading your team
Building the dream team
How to get the best from your team
Everybody is a leader
Leadership demonstrated
Do you know the difference between complicated and complex?
Chapter 5 – ON Buying
So, what’s wrong with the specification?
Becoming a Customer of Choice
The secret all good buyers know
How e-sourcing and tendering taught me to be a better buyer
How to gain and maintain influence with suppliers
A buyer’s tale
The devil is in the detail
Chapter 6 – ON Scaling and surviving
Building a better mousetrap
Start-ups and the ‘rule of twos’
It can’t simply be about the rule of twos, can it?
Cash spreadsheets are king
Experimenting in your business
Scaling a business is a skill not an accident
When you need more cash
When you need to, but you can’t cut costs
Growth at all costs
Some truths and tips about scaling your business
Chapter 7 – ON Exits, valuations and investors
When it’s time to leave or cash out
Being clear about valuations and dilution
They are only investors after all
Getting ready to sell, the need for a company book
Just what is due diligence?
Introduction
This book has been written for entrepreneurs, would be entrepreneurs, and for those people who are perhaps a couple of years into their new business venture and are looking for some advice, or perhaps even some encouragement. If this is you, then stand around in the bookshop for a while and read a couple of pieces that appeal to you, I won’t tell anybody, it’s what we entrepreneurs do. We bend the rules a little and try new things, we don’t fit too well with the normal folks around us, and we find ways of getting things done that need a bit of creativity and sometimes bare-faced cheek. One guy who worked for me during my first career at Mars said to me, ‘I’m like water, you tell me where you want me to get to and I will find a way.’ He always did, and I rarely asked how he did it; he had every trait that an entrepreneur needed.
The book is a distillation of the work I have been doing in the last four years with several entrepreneurs and early-stage growth companies who I have been advising after the sale of my last company: an Anglo-Swedish software adventure that I shared with some of the smartest, funniest and most dedicated individuals I have ever known.
Anyway, I digress. What is contained in these pages are answers to the most common questions I have been asked, or the situations I have been confronted with, in the last four years of working as a non-executive director, board advisor and, in one case, Chairman with some cool new or early-stage businesses. The answers and direction I gave them, and have now written about in this book, have come from over forty years of work experience. Some of it spent in the corporate world, but most of it spent building, growing, developing and divesting new businesses.
This means that the book is not a comprehensive guide to starting up or running your business. There must be an ‘idiot’s guide’ for that already, I have not looked. What it is, is my way of solving issues or creating opportunities. I have called it ‘Simplify to Succeed’ because that is what I believe in.
My mantra in business has always been, ‘You know you will never have all the information and facts you think you need. Eighty per cent is good enough, and if you can’t get that, make a decision anyway.’ This makes you strip issues, situations and problems down to their component parts. It makes you simplify the problem and it helps you build simple solutions or actions.
I don’t think business is hard. At the end of the day, what you are doing in a business is providing goods or a service that somebody, hopefully, wants to buy.
To do this you need to have enough money to invest in the start-up, you need to market what you are selling and sell it, you need to grow the business in order to survive, you need to be able to buy the things you need to make your business work, you need to be able to lead and take your team with you and eventually you need to get your business ready and dispose of it.
I have split the book into chapters that cover each of those aspects of business. You can dip in and out. You don’t have to read it cover to cover, you can skip parts, you can read the bits that interest you when you want to and, if you are still reading this introduction in the bookshop, look behind you. The sales assistant has their eyes on you. It’s not a library you know, and it’s simple: turn round, take out your debit card and make the bookshop and me a little bit happier. After all you have about 80 per cent of all the information you are going to get at this stage.
CHAPTER 1 – ON STARTING UP
When you are starting up, and your idea is burning holes in your brain, and you are finding it hard to sleep, this is the best time to start doing some real planning and preparing yourself for what is to come. This section will give you some advice about things like business strategies and why they are important. You will also gain some insights about how to raise the funds you will need and what investors look for when they are deciding where to place their money.
I’m also going to give you some advice about where and how to source those funds and just what kind of money you are looking for. Did you know there are at least two types of money: smart and dumb? Well, there are three if you include forged, but I would suggest that is not a sustainable business. The other piece of good news you will find in this section is the fact that you don’t have to be the first one on the market with your idea to be a success.
What is a business strategy good for?
I was chatting to a friend the other day who was bemoaning the fact that the strategy of his business was not clear and therefore he, as a senior buyer in the organisation, often found himself out of step with the expectations of the shareholders and the board of his company.
Apart from suggesting that if he can’t change this, he finds a new position, we got into the discussion of what a good business strategy is, how it is constructed and what it can do for an organisation. We had similar views, but they were different, and it reminded me of something another good friend of mine taught me a few years back when we were just starting Freight Traders, but more of that later. Like in all good stories the ‘reveal’ is at the end!
First, what do I think a ‘business strategy’ is?
Simply put, it is a course of action(s), aspirations, and decisions, originated and agreed upon by the senior executives of the business and the owners/shareholders. It is the roadmap that should result in the continuation of the business, hopefully whilst making a profit and generating cash and enabling you to meet or exceed customer needs. Remember, the first requirement of any company is that it should be able to continue to exist.
I am sure you will all have your own definitions, and you may well disagree with mine.
Having established a ‘corporate’ strategy, it must be clearly communicated throughout the business. Because, as you progress down the hierarchy of the company, people must make decisions, and they sure as hell should not have to ask their bosses again and again in order to make these. I still like the saying that was common in my old company Mars, Inc.: ‘Ask for forgiveness, not for permission.’
The strategic plan, when well communicated and understood by your organisation (and remember, if communication doesn’t work it is not the fault of the ‘receiver’ it’s a failing of the ‘transmitter’), will be interpreted at a