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I’ll be blogging today and tomorrow from BizTechDay, the small business and entrepreneur conference. I seem to attend every possible social/enviromental entrepreneurship oriented conference, so this will be an intereting change of pace given the focus on pure entrepreneurship.
Mark O’Leary from Comcast Business Class kicked off the conference with citing seven things small business owners need to know to succeed. These are high level – I hope to flesh some of these out over the course of the conference, as many of the upcoming panels touch on these topics:
1) Focus relentlessly on a niche. You can’t be everything to everybody. Do what you do better than anybody else.
2) Executive brilliantly. (yes but how? He didn’t elaborate. More later perhaps)
3) Get to cash flow fast and keep expenses low.
4) Funding: Figure out what type of funding do you need? Consider all the options.
5) Brand creation. Think carefully about your brand. It has to manifest the value of your product.
6) Brand building. Once you get the right brand you have to build it.
7) Be rigorous in finding the right people. The talent level of job applicants is higher than ever, according to O’Leary. This is a great time to “Get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on.”
What did he miss? More to come…
Comments
October 23, 2009 at 5:29 am PDT | John Joyce writes:
With regard to #1, check out a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. It gives you a framework for identifying a niche market and targeting that opportunity.
- John