Efficient operations management is vital for any business. Ultimately every entrepreneur or company has to do their thing producing the maximum customer value at the lowest possible cost.

Every duplication, each reminder, any slip up adds to the cost.

That’s why we built Front Office Box to support a seamless transition from Target to Prospect to Customer to Delivery Process to Customer Service to Account Development.

Watch the video to see how we smoothly transition from each phase to the next, maintaining a complete customer history along the way.

From Prospecting to Sales to Satisfied Customer, Front Office Box helps you keep all your stuff together so you can get on with the real job – making a living out of adding value to others.

Seth Godin has a remarkable talent for explaining stuff whilst preserving the complexity. In his post The Modern Business Plan Seth suggests new words to define both content and context for any business plan.

Personally, I really like this way of explaining philosophy, strategy, tactics and risk amelioration – and I’m sure you do to

Here’s a list of questions entrepreneurs or business leaders might usefully ask themselves. A compilation of the answers could add up to a credible value proposition. That makes a great start to any business plan, marketing brief or even customer pitch.

It’ll also make a great series of posts in our company blogs – so I’d better get on with that. How about you?

As always Seth Godin has a way of explaining the most complex ideas in terms anybody can understand. The complex idea of course is the value proposition. The simple terms are Seth’s 16 questions.

Starting a business is easy, just like giving up smoking. I’ve done both hundreds of times

And that illustrates the real problem. The starting is easy but getting over the challenges is much harder.

Here’s a list of the challenges we’ve experienced. There will be many others, but these are the ones everybody will face very early in the todo list.

Business Proposition

What will the business do, who will buy it, and how much will they pay for it?

That sounds pretty easy, until we add the word “unique”. Setting ourselves up in perfect competition with a bunch of others is a recipe for disaster. There’s always competition but when our proposition is unique identifying the right prospects and closing sales gets a lot easier.

Challenge 1 – come up with an idea which is unique in several dimensions and be able to explain it in just a couple of sentences.

Marketing

How will potential customers find out about our proposition? How will they understand the unique features and benefits? How much will creating that awareness cost?

Challenge 2 – find a way of getting heard above the noise created by all the other people selling stuff and not going bust in the process.

Cash

Starting a business needn’t be expensive, but it doesn’t come free. There’s a cash cost which builds until sales reach break even point, and beyond. The lifeblood of every business is cash and lack of it causes more startup failures than anything else.

Challenge 3 – find a way of starting a business within the constraints of money we have available, and are prepared to lose. Then build a strategy and execution plan to make the startup operate that way.

Organization

How will we organize our resources to find, win and satisfy customers with the maximum efficiency? Big businesses can cope with bureaucracy, inefficiencies and confusion but those are all overheads the startup can do without. We need the simplest, and cheapest processes and systems possible, so the business runs on rails and we can put all our attention into customers.

Challenge 4 – design a way for the business to operate in a predictable process, with the ability to plan for success, act on the plan and then regularly review performance – improving plans which don’t work.

Any brave soul starting a business will need lots of luck, especially today when customers are only interested in saving money and competition for their dollars has never been greater.

Figuring out these 4 challenges ahead of time will save the entrepreneur time, money and sanity down the road.

Management consultants call the process Planning for Success – best of luck.

Through my career I’ve sold everything from outsourcing to debt collection, and from mainframes to milking machines.  I’ve managed big teams and been a solopreneur.  I’ve pumped gas, driven cabs and caught cans in food factories.  After all those experiences I learned even more business lessons about selling, customer service and the facts of life on the golf course – as a caddie.

Any golf caddie knows more about being a  business owner than most entrepreneurs and managers I’ve known.

Here’s a few of those business lessons.

Constrained by resources.

Every caddie I ever met only had two shoulders, two legs and 24 hours in the day.  It doesn’t matter how much s/he wants to grow there are limits – the resources available – so we’d better make the most of them.

There is always more in the deal

When the Caddie Master says “you’re up” the bag fee is as good as in your pocket.  Now we’re working for the tip.  A $50 bag fee looks a lot better with a $20 tip on top.  That’s 40% more revenue and worth working for.  But it has to be earned.

The customer is always right.

Caddies are guides, companions, educators – sometimes just colleagues, and unfortunately at other times servants. Ultimately they don’t dictate what the customer perceives as value.  They just have to discover it, then deliver it.  Usually they have only the length of the 1st fairway to do that.

There’s always another customer.

If this bag doesn’t work out in our favour the next one will. Lets make sure we get round without the customer complaining to the Caddie Master.  Caddies are really good at swallowing their pride.

Ultimately it’s about delivery.

Caddies don’t get paid on the 1st tee.  They get paid in the car park, when they’ve counted and cleaned the clubs and stored the bag in the trunk. It’s about delivery.

And finally there’s the caddies prayer:

Please Lord let the bag be light
Let the tip be heavy and
The idiot put the ball where I tell him.

Watch this space for more caddie tales.

This is a particularly relevant question for us because we’re embroiled in such an argument ourselves right now. In another business we have a contract for supply but the other party seems to think it’s an agreement for services on demand.

Contracts for employment are governed by a different law, in the UK at least and almost certainly in Europe. In the USA they’re different, but similar. The employer has rights and so does the employee, and those rights pretty much govern the terms of any termination. The employer is required to provide the employee with a statement of terms and those terms have to comply with regulations.

Contracts for services on demand are different. Neither party has particular rights when it comes to termination, apart from the usual confidentiality type issues. Each can pretty much go his own way at the drop of a hat. Contractors get paid more than employees, have less security and more control. An unreasonable boss soon gets told the facts of life. There’s less co-operation and more confrontation in these contracts.

A contract for supply is entirely different. The only way out for either party is breach of the contract and the law governing cases goes back centuries. Remedies for breach only come in two guises – damages for breach and specific performance, another way of saying we don’t give a crap if you don’t like it – do it.

If you’re getting into one of these you really should know the difference between these types because that could stop you making a complete fool of yourself, like the jerk off trying to argue with us. It could also make you an awesomely powerful adversary to anybody who doesn’t .

Good luck to anybody starting their own business. Consider a primer class in laws of contract. It’ll pay dividends for the rest of your business life.

I’m sure there are other great thought leaders out there. I just never came across anybody I wanted to pay that much attention to.

Which is why I’ve included Brian’s .pdf Creative Entrepreneurs in our Download page.

Here’s one snippet from the paper:

“Most Web 2.0 advice is so wrong I don’t bother to correct it . . . why empower the
competition?
The Internet has always been social, even pre-web when bulletin board systems and
Usenet powered the conversation. Don’t believe the hype when you hear that social media
marketing is radically different from other online marketing.
Well, except for that part about it being easier than ever to build a profitable global
business with only yourself and a network of allies.”

Please do yourself a favour and download to read at your leisure.

For attribution Brian says:

“Feel free to republish excerpts from this report, as long as you link back to
Lateral Action for attribution.
And it’s also okay to share this report in its entirety with anyone you think might
be interested. In fact, I’d be delighted.”

Thanks Brian for your generosity.

Debunking most of the myths, Frank makes us focus on that which adds value to the business and understand the simplest of rules which build a platform for success.

The one thing that doesn’t make as much sense now as it did nearly 10 years ago is his advice to forget the website. – I can’t imagine that working today.

Frank”s Top 10 Things You Must Have to Start a Business. These include:
1) Spending everything on a good team and equipment
2) Letting people know the company is in business
3) Raising limited capital
4) Taking stock of a company and determining its needs
5) Being open to opportunities
6) Having a supportive family
7) Targeting mass markets, not just niche markets
Having confidence in new ideas
9) Acquiring and selling to real customers
10) Choosing a great partner.

But watch the video. It really is worth the investment of a little time.

The biggest single demographic starting up their own business is the fugitive from the corporation. Experienced professionals decide the corporate rat race can get along without them. They escape the cubicle to make their own way in the world.

With good reason they believe they have experience others will contract for and they’ll have a better life doing it for themselves, as opposed to “the company”.

Earn more, work less, with more control and less stress is an attractive proposition for the executive leaping off the corporate ladder.

While expertise in their subject is beyond question, starting their own business will bring new challenges – typically administration, accounting, marketing and most of all sales. Selling is something they’ve never needed, until now, to do.

These people are Reluctant Rainmakers. No training, no skills, and probably no aptitude. Nevertheless their services still need selling.

I remember those days, a long time ago, when somebody had to do it and that turned out to be me. It was an uncomfortable time, and I made lots of mistakes.

Subsequently I got lucky – joined companies which trained me, worked with colleagues who generously shared their experience. Over time selling became both an art and a science. Something I was entirely comfortable with.

Not that long ago Gareth decided he wanted to have his own business – this was the beginning of Widespread Solutions and Front Office Box. He’s an expert in getting people software that does the job they need done tomorrow, today, but knew nothing about selling, or customers, or business.

He built Briefcase, the first version of Front Office Box, in a fortnight with me deciding what it should do and how. But it soon became obvious. For all his skills he didn’t know how to find and convert prospects into customers.

That was the start of the Front Office Box blog – really just me writing down some explanations of the most basic concepts of selling.

We’ve evolved quite a bit since then. This blog comprises numerous articles attempting to help people in the same situation Gareth found himself in – the Reluctant Rainmaker.

If that’s also you, I recommend you spend some time here.

This is insight a father passes on to his son, not some B/S published by somebody trying to sell a book.

There’s too much here to link to in one post but you’ll find all the sales related comment/guidance in our Sales Strategies and Tactics

The most popular posts seem to be related to Sales Qualification

And you can find some (not all yet) of this content in our free White Papers in our Download Centre

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Clinical Research Hub

Announcement

Avantrasara is pleased to pre-announce it’s new Clinical Research Hub – an on-line data warehouse complemented by a range of data collection, analysis and management tools. Access to the services will be limited to accredited clinical researchers working in healthcare or academia.

Highlights

• Researchers will use leading edge data management services to store, understand, and share details of patient condition, treatment and outcomes without increasing workload for hospital or university IT Support teams.
• Software will be provided to “pull” readings from patient monitors, to capture observation and treatment data at the bedside and also to bulk upload from comma separated value files such as exports from Excel.
• Captured data will be “pushed” to the CRH using a standard Internet connection, avoiding any need for access to systems through local firewalls.
• Researchers will have total control over which data is captured, pushed and ways they analyze it.
• The data will be stored securely on servers housed in Glasgow University’s National eScience Center
• Analysis tools will be provided so researchers can aggregate, group, compare, contrast, monitor, alert and report their data to suit their objectives.
• Options for sharing research data, on-line collaboration and peer review will be available early in 2010
• During 2010 we’ll be adding the ability to interrogate and analyze data using advanced statistical modeling techniques, including Ogmios, our Bayesian Artificial Neural Network – BANN – framework.

Background
The infrastructure, including data management and analysis tools, was originally implemented to support the Avert-It project – an EU funded research program finding ways of predicting upcoming episodes of hypotension during intensive care.  Ogmios, the BANN framework was developed to “learn” patterns preceding events by analyzing data collected by the Brain IT group.

Subsequently it’s been used to monitor real time data feeds and provide clinicians with early warnings of upcoming episodes.  Avantrasara will be providing this resource as a global service for researchers as part of it’s role ensuring the research results are commercially  available to help improve patient safety and reduce health care costs.

Why a Clinical Research Hub?
During the project we identified problems researchers experience in their efforts to understand more about patient conditions and treatments:

• No access to patient monitor data
• Paper based bedside observation and treatment records
• Limited access to patient demographic data held in Hospital Information Systems
• No analysis tools.
• Data storage limited to local standalone databases or Excel files.

These are exactly the constraints we addressed in the Avert-IT project.  The Clinical Research Hub was built as a single solution to enable the research.

Why Advanced Statistical Modeling?
Machine learning has been helping scientists discover relationships between data for more than thirty years. Statistical modeling is well understood as a technique for recognizing patterns, and calculating probabilities.  Bayesian Artificial Neural Networks combine both concepts to help people organize the answers to millions of equations into aggregations they can understand.  This isn’t diagnosis, but it is an effective way of directing clinicians to the parameters indicating conditions for diagnosis.

Why On-Line Sharing, Collaboration, Peer Review?
The philosophy of teamwork and peer review is embedded in science, and particulalry clinical science.

Clinicians, as part of part of normal activities, share and collaborate with colleagues.  The Clinical Research Hub will simply make that sharing and collaboration process simpler, faster and available to more peers – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere in the world.  More data analyzed by better tools and interpreted by more experts will equal faster and more accurate interpretation, and acceleration in the process of clinical discovery and dissemination.

Service Options and Pricing
For the rest of 2009 the Clinical Research Hub will be offered in “Beta” version to invited researchers and provided free if charge.  During this period we’ll work with early adopters, deciding on the most appropriate packaging of services and pricing.

Early in 2010 we’ll be opening the service to accredited clinical researchers, globally and announce pricing.

Researchers interested in joining the Beta program are invited to contact steve[dot]reeves[at]avantrasara[dot]com.

By stevensreeves 6:31 pm

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