Entrepreneur Viewpoint

Is this a good time to be an entrepreneur?

The current economic climate provides both a challenging and exciting time for entrepreneurs. We spoke to Shields Russell, Principal and Founder of Rapid Innovation Group, to get his thoughts on what it means to be an entrepreneur today.

How would you define entrepreneurship?

Drawing on my own experience, I would say entrepreneurship has four basic components:

1. Being able to spot an opportunity by identifying a problem that has real value to a significant market
2. Systematically reducing risks by proving that opportunity exists – the more you prove it, the less risk there is
3. Being able to inspire and attract really good people to make the journey with you
4. Being able to make the transition from being a start up – that is to say a company that is trying to prove a business model – to a company that has a viable business model, that can build an effective capability before it tries to scale and build the sort of value that UK start-ups too often fail to realise

A lot of transition takes place over a short span of time. To go through all these stages requires entrepreneurs to evolve their roles at quite a rapid pace. And a last thought: too often we focus on the individual entrepreneurs – the ‘great man’ theory. But great companies are built by great entrepreneurial teams.

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing entrepreneurs today?

The first big challenge, the first critical decision, is picking the right opportunity. And, of course, it’s a challenge to realise when you have it wrong. I think most successful entrepreneurs have been scarred one way or the other by a degree of failure. That is part of the DNA of entrepreneurship.

Is this a good time to be an entrepreneur?

It’s a fantastic time to be an entrepreneur, especially a tech entrepreneur, because the cost of building technology is falling. You don’t need as much money. You can do more with less, and you can do it faster.

I think that the most successful companies are probably started in a downturn because the economic climate promotes innovation: companies are looking for ways of driving efficiency, and ultimately technology is an enabler of efficiency, especially in the B2B setting. Also, a lot of competition is wiped out. A downturn instils discipline; you learn to make less go further, and you can potentially hire talent at a lower cost.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on May 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

The Investment Game: how to choose your investors wisely

Tony O’Shaughnessy, founder of ABS, gave us some key points to consider when looking for investors for your company:

“I think the very first thing you need to understand is why you are looking for investment in the first place. It sounds really obvious but you would be amazed by the number of people who think ‘if only we had investment we could do x, y and z.’ Thinking about money problems alone is a very naïve viewpoint. You should really make sure you know exactly why you want the money, what you’re going to do with it, and that what you are going to do with it fits with your strategic direction. This is absolutely key.

You also have to think about what the role you want these investors to play:

• Do you want them to be equity holders?
• Do you want them to be proactive?
• Do you want them to have valuable employment in the business?

The minute that you have investors it will affect the culture of your business and your employees directly. You need to know that it is a great idea because it allows you to build a new product, etc., but also what it means in terms of the way you operate.”

Posted by Guest Author on May 11, 2012 at 12:28 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons, Venture Capital | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Can successful entrepreneurship be learned?

Dr. Markus Perkmann is a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School, where he researches innovation management, technology development and organisation theory. We recently sat down to talk to him about his views on how entrepreneurship is developed.

How would you define entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship involves some kind of high impact activity that does something new – not just a sole trader. It often is unsuccessful, but has the potential to  lead to success and strong growth. That’s what makes entrepreneurship  really valuable: doing something new and taking a risk. The risk is an interesting thing – it’s about who takes the risk. The question is really what kind of risks entrepreneurs are taking. Good entrepreneurs are good at taking risks with other people’s money because that allows them to scale others’ resources. The other people trust them with their money because they think they’re more likely to be successful than the average person. There are very few entrepreneurs who will have the money to do it by themselves. It necessarily involves pooling resources from different resource providers, and those resources are at risk. It’s not just about personal risk; it’s about constituting a good risk for a potential resource provider.

Can entrepreneurs be created?

Can entrepreneurship be learned in terms of students going through entrepreneurial societies? – I’m going to do a research project asking that very question. With entrepreneurial societies at universities, for example, does going through such a socialisation process make entrepreneurs? From a sociological standpoint, it’s a question of identity and role models. If in your social context there are people who will provide an entrepreneurial role model, I would think that people looking at these role models would be more inclined to consider entrepreneurship as a legitimate identity to adopt. You can see a similar phenomenon in the dot com boom. There were groups like First Tuesday, bringing in people and trying to convey that entrepreneurship is an option, that it’s something that’s there to be learned and studied in a certain way. Think of retail nowadays: no one would think of having one shop or restaurant – everyone thinks of having a chain. But that had to be learned, built. In this sense being an entrepreneur is a constructed model that people take on.

The other thing you could say here is that a lot of entrepreneurship actually comes out of existing organisations. You talk about university spin-outs, but the more likely case is company spin-outs. A lot of Silicon Valley foundings essentially came out of other companies, like Intel which came out of Fairchild semiconductors. Whole industries were created by people leaving their former employers, sometimes with teams, founding a new company, taking their learning and doing essentially the same thing. Large, bureaucratic organisations are paradoxically the most fertile ground for entrepreneurship and start ups.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on May 4, 2012 at 1:21 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“Building a product that people want” – An Interview with Dragos Ilinca, CMO and Cofounder of UberVU

Dragos Ilinca is the CMO and cofounder of UberVU, a social media intelligence company with bases in London, Bucharest, and the USA. Dragos began our interview by describing the genesis of UberVU as it evolved out of a web-marketing consultancy into a social media posting platform, into a social media monitoring tool, into its current form as a social media dashboard with social media intelligence.

In your opinion, what is the most difficult part of getting a startup off the ground? Is it getting funding, working together as a team, is it actually developing the product, or something else? Or is it everything in combination?

I think it’s everything in combination. It all comes down to building a product that people want because I think everything falls into place from that. Of course in order to build that product, you need a team. We were lucky because we had known each other for a lot of years, we had started other businesses together, but I look around and a lot of people are looking for co-founders and I think that’s really, really hard, finding someone to start a business with. And once you do that, its about just building something that people want—even if it’s a minimal sort of version—because if you do that, raising money shouldn’t be difficult. If you manage to build that product, that kind of means you’ve got a team, and if you’ve got that team and product, raising money should come pretty easily. So in our case, I think it was definitely figuring out what product to build, but I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are starting with building a team, especially in places like London where developers have so many options to choose from. They could work for, you know, the finance industry, or an already-established startup, and if you’re just starting out it’s difficult to get talented people to join you.

Perhaps it’s too early to ask this question, but in terms of your experience working with social media, how do you adapt? How do you know when to stay your course with your vision for developing a product, and how do you know when to pivot? The social media world is constantly changing, so how do you adjust for that?

I don’t think there’s an easy answer to it, but it kind of comes down to traction. If nobody likes your product or buys it, you need to do something about it. If you have a few people who really, really love it, then you need to understand who those people are and why they love it, and if there’s an easy way to reach more of them, that’s your whole market. And if you’re happy with that that’s fine, but if you need a way larger market, you can potentially work with them and figure out what a dumbed-down version of that product is. I think the most difficult thing is actually making the decision. I think deep down you kind of know when things aren’t really going well, and you can stick around for three months, maybe another six months and see: make a plan, and just say we’ve got this deadline and if things don’t pick up we need to do something about it. But I think people deep down kind of know, but they’re just afraid to make a decision. You need to be able to say, “What we’ve done so far, yeah, it’s a lot of effort, but in the end, people aren’t really paying attention to us and aren’t buying the product, so tough luck. We need to start all over again.”

UberVU strikes me as a pretty advanced mechanism, integrating social media and media monitoring. Do you think the days of simplicity in application development are over? In other words, do you think the skill-level required to produce groundbreaking apps will only become higher as times goes on?

Probably. That’s probably true. Because we’re a business tool, so from that point of view, we need a lot of technology to do what we do. But look at something like Instagram, for example: there’s not a lot of technology in there. If you think of technology just in terms of code, you know, other people can build that kind of stuff in a weekend. If you think of technology as also the mechanism by which they’ve been able to build viral coefficients in it so that it spreads and that kind of stuff, then that’s very difficult to replicate by other people. So I think if you’re building consumer apps—if you know what you’re doing—you can still get away with not having a highly technical solution. But even so, if you look at Colour, they’ve got pretty hardcore technology in there, and it’s just a photo app, more or less. So even these things are becoming more and more complex, and I think the reason is that you can do so much more now with the technology and the stuff that would have been impossible to do in real time is now possible, so you can build a lot better experiences for the user; and the second thing is there are so many people looking at the tech space, that if you build something that can be replicated within a week, and you’ve got absolutely nothing else that can make you succeed, then it’s just not worth it, because other people will copy you ASAP. Just look at Groupon as an example. A lot of people think it’s the technology and they built that in a weekend and there are hundreds of clones; but actually the difficult part is the sales behind it, selling to small businesses and being able to scale and that kind of stuff. So if you think about that as sales, not really technology, but technique and strategy, then it’s very difficult to replicate it. In terms of actual code, some people can probably build that in a day. But it’s not that that makes it work.

Since you’re the CMO, I wanted to ask a marketing related question. Since uberVU and so many applications are so heavily grounded in the online world, how important is actual person-to-person interaction in marketing?

I think it’s still important to have the in-person interaction. Not all the time; we started selling online with credit card, so it wasn’t necessary to meet anyone at that point. You could, you know, make the product and the company look more human by having photos of the members of the team on the website, having a video where you present certain stuff, having a blog that’s very human, but now that we’re moving more into the enterprise space and we’re starting to get customers like NBC or the World Bank, for these sort of things it looks like it’s pretty important to meet face to face, and if you cannot do that, at least have a few phone calls. I think the higher price you charge for what you do, the more you need that sort of relationship. And it’s not just because of the person-to-person interaction; usually if you’re charging a lot of money, the solution that you’re selling, you need to really understand the customer’s use case and be able to show them how the product is really going to make an impact. And these solutions are usually pretty complex, so it’s not like a photo sharing app: you take a picture, you share it with your friends, pretty easy to understand. It can be pretty hard to articulate just from a website and understand exactly how that could be used in your organization, and understand how easy it is to use even though it’s got this breadth of features. It’s hard to make the jump from, ok I see this demo video, how could I use it for my specific use case? It’s very difficult to understand that. And people just don’t have the time and don’t want to take the effort, so instead of researching that tool for 30 minutes and not understanding, it’s sometimes more useful to say, ok let’s just have a 30 minute phone call, you’ll tell me about it and I can explain really easily how we can help or how we won’t be able to help and you’ll probably need some other tools.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on April 27, 2012 at 1:45 pm in Demand Generation, Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Market Views, Product Development, Real World Lessons, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“The only guidepoint is reality” – Interview with Andy Hutt of triOpsis

Andy Hutt is founder and CEO of triOpsis, a real-time visual intelligence company designed to provide technology that allows enterprises to use mobile devices to track the status of products and services on the ground.

I can’t promise any words of wisdom at all, but I can promise words.

1) Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur rather than go down a more traditional career path?

Lots of answers to that. As with most things in the world, life is a bit more complex than, I woke up one day and said, “Fantastic! I’m going to do this.” Life evolves to a point and you make some decisions. For me, one of the most important ones, and it is only one of many, is when I looked at a traditional career path, I just saw boredom. My background is in finance; I’m a qualified accountant. Way back when I worked for PwC, I worked in Private Equity Transaction Services at Deloitte, I worked in corporate finance, blah, blah, blah. And the problem was whenever you looked at the career path of any of those, it was frankly just boring. And for me, I didn’t want to spend 30-40 years of my life doing that. At all. So it’s about how to make a change. And any change is very difficult to make.

For me, the obvious one with the skillset I had was to go and set up a business. It was possibly a bit of a random choice in terms of where we went, but you have to use what you have around you. I had no background in software prior to this, I had no background in retail, no background in utilities, never set up a business, all those kinds of things. But you have to make a decision that says, I need to change something. I need a more interesting path in my life, I need to do something which I find more satisfying, more enjoyable, and I have more control of.

2) What new skills and specialisms did you have to develop as you got triOpsis going? How did you develop new skillsets?

One of the skills a potential entrepreneur has to have is risk taking. Risk taking possibly equates to stupidity or arrogance, because if you knew all the risks, you probably wouldn’t do it because you’d assess you’d fail; or you understand the risks, and you’re so arrogant that you think you can succeed anyway.

A lot of people are very risk-averse when it comes to trying different things. I’ve never set up a business before. Ok, fine, how do you do that? You just go and talk to some people, get a bit of guidance, and do it. And a lot of it comes down to just doing it. I’ve never run a technical team before, in terms of coding, never run a PR campaign before, I’ve never been a salesman, I’m going back to when I started the business, and it’s about risk taking, just dive in and do it. And if you work out you haven’t got the skills, learn. So, can I be a salesman? Yes. If you can’t afford a salesperson at first, that’s what you have to do. You can’t say, “I don’t have those skills!” You have to dive in, do it. The key thing is, if you’re prepared to take that initial risk—which is basically whether you’re prepared to show yourself up, whether you’re prepared to effectively fail—you need to learn quickly. Dive in, learn quickly, chuck it at the real world and off you go.

In terms of acquiring new skills, it’s partly about risk taking, it’s partly about confidence, and it’s the ability to learn quickly. A large chunk of my view of the world, when it comes to learning and entrepreneurship, is about surviving enough failures to succeed.

Most of the time, until you’ve made your business, you’re assembling a collection of small failures. If I go back to the first sales pitches I did four years ago, I cringe. I’m like, “My God, did I ever actually pitch something as stupid and vague as that?” But you have a go and you just learn, and that was a failure. You’ve got to collect these failures. And in terms of how you fund the business, ideally with entrepreneurship, you need to get enough funding to survive enough failures to have learned enough to succeed.

People view failure as though there’s only one way to fail, which is, you know, like the Eurozone at the moment: BIG! And actually, entrepreneurship is lots of little failures. “I tried that, it didn’t work. Put that to one side. I’m going to try that, ooh that didn’t work, ooh that does, let’s do more of that.” Ideally it’s not catastrophic. I got a good piece of advice early on, which is, “Never bet the ranch early on any particular given path.” Some people say, “You’ve got to do it the whole hog, just go for it!” And if you did that, put all your money in one strategy, one path, one thing, and it fails where do you go? I’d rather spread the failures, and then try and learn where I passed. “That bit did succeed, I’ll put some more money over there.” With failures you learn. Success doesn’t actually teach you anything, it’s just like, Oh, I got lucky. More of the same.

3) How do you balance breadth across industries and depth within an industry?

It’s a really good question because for me, success only comes if you focus. But it’s actually the point I was making a second ago about failures, because you don’t actually know which market, which product is going to be a success. So what you have to do, and what we did, is we started off in brands and we tried retail, and we’ve ended up in utilities; we ended up in water, and we’re now in gas and electricity. It’s a case of the same learning curve, but the ultimate goal has to be a focus. As a small company, you don’t have the resources to do lots of stuff. Provided you understand that to start with then you may succeed. If people don’t understand that to begin with, if they think they can have a go at everything, they will fail. You can’t. Unless they’ve got a really big bank balance, in which case, good luck to them! So, what you have to say is, ultimately I do have to focus to succeed, but I don’t know where to focus, so it comes back to how do I learn? How do I fail, etc.? And what you try and do is get into a niche where you think, yeah I’ve got something real. And that particular point to me in terms of business is what I was talking about earlier: you have to get that in the real world. You can’t sit in an office and think, right, it’s going to be this. That’s the way for me. You have to take the risk and then actually go and talk to that particular client. And they’ll probably go, “Oh that’s rubbish.” So you go back, you have a think, you listen and then you go back and you try that again. And ultimately it comes down to, sadly, what will this generate in revenue for somebody or will it save them money? You need to understand that as an end point.

The only guide point is reality, and that’s the bit when I was talking about risk taking earlier. A lot of people aren’t prepared to take a risk. And a risk is standing up in front of people and actually potentially looking a bit stupid. And for a lot of people, they’re not prepared to do that. The ultimate arbiter of everything is reality. You can’t sit in an office and make a profit. You have to actually physically go into the real world, get your product into the real world, and get real world feedback. Think of anyone who sits in an office and says, “Yeah, this is the best thing since sliced bread!” For our products, we could say, “Yeah insurance market, hey! We can do all of this stuff!” But actually if you spoke to someone in insurance they may turn around and go, “Err, you can’t do it for these reasons.”

4) What is the lifestyle of an entrepreneur like?

The lifestyle of an entrepreneur? It varies. In the world of big corporates, hard work is when you have lots of work on. For a small business, when you’re an entrepreneur, that’s easy. I’ve got work. The hardest part is when there’s nothing. You know, there aren’t any projects. You haven’t got a team of people, you have to sit and you have to go, I need to do something, I just need to create something from scratch. That’s hard work.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on April 20, 2012 at 5:12 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons, Sales, Strategy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

What route should students take to become a successful CEO?

Peter Collins, currently the CEO of Permasense, has obtained a PhD Computational Fluid Dynamics and an MBA prior to his various managerial and director roles. He built on his knowledge and skills as an engineer prior to management.

This is perhaps the conventional way to proceed in one’s career, but there are many other opportunities for newcomers these days. The British schooling system creates a dilemma for students at numerous stages. Having to graduate with only few A-levels suggests that you are required to narrow your focus down at a very early stage. However, individuals’ personalities only shape after “teen” years, where confidence and ability to manage others become evident. So there is no clear-cut answer to which is the best route to take.

In order to get an understanding of which route successful CEOs prefer, we asked Peter whether he feels his career advancement was the key ingredient in his success or whether if he could go back in time, would he have done it in any other way…

I have no regrets…

Engineering based businesses are best run by engineers. You cannot build a great engineering business without knowledge of and passion for engineering, as you cannot build a great hotel business without a knowledge of and passion for hotels.

It’s a pity that more engineers don’t remain in engineering, in particular to build engineering businesses…

Posted by Paul Higgins on April 13, 2012 at 11:37 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Inspiration, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Growing a business during a rough patch in the market

You do not need to look far to notice that the Eurozone recession is dooming on us. During the last global recession, entrepreneurs were some of the worst hit across all businesses.

So we got in touch with one of few entrepreneurs who managed to continue hiring and growing his business during the recession, Tony O’Shaughnessy, to describe how he managed to build Fourth Hospitality to a point where it was strong enough to break the storm and plough through by hiring 5 to 10 people a week, and to give us and other entrepreneurs advice on how to survive rough patches…

“The key point here is business planning. I’ve written and seen so many business plans that have unachievable financial targets. This is because entrepreneurs are stereotypically very opportunistic, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you consider the worst-case scenario. You need to consider how you can ride the storm in the middle of the Atlantic, i.e. how can I operate my business with limited resources and demand.

Additionally, you must always think of the basics: what is it that your product does and how is it unique. A lot of people promote products/services that are ‘good to have’, but not many people sell ‘essentials’. If your product is an essential in the market with no better substitutes, the effects of external pressures will be minimal. Once you have identified why the market demands this product, you must drive this through with consistency.

We offered complete back office solutions, which met market requirements that would aid them to overcome the effects of recession. Very importantly, our offering was affordable. Major industry players felt the pressure of the recession and wanted to become more organised to succeed. Consequently, they recognised us as a way in helping them through the recession and coming out on top. In particular, the idea of visibility and sales analysis became very important to them in understanding how they can outperform. Our ability to provide this solution became a great asset for them to control performance of outlets.”

Posted by Paul Higgins on April 6, 2012 at 5:32 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Management Tips, Product Development, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Counteracting threats to your business posed by offshore competition

StarBase, founded in 1992, is a London-based performance testing software consultancy with established testing expertise in a wide range of industries. We spoke to Stephen Davis, StarBase founder and MD, about the threats posed by the economic climate and off-shore competition.

What do you think will be the biggest challenge for StarBase in 2012? 

The biggest challenge is uncertainty in the current financial climate. It is uncertainty as to whether the economy is going through a slow gradual recovery or whether it’s just about to crash again. If Europe has big problems then that will obviously affect the UK and global economy and impact ‘confidence’.

There are two forces at play at the moment. The first is the recession, with the imperative to ‘do more for less’, achieve more with less money. The second driver is a return to quality; companies want to get things right where off-shoring hasn’t worked or achieved the financial savings anticipated. Some clients are motivated by both, which can cause a conflicting view: they still want quality, but at lower prices.

That is the challenge for 2012. Without the return to confidence, companies are less prepared to make long term commitments. We used to get involved in two to three year programmes; I don’t think there’s anything more than 12 months now.

How do you compete in this economic climate and faced with offshore competition?

Focusing on clients’ needs and really understanding their requirements. For StarBase, this means positioning ourselves as being people who understand what our clients need and focusing on being a knowledge-based business. This is supported by providing excellence in client management through people and communications.

Targeting higher-value niche areas that we are able to offer a better service better than off-shore providers. Testing covers a whole range of activities – functional, performance and security are the main ones, but there are approximately 20 different types of testing activity. We have decided to focus less on mainstream functional testing because it’s been picked up by off-shore providers. We decided to focus more on the more complex areas of testing such as Performance Testing and Technical Testing. These areas, require excellent technical and interpersonal skills, more domain knowledge and are also challenging.  StarBase can’t compete on day rates with off-shore providers, but by specialising in this way we are able to deliver excellent value.

Focusing on value, not price. We are not focusing on day rates, but rather on the value that we contribute to our clients. Increasingly, people are recognising that on-shore services can provide greater value without necessarily costing more than the off-shore approach. Several times we’ve found that when we’ve been in competition with off-shore providers, we cost less because we complete the project in less time and use fewer people. What we are seeing is that many organisations are beginning to bring critical functions back on-shore, and that’s the market that we’re playing in.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on March 30, 2012 at 3:52 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Management Tips, Market Views, Product Development, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Key challenges in sales and marketing for entrepreneurs and growth-stage firms

Permasense corrosion monitoring systems provide engineers, inspectors, planners, and plant managers insight into condition and capability of critical oil and gas assets. Potentially it is a technology with wide appeal. Given this, what are the key challenges in the sales and marketing process? What are the key steps and challenges entrepreneurs face in taking a product like Permasense successfully to market and what would you advise they do to overcome them? We asked the CEO of Permasense, Peter Collins…

Identify the product champion

Identifying the individuals in a company that are ‘own’ the problem your product or service is addressing is the place to start in finding the individual to champion it in your target customer.

For example, in Permasense’s case, this person my be an asset integrity, engineering, corrosion or inspection manager.

Identify all that have to sign off on adoption

If you are selling a system solution, impacting on a number of functions or business processes, you must also win the buy-in of these gatekeepers. For example in Permasense’s case this includes IT, safety, plant operations and frequently others.

Identify the economic buyer

It’s as old as sales itself – no sale without a budget, and it’s so easy to believe you’re close to a sale, when the person who has to sign the cheque hasn’t even been brought into the sales process, let alone convinced.

Posted by Paul Higgins on March 23, 2012 at 11:55 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons, Sales, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Customer (and Patient) Control – An Interview with Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli is founder and CEO of Patients Know Best, a personal health record system designed to put the patient first. By giving patients control of their own health records, the system allows more efficient and effective relationships between doctors and patients, as well as between doctors and specialists comprising teams of care providers. Patients Know Best is based in Cambridge, UK.

1)   Before Patients Know Best, had you ever thought of doing something entrepreneurial, or did the drive really start with the problem and solution you discovered?

I started with something entrepreneurial in a sense because I knew I was going to start my own company. I was setting myself my own syllabus, so I went through medical school having learned how to program; I was just teaching myself how to write medical software and the intention was that I’d basically solve problems for physicians. And that’s what I did during medical school. I also grew up in Cambridge, and in Cambridge… I was told in school that when you’re in Cambridge, you start your own company, so I believed them. I knew I would do that one day. The final piece for me was learning business, so I worked for a management consultancy in the States, in Washington D.C. While there, I saw the problem that I thought, “OK, this is really important I could commit to, I can see myself dedicating the rest of my life to solving this because it’s really important.”

Beyond that, there’s also a business model behind solving this problem, and I guess I just wanted to solve this for myself. I was facing the problem as a patient, trying to organise my care, trying to manage my health. I spent a year sulking that no one was doing it, and 2008 came along and I said, “You know what, I’ve literally written the book, so I have to do it. Let’s just go and do it.”

2)   How much has the service evolved since you started as a result of patient and physician input? What developments do you foresee with regard to the service in the near future?

We started with an embarrassingly minimum viable product. We took all the classic startup advice, start with the minimum market product: we launched with only one feature. I came back to the UK and I began asking for interviews from my friends who were doctors and then asked them to recommend other doctors to speak to. They weren’t saying, “My problem is I don’t have a PHR.” They said, “My clinics are overrun with patients and I’m always late in helping my patients. There are budget cuts, I can’t get enough staff…” All these very clinical, very operational problems. So I just began building up clinical problems, and I thought, if you use the patient as an asset rather than a liability, we can help. What’s the minimum feature they would need, that they would pay tomorrow, to use? And the one thing they said was, “We want to send messages to patients across institutional lines, if the hospital wants to send a message to the patient and cc the GP, or GP send a message and cc the social worker, for example.” And that was the only thing we launched with.

To give you some contrast, the UK government spent tens of millions on Healthspace, which is their sort of attempt at a patient portal. And only after they went through that sort of tens of millions did they get the feedback of, “I don’t really need any of these features, but I really need to send messages.” So then they began trying to do messages, but by then they’d spent so much money, no one was going to give more money to develop the software any more. So, we started from that feature and every single other thing you see in the software is because a doctor, a nurse, a patient sat down and said, I need this, or I’m stuck on this.

The whole thing top to bottom has been built by the user saying what they need; we respond every two weeks by putting out new features. From our perspective, it’s great because we’re only building stuff that people care about, but also our users are huge evangelists. Every commissioning customer who uses us can point at a part of the screen and say, “That was mine.” And then they go and tell all their friends, “Go and use this software because that was mine. And also, whatever you tell these guys, they’ll do it in two weeks. They really respond really quickly and I’ve never had a software company do that with me.”

3)   In one of your customer videos, Gary Hotine describes looking for something that would be like “Facebook for Patients.” I’m curious to know how apt a description you feel that is for Patients Know Best.

A lot of our users describe us as the Facebook of healthcare. When we trained patients in the beginning, the docs were kind of worried that the patients wouldn’t understand how to use the software. When we sat down with them, most of the trepidation was that they did not believe the docs had actually handed over the records and given them control. But as soon as they get there, they’re like, “Oh, I see, that’s like Facebook. I’m good.”

From that point onwards they just go ahead and use it. It’s like Facebook in the sense that it’s a very easy method of communication, pulling data from everywhere and it can send lots of places. It’s not like Facebook in the sense that we’re not selling your data and we change the terms of use every week: we are not confusing our financial benefit with your privacy desires.

4)   When you started, I’m guessing it was pretty much just you. How did you then go and assemble a team? What qualities did you look for?

It started with just me having the idea and doing some of the research in the States and then deciding I needed to go back to the UK to start it. Cambridge was the place to do so, both as my home and because I’d heard that Cambridge receives 7% of all VC funding in all of Europe. It’s just a crazy number. So I came back to Cambridge and just did a bunch of things to start building the team. I emailed the CEO of Cambridge Network and said, “I’m coming back to the UK, I’ve trained as a programmer and I’m starting this company; I have no team, no product, and no customers. Who do you think I should talk to?” “Let’s have coffee.”

I think he took pity on me, but he said, “You know you should talk to Ian, he’s a CFO of VC backed companies and I think he’ll talk to you.” It turned out we shared the same pub, and we kind of just spent 2 hours the first time talking about the company and he thought it was really interesting. Over the next four months, the poor guy, Ian, taught me accounting. And then eventually he became a member of our board of directors and CFO of our company. So he was the first really heavyweight executive to commit his time to the company.

Then from the development side, I started by just getting some contract developers to build the proto-type and then some other ones to build the final software. We now have developers from the UK (obviously), but also the States, from France, from India, just a real international team. And they tended to have some experience with healthcare in the past that meant that they were as frustrated with healthcare as I was. And so they’re quite evangelical.

In parallel with that, I got a meeting with Dr. Richard Smith, who was the former editor of the British Medical Journal. It took me six months to get a meeting with him—because everyone’s trying to get a meeting with him—but I knew when I was reading his editorials as a medical student, he was always on the patient’s side, often to the anger of his colleagues and medical professionals. But he’d always be on the patient’s side. I knew that if I could just get a meeting, he’d get it. And sure enough, he got it and he agreed to new meetings. And then one day, he agreed to be chairman of our board of directors.

As you build that core team of world class people, it’s just easy to get people. Everyone then wants to join up.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on March 16, 2012 at 5:23 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Management Tips, Product Development, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

The balance between capturing new clients and retaining existing clients

Anybody who has ever tried to secure new clients for their business will know that this is a crucial process of growing businesses. It is also commonly known that it is just as important to retain existing customers as securing new ones. In fact, in some cases, it can be more valuable. We asked Tony O’Shaughnessy, a renowned entrepreneur, whether he has any tricks of the trade that he can pass on to entrepreneurs on how to secure new clients, retain existing customers and balance the interest of all concerned parties whilst meeting your own company goals…

Securing new clients

“Firstly, I would suggest that you should take a step back, put a clear-cut structure and plan in place, and work consistently to that.

Secondly, you need to understand exactly what it is that you do that makes people buy from you. Then create a simple message at marketing level that puts exactly that point across to prospective clients.

Thirdly, you must identify the people you should be marketing and selling to. You should really take time to understand that. There is a big difference between people who are ‘interested’ in your product/service and then there are people who would ‘buy’ your product. You must distinguish between the two.

Finally, you must be transparent and honest to your clients. If you are having problems, tell them that you are and what you are doing to fix it.  Be realistic to your clients about what you can achieve.

What made Rapid Innovation Group stand out from the crowd was the fact that you had the answer to: ‘What can you do for me and why nobody else can do it for me?’”

Retaining existing clients

“I believe keeping good relationships with your existing clients should be intrinsic, not only a strategy. Honesty and transparency are not only key for gaining new clients, but are also crucial for retaining existing clients. Essentially, they want to trust you, and these are the ways to attain that. You should not look to blame somebody for any mistakes made, rather you should find a way to fix it. You must be loyal to the relationship between yourself and your clients.

For example, ninety-five per cent of the companies give bigger promises than they can keep. You must position yourself in the remaining five per cent. Do not offer something that you cannot materialise, because that will not be honest.”

Posted by Paul Higgins on March 9, 2012 at 5:34 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Sales, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)