Essentials of Deal Making for Entrepreneurs

Posted At : December 29, 2010 3:22 PM | Posted By : Marita Greenidge
Related Categories: Strategy,Deal Making

By Corey Graham 2.0

Deal making is always an interesting challenge, no matter the level of business you are conducting. The key thing in making a deal is having a clear understanding of your business. This sounds simple, but it is challenging to always have a clear picture of what stage your business is and where your marketing is going.

Imagine you are in the middle of your office trying to meet a demanding deadline and someone is asking your make the final decision on some special deal. We agree it’s not easy.

Every deal you enter into is really to help you get another important piece of the puzzle for your business. I think there is no one size fits all when it comes to wheeling and dealing. Each business has special requirements. It is easy for entrepreneurs to get carried away in dialog about some new opportunity. In no time they will be playing with the thought of making a new deal. Talking ideas and visions of the future is what entrepreneurs do! Sometimes though, all the business needs is to do more of the same. Stick with the game plan and you will come out on top.

You might want to fancy your business like a formula 1 car. You get into it, start the ignition and off to your destination at break neck speed, barely slowing down enough to take the corners. The thing that makes a Formula 1 car special, is its near perfect balance between weight and power. You can't just fit another mirror on a formula 1 car because it was a “sweet deal”. That mirror will disrupt your balance.

It's key that as you go about building your business, you evaluate every deal against your near perfect balance between resources & demand. It is your job as an entrepreneur to fit the pieces together in an optimal way.

You want your business to get to a certain destination and in a certain time. You've got to fit the parts together in the right way.

As a result you have got the measure each deal against that weight vs power balance. You should be careful when getting involved in any exclusive deals. Exclusive means its along with you for almost your entire journey.  Are you sure it’s not going to create any drag on lap 3? Will that grind you to a halt? These are some serious questions you have to ask yourself before jumping into and exclusive deal.

Nothing is wrong with starting with a short term contract so you get to test drive the deal. Get feedback and then move forward.

Happy Driving!

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Always Time for Down Time

Posted At : November 9, 2010 10:20 PM | Posted By : Marita Greenidge
Related Categories: Strategy

By Omar Best-Delice


One of the major problems with small and medium enterprises, is that too many are concerned with fixing the day-to-day things (the easy stuff) and spend significantly less time planning long term strategy (the hard stuff). Or even worse, they confuse the two; thinking they are being strategic in focus; when instead they may still only be looking from the short term operational or tactical perspective, but just stretching it to fit a longer time horizon.
 
Sometimes in order to imagine responses to future eventualities from a strategic perspective, you need  to ‘divorce yourself’ from your daily operations and do something different for a while.

‘But my organization Needs Me Now’

The case of ‘They will be no one to do what I do if I take a break’ or even ‘this is a crucial time for my business’. No disputing that your organization may be at that crucial stage where it needs your undivided regular attention, but this will not be so during most stages of the enterprise’s life. A mark of a good leader and a potentially successful enterprise is reflected in the people that work with and below the leader. If your organization cannot exist without you for a week or two, what hope do you have of it succeeding should you suddenly, unexpectedly fall ill?  

If your organization cannot survive without you for a short while you may not be doing as good a job as you think in a few crucial aspects of management, primarily; hiring, training, delegation, employee empowerment and succession planning.

Organizations also Need Downtime

An organization is a collection of people and processes around those people. The same way people with their limited attention spans take time out to do something different to refresh themselves, couldn’t the same thing be applied to the enterprise?

Google’s 20% time is a great example of this. Employees get to spend one work day each week doing something completely unrelated to their daily activities. They get to put the ‘what if’ factor to work, exploring projects and possibilities they normally would never get the time to follow through on. That day has been found to be a boon to creativity and therefore beneficial to the individual employees and to the company as a whole.

The Lesson of Downtime

The lesson going forward is that at the individual level, at the level of the entrepreneurial leader and at the full organizational level, at some point sessions, whether structured or spontaneous, should be scheduled as a regular part of the organization’s life. The benefits of such time spent are intangible but positively impact on internal planning, motivation, creativity and innovation.

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