Becoming a Young Gun

Today, Robert Tuchman, author of Young Guns: the Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking out on Your Own, is providing a guest post. Robert is an entrepreneur who started Tuchman Sports Enterprises (TSE) out of his one-bedroom apartment in New York City. His company was named to the annual Inc. 500 list of America's fastest growing privately held companies and as one of the top 100 promotion agencies by Promo Magazine. He bootstrapped the startup of TSE with no money and no investors and ended up successfully selling it to Premiere Global Sports for a tidy profit. Last year TSE earned over $70 million dollars in sales as the Corporate Events division of Premiere Global Sports. Robert serves as President of that division, still guiding the business he started.


Graduation from college carries such ironic emotion: you have spent four years yearning to graduation, but as soon as you do, you spend your remaining days nostalgic about your school days. College is a great time, but with graduation comes reality. You are now armed with all that you need: you are the fuse and your diploma is the match. Let the fireworks begin!

Many leave college and send out applications to tens of corporations looking for a job. But there are others who take a bit more of a risk: they seek entrepreneurial pursuits. Know that what lay behind you and what lay in front of you is trivial compared to what lay within you. Have courage.

If it is entrepreneurship you desire post graduation, there are several thing you must consider.

An entrepreneur needs to be someone who can both visualize and actualize. He needs to be able to visualize something—and once he has that “something,” he needs to see exactly how to make it happen. In order to make it happen, there are several steps that you as an entrepreneur must take on your way to entrepreneurial success. Do not just enhance what is, but advance towards what will be: keep the long term in sight.

It is essential that you are able to marry your work and what you love. When in sales, there is no right or wrong way to sell: all you need is passion and enthusiasm for your product. This passion will ignite the minds of your potential client, facilitating connections, and connections between will be made. Your passion and enthusiasm for your product will be what encourages the sale—not the rote duplication of someone else’s selling system. It takes courage to grow up, form your own philosophy, and become who you really are. What you do to sell and promote your business has to be a reflection of what you are already willing to stay up late for and get up early for. It has to connect to your “why” and be a part of your own experience.

Second, you must start working your plan, whether you are ready nor not. Know the four good things that you are about to do: first, that your business is going to be built on a great idea; second, that great idea is going to connect you to a market; third, that you will create a plan based on what you learn, on an ongoing basis, about that market; fourth, that you will adjust that plan over time.

After you have visualized your plan, find the right partner… and avoid the wrong one! You will have a significant advantage over one-man businesses if you come together with another person regularly to make important decisions. Find someone with whom you have good chemistry, someone who fills your blind spots. Successful partnerships are based on the idea of taking different perspectives in a discussion and having different talents.

Once the groundwork has been established, set priorities for the absolutely crucial first year. Concentrate on why you are doing something—not how. Your “why” will keep you closely connected to your company and your product. As soon as you lose sight of “why,” you will also lose sight of your driving force and your motivation.

Through your first year and beyond, court clients—and keep them coming back! In order that you become a successful entrepreneur, it is essential that you are the person who is willing to pick up the phone and call people to talk about making deals and doing business. When you make this phone call, make sure you are absolutely certain about the product that you are selling. With this certainty, you can use confidence to build up a network of contacts. The network cannot be established overnight—it is going to take a lot of phone calls. You cannot just wave your magic wand over a corporation and change them into a profitable client.

In order to keep your client base, you need a great team to work with. Make sure that your company has shared values, that there are rewards for quality improvements, and that there are strong internal and external relationships. Empower the best, lose the rest!

Inevitably, there will be failure. You must learn from failure: use it as a stepping-stone. Do not forget what mistakes you have made, but do not allow yourself to dwell on them. Take from your failure: take the lesson learned—do not let it take anything from you: not your energy, not your time and not your space.

Finally, in order to keep your company going and keep your clients happy, maintain good relations with your vendors. It is essential that you support the people who support you. If you are making a big commitment to a client, make sure you have a solid relationship with your vendor.

In the end, take energy from taking risks. Live in the spirit of the entrepreneur!

The Boomer as Entrepreneur

If you happen to be a boomer (or even if you are not), take a look at the following study from the Kaufman Foundation called “The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom.”

Per a press release from the Kaufman Foundation:

According to Robert E. Litan, VP of Research and Policy at the Kaufman Foundation: “The fact that the largest age group of our population is also the most entrepreneurial bodes well for the United States' economic future. This study shows how several other emerging trends, from job tenure to regulatory changes due to the current recession, should facilitate entrepreneurship in coming years." Contrary to popularly held assumptions, it turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55-64 age group. The 20-34 age bracket, meanwhile, which is usually identified with swashbuckling and risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google), has the lowest. Perhaps most surprising, this disparity occurred in the 11 years around the dot-com boom—when the young entrepreneurial upstart became a cultural icon.

Other key findings include:

While people under 30 have historically jumped from job to job, the most striking development today has been the deep drop in the incidence of "lifetime" jobs among men over age 50. Long-term employment has fallen dramatically for people ages 35-64 over the past 50 years.
With longer life expectancies and greater health in later life, older generations may continue to start new firms—or mentor young entrepreneurs. Since the first Internet-era recession, transaction costs and barriers to entry have fallen for entrepreneurs of every age.

I think one other point is worth mentioning. Some boomers who are entrepreneurs, are now ready and willing to sell their existing businesses. These boomers also know that to sell their business in these uncertain and tight credit times, means that they will have to also finance the sale of their business, which opens up a tremendous opportunity for the younger generations. So this may also be a good time to look at your local boomers and see if you can buy a business from them. Remember the entrepreneur’s mantra: everything is for sale.

ARC Loans

Thanks to Dr. Mike Haynie for passing this along:

Internet Address: http://www.sba.gov/news

Small Business can Apply for ARC Loans Beginning Today

WASHINGTON – Starting today, June 15, SBA will begin accepting loans for a temporary new program called America’s Recovery Capital. “ARC” loans of up to $35,000 are designed to provide a “bridge” for viable small businesses with immediate financial hardship – to keep their doors open until they get back on track.

“These ARC loans are another tool in the SBA toolkit which will provide critical support to small businesses struggling to make it through these tough economic times,” said Administrator Karen G. Mills.

ARC loans are deferred-payment loans of up to $35,000, available to established, viable, for-profit small businesses that need short-term help to make their principal and interest payments on existing and qualifying business debt. ARC loans are 100 percent guaranteed by the SBA and have no SBA fees associated with them.

ARC loans will be disbursed over a period of up to six months and will provide funds to be used for payments of principal and interest for existing, qualifying small business debt including mortgages, term and revolving lines of credit, capital leases, credit card obligations and notes payable to vendors, suppliers and utilities. SBA will pay the interest on ARC loans to the lenders at the variable rate of Prime plus two percent.

Repayment will not begin until 12 months after the final disbursement. After the 12-month deferral period, borrowers will pay back the loan principal over a period of five years.

ARC loans will be made by commercial lenders, not SBA directly. For more information on ARC loans, visit www.sba.gov <http://www.sba.gov/

For more information about all of the SBA’s programs for small businesses, call the SBA Answer Desk at 1-800 U ASK SBA or TDD 704-344-6640, or visit the SBA’s Web site at http://www.sba.gov <http://www.sba.gov/> .

Find the Pain; Find the Opportunity

An entrepreneur from Virginia sent the story below to me, with a suggestion that perhaps this is another form of entrepreneurship that we should think more about in our business schools. His concern is that b-schools spend so much of their student’s time talking about launching high-tech ventures (i.e. the next Google) that we don’t point out to our students that there are other opportunities out there. In the short time I have been at Syracuse University, I’ve talked to students who are thinking of businesses in industries as diverse as restaurants, manufacturing, software, entertainment, and on and on.

But my friend from Virginia’s point is well-taken so take a look at this article, Waxman’s Beat, about finding the pain in the news marketplace and then identifying the right VC group (Seattle-based venture capital firm Maveron LLC, founded by Dan Levitan and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz) to back the enterprise.

Wine and Social Media

If you like drinking wine, you probably know of Murphy-Goode Winery which is located in California. If you’re really involved in social media, you also probably also know about Murphy-Goode but for an entirely different reason than what’s inside the bottle. The winery, which turns out some really nice cabernet’s, is running a unique contest to find a temporary employee who can bring them into the world of Web 2.0. As they put it on their website:

We at the Murphy-Goode Winery got to thinking about the new age of communications and we figured it was a pretty good thing. So to get going, we’re looking for someone (maybe you) who really knows how to use Web 2.0 and Facebook and blogs and social media and YouTube and all sorts of good stuff like that — to tell the world about our wines and the place where we live: the Sonoma County Wine Country. In exchange, we’re offering you a “Really Goode Job” — a six-month job paying $10,000 a month plus accommodations! We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.

So how do you apply? Not in the oh-so-old-fashioned way of sending in a resume or filling out an application? Nope…Murphy-Goode is asking interested individuals to send them a video, “60 second (or less) video in English, created by you that shows why you are the best person for the job and exhibits your ability to communicate. It should be entertaining. We are looking for a video that demonstrates your storytelling, personal presentation, video production skills, creative content, enthusiasm, knowledge of Murphy-Goode wines and the Sonoma County Wine Country.”

I’ll be following this to see how the experiment goes.

Both Sides of the Table

In reading Ask the VC by Brad Feld, I came across the blog, Both Sides of the Table by entrepreneur turned VC, Mark Suster. Having spent some time reading through it, I like what I’m reading. Mark is interesting, on-topic and with lots of good things for entrepreneurs. To get to know his blog, take a look at this series of posts which begin with The First VC Meeting. Print out this series, and find a time to read through all of them, preferably in one-sitting. I think you’ll enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Washington and the VC

Jeff Cornwall in his blog, The Entrepreneurial Mind, pointed out something today that really resonated with me. He said:

“I continue to be concerned about the inordinate amount of attention that Washington is giving to venture capital. There seems to be an assumption that VC investment is a White Knight that will help spur entrepreneurship in America and pull us out of our recession.Remember, venture capital only funding a small part of the entrepreneurial sector. In fact, one study found that 99.962% of entrepreneurial ventures in the US had NO venture capital investment.”

This reminded me of conversations I would have back at Rollins College with my friend and chairman of the Crummer Graduate School Center for Entrepreneurship Board of Advisors, Bill Grimm. Every year, after the entrepreneur of the year awards were handed out in Orlando, we would look through the list of companies that were in the running of the award, and we would usually find, if we were lucky, one company in ten that was venture backed. The others were done through bootstrapping. Yet, throughout the country, the interest is always in seeing VC firms come to town, and now Washington has picked up on that same theme. Jeff is right, the current assumption making the rounds of our nation's capital is that the VCs will be the ones to get us out of the mess we’re in. While they will certainly help, in truth, it’s going to be that 99 plus percent of companies that are started slowly (with help from family and friends), grow gradually, and hire continually that will be the ones that are the true catalysts for change in the United States.

I Need Your Help

I need help and I’m reaching out to my blog for it. At Syracuse University, we run an outstanding program called the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. The program assists our post-9/11 veterans who have been disabled as a result of their military service and helps them to start their own businesses. The program was founded at Syracuse University, and now is offered nationally in partnership with four other great universities; Purdue, Texas A and M, UCLA and Florida State. Right now around 125 veterans go through this program each year.

The number of American soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, as of March of 2009, has exceeded 45,000. Improvements in body armor and other technological advances have resulted in an unprecedented number of soldiers surviving major injuries, but returning home with a chronic disability. Further, the number of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress and other psychological challenges resulting from their service suggests that the number of Americans who endure a disability as a result of military operations since 9/11 has exceeded 300,000. Notably, many of these veterans are young adults, in their early to mid-20s. For the veteran returning from war, it is often the case that the traditional means through which to ‘climb the economic ladder’ are closed as a result of a physical disability. Simply put, at Syracuse University we represent entrepreneurship as a means through which veterans with disabilities can engage the economic engine of their community, and ultimately our nation.

The Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program consists of three phases: an online course focused on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and small-business management, followed by a 10-day, entrepreneurship bootcamp at one of the five universities where some of the best entrepreneurship instructors and entrepreneurs from around the country will focus on helping these men and women turn their entrepreneurial dreams into a reality. The third phase of the program will consists of on-going mentoring support to our EBV students. Importantly, the program is offered entirely free to our veterans. They have already earned the price of admission.

I need help because we would like to provide the veterans who go through this program with even more assistance than we already do. In particular, we’d like to provide them with a laptop computer, and a printer to help them launch their entrepreneurial effort. We’ve put together an impressive sponsorship package for participating companies, but I need contacts in upper management or in the sponsorship department at companies like HP, Dell or Apple to donate the laptops and printers. This is a fantastic program, but I need your help. If you happen to have a contact that you’d like to share, send me an email at tkruczek@syr.edu or call me at 315-877-2306. Thanks for your help.

Raising Money in a Different Way

While in business schools, we like to talk about venture capital and angel investors, the reality of entrepreneurial life is that most entrepreneurs raise money from family, friends and fools. But in the June 5 Wall Street Journal , Diana Ransom brings up some other options for funding a business in her article, Unique Ways Entrepreneurs are Raising Money.

The Times They Are a Changing

Reuters writer David Lawsky just posted an interesting article on the venture capital industry, called Venture Capitalists See Their Industry Shrinking. While this industry gets far more attention, both good and bad than they deserve, the piece provides some interesting insights and stats; one of which was that the number of VC firms dropped by ten percent over the last year as investment money disappeared.

From the article:

"It is very tough to make a commitment to a new venture fund these days," said Panda Hershey, director of global private markets for the large pension fund, TIAA-CREf. "Many of us benefited in '99 and 2000, but subsequently it became very tough for venture as a whole to get returns," she told a panel at the Venture Capital Investing Conference. "I would say, please produce some returns before we re-up with you."

Now They Get It

A favorite movie of mine is “Wag the Dog” the 1997 dark comedy with Robert DeNiro. In it, his character who is a political consultant, keeps using the phrase when referring to the press, “Now they get it.” I was thinking of that expression when I saw the piece in today’s Wall Street Journal written by Josh Mitchell, “Car Chiefs Grilled on Dealer Closings.” Now Congress and the press are "getting" one of the untold stories about the entire mess with the auto industry, and that’s the problem that shutting down thousands of dealerships will cause for small towns all across the USA.

As one example, over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in Cody, Wyoming, and in that town of around 7,000 year-round residents, the car dealers were among the biggest and best employers, they were big contributors to charity, and they were the ones youth baseball, soccer and hockey teams went to for sponsorship. Truth be told, youth sports in our country the last twenty years would have been in a world of hurt without car dealers as they were the ones who paid for lots of uniforms, bats, and balls.

This same story about economic impact for communities can be told across the USA, and with these dealers going out of business, the trickledown effect for our country will be huge. This should have been something that was addressed with Detroit before the billions in bailout money was given to them, but as is often the case, “Now they get it” is heard later rather than earlier and the impact has yet to be felt. Rest assured though, it will be felt.

Bloblive!

A couple of years ago, I met with the president of Blue Orb, Pete McAlindon in Orlando, and he introduced me to Jeff and Rich Sloan, who had launched StartupNation. Over coffee, we talked about the need for “community” for entrepreneurs. We talked about how lonely it is running your own shop and how you need to have people to talk to about your problems. When I owned my companies, there were a group of us who used to go out for dinner and beer at tradeshows, and talk about our problems. We weren’t competitors, so we felt that we could talk and share, and in the process we learned from each other.

I bring this up because of an article on entrepreneurial community in the NY Times written by Don Steinberg. The article, A Network for Small Businesses and Start-Ups, provides some interesting food for thought. The article talks about bloblive, which as the article mentions are events trying to create a community where entrepreneurs can feel free to share ideas and concerns and get feedback and maybe even some advice or a connection. Think of it as idea networking for the entrepreneur.

While it’s possible that the owner of the program, the Advanta Corporation (yes, that Advanta Corporation which is in a world of hurt these days thanks to their credit card business) isn’t the best one to launch what they are calling ideablob’s, perhaps colleges and universities through Centers for Entrepreneurship are better served to fill the need the Advanta has identified. But hats off to Advanta for taking the first step and reaching out to our community through these forums.

Professional Athletes and Doing the Right Thing

Sometimes professional athletes are seen as a group of immature, spoiled brats. Read this piece from ESPN and read about the Denver Nuggets (including Syracuse University grad Carmelo Anthony) doing the right thing.