Lending to the Entrepreneur

In today’s Wall Street Journal there is a piece of interest to entrepreneurs regarding financing of new ventures…and by financing I am writing about bank financing. The article by Emily Maltby is Entrepreneurs Find Success with Specialty Lenders. In thinking of conversations with entrepreneurs who have had success with banks, the notion of leaving no stone unturned should apply. And while we’re on the subject, while it’s fashionable to take shots at the bankers for not lending, in many cases the reason they are not lending is that they’re hands are tied based on what the federal government and the regulators will allow them to do. Talk to your local banker, talk to a specialty lender and most especially, have your act together before you make the ask for the loan.

Angel Investing Q and A

Playing catch-up after a busy week at the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship…where we gave away $45,000 in prize money to student ventures in our Panasci Business Plan Competition. Yesterday’s on-line edition carried an interview with the author one of my favorite entrepreneurship books, Susan Preston who wrote the wonderful book, Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs. I’ve pasted the entire Q and A below, but here is the link to the article by Colleen Debaise, “How to Win Angel Funding.” As a side note, if you are thinking of getting your venture in front of any angel investors, do yourself a favor and buy this book. You’ll do yourself and the angels you are pitching to a big favor. My old friend Doug Calaway used to tell my students at Rollins College that investors want to know "how much money do you want?"; "what are you going to do with my money?" and "when do I get it back?"

Here's the Q and A

Adapted from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL COMPLETE SMALL BUSINESS GUIDEBOOK (Three Rivers Press).

If you're looking for a cash infusion for your high-growth company, angel financing might be for you. (See related story, "What's an Angel Investor?")

I asked Susan Preston, author of Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs and an angel herself, to explain what an angel wants to see before making an investment. Here's her list:

• A solid potential for return. Angels want to know how your company will make money, when it will turn profitable, and when they can expect a return on their investment. You'll need to back up those promises of profitability with financial documents that include an income statement (also referred to as a profit/loss statement), a balance sheet and cash flow statements.

• A good plan for the cash. Investors want to make sure their money will be spent wisely. If you've founded, say, a consumer product company, you'll need to show how the money will be used to design, develop and distribute your product. And emphasize your thriftiness: angels don't want to see the money being used for big salaries or fancy office space.

• A winning attitude. Get fired up. Angels want to see passion; they want to see you're committed to your concept and company and that you'll stay the course when obstacles arise. Aside from enthusiasm, you must be able to clearly articulate your company's mission—and how you'll make that dream a reality.

• A seasoned team. Angels want to see a strong management team that's capable, experienced in their industry and, more important, open to suggestions and opinions. "If I don't think that a CEO or founder is coachable, I won't invest," Preston says. "Someone who comes in and says 'I know all the answers' is the kind of person who is doomed to failure."

• A competitive edge. How are customers responding to your product or service? An angel will want to know that you can capture market share quickly and beat out competitors as you ramp up. If your product or service is fairly unique, an angel will want to see you've secured the patents, copyrights or trademarks to protect your intellectual property.

• A well-defined exit strategy. Investors will want to know exactly how you plan to make them money—and just saying "IPO" or "acquisition" might not be enough. Research how other companies in your industry have returned profits to investors. Identify potential suitors for your business. "It's a homework point that they need to have done," Preston says.

The Dream Machine

Our Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) program had some exciting news to share yesterday and we were able to announce it in the heart of New York city in Times Square. PepsiCo International announced a wonderful new national partnership that will provide us with help for our very special veteran’s initiative. Our EBV Program was selected over dozens of other groups, and will get not only significant funding, but tremendous national publicity as well. In an effort to increase recycling, Pepsi has decided to offer an added incentive to return bottles and cans: they are setting up thousands of “dream machines,” and for every recyclable deposited in one of these, PepsiCo will make a financial contribution to the EBV program to ‘help a veteran live the American Dream of becoming an entrepreneur.’ It’s an awesome way for Americans to protect the environment and give back to the disabled servicemen and women who served them so selflessly and so honorably. This is an exclusive and three year relationship, where the EBV program is the sole financial beneficiary of PepsiCo’s recycling campaign.

The EBV program, founded by our own Dr. Mike Haynie is based on one simple idea: helping disabled veterans with dreams of entrepreneurship to start their own businesses. Since its inception in 2007, we have graduated over 225 veterans! This is such an amazing program…truly life-changing for the participants. One of my hardest (and saddest) tasks though has been to turn away eager applicants because our program has been full. With this new partnership with Pepsi we’ll be able to open the program to even more deserving vets. For more information on this neat program, take a look at the Pepsi Dream Machine Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/dreammachine#!/dreammachine?v=wall

Ag 4 Africa and the Dell Competition

Congratulations to Holly Tassi ’10 BS, Ryan Seeram ’10 BS, and Tamara Cohen ’09 BS from Syracuse University for their achievement in making it to the final three teams in the Dell Social Innovation Competition. Over 700 other business ideas from colleges and universities around the world had also entered the competition, which seeks projects that improve areas of critical human need through innovation.

Holly’s and the team’s business idea, Ag 4 Africa, is a rural development model for Sub-Saharan Africa, focused on promoting sustainable agriculture and self-sufficiency. The AG 4 Africa concept is being developed in collaboration with the Whitman Schools’ Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises.

The team will travel to Austin, Tex., on May 5 to present their business plan in front of a panel of judges comprised of leaders from the business, nonprofit and government sectors. All three of the finalists will receive prizes; the overall winner receives $50,000 to launch their venture.

Congratulations Holly, Ryan and Tamara and good luck in Austin!

A Generation of Wealth Lost

As someone who knows a bit about the Florida real estate market from my time in the Sunshine state, the article titled A Generation of Wealth Lost by Zach Fox is a sobering reminder of exactly how bad the real estate situation is in that state. I remember in Orlando back in 2007, looking at the amazing number of houses for sale for a million and two million dollars, and knowing the wage scale in the state, I found myself wondering who truly could qualify for all those multi-million dollar homes.

As someone who thinks about entrepreneurship, it’s also important to recognize how what happened in Florida, also impacted entrepreneurs in the real estate industry in Arizona, California and Nevada. To my knowledge, I’ve never seen a comprehensive study/report that describes the impact that the bust had on entrepreneurs; both those in that industry, as well as those in other industries but who used their building, manufacturing facility, offices, etc as collateral on bank loans. It would be interesting, but a bit depressing to read.

The Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Engaging the World

Mike Haynie, entrepreneurship professor and the father of our Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program will be receiving today the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence in Engaging the World. This award is presented annually by the Nancy Cantor the Chancellor of Syracuse University to the faculty member who, through their research, teaching, and service has had a profound impact on society beyond the walls of the University, and who has demonstrated thoughtful, determined, and sustained efforts to enrich the lives of students, faculty, staff, and community. Join me in congratulating Mike on this wonderful award…but more importantly, join me in thanking him for using his entrepreneurial knowledge to launch and grow a wonderful program which assists veterans who have given so much to our country. Congratulations…and thanks Mike!

David Bing on Campus

I had the chance to meet David Bing today and hear him speak about Detroit’s Next Chapter: A Team of Change. Mayor Bing is a Syracuse University graduate, a former star basketball player for the Orange and for the Detroit Pistons in the NBA, and a successful entrepreneur. Once his playing days were over, building off what he learned in nine off-seasons working in banking and the auto industry, he started a business from scratch with just 4 employees. That entrepreneurial venture eventually became the Bing Group, which was a premier supplier of quality products and services to the automotive industry employing over 900 people. Then about a year ago, at a point in time when many might have thought it was a time to retire, Bing decided to start a new career and ran for mayor of Detroit; a city that was clearly in need of a transformation.

In his address today in the business school, he spoke at length about entrepreneurship, about the need for building a strong team around you, and about the never-give-up attitude it takes to be a winner…both on the basketball court as well as in the board room. He spoke candidly about the challenges ahead of him in the revitalization of a city that has lost a population and job base that is staggering. His goal...operate the cityof Detroit just as he did his business. And for those of us business folk who sit on the sidelines, we wish Mayor Bing the best of luck and hope that if he has success, more cities will try and take the same route. Cities and counties that behave like business…now that’s an idea!

The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur

I get an email periodically from the Kauffman foundation, and today’s carried a link to two recent academic reports on the Anatomy of an Entrepreneur. I've placed in bold some items in the summary that I found particularly interesting. From the summary:

Although entrepreneurs provide the majority of jobs in the United States, little is known about what makes them tick. The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur fills in some gaps by providing insights into high-growth founders' motivations, their socio-economic, educational, and familial backgrounds, as well as their views on the factors determining the success of start-ups.
A team of researchers led by Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University, Raj Aggarwal of the University of Akron, Krisztina Holly of the University of Southern California, and Alex Salkever of Duke University surveyed 549 company founders of successful businesses in high-growth industries, including aerospace, defense, computing, electronics, and health care. The findings are presented in the following two reports.

Family Background and MotivationThe Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation provides insights into high-growth founders' motivations and their socio-economic, educational, and familial backgrounds. Findings include:
More than 90 percent of the entrepreneurs came from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds and were well-educated: 95.1 percent of those surveyed had earned bachelor's degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

Seventy-five percent of the respondents ranked their academic performance among the top 30 percent of their high school classes, and 52 percent said they ranked among the top 10 percent. In college, 67 percent of the founders ranked among the top 30 percent of their undergraduate classes, and 37 percent ranked their performance among the top 10 percent.
Founders tended to be middle-aged—40 years old on average—when they started their first companies. Nearly 70 percent were married when they became entrepreneurs, and nearly 60 percent had at least one child, challenging the stereotype of the entrepreneurial workaholic with no time for a family.

Making of a Successful EntrepreneurThe Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Making of a Successful Entrepreneur provides insight into company owners' views about what influences the success or failure of a startup business. Entrepreneurs identified prior work experience, learning from previous successes and failures, a strong management team, and good fortune as the most important factors in their success. Findings include:
Professional networks were important to the success of their current businesses for 73 percent of the entrepreneurs. In comparison, 62 percent felt the same way about personal networks.
Only 11 percent of the first-time entrepreneurs received venture capital, and 9 percent received private/angel financing. Of the overall sample, 68 percent considered availability of financing/capital as important. Of the entrepreneurs who had raised venture capital for their most recent businesses, 96 percent considered financing important.
Eighty-six percent of Ivy-League graduates ranked university education as important, as compared with 70 percent of the overall sample. Only 20 percent of entrepreneurs and 18 percent of Ivy-League graduates ranked university education as extremely important.
Most company founders (86 percent) ranked state or regional assistance as slightly or not at all important.

In identifying barriers to entrepreneurial success, the most commonly named factor – by 98 percent of respondents – was lack of willingness or ability to take risks. Other barriers cited by respondents were the time and effort required (93 percent), difficulty raising capital (91 percent), business management skills (89 percent), knowledge about how to start a business (84 percent), industry and market knowledge (83 percent), and family/financial pressures to keep a traditional, steady job (73 percent).

Kawasaki on Well...Lots of Stuff

Jim Olsen of US Airways sent me the following piece from Guy Kawasaki. I particularly liked the Q and A regarding b-schools and career paths. My take on what we should be teaching our business school students…we need to make sure that they can write clearly and with brevity; we need to make sure that they can speak in front of groups and can do so without having to drone on for 45 minutes to make one point; and we need to make sure that they can work in groups. Nothing worse than the brilliant business school grad who can only work with his own overinflated ego.

Here's the interview from the NY Times with Guy Kawasaki, a co-founder of Alltop and managing director of Garage Technology vetntures. The interview was conducted, edited and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. At what point in your career did you first become somebody’s boss?
A. I was probably 28 or 29 years old and in the jewelry business. I started my career counting diamonds and schlepping gold jewelry around the world. The jewelry business is a very, very tough business — tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers. I learned a very valuable lesson: how to sell. Sales is everything. As long as you’re making sales, you’re still in the game. That lesson has stuck with me throughout my career.

Q. So how did the transition into management go?
A. When I was getting my education, I fell in love with the writings of Peter Drucker. He was my hero. I had a naïve belief that when I became a manager, it was going to be like Peter Drucker’s books. That is, I was going to be the effective executive. I was going to talk to people about their goals. I was going to help them actualize.

My thinking was: I’m a natural leader, so I’m going to study what’s hard and mathematical like finance and operations research, not the touchy-feely stuff that would be easy.
When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people. The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard. The quantitative stuff is easy — you either don’t do much of this as a manager or you have people working for you to do it.

Maybe it was just my education, but much of education is backwards. You study all the hard stuff, and then you find out in the real world that you don’t use it. As long as you can use an HP 12 calculator or a spreadsheet, you have the finance knowledge that you need for most management positions. I should have taken organizational behavior and social psychology — and maybe abnormal psychology, come to think of it.

Q. So how did you learn to do it?
A. First, over time, you develop some knowledge and expertise in managing and leading — in many cases because you’re forced to.

Second, you learn to put in a cushion between you and the front line. You should hire people who are better at doing things than you are. So, in my case, I was not the warm-and-fuzzy manager, so I tried to hire people who reported to me who were warm-and-fuzzy types to provide a buffer. If you can’t do it, you should find somebody who can.

Q. Tell me about the best bosses you worked for.
A. My boss in the jewelry business was great because he taught me how to sell and how a business reputation was built on trust. My boss at Apple was a guy named Mike Murray, who was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. He gave me so much rope that I could hang myself and sometimes I did. After a while, your neck gets stronger and you also learn not to hang yourself.

A few levels above me, I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen. These are powerful lessons — very different from saying we just want to eke out an existence and keep our heads down.

Q. So how do you create a sense of mission in a company?
A. The foundation is the desire to make meaning in the world — to make the world a better place. We believed in the Mac division that we were making the world a better place by making people more creative and productive. Google, at its core, probably believes it’s making the world a better place by democratizing information. So it starts from this core of how you make meaning, which translates into some kind of physical product or service that actually delivers.

Q. How do you hire?
A. The most important thing is that you hire people who complement you and are better than you in specific areas. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.

Time and again in Silicon Valley, two engineers who are the founders of a company have a very unique perspective. They believe that engineering is hard, and everything else is easy. Sales, marketing, finance, operations, manufacturing — all that is easy.
With this perspective, they think that if they set their mind to it, they could be the best V.P. of manufacturing, best V.P. of finance, best V.P. of marketing, best V.P. of sales, best V.P. of everything.

However, in a perfect world, someone who is a truly great engineer and founder would appreciate the difficulty of marketing, and hire a marketing person who is far better than he or she is.

In a perfect world, you would take pride in the fact that you hired someone who is better than you. Hardly anybody has that attitude, though. The second ideal goal would be to make yourself dispensable — what greater accomplishment is there than the organization running well without you? It means you picked great people, prepared them and inspired them. And if executives did this, the world would be a better place.

Q. Talk more about this notion of dispensability.
A. Insecure people would rather see the company fail without them than succeed. It’s because their ego is so large that the thought of a company succeeding without them is incomprehensible. They would rather see it fail.

Q. Other thoughts on hiring?
A. A major issue is with how interviews are conducted. There’s a body of research that says you should conduct first- and second-round interviews by phone, not in person. This is because when you interview in person, many variables come into play that have nothing to do with competence. So is the person good-looking or not? Is the person dressed appropriately or not? Lots of factors can sidetrack you. There should also be a checklist of questions that you ask every candidate on the phone instead. Another issue is that most people believe they are good interviewers, and that they are good judges of character. They’re wrong. That’s why you see clones of the boss in some companies: everybody is white, tall and from an East Coast private school.

Q. What should business schools teach more of, or less of?
A. They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.

Q. Why?
A. Because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting. What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.”

Q. And what would you say to business school graduates?
A. It’s a more general lesson, but in the end, success in business comes from the willingness to grind it out. It’s not because of the brilliant idea. It’s because you are willing to work hard. That’s the key to my success.

Q. What’s your best career advice for somebody who’s just graduating from college?
A. Most people who graduate from college think they have to make a perfect choice. Is it Goldman Sachs? Is it Google? Is it Apple? They think that their first job is going to determine their career, if not their life. Looking back, that’s absolutely incorrect. By definition you cannot make a mistake in your first job other than becoming a consultant or an investment banker.
Let’s say you land in a start-up, and it becomes the next Google. Now you’re 25 years old, and you’re worth $50 million. Anybody would call that a success. But let’s say you join a start-up, and it implodes. You would learn more about leadership inside a company that crashes than you would inside the next Google. Specifically, you will learn what not to do. You can’t make a mistake as a college graduate.

Q. Why did you carve out investment banking and consulting?
A. With investment banking, you make a lot of money, and you get a distorted feeling of how wonderful you are. You’ll be flying around in corporate jets and you’ll be attending board meetings, but you don’t really add value.

The issue with consulting is that if you go straight to work for a consultant, you develop this perspective that the hard part is the analysis and the decision. In reality, that’s not the hard part. The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it. So the problem with consulting is you get paid $400 an hour, you do your beautiful charts, you make your PowerPoint presentation, you tell the client what they should do, and you go on to the next project. Meanwhile, you’re building up this belief that you’re a genius: you know how to analyze; you know how to make a decision; and, worst of all, you know how to implement — but all without implementing.

You can develop an absolutely incorrect perception of yourself as a great manager when, in fact, you haven’t implemented anything. You haven’t fired anybody. You haven’t introduced a product. You haven’t supported a customer. All you’ve done is make spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
You can also throw venture capital into this pile. Going into venture capital straight out of school is a big mistake because entrepreneurs start sucking up to you and ask you stuff you know nothing about — like how to run a company.
Jobs for college graduates should make them gain knowledge in at least one of these three areas: how to make something, how to sell something or how to support something.

Starting the StartUp

One of the most asked questions I get is…I’ve got the idea and I want to start my company, what is it that I should do next. The article in the NY Times by Kermit Pattison, How to Register a Start Up is a wonderful summary of what you should do once you make the decision that you’re going to get started.

Five Tips on Growing Your Business

Orlando friend, entrepreneur and social marketing expert Mark Carbone forwarded on the article, Growing Your Business: Five Tips from the Founder of Foursquare.

From the article regarding guerrilla marketing:

Foursquare is by no means perfect. As a young startup, the company faces the challenge of keeping their servers running as they attract record levels of activity, and doing so always in the public eye. It’s a daunting position to be in unless it’s approached head-on, and that’s what Crowley (co-founder of Foursquare Dennis Crowleyand Syracuse University grad) and his team do on a daily basis.

“We’ll use Twitter Search to search for things like “foursquare sucks,” “foursquare broken,” etc. to find people who are experiencing problems but who would probably never submit a support ticket. With a quick @reply we can often shed some light on the issue and do it in public.”
The same guerilla-style customer service is perfect for small businesses, especially with regard to negative press or unflattering blog posts and comments. Crowley says, “don’t feel shy, jump in and comment. Making yourself part of the conversation shows users you’re listening and care about the issues they have.”