On Internet Business

FundedApps: Turn ideas into cash

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources

Many of us think we have a great idea for a new app, but lack something: technical skill, time, investment possibilities, to turn that brilliant spark into a commercial blaze.  Now there’s a fantastic new app that helps make apps happen. Called FundedApps, it invests its resources, creativity and experience in making bright ideas into money-earning apps.

How does it work?

It’s a lovely process of using an innovation to develop an innovation. You just:
•    Download the App
•    Use it to create and send your idea (costs £1.19)
•    Idea is reviewed
•    If it passes the criteria it gets investment to turn it into an App (cash payment, see payment schedule below)
•    More investment launches the new App (ongoing revenue stream kicks in)
•    App management and improvement is ongoing

What’s the return on intellectual property?

Three forms of return:

1.    The transformation of an idea into a successful app which earns income
2.    One off payment of £250, made when theAppsFund commits funds to develop an idea
3.    Ongoing 25% net revenue from the launched App will be paid quarterly to the originator

The team behind FundedApps is small and entrepreneurial and uses its business, technology and creative experience to identify, improve and launch ideas into the marketplace so ‘flashes of brilliance’ can become economic earners.

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Making the workplace fun

Posted by Michael under awards, Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

An article in Director magazine highlights the importance of fun and creativity in the workplace. Happy team members take fewer sick days and work harder for longer

Define your differences and use them to achieve more

By offering a different kind of ‘perk’ and a clearly defined brand experience to your employees as well as your customers, you can help shape your employment policy and recruit the right people to grow your business. Competitive businesses like the Richmond Group really incentivise their teams by giving them capital to run with on new projects and acquisitions and pitting them against each other.

Do more for them, they’ll do for more for you

Ikea gave all their staff free bikes after the UK government gave companies a cycle to work tax break and several UK companies give their employees free mobiles or free minutes – all this might sound like freebie heaven but it’s a way of showing the quality of investment you have in your employees. In the same way, measuring stress and monitoring workplace issues can really help a company and its employees to manage what matters – which is performance in action. Pret a Manger uses a mystery shopping programme to measure performance and reward ALL staff in a shop, not just the manager, if the results are good.

Reward what matters

Some companies offer holidays in return for performance, others give bonuses and incentives for greener lifestyle choices. Whether it’s onsite gyms or having dry cleaning picked up by a concierge, knowing what your staff want and what they’ll really work for is a way of getting them to respond to challenges with a gusto rather than groans.

Offer choice

Shine Communications lets the employees design their own incentive packages – other companies let staff bid on what they want to achieve or opt out of benefits rather than opting in. It’s all part of empowering the employee and that produces a more satisfied and dynamic team

Reproduced image courtesy of daily sunny

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Scaling your business

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Robert Craven has an interesting think-piece in Real Business, exploring the balancing act that’s required to master the relationship between planning and delivery in a small or new enterprise.

His point is that the problem is rarely a poor plan. It’s usually some kind of impediment to delivery because the organisation isn’t balanced in its structures and the weighting given to different aspects of management. In other words, the love and affection that most entrepreneurs lavish on their creations is misplaced – they work in the business rather than on the business and instead of making scalable businesses using systems, they make successful start-ups that then resist scaling upwards precisely because of their initial construction.

There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests many entrepreneurs actually have to move away from their business (willingly or unwillingly) during the scale-up process. Quite a few return when it’s over, but it seems the skills that make an entrepreneur may not be those that make a business grow from SME to large enterprise. ‘Systems, processes and controls’ says Craven and those are often dirty words to the streamlined, workaholic, visionary founder.

So finding space to deliver—even if the delivered item/idea/service is less than absolutely perfect—is vital to longevity. That means moving away from planning and perfecting and into the grittier business of meeting deadlines, consistency and reliability. A balancing act that allows for growth.

Photo by banalities

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The 5 key questions to ask a previous employer

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

According to Geoffrey Smart, there are five vital questions to ask when taking up references on a potential employee. Smart is the author and co-creator topgrading: a talent management process and an expert in obtaining the right people for a role.

The 5 key questions are:

1.    In what context did you work with the person?
2.    What were the person’s greatest strengths?
3.    What were the person’s biggest areas for improvement when you worked with them? (bearing in mind that it may be some time since they worked together)
4.    How would you rate his/her overall performance in that job on a 1 to 10 scale? What about his or her performance causes you to give that rating?
5.    The person mentioned that he or she struggled with ……… in that job. Can you tell me more about that?

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Growth businesses in 2011

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Online Retail

IBISWorld Market Research has surveyed the global economy and picked out some industries that a set for growth in 2011 based on revenue and employment growth, current profits, and ease of entry.

Debt Collection

The agency world is growing – and debt collection agencies are a growth industry, proving that financial clouds provide other people’s silver linings.  It’s likely that expected employment and housing recoveries will result in debt collection booms as more liquid punters become able to pay back previously frozen loans.

E-commerce and Online Auctions

There’s been a massive growth in e-commerce, with specialist vendors making huge inroads into classic retail in everything from bespoke tailoring to furniture. There are new online commerce and auction communities too, such as Newegg, and even Ravelry for knitters!

Environmental Consulting

The plethora of new rules, plus new international agreements and the high profile environmental failures in the last two years have all led to a substantial investment in external environmental consulting and verification. But it’s not just big business – there’s a boom in community-based consulting in flood or drought prone areas or where newly built housing may turn out to be an insurance risk. Many ‘domestic focus’ consulting firms registered as start-ups in 2010 and lots of them have seen enough business to be hiring in 2011.

Advertising

Smart agencies are going digital – the demand for digital media is expected to nearly double in the next 5 years and many of the big agencies are setting up incubators to find the advertising talent to meet the projected need.

Employment Consulting

Training, retraining, reskilling and reworking are the buzzwords: re-working is getting the long term unemployed back into employment, reskilling is turning those who’ve lost their jobs into a viable workforce, retraining is about improving business (and non-profit) performance in the face of budget cuts and training is related to skills development and team retention – most of which require outside expertise. Boutique employment consultants are seen as the future: small specialist agencies that combine to meet the needs of large organisations such as government departments.

Photo courtesy of umjanedoan

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Vision – a vital component of business success

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

If anybody can be said to have vision, it’s Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s deli in the USA – his book on customer service has become a bible for small customer facing organisations, and a handbook for bigger businesses that want to up their game in customer relations.  If he says visioning can be used for just about anything, it probably can.
However his steps, as outlined in a presentation at Inc. are quite structured and worth looking at. To begin he says you must be ‘clear about what you’re working on. Is it a vision for your organization overall? Or just for a particular piece? For today’s shift? Or your retirement?’ While he says that Zingerman’s do visions for all these, and more, knowing what your vision purpose is stops you drifting off target.
Then you need to pick a time frame – and ideally, his suggestion is to choose a period that gets you past present-day problems but not so beyond them that you can’t have a sense of how you’re going to get to your vision – so he suggests five years may be a good place to start.

The third step is fascinating – it’s to make a list of past positive achievements: anything from contributions to past successes to specific skills and resources – anything good counts, he says.
Four is actually the key, to my way of thinking – it’s when you start to write. Weinzweig offers five simple tips to get you started:

•    Put something wild out there. Get past the 59 reasons why it won’t work.
•    Put down what pours out, not what other people want to see.
•    Write as if your vision has already happened.
•    Keep writing for 15 to 30 minutes, regardless of how silly you sound.
•    Build your passions into what you write. Don’t write a vision that you aren’t a part of.

These tips make you fluent and integrated into the vision, and stop you giving yourself, or your organisation the excuse not to strive for excellence.

Steps 5 and 6 are revisions – 5 is about changing language to make it positive, action filled and inspiring and 6 is more of the same but only three more drafts are allowed – A,B, and C, after that you’re getting into procrastination territory!

Step 7 is where you invite those you trust to give you some feedback on your vision – try to keep them focused on that, rather than the actions needed to achieve the vision, but jot down practical ideas that they come up with, as those insights may be invaluable when you actually put your vision into operation.

And 8 is where you share. Weinzweig makes a great point here that ‘it’s inevitable that people will ask questions about how you intend to achieve the vision. They’re asking you about the how. The vision, however, is the what. It’s totally fine if you don’t know how you’re going to get there.’ The idea of sharing the vision is to allow others to help you travel from the what to the how – which is what leads to business success!

Photo of Zingerman’s by surlygirl

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