Help is needed at times when you are running a small business.  We find ourselves in a fortunate position of having now enough good ideas to last well into the future.  The rub is that time is our shortest commodity.  This means that we feel the frustration of opportunity for accelerating growth slipping through our fingers.  Our coach defines it as Capacity issues and in truth what successful startup has not felt the capacity squeeze.

So the question is - what to do about it.  My flippant answer is our coach has the answer, it's tied up in the models we use and the detail is in us once the framework is applied, but we are coachless for a while so we are flying solo right now which means we can freestyle on our decision processes.

Here's my take on how some businesses, well us actually, are going to strive to relieve capacity and grab the next opportunity set:

1) Get more capacity - easy errr no!  We have been lucky, we have found him - MR EXTRA CAPACITY.  The truism goes that you must recruit people who are better than you...the challenge then comes on finding them and securing the services.

2) Use collective intelligence to nail the good ideas from the rest - easy - err YES! We can see the next the step and its in the application world.  Why do we know its right, because their is a collective opinion that it is the right thing to do and we have two beta test areas already.  But remember, the web can aggregate opinion, that will let you find the good ideas fast.

3) Learn to say no - this one has been suggested to us by two independent trusted sources.  Get stable by saying yes to everything, get ride of your stench of desperation and get tougher, so NO! if the price ain't right - OH how we laughed when we set this mantra and them a shiny big corporate comes along and asks for lots of value for little early reward....TRAP and in we fell.  Shiny corporates...UUMMM so alluring...

4) Manage expectation - we have been gunning it over the past 3 weeks, but we have not missed a deadline yet.   Thing is now to focus on spreading the load across the calendar as well as the work force.

In the real world we saw today the clearest expression of what content platforms will do the for future - Paul Briggs at IDG is a visionary and an inspiration (these sorts of accolades are not easily given away).  I am feeling the heat of the applications that are being created in FaceBook every second.  I love the fact that Techcrunch internee had the balls to even attempt a top 10 favourites considering the next oooh so exciting shiny shiny was only a millisecond away...oh there's another and another... bollocks that my good idea gone for this week!!

Comments

There are currently 0 comments about this blog.

Leave a Reply