jbsh

[Disclosure: I attended in my role as Flagship Initiative Adviser for Knowledge West, we have the Knowledge West Enterprise Awards, which brings together competitors from the 6 University Business Plan competitions in the area. However, I'm not on that judging panel, nor this one, and my views here are not those of Knowledge West.]

After the introductions and thank yous, the keynote was Adam Goodyer (co-founder of Concert Live, UWE graduate & HSBC 2007 Start-Up Stars winner). Adam gave a barn storming keynote, with a mix of humour, humility and insight into how they’d grown and overcome early adversity. Concert Live basically record gigs live, mix them to CD, burn them and then sell to the crowd just as they’re leaving the gig. Following early success (they secured an early contract to cover The Levellers gig tour) they hit a dry patch where the industry wouldn’t touch them because their business model was perceived as potentially competitive to the core business of shifting CD singles.

Adam used Porter’s 5 Forces to identity the dominant force in the market (major label’s fear of losing sales & chart positions) that was overcoming a strong customer force (people love buying CD’s of the actual gig they attended) and figured out how to flip the forces in their favour. By setting up a secure chart transaction system to sell singles at the gig, they could bundle a couple of singles mixes in with the live CD. That was a bonus to the customers (they basically got 2 albums for the price of one) and a huge bonus to the Labels (each single mix counts as a separate chart sale). They could then go to the major labels and say that by giving Concert Live a license, their artist would shoot up the chart with every concert, genius!

Adam then admitted that they hadn’t actually sat down with Porter’s diagram and worked it out, but the process did accurately describe what they’d down and how they’d identified the dominant players and the blockage that needed to be cleared.

Next up was Patrick Dasoberi (Student Community Portal System & 2007 BizIdea winner). Patrick’s idea, as submitted to the 2007competition, had evolved significantly into the business he’s now running, though the core vision is the same: helping temporary international residents find their way in a new country. Patrick’s initial focus was on the student population but he’s now working with a wide range of organisations that send people around the globe to work in communities.

What was really interesting was that the software developed to do this (Whahala), is to be provided as a white label solution for other organisations that want to establish their own international support network. Very cool!

Claire Foster (Superjuice) - discovered smoothies and juice bars when on her travels in Australia. When she came back to the UK it proved really difficult to get the same idea of the ground here. So she went to London and talked to everyone in the juice/smoothie business (being from Somerset she wasn’t perceived as a threat). She went down into the far South West and worked a couple days for free to learn the business. She then landed some Business Link support, Princes Trust support (links to page with video) and things began to take off. She’s now purveying to the rich and famous (well Prince Charles at least) and building her brand. The immediate expansion plans are into the new Bristol Broadmead development.

Last up on the Keynotes was Sally Lincon (co-founder Nomensa). Sally described their journey of building a digital design and usability company, along with some highs & lows.The common thread with all the presentations was that every day was different and they all thoroughly enjoyed the experience of running their own businesses.

Competition Winners

The winner of the Best Business Idea was Carolyn (Chief Whale of Whale Bags), eco-shopping bags made of 100% cotton/calico that fold neatly into a small pocket that’s part of the bag. We didn’t get to see the business plan but the idea is a really good one, and very topical with the Zeitgeist of recycling and reusing shopping bags.
The runner up was Magee Private Investigator, a criminal law student that setting up her own PI business. The gap in the market being that soon PI’s will have to be licensed (they aren’t at the moment), with her law background Magee thinks she’s got a differentiator.

The winner of the Best Social Enterprise Idea was the Bristol Festival Community Group a collection of volunteers, with a wide range of backgrounds, interests and ages, who have come together to plan a community-based festival for September 2008 following the sad demise of the Bristol Community Festival at Ashton Court. The runner up was Vscheme a volunteering management scheme for individuals and organisations.

In the Best Creative Design Idea, the winner was Five on One (can’t find a website) with a DVD magazine showcase five aspects of Bristol social and cultural scene, given away alongside Venue magazine and funded through advertising. The runner-up was Basic Baroques, providing everyone with the elements to make their own baroque styled interior.

[I'll try and get more links and logos as people launch their websites]

Uploaded by Lutz-R. Frank on
02 Aug 07.

The reason this post is a bit late is I spent most of yesterday evening setting up a Facebook group for OpenCoffee Club Bristol (and we already have 5 members, cheers), posting the next four dates (17 June, 1 & 15 & 29 July and 5 August), updating the upcoming group (17 Jun, 1, 15, 29 Jul, 5 Aug), and posting the OpenCoffee Bristol Twitter; still need to construct an OpenCoffee group in my Gmail (for those not on the aforementioned socnets) to send out reminders and updates.

Back to yesterday, Sam and I arrived just after 8am and set up shop downstairs while the Starbucks folks put up signs and balloons. First to arrive was James and we quickly had a couple tables pulled together with discussions bouncing around business, technology, social catching up and finding out what each other did.

Chris Garrett (via Twitter) and Craig Hellen came down from Gloucestershire with their new mobile, locative and video media ideas. After exploring their business model and target segments a few business cards swifted exchanged hands, which is what its all about.

About half-way through the morning a couple of fresh pots of coffee arrived and refueled everyone through to past 10.30am.

We closed with Martyn Shiner’s open source manufacturing systems development project at Severn Delta. They’ve built their own system and are looking for hot php/PostgreSQL/UI coders to help them turn an internal project into a set of repositories that they can open up properly to other companies as a series of modules (sorry if I got a few details wrong Martyn). Martyn’s still looking so if you’re in the Somerset area (or are happy to spend a bit of time there) drop him a note on twitter (if it’s up).

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20 Aug 07.

Not about a portfolio of businesses, but rather for a business to have a portfolio of income streams from a single (or small number) of core products / services.

Several recent conversations in Bristol, Leeds, London and elsewhere have shown that a winning business model could be through diversification of income. A number of excellent projects have been initiated with funding from the Government or charitable foundations. These usually have a section on sustainability, but they tend to be very light.

When the funding ends, the crunch bites. Obviously you don’t want to kill the service, goodwill and community that’s been built up, but without a cash flow, any service will end or at best stagnate.

I’ve found examples of deep community knowledge and solid data even without Facebook / Phorm style tracking. The challenge then becomes how to identify income streams to sustain the service/community once the grant funding runs out.

The models that are intriguing me most at the moment are blending sponsorship models (basically brand association), membership fees, and the possibility of consultancy / expert witness type activity.

If you’re managing a community (however lightly) then you know the demographics, levels of engagement, patterns of engagement, areas of interests, what’s current, what annoys, etc. And that’s valuable knowledge, knowledge that another organisation wishing to work with that group, or develop products/services for that group may pay for. This is not about selling your email list / registration database, there are good data protection laws in place to stop that.

So that’s part of what’s interesting me at the moment; mixed business models blending sponsorship, membership and consultancy. The other two two oft-cited business models (freemium services & advertising) are also of interest for commercial clients, but less so in the situation of many foundation initiated projects.

What are your experiences of transitioning from grant funding to revenue funding?

Disclosure: As well as Managing Partner of jbsh LLP (the business behind this blog) I also work part time for the University of the West of England on the Knowledge West project managing their QuickMark® service.]

Today was an important day for jbsh, I gave our first unsuccessful pitch. Obviously in writing research grant applications and funding proposals, I’ve had unsuccessful submissions and I’ve talked a couple of clients out of engaging me in favour of more appropriate (and cheaper or free) options.

What was different today was that I really felt that this was a great business that I could add value to.

With most funding applications you don’t get great feedback on why you’re unsuccessful. When the negative email came through there was an invitation to explore why we weren’t proceeding with the plan as discussed.

The discussion brought an important point home, you need to constantly evaluate every message across every medium to make sure it’s effective and conveying what you think it is. I’ve been working on building the QuickMark service, taking on new Researchers and more clients. I’m actively seeking ways to grow and build the service as a sustainable offering outside the funding that has provided stability so far. In doing this I’ve significantly refined the proposition, carefully positioning the service between the core activities that the Universities offer and those that are provided by commercial market research organisations.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t spent quite so much time on this blog evaluating what message I wanted it to convey. Originally it was a place to share thoughts, talk about events I’d attended and give jbsh LLP a presence on the web. This has all be augmented by LinkedIn, Facebook, MyBlogLog, Twitter, etc. Since that launch (almost exactly a year ago) the message that this blog is being used to convey has changed. Sam is using it to promote, explain and disseminate her research, and I was using it to build confidence with potential clients to trust their businesses to my advice and guidance. This last bit hasn’t worked, because I haven’t developed the blog, I’ve just used it to a different purpose (one it wasn’t designed for).

The other messages are still important, so we won’t undergo a complete redesign, but there will be some changes. Most critically I’ll be putting more references to existing jbsh clients and stories from businesses I’ve helped in the past.

It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s survival of the most adaptable and appropriate to the environment.

[Note on the photo: I grew up in Gibraltar and have fond memories of walking across the runway to catch planes to 'exotic' locations like Southend where my Grandad lived. My first thought was say something about stopping and re-evaluating, hence the flickr search for stop signs. Searches for failure weren't as nice so I'm sticking with the image.]

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17 Aug 06, 9.27AM BST.

The nominal theme for this morning’s Open Coffee was ‘articulating your message’, or the art of the elevator pitch. Without wishing to do anyone (including myself) out of a job - go to this blog post and read it.  Actually might as well read the whole site if you’re looking at the investor path.

Having suggested that Matt from Montage Communications might get the ball rolling with a few pithy words on communicating complex ideas in compact spaces, by the time I got downstairs at Starbucks on Park St, the conversation was in full flow!

With roughly 2:1 entrepreneurs to business support professionals there was plenty of discussion and swapping of business cards. Everyone I spoke to had met someone new and interesting.

My new connection was with Rob Cox, launching a new motivational and self belief workshop and mentoring service for kids to “Dream, Believe, Achieve“.

Thanks go to Hannah at Montage Communications for handling the coordination with Starbucks and to Rosie (Interim Store Manager, Starbucks) for keeping the (free) coffee and cakes flowing.

The next Open Coffee is on 20 May, same Starbucks on Park St., please sign up or leave a comment here so that Rosie can order in enough fresh muffins!

I mentioned earlier on Twitter that I was hoping to confirm some additional support for Open Coffee, well Starbucks are getting behind us and offering free coffee, free muffins and free WiFi to attendees of Open Coffee at 9am Tuesday, 6 May.

We’ll be downstairs at the Starbucks on Park Street (map).

Kick off will be from 9am but some folks will be there before and you’re obviously welcome to stay as long as you like. Rosie (the interim Store Manager) has offered free coffee until 11am.

Hopefully this will be a long term partnership for digital companies in Bristol. The next 3 Open Coffee meetings are already scheduled in for 20 May, 3 June and 17 June.

All the details are on the Upcoming group, I’ll be talking about them here and on Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else that folks will be checking out. I’m also hoping to get notes put in BEN event announcements, Creative Technology Network, Bristol Media, Business Link, etc. The purpose is to give those companies (or start-ups) that are building growth businesses in digital software, services or media have an additional physical network to augment their online networks and wider business support services.

See you there!

There’re a ton of networking events taking place in Bristol, but there appears to be a gap around the business of doing business in the digital media / interactive technologies / software
development type area. Simon Bunker launched Open Coffee Bristol almost a year ago but it never really achieved critical mass and became a bit of a pub session to discuss technology (mostly mobile), which is cool but doesn’t address this gap.

So is there a gap? Well I think so, and from the feedback at a South West Screen event promoting access to digital media finance, quite a few others think so also. The one clear call after the event was for more structured networking with investors. There was a corollary to that, Andy made the point that there’s no shortage of ideas in Bristol but that’s different to commercial propositions (rather than grant applications, lifestyle support schemes, and one-off art commissioning). The Angel/VC representatives at the event suggested there was no shortage of money, though getting to it might be a bit harder at the moment.

A recent lunch hosted by Nigel Belletty at Milsted Langdon saw the local banks cautiously talking up the business environment in Bristol. Clearly it’s in their interests not to run to the hills screaming “Doomed, we’re all dooooomed” but they were talking about businesses with revenues, customers, products, markets all seeing growth and approaching them for conventional banking services. The point of concern (from my perspective) was the lack of local angels that were prepared to consider digital media / innovation investment prospects. If you have a physical product to show off, you’re probably OK, otherwise you’re probably looking to London or beyond. Which is nuts. This is the 21C, the knowledge economy, mobile, ubiquitous, always on, digital, global, blah blah blah.

Oil and Water Fusion
Originally uploaded by JBR_JBR.

So I’m thinking of a series of Open Coffee-type networking events (to build commercial propositions) with occasional semi-structured evening dinners where entrepreneurs can mix with investors with a view to building relationships towards high growth. This isn’t Investor Readiness and it damn sure ain’t Dragon’s Den, it’s about getting local entrepreneurs, business owners, and start-ups into a support network that will let them learn, practice, connect, and refine their business idea and then decide if they want to jump on the high-growth escalator or carry on with their lifestyle/corporate job. It’s also not all about being the next Google, there are plenty of businesses that are growing very nicely thank-you-very-much on revenues but that may have hit a growth block, or are thinking about the next transition. Clearly the hockey-stick 10x return in 9 months is great PR but that’s not a practical business model for a city-region.

The sort of topic that each session would nominally work around will be familiar to anyone in the start-up, business growth support world:

• Addressable Market vs 6bn people on the Internet
• Business models (the whole free thing and monetisation)
• Financial instruments (equity, debt, share options, convertible debt, SFLGS, etc)
• No “I” in Team (though there is a “me”) – role of the entrepreneur and their management/advisor team
• Patents, Open Source, Copyright, Creative Commons, GPLx.x
• Forecasting growth (and presenting that forecast)
• Hiring – firing – outsourcing

And so on. If people need specific advise then there are lawyers, accountants, etc that can help, there are Business Link courses, and business professionals (me for one) that will help with planing, strategy, presentation, etc. In fact there’s no shortage of help but it’s not working together in a critical mass that become self sustaining.

So have I had one coffee too many? What would you want to talk to fellow entrepreneurs about? What are you doing in your city/region that’s similar? What works, what doesn’t?

Until I hear otherwise I’ll keep plugging away, everyone I’ve spoken to since the SW Screen event broadly agrees with me. There may be some developments in the near future with Bristol Media but I think there’s a momentum here in Bristol that doesn’t need huge resources to accelerate, just a bit of doing. Which I guess means I should shut up blogging & twittering about it and start putting some events together Read the rest of this entry »

Last night was spent up in Bristol University’s Chemistry lecture room courtesy of Bristol Enterprise Network (this evening chaired by Prof Stephen Hagan, Director of the University of the West of England’s Research, Business and Innovation group). The delegate list was rather larger than the turn out, but there were still plenty of entrepreneurs and business leaders to mingle and discuss leadership and business developments before and after (a very polite University porter had to throw us out, the networking was going so well).

First up was John Kirwan (Partner, Strategic Planning Solutions). A very good lead with solid theoretical grasp on leadership, psychology, and the practicalities of moving a group of people from a current reality to some future vision. This basic concept of leadership was backed up with quite a few concepts, quotes (from Mintzberg & Goethe to Paxman), stories and good humour. In the Q&A John even got into locus of control.

Possibly his best quote was:
“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse. However, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.” Goethe

John ended with a description / definition of Living Leadership - The cornerstone of inspiring leadership is efficacy:
the capacity to make things happen that you consider important, starting with being and acting as the kind of person you want to be in your life.

Next was Chris Farmer, Founder & Leader, Corporate Coach Group. Chris had thoughtfully provided us with an advertising brochure, after-dinner speaker flyer, a diagram of his key message and 6 self-administered assessment questions on the leader-managers within our own organisations. Unfortunately it was more fun watching Chris, who I suspect is actually a very nervous speaker but managed very well, than listening to Chris. He had an interesting take on the basic foundations that John had talked to, his approach is probably as good as most, but there didn’t seem quite as much substance.

A slight change of pace introduced Melissa Henry (Marketing Director, Sustrans), talking about leadership and entrepreneurialism in the not-for-profit sector. Melissa began by asking “Why are charities founded?” and it turns out it’s often for the same reasons (in many ways) as any other start-up. To make a difference, do things better, fill a gap in the market/social need. Another point was that no one works for a charity / start-up for the money - it’s taking a stake in something bigger (social or commercial). An interesting element that Melissa touched on was the need for clear succession planning as an element of leadership (the idea that the charity has to be bigger than the leader). She also made the point that monitoring and evaluating outcomes were critical to ensure vision is relevant rather than idealistic. Too many charities (and start ups) spin themselves into a froth without checking their customer base for feedback on outcomes.

Melissa also talked about back casting (as a planning tool; start with a ‘known’ future and then work out how to get there; rather than a fly fishing technique). Charities use back casting because they have a clear vision of the future and need to plan a route to get there (and explain that route to funders). Start-ups do the same when they predict a future (100m users in 3 years) and then try to figure out the how. This became most obvious in the Q&A when someone asked about planning horizons and leadership. The 3 for-profits confirmed that most of their planning went out to around 6 months, with broader visions/goals out to around 2-3 years. As an in-the-thick-of-it entrepreneur Paul admitted to occasionally working to a 1 week horizon when critical issues hit, but that he always made a point to regroup post-crisis to learn from it and re-plan the following 6 months in the light of what he’d learnt. Melissa started with a 15-20 year vision then then worked back to the current projects.

One issue that Melissa did share, and that is probably quite common in the third sector, is the double edged sword that the open sharing knowledge to achieve vision brings. If you ‘give’ everything away and work to bring about social change, the important message is sustainable transport options, rather than Sustrans itself. Ultimately they don’t really mind who builds more cycle paths, green-ways, etc, but if no one know that Sustrans was behind it then grants and donations dry up. I’m pretty sure there’s something to learn from Hugh Macleod’s global microbrands, Jeremiah Owyang, JD Lasica, Chris Brogan to name a few (leaving aside the significant pack of marketeers on Twitter)!

Anyone out there have experience of working with non-profits and these open communications challenges?

Paul Tinkler, (Managing Director, Mirifice Ltd) rounded out the group with no theory (though a lot of thought) and lots of personal experience. When are you successful - never as an entrepreneur, there’s always the next goal, target, business, market, etc to conquer.

The 6 traits of an entrepreneur;

1. unswerving self belief in success, complete unwillingness to look facts in the fact that don’t support vision (not inflexibility
2. being a risk seeker, that is where fortunes are made (not reckless, know the risks)
3. durability, mental toughness
4. disregard for rules, at least the ones that don’t apply to ‘me’
5. know when to step down/ aside (though this one has to be tested at Paul is still in the thick of it)
6. communications are critical - be excellent - constantly learning / getting better, fear of not being the best (rather than of failure)

All in a really good evening.

At Open Coffee the other night, after bemoning the lack of access to pre-seed capital and the unlikelyness of the banks to lend Simon and me £1m to run our own venture fund, the topic turned to the usual mix of mobile, hacking and start-ups.

Somewhere between the beers, Dan proposed a hackathon in Bristol! Sam and James were up for it, I haven’t coded since 8086 days and a bit of kludging in ada but happy to support as always.

Thinking of a Friday night - Saturday session, perhaps at The Hub in Bristol.

So what should the focus be (mobile, games, soc-nets)?

Who wants in?

Last night was the launch of SkillSwap Gloucestershire, hosted by Gloucestershire Media Group. Based on the same successful formula as Brighton and Bristol, the evening brought together creative media types, digital tech types and a couple enterprising business types.

The venue was kept nicely informal at the Beehive in Cheltenham and expertise was provided by the Kevin Hapeshi (University of Gloucestershire’s Head of Computing), though in keeping with SkillSwap most of the expertise was dispersed among the room and freely contributed by all. It was a good launch evening, and the ambition of swapping skills between two fairly disparate groups is noble (and needed). The two main coordinating groups brought a balanced mix of people in the room but the working title for the evening was a bit vague, perhaps future events will have a tighter focus.

Lets see what future swaps bring.