Today’s guest author Brian Rutledge, is Managing Partner at Search Marketing firm Get Page One, LLC., which he founded in 1998. Get Page One specializes in helping small to medium sized business grow and manage their online presence through organic search engine optimization, social media optimization and paid search marketing campaigns. Based in Austin, Texas, Get Page One helps clients worldwide with holistic internet marketing campaigns focused on sales, brand awareness, and reputation management.

Jeff Chavez Discusses Killer Entrepreneurship

Jeff Chavez runs one of the most successful small business coaching companies in the United States. In addition to his duties as CEO of Northstar Ventures, he’s active in the professional speaking industry.  At his latest event in Austin, which also featured his friend Tito Beveridge, Jeff discussed the 11 Killer Instinct of Entrepreneurship, a topic which had the audience deeply engaged.  There was so much feedback from the event that Jeff is now writing a book entitled, The 11 Killer Instincts of Entrepreneurship.

Jeff Chavez: Serial Entrepreneur

As founder and CEO of Northstar Ventures, Jeff is able to apply the lessons that he has learned while starting each business, whether successful or not.  He explains in his blog that some of the best lessons he’s learned was from failure, and not from the success some of his companies realized. With each failure, he grew stronger, and was able to pick up the pieces and move in a new direction; with more resolve, experience and commitment to making his next business more successful.

Jeff Chavez began his entrepreneurial career in 1992, as the Founder of Foothill Fire Safety Co. He continued to manage FFSC while forming a second company, Home Healthcare Direct, which distributed medical supplies to assisted living facilities. Both companies were successfully acquired in 1997.

From 1999 to 2002, Jeff Chavez served as Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of DispenseSource, Inc. (now Nexiant, Inc.) where he established it as one of the leading providers of automated inventory systems within the industrial and manufacturing industries. The company has emerged as the world’s leading provider of automated inventory systems.

Jeff Chavez Launches Northstar Thinktank

Northstar Thinktank is the newest edition to his business repertoire. Acting as a resource center for entrepreneurs, his team of researchers scour the internet, magazines, books, newspapers, and blogs searching for the most relevant insight that any small business owner would appreciate.  Updated nearly daily, this concept allows for professionals to select any helpful tip which is divided into the three categories of the business cycle: research and planning, marketing and sales, and growth and execution.  This site is especially helpful to those just starting their entrepreneurial journey.

Jeff Chavez: Expert Business Coach

Jeff Chavez is also writing another book called Survive-olution: How successful companies survive and thrive through innovation and evolution. The book focuses on how the success of business hinges on the ability to be flexible and change as needed.  Jeff hopes the book will be published by early 2009, where he will start his book tour and speak on this topic around the country.

Jeff Chavez also appears on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch as an expert business coach for struggling entrepreneurs. His role requires him to become familiar with each business plan, uncover the problems, and then suggests several ways to improve their concept, brand, finances, and focus.

Information has always moved pretty quickly on the Internet. But the new technology allowing information to move in an organized, highly targeted way is changing everything about Internet marketing.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses who understand how to tap into the online world of community and customization will be able to reach buyers in ways we never dreamed before.

Take a moment and watch this powerful video below (over 2 million views), The Machine is Us/ing Us but before you do, if you’re not a “techie”, don’t focus on that aspect of this clip because you might glaze-over in the first 20 seconds. Instead, stick with it through the end and focus on what this video illustrates about the future of customized online information. What does it indicate to you about where the internet is going? What does it indicate about your need to understand the new speed of the Internet?

Brad Fallon, a search engine optimization expert had some interesting thought on this video:

“It’s a very cool combination of screen capture and video which makes some really salient points about the future of web technology and the effects it will have on how people interact and express themselves…This piece, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” covers the changes occurring online that are democratizing and socializing the shared online spaces we occupy.

It’s got me thinking not just about what this means for “community” online, but what it can mean for business and commerce. In a lot of ways this kind of interactive development has brought the web full circle. Rather than having global mega-stores that sell everything, we see more and more mom-and-pop corner shops appearing, albeit with a potentially global customer base.”

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Seasoned business-builders typically recoil at the prospect of facing any public exposure of their failures, and they certainly don’t report their own mistakes to the world.

But Bessemer Venture Partners does just that. They actually report their “Anti-Portfolio”.

As someone who lives in the world of small business, it’s refreshing to observe that even the best entrepreneurs and investors make the same mistakes I’ve made; missed opportunities, wrong assumptions, poor judgment, and lack of foresight. All necessary lessons on the road to success.

Thanks to BVP for showing some light-hearted humility on our behalf:

“Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

We chose to decline the investments below, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company.

Our reasons for passing on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, whom we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year’s Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet. Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies — our “anti-portfolio” — whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working:

		Apple Computer BVP had the opportunity to invest in pre-IPO secondary stock in Apple at a $60M valuation. BVP’s Neill Brownstein called it “outrageously expensive.”
		eBay “Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding,” thought Cowan. “No-brainer pass.”
		Federal Express Incredibly, BVP passed on Federal Express seven times.
		Google Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
		Intel BVP’s Pete Bancroft never quite settled on terms with Bob Noyce, who instead took venture financing from a guy named Arthur Rock.
		Intuit Along with every venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road, Neill Brownstein turned down Intuit founder Scott Cook. Scott managed to scrape together only $225K from friends, including HBS classmate and Sierra Ventures founder Peter Wendell, who personally invested $25K to get Scott off his back.
		Lotus and Compaq (formerly known as Gateway Computer) Ben Rosen, one of the founders of Sevin Rosen, offered Felda Hardymon the chance to invest in both Lotus and Gateway Computer on the same day. Says Hardymon: “Lotus had just missed a payroll, and I was worried about the situation there. As for Gateway, I told him there was no real future in transportable computers since IBM could do it.”
		Paypal David Cowan passed on the Series A round. Rookie team, regulatory nightmare, and, 4 years later, a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay.”

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Check out these great posts for more information about this topic:

Embracing Failure

Don’t Hide Your Failures-Advertise Them!

Entrepreneurs, by nature, are emotional liars.

Our nature is to get so excited about our vision, adopt an unstoppable optimism, and refuse to face the realities of market factors. We get emotionally attached, and we lie (not in the malicious sense) to ourselves and others when market truths scream that something is wrong. It’s a classic formula for failure.

Here’s why this isn’t all bad; the truth is, your initial failures associated with emotional business decisions can eventually be the key to your future success. Ford’s famous Edsel was a massive flop in 1957, but because of it, the Mustang emerged in 1964.

The idea is that you want to fail fast, learn quickly, and hopefully the failures, while painful, are not fatal. In the case of Ford, they could afford to learn this painful lesson without going out of business. In the case of an independent entrepreneur or small operator, you might not have as much room for error, so you must consider this carefully. (Want some extreme examples? Recall the great flops of the late 90’s.)

So, keep this in mind…first and foremost, don’t get too emotionally attached to your business idea. If you find yourself defensive or angry when someone effortlessly pokes a hole in your concept, or if you have to work real hard to “prove” that it’ll work–you’re in very dangerous territory. Second, understand that there are a thousand ways to get where you want to go, and often the first idea might not materialize, but a new solution or idea will eventuate in ways you could never have planned. It’s amazing how this happens.

You’ve just got to stick with it and keep learning.

PS-Need some more evidence that “liar” can be an appropriate term for eager entrepreneurs (hey, I’ve told many standard emotional lies myself!)? In a classic post, Guy Kawasaki provides a list of The Top 10 Lies of Entreprenuers from the perspective of a seasoned Venture Capitalist.

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Check out these great posts for more information about this topic:

“No Surprises, Jeff”