Kevin P. Taylor

Video: How Business Owners Can Balance Work and Life

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

How Business Owners Can Balance Work and Life – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, there are many ways to change the world and do meaningful work. Entrepreneurship is one such way. But, as an entrepreneur you also have the opportunity to create and structure a company to fuel you reaching your life goals.

I also reference the E-Myth Revisited, a book that I read soon after founding Obtiva and one that fundamentally changed my outlook on entrepreneurship and business ownership.

Video: Building a Strong Company Culture

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

Building a Strong Company Culture – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, create the company that you would want to work at as an employee. Then, hire people that will self-select into that culture that you have intentionally created.

Video: The Responsibility of Being a Business Owner

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

The Responsibility of Being a Business Owner – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, what keeps me up at night as a business owner is that the decisions I make have serious implications. They affect not just the company's well-being but the well-being of our employees and their families.

Also, entrepreneur must get good at failing frequently and in a recoverable manner, because failing is the first step to learning and eventual success.

Lean Machine Chicago Weekend

Friday night, 40-some hackers and startup entrepreneurs gathered for Lean Startup Machine Chicago at the Illinois Technology Association's TechNexus.

Kick off keynotes by Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits, Brant Cooper and myself started the weekend event and gave the contestants a crash course in Lean Startups and Agile software development.

Then the fun started.

Contestants gave 60 second pitches to the group for their startup idea. Everyone cast votes to bubble up the top ideas. The contestants then self-organized into teams and commited to spending the next 54 hours doing customer development and prototyping. The goal? Build out a winning business model and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by Sunday afternoon.

I'm sitting in the lobby write this on Sunday afternoon. The team presentations are only a few minutes away and I am hearing intriguing tidbits from the teams.

How many pivots can a team do in 54 hours? How many actually got out of the building to talk with potential early adopters?

Here are some pics from the event:

Video: The Fulfillment of a Business Owner

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

The Fulfillment of a Business Owner – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, my proudest accomplishments as a business founder to date are the culture of Obtiva that celebrates software developers and gives them a fantastic group of peers to work with. And, the exceptional—in many cases life-changing—value that we have brought to our clients over the years.

Video: Managing a Management Team

Here is the second of several video segments from the interview Raman Chadha conducted with me at DePaul University. 

Managing a Management Team – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

In summary, at some point in a growing business, typically when entering the second stage, the founder needs to transition from being a day-to-day operator to being the leader of a management team. Leading, managing, and coaching an executive team requires a wholly different work-flow and set of skills than that of a startup entrepreneur. As the founder, if you are not interested in, or capable of, growing into this new role, it is time to bring in someone with the right skills.

Video: Cutting Costs During the Recession

Raman Chadha of DePaul University's Coleman Entrepreneur Center recently invited me down to the campus to record a video interview. They broke the interview into several short segments, which I'll post links to here on the blog, as they become available.

The first segment is about my experiences helming Obtiva through the depths of the 2009 Great Recession.

Cutting Costs During the Recession – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

In summary, anyone can look like a great business manager when times are good and profit margins are covering up sub-optimal decision-making. But, when times are tough even minor mistakes are amplified and can put your company at risk.  

Conversations over RFPs

I had a conversation recently with a friend who also runs a software development company. During the conversation, the topic strayed (as it often does), to how we each find new clients. I was shocked by his response. His relatively successful company finds many of its new clients by responding to RFPs.

For those of you who haven't had to deal with them, RFP stands for Request for Proposal. Companies write RFPs that explain a problem that needs to be solved and then the company invites one or many vendors to respond with proposals describing how the vendor would solve the problem and how much it would cost.

It sounds wonderful for a client company. The company has an opportunity to compare multiple proposals against each other and choose the most appropriate one. And, in fact, RFPs are used successfully in many business situations, such as building out a new data center or replacing a roof.

But, when a company is looking to purchase custom, creative services such as software development, RFPs become an obstacle. We all know that one of the primary determinants of a successful software project is the cooperation between the different members of the team. The product owner, business stakeholder, developers, and designers need to be pulling toward the same goal. There must be trust and collaboration.

How are potential trust and collaboration measured via an RFP process? Well, they aren't, of course. So, a critical aspect of the client-vendor relationship is left eerily unaddressed during the RFP process. The crucial question of, Can we successfully work with these people?, is left unasked and unanswered.

So, instead of responding to RFPs outright, we always attempt to engage the company in a conversation. We do this because, quite frankly, we don't want to take on doomed projects. Only through the series of conversations and brainstorming/planning sessions that happen during the sales process can we get a read on whether we think we can trust and collaborate with the potential client. And, I want them to take that same read on us.

Ultimately, if the company is unwilling to discuss their problem with us outside of the RFP process and iterate with us over possible solutions, we disqualify them from our sales pipeline and move on to prospects who are looking for a relationship based on trust and collaboration instead of a relationship based on commoditization.

GrowThink University Interview

A little while back (actually in 2009), Dave Lavinsky of Growthink University approached me about doing a podcast interview on my experiences in entrepreneurship.

You can check it out here, but you will need to buy a trial membership to their site.

In the interview, I share some of the lessons that I have learned over the past 5 years founding and growing Obtiva, a successful software development company.

One of the main points that I make in the interview is that my approach to entrepreneurship and managing a company is exactly the same as my approach to everything else in life. Very early on in any new endeavor I focus on learning (through books, mainly) and finding mentors who can share their wisdom and accelerate my ability to reach competency.

As a successful hacker, you already have the innate ability to learn quickly and reach competency quickly. Take this same approach in your startup.

Transitioning to a Second Stager, or "Damn, we did it!"

You're the leader of a multi-million dollar business. You have begun putting your management team in place. But, you work 50-60 hours a week. In fact, you are still involved in most day-to-day operations. You know you need to slow down, think strategically, and improve the business's ability to grow sustainably. 

If these statements describe you, congratulations! You've grown your company into a second-stager. It is no longer a startup.

As you'll have seen, a startup must do three things to prove itself: validate its business model; sell reference clients; and, of course, get its hands on cash. This is an all-or-nothing proposition, and the founders of a successful startup will be intensely-focused on succeeding on all three counts.

Then one day, the founders will pull their heads out of the oven, look around, and think, "Damn, we did it!" Keep a watch out for this moment. It will happen if you are one of the fortunate (yes, fortunate) few who make it this far.

The pull-your-head-out-of-the-oven-look-around-and-think-damn-we-did-it moment is an inflection point. It is a point on the growth curve of every business where the founders need to decide what is next and what needs to improve in order to get there. Chances are good that nobody on the team has thought quite that far ahead. Why bother thinking about market share, management teams, advisory boards, business efficiency, vision, BHAG, or mission, before a fledgling business has proven itself in the marketplace?

If you don't recognize the inflection point when it occurs, your company's growth will flatten out. The three concerns of the startup described above are not the only, nor likely primary, concerns of the second-stager. Not recognizing this will mean the founders will be focusing on the wrong priorities. Growth will stagnate, or worse, will become uncontrolled and possibly threaten the company's existence (the proverbial implosion).

To sustainably grow a second-stager, its leaders must embrace the following mandates:

1. Create a management team
2. Create organizational clarity
3. Over-communicate organizational clarity
4. Create systems to reinforce organizational clarity

Looking forward, in which of the above areas must you focus to move your second-stager forward?