Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Seventh in a Series) | Peter Mehit

August 15, 2016August 15, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

7. Be Wrong, be Strong

The ability to be truthful goes directly to the heart of whether you get funding, attract customers and recruit great employees. But that is just one part of it. The ability to be wrong can determine if you survive at all.

We’ve all had bosses, friends and relatives that just couldn’t admit they’d made a mistake. We know how we feel when we know the facts and someone tells us we’re wrong or don’t understand. The longer we are in that environment, the less we trust the person, the more we doubt reality, or both.

Make no mistake, we presently live in a say anything to win environment. Sometimes people are intentionally dishonest. These situations tend to be self-liquidating. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, who famously said that having a backup plan is admitting failure, is the latest example where outright deceit brought someone crashing down. While spectacular, these cases relatively rare.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Sixth in the series)

May 10, 2016May 31, 2016 ~ CBPS ~ Leave a comment

6. Investors and The Rule of Rocks

Shark Tank has done a lot to raise the level of wishful thinking in America. Many people believe that if you find the right ten slides, or the perfect 30 seconds, you’ll be able to extend your hand and a check will float from the ether and drop into the palm of your hand.

Oh, that this were true.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Fifth in the series)

March 7, 2016May 10, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

5. You Can’t Win, If You Can’t Walk

Bert was one of the most successful people I’ve ever known. He was the co-owner of a construction company I worked for in my twenties. His whole life would change when he had a chance meeting with the creator of TV Guide, Walter Annenberg, on a bike ride in Rancho Mirage. From that fateful meeting, he went on to become fast friends with Ronald Reagan and a behind the scenes power broker in the California Republican party.

But before that time he was a roughneck that made good. He was always helping people regardless of their color, religion or political beliefs. He used to take me along to deal negotiations. On these long trips we would discuss and sometimes debate politics, unions or the general state of the nation. He was older, rich and on his way to becoming wealthy and conservative. I was young, broke and very liberal. There were things we didn’t see eye to eye about, but I never felt judged by him. He always treated me with respect even if he thought my opinion was less than smart.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship ( Fourth in the Series) | Peter Mehit

February 22, 2016March 7, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

4. Minimum Viable Products Can Be Missing Valuable Pieces

Fail fast. Fail forward. Nice, glib encouragements that old farts will give you from the security of their wealth and comfort. Use lean start up techniques to consolidate your ideas into a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can get in front of the market to see if there’s interest. Use the least amount of effort and treasure to see if there are buyers. Once you get a spark, pivot toward a business model that you can monetize by adding costly but more unique aspects to your product or app.

It makes sense. Think of your start-up effort as more of a lab than a business. You’re experimenting more than launching and using the results to fine tune the next moves toward the market. If you’ve done everything properly, even your failures will teach you something as you assemble the information you need to identify your ideal customers and build the product they want to buy.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Third in a series) | Peter Mehit

February 3, 2016February 22, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

3.You can’t succeed without the ‘f’ word

I know what you’re thinking. Either a.) he can’t possibility mean that ‘f’ word or b.) the ‘f’ word is focus. Focus would be a good ‘f’ word. Nothing truly gets done without it. People who think they are multitaskers are really deluding themselves. Not even computers multitask. Designers just add more cores, but each one of them is only processing one instruction at a time, really, really fast.

We teach people how to visualize businesses and focus is an important part of it. I can tell you I get my best results when I can eliminate distractions. But that’s not the ‘f’ word we’re talking about.

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (Second in a series) | Peter Mehit

January 25, 2016February 3, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

2. Nobody With A Job Can Help You Become An Entrepreneur

If you spend two seconds thinking about that statement, the truth of it becomes evident. Unfortunately, if you want to become an entrepreneur, the most visible sources of help are the least helpful.

It doesn’t matter how much information you have about how businesses are launched, the missing element is the courage to actually take risks. The entrepreneur, while reducing risk, must embrace it to make their goal a reality. If you need a steady paycheck, you are not an entrepreneur. So why would you get direction from someone who does?

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Millennials: 10 Things Old Farts Won’t Tell You About Entrepreneurship (First of a series) | Peter Mehit

January 18, 2016February 22, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

1. You’re not going to win the pitch contest – even if you win it

Shark Tank is great entertainment. It’s the perfect reality TV format. Entrepreneurs, fresh with enthusiasm and ideas vs. hostile moneyed elites tearing their dreams asunder for the entertainment of the viewing audience. America loves a good fight, and Shark Tank delivers the humiliation and put downs that make great television. But the link between it and actual reality is tenuous at best.

“But there are winners,” you protest, “Checks get written.”

Do they? We had the privilege of participating in an event where some of the contestants of Shark Tank came out to meet the faithful who were dreaming of following in their footsteps.

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Planning for Growth | Lydia Mehit

January 11, 2016January 18, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

2015 was a growth year for CBPS. We connected with new referral sources for clients, celebrated one year in our new office and expanded our list of services. We are now formulating our plan for 2016 and beyond.

Sometimes you are so busy in your business that you don’t have time to step outside and view it. Stepping back from the business helps you gain clarity. In 2015, we took time to put a marker down and articulate where we wanted to go. Although things didn’t turn out exactly as planned, we still booked more work in 2015 than in previous years.

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Wikipedia Has Won | Peter Mehit

January 4, 2016January 11, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

“These statistics,” I said, “Where did you get them?” The writing was solid and everything made sense, but there was no source attribution.

It was 2005. We’ve just gotten serious staff for the first time. The writer was a fresh faced woman from Texas, who, by the way, possessed serious brains and a dangerous wit. She answers me confidently.

“Wikipedia.”

“The open source online encyclopedia?,” I asked. Wikipedia was only four years old and notoriously inaccurate. I wanted sources as close to the information as we could get.

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