New Entrepreneurs - A Common Notion Needs to be Challenged

I've noticed a common notion among aspiring entrepreneurs and even existing business owners. This includes students in the classes of my Successful Entrepreneur program at Independence Community College and businesses up and down Main Street. The notion inhibits successful profits (i.e. what many small business owners use to make their living) and sometimes causes businesses to die after suffocating under the weight of their overhead.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, we need to begin challenging this notion early. I'll demonstrate the notion here by paraphrasing what I hear from my students quite regularly.

"I want to offer my customers more value; bigger, better, faster.....whatever my customers they want that's not being provided by my competitors. "I want to meet or beat my competitors' prices."

If you're an aspiring entrepreneur or existing business owner and your strategy is offer more value while at the same time meeting or beating your competitors' prices, I'd like to present some ideas here, in the form of a challenge, for you to think about.

The first part of your strategy is great. All businesses should always be looking for ways to offer more value. Adding more value--benefits not available from competitors--is the key to attracting customers to you. Its the key to attracting customers from outside your normal trade area. If you are truly successful at adding a value that customers want, they will pay more. If product/service offering is truly perceived as a greater value than available from your competitors, customers will pay more.

Most of the time, creating this greater value for your customers will increase your costs of doing business. When businesses spend the extra time and money creating greater value for their customers while using a pricing strategy to "meet or beat the competitors' prices" they put themselves into a time/cost squeeze that is difficult or impossible to sustain.

If you put the extra money and effort into creating a greater value for your customers and price yourself too cheaply, you could go out of business (from losing money) or end up working long hours making less money than if you worked in a minimum wage job.

The key to small businesses surviving and thriving in the future is not to offer low prices, but to use innovation to create a greater benefits (not available from competitors) for which customers are willing to pay more.

Character First Provides a Great Tool for Developing Core Values

Character First provides a great tool for helping develop a set of core values for businesses and organizations.  Core values go a long way toward engaging and valuing employees, elements that lead to happy, very productive employees.  Unfortunately, many business owners and managers don't get this, relying on "management by numbers" and hiring only based on technical skills.  The business schools have never really taught about the importance of core values and character in the workplace; most never will.  That's why there's a whole industry of companies like global Character First (now part of Strata Leadership, LLC) showing organizations that will listen how to engage their employees by using servant leadership and core values.

(Email invitation to my contact list yesterday.)
July 9, 2013

Hello:

Several area small business owners have asked us to coordinate a group training session to help them initiate Character First.  On August 6, we have the opportunity to participate in a Character First Orientation Training in Independence Kansas.  Through a joint effort, the Innovative Business Resource Center (IBRC) and the Successful Entrepreneur Program at Independence Community College will host the training at ICC's West campus providing a cost effective way for small business owners and other organizational leaders  to take advantage of this training.

Training hours will be from 9:00 to 5:00 and include a light lunch and refreshments.  Cost of the training is $149 per manager/leader payable to IBRC.   Registration is open with links at www.ibrc.org or you can call me at 620-332-5470 to register.

Since 2006 when I began to work with entrepreneurs and small business owners through this program at ICC and the Chambers and Main Street groups in both Independence and Coffeyville, I've observed small businesses and organizations struggle to "engage" their employees to enhance the relationships with customers, vendors and coworkers.   Although experiencing organizations with disengaged and dissatisfied employees is common, there are also the exceptions;  organizations with employees that excel in serving others seem to enjoy what they are doing while receiving a sense of  fulfillment in their work.  What makes the difference?

I have become convinced over the last couple of years that having a set of common, core values in a business or organization is an essential element to hiring and retaining employees that will be actively engaged in serving customers, vendors and coworkers in better and better ways while at the same time receiving a sense of purpose from their work.  Any time is a good time to start the effort to establish a culture of common values.  For new businesses, the absolute best time is to start just before or after the first employee is hired.  For existing businesses with one to many employees, there is no better time to start a new culture than right now.  Once the culture is established each new employee will embrace it. 

Character First provides a methodology of using 49 character traits as common values for the organization.  Each month, small groups within an organization studies the featured character trait and how it is relevant to the success of the organization.  Eventually, a culture of character develops which provides many of the common values needed for the organization to be most successful.  If you’re not familiar with Character First, there’s a great introductory video on the Character First web site:  http://www.characterfirst.com/

Character First Orientation Training is a full-day program that introduces Character First to business leaders in a way that explains, trains, answers questions, and practices techniques to help roll-out the Character initiative in an organization. Through lecture, Q&A and demonstration Character First materials are presented to lay the foundation of this culture shift. “At the end of the day, leaders will walk away knowing the steps to implement Character First in their organizations”, says Beau Bailey, training facilitator with Character First/Strata Leadership. LLC.

Please feel free to call me at 620-332-5470 with any questions you may have.

Jim Correll,
Facilitator/Business Coach
Independence Community College
Independence, Kansas

Community and Relationship Building Needed for Entrepreneurship to Reach Full Potential

Long before the Ice House Entrepreneurship program was developed, Clifton Taulbert evolved from an entrepreneur and first time author into an author of several more books and nominee for the Pulitzer prize for his second book "Last Train North" in the early nineties. His work connected with so many people that along the way he's become an Internationally known speaker and community builder. His message to us on the evening of May 29 will go far beyond entrepreneurship, telling us how entrepreneurship is but one of the values we can embrace to build stronger families and communities.


The kind of grass-roots economic development the entrepreneurial mindset can bring to my community will not reach it's full potential without the the community and relationship building that Clifton Taulbert has been speaking about Internationally for the last 20 years. I suspect the same is true of many communities including yours.

Please feel free to come to Independence, Kansas on May 29 and hear Clifton's message. You'll think he's talking to you about your specific situation and community. For my distant friends and contacts, if you come to Wichita, Tulsa or Kansas City you'll be within a couple hours drive of of Independence. This will be a memorable evening and worth your time, no matter from where you come.

Tickets and information about this special event are available at www.ibrc.org.

Entrepreneurship Misunderstood; A New Vision for Entrepreneurial Mindset in Southeast Kansas

I think I've underestimated the potential of entrepreneurship (now, I would call it entrepreneurial mindset) since 2006 when I learned how to spell the word after accepting the position of facilitator/business coach of the Successful Entrepreneur Program at Independence Community College, Independence, Kansas.


For many people, the term "entrepreneur" implies business ownership or business "start-up". Certainly, that is true sometimes, but entrepreneurship can be interpreted as the practice of finding new ways to solve problems for others, many times with limited resources. Successful entrepreneurship includes continuous innovation as successful entrepreneurs knowing they always have to be looking for the next greatest way to serve their customers. Innovation sometimes means new inventions and/or new technology but many times it means a new twist on an existing idea.

Today I'm starting to realize that a goal of developing the "Mindset" among everyone in a region has a great potential to provide economic prosperity and overall satisfaction with life.

The overarching objective of Entrepreneurial Mindset, featuring the Ice House Entrepreneurship curriculum is to learn how successful entrepreneurs recognize problems as opportunities and figure out creative ways to solve them. Pretty much, no matter what any of us do with our lives, we are involved in solving problems for others, or at least we should be. This can be as a self-employed business person, or as an employee in someone else's company or organization. Entrepreneurship goes far beyond that. Our social, civic and government programs also seek to solve problems for others.

The eight life's lessons in entrepreneurship from the Ice House curriculum provide the central themes of the "Mindset". They are timeless and really have more to do with a way of looking at life and interacting with others than they do with specifically starting or running a business. (That's the reason no technical aspects of business management are studied in this class; only the "Mindset" of creative problem solving.)

So, while we do talk about business start-ups in this class, what we really emphasize is how to learn to become better problem solvers. Entrepreneurs can be at work both within other companies and organizations as well as within their own businesses. Employees that understand the "Mindset" will do a much better job at taking care of customers whether they be external to the company or internal customers within the same organization.

As more and more companies strive to be more entrepreneurial in our current entrepreneurial economy, look for more and more employees to come to the "Entrepreneurial Mindset" class and sitting down beside those with a goal to open their own businesses. All are looking for a new mindset to better view problems as opportunities and find innovative solutions.