Category Archives: Business

Aspirational Entrepreneurialism

Through your work, do you improve people’s lives?

Successful entrepreneurs are a wonderful sort of people: They create sustainable businesses that provide great places for wonderful people to earn a living for themselves and their loving families. They create and sell products, services, and experiences that people need or want. They care for their customers with a sense of gratefulness and humility, knowing that without them, none of it could exist.

These sorts of entrepreneurs are masters of the craft, and there isn’t a whole lot farther they can go. But if there is another level to reach, I’d call aspirational entrepreneurialism.

The aspirational entrepreneur does all that the successful entrepreneur does, plus something special: the company’s output improves people’s lives.

As our businesses grow, let’s remember that it’s not about selling more things, faster. We can, of course, do just that, and inso doing we can create a good place to work, give customers what they want at a price they can afford, and make some real money along the way. But if we aspire to something more – if we accept the challenge to improve people’s lives through our work – then we won’t have to wait until we sell the business to begin our philanthropic journey, because we’ll have been doing that very thing every day for as long as we’ve been on the entrepreneurial journey.

Turner Field and Opportunity Cost

I am just fine losing the Braves Stadium to Cobb County. Stadiums are questionable investments in the best of circumstances, and even if you can wrench something positive from them, you’re still stuck with a giant empty parking lot sitting on land with which you could confidently earn a considerably higher return.

The above image shows the location of Turner Field at the same scale as significant parts of Little Five Points, Virginia Highland, Buckhead Village, and Midtown. I threw Venice in there to get people really thinking about all the options. To paint the picture more clearly, the stadium and all its parking would take up a space in Midtown as tall as from 8th Street to 15th Street and as wide as West Peachtree to Juniper.

If you’re trying to build a thriving, durable, and vibrant city, always choose urbanism over a vast, single-use, and mostly vacant ego structure.

Profile of a great channel partner

A channel partner is an organization or individual that helps you grow by introducing you to prospective customers.

Sometimes channel partners are resellers whom you pay when their customers buy your product. Often, those resellers will also take on support, billing, and collection responsibilities for the customers they bring your way. Sometimes, the relationship is more arms-length, and the partner does little more than make an introduction. In those cases, you might pay the partner a one-time fee for each new customer they refer to you. Often, no money exchanges hands (this is how most of my company’s partnerships are). In cases where there are no fees for referrals, it’s probably a two way street, and you’re also going to be referring business to your partner, providing them with some other services, offering preferred services or pricing to their customers, and/or creating value for them in some other way.

At GuildQuality, around half of our new business comes from a diverse group of dozens of channel partners (I referenced some of those in a post about our beach heads). Our partners include consultants, building product manufacturers, trade associations, industry publications, and other software companies that serve our same market. Some are small, and send us only a handful of very high quality companies each year. Others send us far more, and the quality is spottier. Despite their differences, our very best channel partners share a handful of common traits that make us great allies for each other:

  1. Relevance. We have non-competing offerings and a significant overlap in our target markets. A meaningful percentage of their customers (greater than 25%) are the profile of company who would be interested in GuildQuality, and vice versa.
  2. Understanding. We each clearly understand what the other does, how we create value for our customers, and how we can create value for each other.
  3. Communication. We have a healthy dialog, and connect on a regular basis to make sure our relationship is mutually rewarding. This usually entails us sharing what our “picture of success” looks like. Perhaps that’s 50 new customers over the next year, or maybe its 100 inbound leads that site the partner as a source.
  4. Commitment. We share an understanding of co-marketing expectations, and we each execute on our commitments, i.e. We’re going to provide some compelling content for the partner to use in six of their newsletters; They’re going to promote our free trial to all of their customers three times a year, etc. Whatever the commitments are, we outline them in some sort of agreement at the start of the relationship.
  5. Empowerment. Our primary point person is empowered to get things done. This is sometimes an issue when our partner is a larger organization or association, and our point person regularly needs to seek approval from others in order to make commitments or initiate campaigns.

When I reflect on the common characteristics among of our great partnerships, those are the five things that come to mind. What do you look for when finding new partners to help you build your business?