Planning, Startups, Stories

True Story: Or So He Said, and I Believe Him

"How old are you?"

He seemed a lively guy, friendly, we'd gone just about half a mile, he was teasing the radio operator. Of course I'd only seen the back of his head. He was driving the taxi. We were going from the beach hotel (Fiesta Americana) to the old center of the city in Veracruz, Mexico. Yesterday.

"I just turned 60," I answered.

He answered quickly, with the simple, matter-of-fact pride you might expect, not out of place, much more friendly than anything else:

"My oldest son is older than you. 61."

Now, my 88-year-old father is doing very well, golf and tennis daily, but this guy was driving a taxi, and happy about it.

"Veracruz has the prettiest women in the world," he said. That's a hard comment to answer; but no worry, he went on quickly enough that no answer was required.

"That's why I'm in Veracruz. My wife is from here."

Here's the story he told, more or less in his words:

I was driving a trailer truck from Rosario (northwestern Mexico) to Veracruz (Eastern Mexico, on the gulf) when the prettiest girl I'd ever seen walked across the street, in a little town outside of here.

I stopped. I asked her where I could get lunch. She told me she could do me the best lunch in town, and she showed me where she lived, in a pretty blue house, unassuming, but well kept. So I gave her 100 pesos.

Lunch was delicious. I asked her how much I owed her, she said nothing; that I had already given her 100 pesos. I said no, that was for the food, I needed to pay her for the effort too. So I gave her another 100 peso bill and said if she wouldn't charge me, then I would have to give her that. Fair's fair.

Then I told her I wanted to take her out, and then marry her. So she took me to her mother, who said she's too young: she was 14 years old.

I said she's all grown up and she knows what she wants, and she agreed, so that was that. Except that it wasn't, because I do things right. So where is your father, I asked.

"He's the mayor (presidente municipal)," she answered.

So I went to the mayor, walked right up to him in front of 13 of his men, and told him I wanted to marry his daughter. I told him straight and tall.

"Shall I run him out of here?" one of the other man asked the mayor.

"No, this kid's got guts, he's standing up straight and speaking his mind," the Mayor answered.

But I'm not a kid, I said. I showed him my truck, and I showed him 1,500 pesos in bills, and I told him I was a man, I knew what I wanted, and his daughter did too.

That was 52 years ago, in 1956. They are still married. They have 23 kids, 10 daughters and 13 sons. "I can't even tell you how many places my children and grandchildren live in," he said, "but they come back all together every year for the new year, and there are 80 of us now, including great-great grandchildren."

He said he's never smoked, never drank, never ate seafood, fish, or red meat, and never strayed from his wife.

And that was the end of the story. We'd arrived at Cafe La Parroquia, in the old section of Veracruz. He jumped out of the driver's seat and took my wife's hand to help her out of the taxi, then he shook my hand, took his fare, and off he went. As we walked into the cafe, I said "damn! I didn't even get his name. And I should have taken a picture."

Distant Neighbors, Common Cause

I'm in Veracruz Mexico this week at what I hope will be an inflection point for cooperation between the U.S. small business development centers (SBDCs) and the equivalent Mexico organization, AMCDPE. They are calling it "Making Small Business Grow (Hacer Grande la Pequeña Empresa)".

Politics of LAFTA and all notwithstanding, especially in an election year, what's going on here, with very little notice, is three days worth of meetings between people in both organizations. The agenda is spiced with American veterans of US SBDCs sharing their experience with their Mexican counterparts, one presentation at a time. Most of the panels include one person from a US SBDC alone with one or two from Mexico.

For example, tomorrow's agenda includes the director of the Mississippi University SBDC and experts from Veracruz and Tabasco looking at how small business recovers from natural disasters. The theme: "three years after Katrina." This event, by the way, is in Mexico's Gulf of Mexico port that was seriously submerged in the 1988 by Hurricane Gilbert.

They're also presenting panels including US and Mexico experts on technology transfer from universities, working with banks, and sharing some success stories.

I'm on the agenda on Wednesday, talking about business planning.

This strikes me as a good place for cooperation between these organizations. Let's grow small businesses. I don't know the Mexican organization very well, but I do know that the US SBDCs are among the best advice givers there are for small business, and the more successful small businesses in Mexico, the better off the world. So I'm rooting for this idea to work.

Lions for Lambs

While I don't normally post about movies, I caught Lions for Lambs on a recent plane flight and I'd heard so little about it, and it was so good, that I want to recommend it here. This is a thoughtful, very well developed, but also entertaining movie that asks -- asks, but doesn't answer -- important questions about war, politics, and education, against the background of the war in the Middle East. 

It jumps between three simultaneously playing scenes: a professor (Robert Redford) and a student; a senator (Tom Cruise) and a journalist (Meryl Streep); and a war scene in Afghanistan. All three are related.

What's most interesting about it is the sense I get of balance, meaning not being heavy handed about taking sides. It's all about important issues. It will make you think.

One Year Later: "Safe Harbor" Nonretirement

It's been a year this week since I traded managing for blogging. It's been great for me. I'm enjoying my new job, working hard at it, but loving it.

In my new job, nobody reports to me, but I still work full time, and in the general area I love: business planning, starting businesses, and entrepreneurship. Blogging, writing, teaching, speaking.

I like to call this "safe harbor." I'm 60 years old this year, I needed a change, and the company needed a change. But I dread the idea of retirement. The safe harbor idea because what I have now is a job, and a full-time job, but it's a refreshing change. This feels a lot better than running the company. I'd done enough of it. Ironically, I think I'm working as much now as ever, but really liking it a lot more.

Meanwhile, it also opened things up for new management. Does that make sense?

So here it is a year later, this week. The company's going strong, the new management team is doing great. Yesterday we formally launched Email Center Pro, an excellent Web-based solution for companies managing shared email boxes like help@ or info@ or marketing@. It's based on a specific problem a lot of people have, and a solution we used in house for years and then rebuilt, from the ground up, to take advantage of what's happening on the Web.

True Business Story: What a Difference a Nickel Made

One of my dumber ideas was the time I decided that $100 was a better price for direct mail marketing than $99.95. Smarter people than me thought that was crazy. I said that the nickel difference was obvious, an even hundred was a cleaner and more direct price offering. The $99.95 was mildly insulting. I insisted we try it.

Everything else was the same. We changed only the price.

Response went down to about 40% of what it was at $99.95.

This was back in the days before the Internet mattered, and small software publishers often used direct mail to generate sales, the late 1980s.

Direct mail was really hard. Hooray for the Internet.

Do Business Values Matter? But How Would We Know?

And the next question is: but how do we know what values companies really have? To what extent can companies, like individuals, declare themselves to be socially conscious, creating a mismatch between image and reality? I know, it seems cynical, but I'm not the first to suggest that values spin is part of the problem. 

Lewis Green asks the values question in a thoughtful post titled "Do Values Matter" in yesterday's MarketingProfs Daily Fix. He tracks some interesting research, and concludes:

Are business values important to most Americans or are they just words on a piece of paper that make us feel better about ourselves? Many of you know where I stand based on my book and my other writings. But where do you stand?

The research is intriguing:

The 2004 “Cone Corporate Citizenship Study” revealed that 80% of Americans trust companies that work for good causes, a 21% increase since 1997. Social outreach is only one factor in a values-based business but I believe it is the most apparent one to those outside the company.

“Our report is the nation’s longest study of American attitudes toward corporate support of social issues,” says Carol Cone, CEO of Cone, a Boston-based strategic marketing firm. “This study, in a series of research spanning over a decade, shows that in today’s climate, more than ever before, companies must get involved with social issues in order to protect and enhance their reputations.”

So far, so good, but something in Lewis' introduction caught my eye. I think there may be another angle on this. He says, before introducing the research:

...businesses such as Starbucks, IBM, HP and Merck built their ethical and moral foundation on stated values through which they filter business decisions. I've begun to wonder if anyone cares.

What catches my eye there is some doubt about large-company examples. Starbucks, for example. I've admired Starbucks several times in this blog, but I also liked Steve King's post, Doing Too Well by Doing Good, on Small Business Labs, which looks at one small piece of Starbucks lore from a very different angle. That's just one example. IBM? Merck? Maybe. I wonder if they still achieve premium pricing in developing countries, like they used to.

So then again, about values in business, maybe it isn't that nobody cares, but rather that nobody really believes, particularly not when we're talking about larger companies that presumably understand and manage the power of spin.

Maybe that's why I still like the smaller business, in which values are (I think) more visible, more about treatment of employees, and customers, and what they sell, to whom, and how. Or maybe it's just late at night, and it was a long day.

Happy Earth Day: Beautiful Pictures of Our Planet

Happy Earth Day: Beautiful Pictures of Our Planet | Wired Science from Wired.com: "wow." Amazing. Gorgeous. It's their post, I second the title.

Alltop's New Green Page

Even if it weren't an Earth Day tie-in, I'd still be adding Alltop Green to my regular visits. I like browsing the Alltop small business section, which is usually my first view in the morning. It reminds me of the early Yahoo!, streamlined, quick, and easy. Most days I get lost in there and I end up pulling out to jump to Windows Live Writer to post related to something I've seen there.  This new green version, a joint effort with Flock timed for Earth Day, gives me the same streamlined view of Flock's favorites from treehugger on down a pretty substantial list.

I think Green is going to be steadily more important from now on, so it's definitely part of my agenda. And I do mean green as in environmentally and socially sensitive, and, in my case, with special emphasis on implications for startups, business planning, and small business.

Can You Really Start a Business in Three Weeks?

Yes, you can. Maybe not all businesses. Maybe not any business. Some businesses, though, can start in three weeks. My first business started the day a former client called and asked my to do a market study in Venezuela. That changed things from one day to the next.

That's a true story. If you're curious, I posted that one a few months ago on this blog as The First Day of a New Business.  That's one example. There are millions.

There are 21 million companies in the United States without employees. I wonder how many of them started up in 3 weeks or less.

A 2006 study sponsored by Wells Fargo and Conducted by Gallup found that the average startup cost was about $10,000. I wonder how many of those started in three weeks or less.

It would be easier to count the businesses that can't start in three weeks, because there are a lot fewer of them.

• You can't do it in three weeks if you have to raise significant money to start with. I have indications that angel investors financed about 60,000 new businesses in the United States last year, and venture capital investors are doing about 2,500 deals per year. That's a very fine stratum at the top of the new business picture, a small percentage of the 800,000 or so new businesses started in an average year.
• You can't do it if you have to wait longer than three weeks for a bank loan. Some bank loans can take less than three weeks. That's more likely if you're borrowing off an established and solid asset, like your house equity (if it is solid and established, and not a victim of the sub-prime mess).
• You can't do it in three weeks if you have to establish a location, build a team from scratch, manage prototypes, prove your viability. All those are among other reasons.

Even in those cases, however, you can play with the definitions. You can call it starting in three weeks if you get the team together, the basic idea settled, the first legal steps taken, and you start the search for the location and start the search for funding.

Why do I care? That's a reasonable question. Yesterday Sabrina Parsons and I finished our compete draft of a book called "Start Your Business in Three Weeks," to be published by Entrepreneur Press next fall.

That was the second book draft I've sent to Entrepreneur in two months, and the last for a long time. Of course I/we didn't write them that fast, they were both a long time coming. That's what happens, I guess, when you name a new CEO for a company and task its long-time president with blogging writing, teaching, and speaking.

Why Didn't I Think of It Award for Retail Packaging

Great packaging. My wife Vange picked this up at the local health foods store, and showed it to me yesterday. I don't know what's in it, or how good it feels, or whether or not it works; but I don't care. The product name, the jar, and the label made me like it.

The Jar	The Label

I've been dealing with retail marketing for 15 years now. I'm amazed how much of the marketing boils down to the package itself. In software, it's the box. Things you might not think of, like how much it weighs, make a big difference. Every nuance matters. For many smaller companies, their main message is the package itself.

For more on this one, here's the website:

Little Moon Essentials - Soak Your Tired Old Ass!