Executing Your Newly Incubated Business Idea

Founders soon learn that customers only spend real money for solutions rather than ideas. Investors have also learned not to invest in ideas but only in entrepreneurs and teams who can deliver solutions. Success requires moving your passion quickly from the idea to the business implementation.

A good execution requires a plan and the right people, combined to create operational excellence and exceptional customer value. Companies that do this best become market leaders. Google, for example, was not the first Internet search provider (think Yahoo!, AltaVista, InfoSeek and others), but according toInvestopedia, Google was the first to really monetize search.

As a result, Google has become a verb, and the company is a tech giant with record growth rates and a revenue of $74.5 billion in 2015. But Google is not unique. Many other companies have followed a similar set of execution principles which I believe are required for business success, no matter how great the idea:

1. Tune the business model to optimize value for all constituents.

Smart entrepreneurs architect a value chain that includes customers, partners and vendors, based on market dynamics. They then drive innovations and solutions to feed that value chain. A growth model without monetization for key players is not a long-term success strategy.

2. Plan for pivots as improvements based on results.

If every plan adjustment is a reaction to a crisis, you won’t take corrective action quickly enough and will never find new opportunities. Continuous improvement applies to the business model as well as the product. Set business goals and milestones, and use metrics to track performance.

3. Enable team members to run the business as their own.

Every team member needs the motivation, training and authority to make day-to-day decisions without review and approval. That means milestones have to be documented, measured and desired results rewarded. The whole team is required to deliver a winning customer experience.


4. Two-way communication at all levels is always top priority.

People who don’t know what is expected of them can’t do the job. Customers won’t be happy if you and your team don't listen to feedback and expectations. Strong leaders realize that effective communication becomes exponentially more difficult as the number of players increases.

5. It’s hard to improve results that you don’t measure.

In operationally excellent businesses, productivity and results are measured at every step in the value chain, not just at the end. Targets are benchmarked against competitors, customer reviews and industry expert expectations. Merely keeping up with previous results is falling behind.

6. Define at least one worst-case scenario and recovery plan.

Proactively engaging the team in building a plan-B is the only way to assure a timely response to key challenges. A passionate commitment to an idea alone will not carry the business over downturns in the economy, market evolution or customer trend changes. A great business must be agile.

7. Optimize team efforts with the latest technology and tools.

In this era of rapid technology advancement, an open mind must be the norm in leveraging the latest tools and process architectures. This means regular team training and update sessions, bringing in outside experts, and working with partners and vendors on win-win deals.

Business excellence is a convergence of technology and business elements to maximize customer value as well as company and partner returns. This convergence is not a one-time effort, but an iterative review and improvement mentality that has to be drilled into the team and built into every process and measurement. It has to start with the entrepreneurs at the top.

Google, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin leading the charge, demonstrated a technical leadership combined with the foresight to bring in business help, including Eric Schmidt and others, to optimize the business execution focus. Are you sure your startup is moving beyond the idea stage, with the execution principles outline here, to assure long-term business success?

Ways Of Creating Positive Energy In Team Meeting

Almost every single aspect of modern civilization can be traced back to collaboration and some division of labor on a grand scale. This fractal of synergy is what makes us the most innovative species by far on the planet. In the 21st century, we count on things like team meetings to clarify everyone’s individual tasks and coordinate large projects. But you can’t count on meetings alone to boost the productivity of your organization. If you want to remain competitive, the meetings have to lead to something. If you’re hosting the meeting, you need to lead the discussion into something highly-productive and positive.

You need to know how to have a proper team meeting on Zoom! The road to a great meeting can be summed up in four basic principles that you must adhere to whenever possible in hosting your meetings. Let’s have a look at those, shall we?

Make the conversation about data.

After the chit-chat has finished, it’s time to make it clear that we’re getting down to business. One of the best ways to do that is to get the numbers flowing as soon as you can. All the data related to the conversation should be discussed here. Emotional and opinionated talk should be discouraged and put aside in favor of empirical discussion. This pushes everyone towards a data-driven mentality. It makes people use the numbers discussed to justify their points of view later in the conversation.

If you can, present some visual cues of the importance of data by using Zoom’s screen sharing feature and displaying charts and graphs that are relevant to the discussion.

Steer towards inclusivity.

Now you have started to see embers. It’s time to breathe life into them so that they may transform into flames. At this point, make sure that the conversation is as inclusive as possible. Do not allow people to dismiss each other’s ideas, and make sure that you are as attentive to all of them as possible. In short, make everyone feel that their voice has been heard. Even if an idea sounds objectively weak, try to expand on it for a moment. If all else fails, just acknowledge the idea and move onto the next one. The idea is to make people feel as much a part of the conversation as possible.

Build consensus through win-win thinking.

The most productive meetings have some form of consensus between their attendees. Working towards a consensus involves trying to engage everyone in a similar mindset. Yes, humans are humans, and because they’re humans, they’ll have a confrontational and competitive nature. There’s nothing wrong with healthy competition as long as the end goal of collaboration and compromise comes first. In a team effort, everyone has to be on the same wavelength. It might actually take you a few meetings, but you can accomplish this as long as you try as much as you can to create environments in which people can come up with win-win situations in every possible occasion.

Find common ground.

It’s inevitable that you will reach a point of entropy, where conflict will overtake the discussion. It is at this point that you should actually avoid going into “damage control” mode as much as possible. If you want to solve the conflict, backing down is only going to make things worse. Instead of trying to quell things, focus on trying to find common ground. Elevate yourself above the rest of the voices and be assertive. Then, once you have everyone’s attention, attempt to find where the dissent comes from. After that, discover every point where everyone is in agreement and pick it up from there.

Once you’ve finished quelling the conflict, you should then try to work with the naysayers to see whether they are spotting a potential issue with what’s being discussed. Sometimes, they’ll spot something that could cause deep problems with the goals you’re trying to accomplish. Listening to negative input doesn’t hurt!


Contributor: Pricilla  B.