Thursday, August 30, 2007

Signed up for FastTrac TechVenture

Today I signed up to attend the FastTrac TechVenture:

FastTrac TechVenture Workshops

fasttrac logoFastTrac® TechVenture™ Program Overview

FastTrac® TechVenture™ is a comprehensive business training program that addresses the needs of start-up entrepreneurs refining and writing their business plans and seeking to grow sustainable high-impact companies. The program combines one-on-one coaching, peer learning, guest speakers and comprehensive tools to help entrepreneurs produce solid business plans and strategies.

Program Goal

The goal of FastTrac® TechVenture™ is to enable entrepreneurs to develop an effective Elevator Pitch, Business Plan, and Investor Presentation in order to effectively communicate your:

register for FastTrac online

• Market opportunities
• Business concept
• Investment potential

Dates:
Ten Tuesdays starting September 11th from 6:00-9:30 p.m.; Program concludes with graduation where participants meet investors.

Location:
Innovate Building — Downtown Greenville, SC.

Class Outline:

* Week 1: Exploring Entrepreneurship
* Week 2: Defining the Target Market
* Week 3: Conducting Market Research and Analysis
* Week 4: Testing Your Business Concept
* Week 5: Entering and Capturing the Market
* Week 6: Planning for Financial Success
* Week 7: Building and Compensating Your Team
* Week 8: Protecting the Business & Your Intellectual Property
* Week 9: Identifying Funding and Working with Investors
* Week 10: Managing Cash and Operating Your Business
* Post-Class: Investment Pitch Refinement Session
* Graduation: Class graduates meet angel investors, venture capitalists and event sponsors

A Discussion with John Warner

John recently agreed to meet with me to discuss a technology-based idea I am pursuing. What I gained from this discussion will greatly help me be more successful and, from that perspective, I wanted to share this insight so that if you have an idea or concept you might gain a solid direction on how to start down the path of bringing your ideas to life. Not to say this is everything you need to do but think of this as a launching point. We will move together through the rest!

1) There are a lot of great ideas out there. You and I have heard and come up with a bunch of them. We might have even seen a few of our ideas which were born years ago be developed by others. Well, the first thing you have to get over... your idea, like many others are nothing nor will they amount to anything until you execute on them.

Do research on the web, check out the US Patent Office website (http://www.uspto.gov) for any patents touching or surrounding your idea, and share your idea with a few, trusted individuals to help qualify and build on your idea. It would help if the ones you share this idea with are knowledgeable in the field where your idea or product falls.

When you do your research be sure to ask the right questions. John used an example from a recent blog from Swamp Fox to explain this one: Henry Ford said, If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. By asking the right questions to his potential customers he learned they wanted to get to town faster and be able to get back home sooner after selling their goods. Ford, hearing this need, developed a stripped down, basic car for the masses to help them do just that, replace their horses for basic transportation to and from town. Please read the blog entry by going to: http://swampfoxinsights.blogspot.com/2007/08/henry-ford-if-i-had-asked-people-what.html. The right questions should further help you define your target market and sales channel.

2) One of the first questions John asked me was what will motivate anyone to by this product. Just because the idea is a no-brainer in an entrepreneur's mind doesn't mean a hill of beans if a defined market set or demographic will not purchase large numbers of this item. The motivation to purchase should come from an inner need of the buyer to make the purchase. What environment, place, circumstance, event, etc. does a person need, want, or require the item you are developing. You must define when and where people will want to buy your item and set up a sales channel to direct your product to those people so when they make up their mind or realize your product is what they want or need that you are there to sell it to them.

3) Keep it simple. With every additional step or process you add to your idea or product the difficulty and frustration rate goes higher exponential. Do not complicate a simple idea or process with extra bells and whistles. Stick to the core reasons for your idea coming about. If you developed a paper cup, make a cup, not an insulated, covered, spill proof, with a lid cup. Make your cup, sell your cup and get profitable. After you are profitable you can come back and add whatever else to the cup your paying customers want.

4) Who is your competition? Your idea or product is more than likely a reconfiguration of ideas or products already on the market. What are those products on the market and why would anyone purchase your product over something else? If there is a market for your idea or product, re-invent it by reconfiguring a product or solution (your idea) that re-defines the market. By developing or re-inventing a market you will gain and hopefully retain market share and success. The first out of the gate, historically speaking, is usually always first.

5) Remember your resources. There are a lot of resources available to you to develop and explore your ideas. If you are a high tech, knowledge based entrepreneur then you have Greenville NEXT (http://www.nextgreenville.com) made up of some of the most talented and resourceful entrepreneurs in the country. You have SC Launch! which was created to facilitate applied research, product development and commercialization programs, strengthen South Carolina’s Knowledge Economy and create high wage-earning jobs by executing the mandates of the South Carolina Innovation Centers Act of 2005. (http://www.sclaunch.org) There are more resources than I can list in this article, I would suggest you contact the Greenville Chamber of Commerce for more details on who and what can best support your execution of your idea into a reality.

In summary, The only thing holding you back is yourself. You have no reason not to pursue your idea if you feel strongly about it and if you feel your idea or product will be accepted by your public. If you do not know if it will be accepted, then find out by asking the right questions and doing research on your idea. This will enable you to define who your public is and how to sell to them based on their times of motivation. When you sell to them, sell a simple to use product at whatever price that will get your venture profitable. Come on, how simple is that!

For those who are not familiar with John Warner:

John Warner is President of Swamp Fox LLC, publisher of Swamp Fox: News of the Southeastern Innovation Corridor and producer of the annual InnoVenture Conference. John is on the Board of the SC Venture Capital Fund, and is President and Co-founder of Capital Insights LLC, a Greenville, SC venture capital firm. He served as Chairman of its most successful portfolio company, Earth Fare, Inc., a southeastern chain of organic grocery stores. He holds numerous other business and community leadership positions.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

In the beginning

Hello all,

I am Joe Milam from Greenville SC... I have been a self proclaimed entrepreneur for at least 6 years ever I left my sales position at ScanSource to help them move into e-commerce with a product called BlackArrow. BlackArrow was built to help ScanSource resellers move to the Internet and sell products that ScanSource sells. Being a part of the BlackArrow team and something so innovative made me want to go out and do something new on my own.

I left BlackArrow and ScanSource in July of 2001 to start up my own business. After I did some web development for a little while with a reseller I started Gorilla Networks with some friends to provide wireless networks for businesses. One of our first projects was to wirelessly enable downtown Greenville. We wanted to use this as a marketing method for our business. And it worked! By the press generated by the wireless project Gorilla quickly moved into doing large scale wireless networks for hospitals, other cities and colleges.

It looked like we were on our way until we made a very bad decision, we diversified.

VoIP was coming on really strong at the same time wireless networks were popping up everywhere. Being young and invinsible entrepreneurs we lunged into developing a hosted VoIP solution before VoIP was cool. We justified this diversion by saying the hosted VoIP would lead directly into wireless hosted VoIP - man what a mouth full. Well, needless to say this diversion cost Gorilla a lot of time, money and relationships. Key thing to remember here and learn is you need to pick one thing and be the best in the world at it. We should have stuck with wireless and let other companies with more of a bankroll tackle hosted VoIP.

We ended up selling off the wireless business we worked so hard to build in 2005.

In Jan of 2006 I joined forces with my brother's existing company called PICS or Profitable Inventory Control Systems, Inc. PICS is a software development company focused on building inventory control, asset tracking and process tracking solutions for the manufacturing vertical. Since joining the company, which my brother and I had discussed for some time, I began to work directly with one of our very talented .NET programmers to produce what is/will become the best process tracking solution on the market.

With all this being said, this brings us to today... the birth of a new idea. So what I want to try and do is give you an insider's view of what I am doing and going through to make my idea happen.