5 Clever Start Up Lessons to Help you Build Your Business: Learned During Start Up Weekend

Where can you spend 54 hours with 100's of aspiring entrepreneurs, business coaches, and venture capitalists?

Welcome to Buffalo Start Up Weekend.

What is Start-Up Weekend?

A 54-hour event designed to provide superior experiential education for technical and non-technical entrepreneurs.  Beginning with Friday night pitches and continuing through brainstorming, business plan development, and basic prototype creation, Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurs. The weekend is centered around action, innovation, and education. 

What do you learn? You learn a lot.

Simple lessons like how much caffeine your body can consume in 54 hours.

Emotional lessons like recognizing your pet peeves? Or how many times can you will interrupted before you speak up?

Life lessons like being grateful and resilient. People often forget how much worse things could be. For example, a gentleman in my group is an international student from the Dominican. Hurricane Maria destroyed all his personal belongings and his home last month. His only personal possessions are in the two suitcases he brought to Buffalo. Count your blessings!

Countless business and social lessons.

Below Are 5 Clever Start Up Lessons To Help You Build Your Business

Lesson 1: PEOPLE ARE YOUR GREATEST RESOURCE

Every team needs three things: Industry experience, business development to make money, and savvy developers to make technology work.

Pro-Tip: Everything comes from our beliefs-everything. Culture is born from what we believe. The harder, more transformational and lasting work is the belief systems about people, business, leadership, work and success. People are most engaged and empowered when they align to a greater cause.

I'm a student and practitioner of behavioral psychology, making this event was like a social experiment for me. There are four personality types, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. When you consider the audience is mostly millennials and multi-cultural. A diverse group of marketers, engineers, developers, coders and software engineers, you have a full spectrum of personality types on teams to work together for the first time.

Some are self starters who take initiative and execute. Others are task oriented and prefer a list to work from. Communication is a challenge. No one tells you how they prefer to work. Some follow-up, others need to be managed. Some focused, others easily distracted

The Gap: Some of the most overlooked skills include: Collaboration, communication, organization, delegation, project management, people management, time optimization, emotional intelligence, and leadership.

*Worth Mentioning: My pitch, a virtual micro-credentialing, virtual training University. It addressed the skills gap mentioned above. Teaching life skills that bridge the gap between what businesses need, and what education provides.

Lesson 2: PLANNING - RESEARCH IS YOUR FRIEND

Use market data to prove you know your industry inside out, including key competitors and market opportunity.

Reference social proof and market intelligence from people in the field.

Use analytics tools to extract your competitors marketing tactics, tools, costs, and traffic trends in a matter of moments. Tools are your friends. Analytics are awesome, if you know how to search, sort and filter the results.

Lesson 3: PRESENTATION MATTERS

10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a pitch should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. 

A clever intro speaks to the problem in the form of a question and uses the customers language.

Keep it simple. Use high-quality graphics and appropriate charts that show trends and peak emotion.

Know your audience, and engage them from the opening slide

Have a sequential and strategic flow of presentation. Explain the customer journey in the form of a story where you answer the most common objections.

Use customer voice (testimonials, survey results) to prove market demand and perceived value.

Practice your pitch, so you have a comfortable pace and smooth delivery.

Lesson 4: BE A STUDENT.

The best students are the best teachers. You document the process and ask for feedback early and often. Your growth during the start-up process should be rapid.

You are willing to learn and keep an open mind. You are agile, nimble and ready to pivot. It's important you have a strong belief and integrity at your core. There will be countless idea's, opinions, and suggestions coming your way.

Know when to hold them, and know when to fold them.

Lesson 5: COMMUNITY AND CONNECTIONS

The start-up and entrepreneurial scene is a small circle. I tell college students to go out and show people how they work, instead of telling them. This same advice goes for entrepreneurs.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou

Through experiential learning and networking, you meet people you would otherwise never meet. You showcase your vocational and social skills. You become member of a community that may cause you to collide with a future co-founder, employee, contractor, customer, or friend.

Pro Tip: You get out what you put in

During start-up weekend,business coaches are at your finger tips. Successful entrepreneurs with answers right there waiting for your questions. Venture capitalist that make investment decisions are waiting for you to ask questions.

ASK GOOD QUESTIONS. Open ended and probing questions. Actively listen to the answers you receive. Take notes and reflect on what you hear. Try to poke holes in your plan. Make these experts think about your problem/solution and work on your plan. Engage their minds, challenge their thoughts, and pull knowledge out of them.

Most people underestimate the difficulty of building and funding a successful business.

It's easy to start a business.

It's much harder to offer a product/service that people will pay for. Build a minimum viable product/service that can be brought to market and acquire customers. Develop a team and culture that supports the business goals Then ride off into the sunset profitable and prosperity.

Use these 5 Start-Up Lessons as a foundation to improve your likelihood of success when you set out building a business.

BONUS: What Percentage of Small Businesses Fail?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Business Employment Dynamics, here’s what the survival rates looks like:

You can pretty much bet on a 80%, 66%, 50%, and 30% survival rate across 1, 2, 5, and 10 years in business—no matter the year.

What is the number one reason a business fails? 82% of business failed because they experienced cash flow problems. This statistic reiterates the often overlooked fact: Small businesses need capital to grow.

This article was edited and posted in UpstartNY, you can view it here

If you read this far, let's schedule a conversation to discuss your needs: calendly.com/michaelspence

At Coaching Performance Results, we combine strategic consulting with prescriptive training programs and modern business intelligence technology to drive adoption of your highest value sales practices.

We use research-driven sales strategies and tailor them to fit complex real-world selling challenges. If you're looking to maximize the effectiveness of your sales organization, I encourage you to contact us to learn more about how we generate transformative results for our clients.

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