The 7 Pillars of Success

In the development of your company you need to prepare for 7 key variables.  These are Customer Support, Company Vision, Product Development, Retail Sales, Manufacturing, R&D/Engineering and Logistics. Each of these variables contains it?s own classification of sub variables and resources.

These variables are called the 7 pillars of success:

1. Customer driven community; leverage the wisdom of customer driven communities to support your product. Integrate with inbound CRM and social media tools. Be transparent and honest with your community. Consumers will forgive you for mistakes and celebrate your successes. Community driven customer support is a great R&D resource for product improvements.

2. Narrative drives sales & brand; create a story and vision that shape product design, user experience, brand, PR and social media. This is the soul of your company that you communicate to media, partners, distributors and ultimately to your customers. Emotional belief in your narrative drives sales... not features and benefits. Consumers want to believe in your vision, that your product is the beginning of something big and important to them. 

3. Iterate fast, integrate carefully; continually test your products for improvements to UX and design. The sooner you discover flaws the sooner you will lower warranty and customer return challenges. Learn to integrate changes to your design and ultimately your manufacturing process carefully and with methodical review. Understand the value of your product changes before investing in expensive tooling updates with your manufacturer. 

4. Manage retail shrink; keep retail interested but not satisfied. You need to continually shrink your on-shelf inventory through consumer pull, media coverage and nimble forecasts. Fulfilling retail expectations could kill a start up through inventory write-downs, product returns and warranty issues. Otherwise known as your “Demand Coefficient.” If you get ahead of your Demand Coefficient you risk high return rates, inventory mark downs or cash management issues. 

5. Finance manufacturing pull; underwrite the cost of goods and supply chain through Letters of Credit, Distributor deposits and extended terms with vendors. How you manage manufacturing and related financing will determine revenue acceleration or roadblocks to your growth. For example European retailers and distributors often provide more favorable payment terms then US retailers including upfront deposits against P.O. orders. 

6. Separate R&D from Engineering; innovation is core to any startup but R&D needs to live outside of product engineering. Developing a respected hand-off process between R&D with Product Engineering is required for manufacturing and supports continued innovation of your product. Lucas Films for example kept Industrial Light and Magic separated from Skywalker Ranch for this very reason. 

7. Partner on logistics; inventory management and retail support are core functions that require partnerships. The moment your product leaves the factory you need partnerships for delivery into retail and to global distributors. After your product is purchased you need partnerships to review/handle product issues with engineering and manufacturing. Outsource to companies like Rush Order or Shipwire for operational logistics and order fulfillment.