Age of Artisanship

Its amazing what happens when you breathe a few words of freshness into your linked-in profile, suddenly a raft of people who you only slightly know mention you to their contacts that you don’t know, who cycle back approaching you about things you didn’t realize you really knew!

It’s a great way to make new contacts with proactive business people who are doing really interesting things. In the past few days alone I’ve been cold-approached by: A life coach who wants to expand from a limited base of clients to offer larger block training courses but is not used to developing structure around his great ideas (or necessarily writing them down!), a programmer who sees opportunities for software that could greatly improve the ability of companies to offer time and location independence. A small business owner to wants to dive into event-networking to reach new customers and a hobbyist VC who wants to build a business around creating quality business plans for entrepreneurs wanting to look for capital on P2P investment platforms like our NZ Investment Network.

It’s pretty exciting to be in, or going into business right now. We truly seem to be well into a new paradigm where quality and individuality is valued over scale and standardised manufacturing capability. An age of Artisanship as I can imagine Roger Hamilton would say in which companys like Local Motors (heading picture) will radically change the way we create previously standardised products like cars. Its interesting though that despite the number of people with entrepreneurial ambitions, and the significant number of experienced business coaches in the (global) marketplace, lots of startups are barely doing the basics in terms of planning, building a team or starting with a customer need-centered approach. Creator entrepreneur’s answering “What” without asking “Who”, or people eternally optimistic about making a million dollars from their 'original' idea meanwhile ignoring what is necessary to put gas in the tank to go to a meeting.

As I’ve been having these discussions in the last few days I keep coming back to how great it is that it is possible to benefit greatly from the vast amount of proven knowledge around how to progress step by step through connecting, finding a market, innovating to needs, and building quality pipelines that deliver value to customers from the first approach. But you need to find the right person to help unlock that knowledge and make it truly relevant for your idea. I love being a part of this world, and I love that NZ is getting

some great attention from wealth creators such as Kerwin Rae, who’s Fast Growth Summit is running early next week at the Pullman (Sold out unfortunately fastgrowthsummit.com if you want to try for a last-min ticket) but for those that were in early I’ll see you there!