Email

Email is a powerful tool and creates a way to engage your audience like no other mass communications tool. 

Also, it can be a powerful tool to organize your thinking, produce and share content, plus email provides a means to engage your audience on a consistent and ongoing schedule.

Email also takes deliberate and focused commitment - what words to craft, what content to highlight and share, the format - all that. 

Email is work and for the long-game - but you will be rewarded if you are committed.

David Hieatt, the founder of Hiut Denim Co. and the Do Lectures, has crafted a wonderful book on the subject:

Do Open - How a simple email newsletter can transform your business (and it can)

You can find it here: http://bit.ly/2QpDlxm

It is packed with wonderful tactics and I visit it from time to time for inspiration and ideas.

-Marc

Brigadoon’s Emerging Issues for 2020

Brigadoon is a global network of entrepreneurs and thought leaders looking to make better connections and seeking to better understand the emerging issues shaping commerce and culture.

Brigadoon’s Emerging Issues for 2020 identifies those issues shaping commerce and culture, not only today, but those issues that will be front-page news stories in 3 to 5 years.

Enjoy the ride and plan accordingly.

Curated by Marc A. Ross

Released December 31, 2019

Idea as strategy

What is the big idea?  

What makes your business special?
   
Can you answer these questions?

Many businesses are focused on tactics.

Strategy is hard.

Tactics are easy.

I like to start with the idea and always go back to that idea to clarify the business model, tactics, how the business will be organized, etc.

It is good to have a north star and be clear where you want to go - your customers define your future so chose your customers with great care and attention.

-Marc

Audiences + Business Models

Like most entrepreneurial endeavors, we rarely know what the market wants or needs - and we often launch a product or service based on guesswork and hope.  This leads to revenue mismatch, creating too many offers, and going after too many customers / too many marketspaces.

Bill Aulet has written and lectured extensively on the concept of Disciplined Entrepreneurship.

Aulet is a multi-time entrepreneur and the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

You can find his materials here - http://bit.ly/2Q7wObS and a lecture here: http://bit.ly/2F47I7g.

Amazing resources.

From my entrepreneurial endeavors (and numerous failures) being disciplined, being able to say no, staying focused is essential.  You need to say this is not for you and be able to walk away - you can’t be all things to all people.

No doubt this is a challenge, but at the end of the day, it is critical.

Many times entrepreneurs are going after two audiences, two customers, and two types of revenue. 

One B2C and one B2B.

Both demand different types of strategy, tactics, and business organization - not impossible - but a big challenge to be successful in both. 

Consider there is a reason there are so few KFC-Taco Bell joint restaurants - it is a massive challenge even for a well-funded, long-established, massive corporation to produce food for two different audiences.

-Marc