Launching and Growing a Social Venture

We are arriving to the end of the course. The last articles are related to writing executive summary, scaling entrepreneurs and learning from marines.

How to Write an Executive Summary

People that I might get most help from are very busy people. When a business plan is given to them, probably the only thing that they may read is the executive summary. That said, a good executive summary can literally open opportunities.

The article provides some advices on writing executive summaries:

• Work on the first paragraph. The first paragraph should clearly explain what the company does. It should compel the reader to read the rest of the summary.
• Match the story to the audience, business and desired outcome. Include the core strength in the summary. Consider to include the following categories: company description, the problem, the solution, and “why now.”
• Use proper tone. The tone depends on the audience. It is also advisable to change the summary for different audiences. In all cases, be confident.
• Limit the length to one or two pages. One or two pages can be printed in on front and back of a single page.
• Avoid superlatives, clichés, or any over-used expressions.
• Proof read. Have it reviewed; if a 5 grader can explain it after reading it, it’s a good sign.

Why Entrepreneurs don’t Scale?

The article mentions four tendencies that keep a founder entrepreneur from scaling:

• Loyalty to comrades: Too much loyalty can become a liability when managing large scale, complex organization.
• Task orientation: Excessive attention to detail can cause a large organization to lose its way.
• Singlemindedness: This attribute can become a hindrance as new ideas are not encouraged.
• Working in isolation: This could result in disconnecting the business with the outside world: customers, investors, analysts, reporters and others.

A Few Good Principles

There are four principles used by Marines that can be applied to businesses:

• Fast is better than perfect. Make fast decisions, indecisiveness is worse than making a mediocre decision (mediocre decision can still work if properly executed). Sometimes determining what actions must be avoided can be important too.
• Make every team member a problem solver. Allow people at lowest level of the organization to make decisions that can impact the success of the organization.
• Reward failure. Failure may not be a bad thing. Failing could mean that people are taking chances and learning from experiences.
• Seek outside perspectives. Consider the outside view of the organization. It can bring new insight and new dimensions to the business.

Applying to my venture

The suggestions provided by the first article regarding the executive summary will be taken into consideration. Specifically I will revise the first paragraph.

The other two articles are useful when the business is in execution.

Indeed, I have experienced two of the tendencies that keep entrepreneurs from scaling: loyalty and task orientation. Loyalty is one of the principles that I praise most, but certainly in business it can result negative effects. Also, as engineer, task orientation is a natural tendency. Instead of delegating works, I tend to review all the decision becoming a bottleneck. Especially, those fields that I am not expert, I should delegate to others.

The Marine was interesting as it broke my belief that Marines was a conservative and strongly hierarchical organization. Although I agree with the principles, they are not easy to put into practice, at least not in a start-up, when the resources are scarce. For example, given a limited budget, all the decision has to be taken with care in order to maximize the ROI. Also failure is seldom an option. Losing a contract or misstep that leads to losing resource could become fatal.

Nevertheless, tardiness in making decision could be harmful as well, and not allowing people to take changes may mean losing competitiveness.

As entrepreneur, I must learn to balance tight situations, handle risks, manage different types of people, and ultimately make correct decision for the overall benefit of the organization. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy job.