Inside Out: Share your Vision, sales will follow

I watched a great TED talk from Simon Sinek about inspiring consumers through the clear communication of your core values.  He says that people are much more comfortable buying into beliefs than products or features.  I have been looking at things this way for canvas & hide, but having trouble with the "clear communication" part.

I think the trouble I was having was getting lost in the details.  In the end, some of our values will ultimately be subservient to the others, so what is the big value?  Reparability? Versatility? Empowerment?

Below I have outlined our customer forward values.  These are the values that we need to clearly communicate to our patrons.  Our other values are equally important, but only need to be lived (not spoken.)

I think that this is a good start to moving forward.

I also enjoyed last weeks exercise of breaking down the functions of the company into easily digestible parts.  I've been playing with this a lot and am looking forward to using this to move forward.  It almost could be turned into a checklist for each phase and task.  Very good to know you haven't forgotten anything.

until next time - Ben.

Vision, Mission and Overarching Goals

Time and again I have come across the importance of creating a 'vision'. Steve Jobs who firing his best engineers just because they didn't share the vision of the company is an example of how important it is to create something that the company is built to achieve, something it stands for no matter what.

In one of my Strategy classes, I read an article by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras called 'Building Your Company's Vision'. The article illustrates the importance of have a core vision, and how successful companies stuck to their core vision even if it turns out to be competitive disadvantage.

As per the article, there are 4 aspects that a company needs to define in order to have a successful vision:

1. Core Vision:
- Core Values: Internal guiding principles of an organization
- Core Purpose: The reason for existing
2. Envisioned Future:
- BHAG: Overarching goals achievable in the next 30 years
- Vivid Description : Make the goals tangible

To do this for Clip, I had to go back and think about the initial concept, why we really wanted to do what we did, and what were the core values behind it. Here is what I came up with, but I want to continue working on refining these as we move along the course.

1. Core Vision:
- Core Values:
Well designed, innovative products for the good of humanity
Extensive Imagination & Creativity
Making life easy for people

- Core Purpose:
To design for real needs

2. Envisioned Future:
- BHAG: Overarching goals achievable in the next 30 years
Become the next Ikea
- Vivid Description : Make the goals tangible
We plan to make need based products, really understand our user and make products that fit their aspirations and lifestyle. Our core strength will be a deep understanding of our customer's needs and this is what will help take us where we want to be.

I would like to end with a TED Talk by Simon Sinek, where is articulates the importance of knowing why you are doing what you are doing, and conveying that to your customers.

Leaning Your VSM

While evaluating your Value Stream Map, consider the following questions outlined by industryweek.com in order to “lean” (Hild, 2009) your business process: 1. Where are you now? 2. Where do you want to go? 3. What work must be done to move toward the future state? 4. Why hasn’t the work already occurred? The article, “Value Stream Mapping: Making It Work,” emphasizes that the mapping can be used for more than just creating a flow of activities necessary to the functionality of your business. One of your primary goals should be to get rid of the weeds that are either prolonging your process, creating unnecessary costs, or creating complexities. Also, as you observe the various branches of activities pictured on your map, find ways to consolidate tasks and steps to eliminate gaps and the possibility of needing more personnel. Article: http://www.industryweek.com/lean-six-sigma/value-stream-mapping-making-it-work An article on Six Sigma titled, “The Lean System of Motivation,” explains how value stream maps can also be used for problem solving and delegating job duties to team members in order to improve the decision-making process.

Article: http://www.industryweek.com/lean-six-sigma/lean-system-motivation Also, I thought this excerpt from an article written by the Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute was quite helpful for deciding what processes are crucial to a business system: “The objective in drawing the map is to identify each significant action required to create the desired value. These are carefully written down, along with information about the performance of each action. Specifically, we want to know whether each action (also called a process step) is: • Valuable, meaning whether it actually creates value from the standpoint of the customer. The simplest measure of the value of a step is to ask if the customer would be less satisfied with the product if this step could be left out. For example, leaving out the step of painting a car would be a problem for practically all customers for motor vehicles. They think that paint adds to the value of the product. But leaving out all rework and touch-up required to get a good paint finish wouldn’t bother any customer. These latter activities are waste and need to be steadily reduced. • Capable, meaning the degree to which a good quality result is achieved every time. This is the core concern of the quality movement, and the starting point for many Six Sigma projects. • Available, meaning the degree to which the step is able to operate when it is needed. This is the core concern of Total Productive Maintenance. In typical operations, many steps can’t produce a good result a significant fraction of the time (a capability problem), and won’t run at all a significant fraction of the time (an availability problem). Toyota often combines the issue of capability with the issue of availability to estimate the stability of an action. • Adequate, meaning the degree to which capacity is in place to respond to customer orders as needed. Adequacy is commonly the focus of Theory of Constraints and bottleneck analysis, and analysis of bottlenecks is often essential to improve the performance of a value stream. As I walk along value streams all over the world, however, what I more commonly see is vast excess capacity. Most steps have more than adequate capacity, and this creates waste of a different type. This waste occurs because equipment designers still want to build large machines designed for lowest cost per step at high target volumes. However, from a lean thinker’s standpoint, the one thing that is certain is that market forecasts of demand are wrong. Such errors lead either to chronic overcapacity or intractable undercapacity, when getting even a small amount of additional capacity requires purchase of another large machine. The lean thinker’s answer is to “right size” equipment whenever possible to create the possibility for labor and capital linearity. This means the ability to add and subtract small increments of machinery and manpower, so that both are fully utilized over a wide range of volumes. • Flexible, means the degree to which a process step can switch over quickly and at low cost from one member of a product family to another. Flexibility permits the production of very small batches, or even lots of one, with many benefits for the entire value stream—as we will see in a moment. Flexibility has, of course, been a hallmark of the Toyota Production System.” Article: http://www.sme.org/Tertiary.aspx?id=30192&terms=value%20stream%20mapping%20%2bwomack#sthash.1K3x6kon.dpuf

Bottom-up Forecasting

This week’s topic is about making things happen at the right time. Part of that is creating a forecast model with the right parameters in place. Obviously no predictive model is perfect but executive management who follow conventional planning believe that the organization should meet the numbers that were predicted. With discovery- driven planning, predicting the correct numbers is not the main focus. The goal of discovery-driven planning is to learn as much you can for the least amount of expenditure. Within these plans many entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast, but a bottom-up forecast is able to predict numbers that are more likely to happen.

The Boston Consulting Group released a report, “The First Billion, A forecast of social investment demand.” The purpose of the report was to assess the future of social investment demand (in the UK). Part of their methodology in researching the market was by the bottom-up methodology. This methodology starts with the sectors the organization would like to target. From there, these sectors are broken down into sub-sections. Then the market size of each sub-section is added up to gain a comprehensive picture of the market.

I believe that when creating a business model, Care Van can benefit from the bottom-up methodology. By dissecting the market into sub-sections will allow us to see what part of the market is growing and actually attainable. One example of a sub section in our market would be individuals over 65, who live independently vs. living in a assisted living home. My question is, in order to have a good idea on the growth rate of the population, how far back do you need to go for your forecast model?

Source: https://www.bcg.com/documents/file115598.pdf

What to focus on

This week I worked on the value stream of LUVwater. A value stream is essentially a roadmap of how things are going to get done in an organisation. It made me think at first from an overview of the operations and then after breaking it down from a very detailed level as to how the venture would operate. This was a great exercise to do and I would encourage every entrepreneur to do it as it makes you think of the finer details of the operation and where problems could occur that you previously never thought of. It gives you an idea of what resources you will require when and gets you thinking as to how you would acquire them. Also a good thing is you can also have a lot of fun with it but figuring out new and novel ways to explain a complex procedure in a very simple way.

There were quite a lot of things that got me thinking on LUVwater's value stream. Who are our prototyping suppliers (who will supply us the UV-C LED's at the prototyping level, who will manufacture final prototypes for us and who will test them out)? Well this actually requires thorough research on which companies currently operate in that sector and who would be the most beneficial to us. We will have to decide if we want the same partner to assist us in scaling up later or do we even want someone with those capabilities for now?

Another aspect of the value stream I had a hard time figuring out was the service aspect of the venture.The product will contain cleanable filters. Weather these filters are cleaned by the users or they are replaced over time is a design decision we are going to have to take which will affect how servicing plays out. I reached out to our professor Tim Zak with this issue and he said once you choose the right market you can figure it out yourself which made perfect sense. So I know I want to start this in India as thats the market I know best. Now, I did some research and I came across this interesting statistic from the unicef website which says "Sixty seven per cent of Indian households do not treat their drinking water, even though it could be chemically or bacterially contaminated.". I found that unicef spends about $47 million on water projects every year alone. A lot of the water diseases in India boil down to the fact that children get affected more adversely and more children die every year which is why unicef is doing so much in India. Figuring what kinds of organisations work in India can lead me to more research on how they operate and probably figure out if we do need a service component or it could be handled directly by the organisation that bought the product.

I was also thinking about how the backend of the system will work. Who will be handling finance and IT and the website? I would also like an app for our customers to be able to track the products they leave behind and how many people they are able to affect and save lives of. I have to figure out at which stage that app has to be developed and by whom. Of course these are questions that have to be answered later and that there are more important things to be focussed on now.

These and many other questions about the value stream I have can be answered by better understanding of the market and doing more through research. I am starting to talk to certain charities and aid organisations in India and I will figure out the best strategy in the coming weeks.

Sizing the Market

CrowdSpotter’s Revenue Projections:

Portland

•Population: 2.2 Million

•Median Age: 35.8 Years

•Median Income: $47,033

Hawthorne

•Population: 12,000

•Median Age: 35.4 Years

•Median Income: $60,679

Projections

•Offering a 3% annual return to this population

•Capture about 525 people

•Raise $2 Million + 2 Million foundation match

•Average investment of about $3.8K from the first iteration.

•3% brokerage fee on $2 million = $60,000 in revenue

How I came to these numbers: I used our sole competitors information. On their site they list their offerings and the amount they have raised on each offering. Picking a neighborhood that was similar in income to some of the DC neighborhoods they were putting properties into. I then reduced our expectations a little bit in order to maintain a more conservative approach in my estimations of the amount of revenue to be expected in our first iteration. 

This first run through shows me that we would have to do multiple offerings in a year to be profitable. The $60,000 in revenue would be eaten in half by the expected legal cost associated with filing a regulation A offering. We would then still have to pay all our other cost such as employee compensation, office space, and data storage. I am still working on the number of “units” we would need to sell in order to profitable.

CrowdSpotters Market Size Projections

This has been a very difficult estimation for me. The way I have currently approached it is by taking the current crowd funding market and it’s monetary % of US donations and then taking that % and applying it to the REIT industries total market.

Crowdfunding:

2012: 1.6 billion spent through crowd funding platform

Expected to double in 2013

·      In 2012 300 bill given in charity

o   Crowd funding was therefore about .5% of total charity

So taking that .5% from the crowd funding as a % of charity we apply that number to the REIT industry’s total number.

REIT Industry:

·      670 billion in 2012

·      So taking .5% of that 670 billion

·      Which gets you $3,350,000,000.00 or 3.35 billion

This would be our initial market size expectation with it growing hopefully on par with the growth all of crowd funding is seeing.  So it would seem with few competitors and a field that has yet to have a player establish dominance there is currently a lot of money to be captured and spread around.

I wanted to share this base line calculations with the class because I am hoping that it might either help someone in their conceptualization of the size of the market and I am hoping that someone might have a better way to size the market. If you do please let me know.

NGO Capacity Building

The McKinsey Capacity Framework reminds me of a relatively successful Non-Profit Organization in Shanghai, which is, Hand on Shanghai. (http://www.handsonshanghai.org/) It focuses on education, children’s health and elderly care. The volunteers are mainly university students. Its capacity is as followed and I believe the key factors for its success is its partnerships.

Elements	Hands On Shanghai
Aspirations	To promote volunteerism, inspire, equip and mobilize people to take action that changes the world
Strategy	Education, Elderly Care, Children’s Health and Facility Improvement Programs
Organization Skills	Partnership with universities, elementary schools, hospitals and elderly care centers.
Human Resources	There are university student clubs for recruitment.
Systems and Infrastructure	Volunteers can register online for a certain program.
Organization Structure	The board members are mainly made up of three groups of people, which are university professors, industry CEOs and non-profit organization leaders
Culture	People drive change – People can make all of the difference. Passion overcomes obstacles – Passion and boldness transform. Service bridges and bonds – Working together in service to other bring people together. Innovation drives results – Reimagining possibilities creates impact. Servant leadership transforms – Humility and grace can change our world.

With stable partnerships with schools and care centers, the sustainability of the programs is promised. The partnership with universities make it easier for the organization to recruit volunteers. There is a policy in Shanghai that every university student should take part in at least two volunteer activities in one year. The weakness of the organization is the Systems and Infrastructure part. It does not have a performance measure. It is great that it can hold hundreds of volunteer activities every year. However, there is no clear definition on the quality of activities. If the measure can be set, the organization can advance to the next stage.

To be honest, Shanghai is not quite an incubator for non-profit organizations. Few people have the awareness of doing good. Non-profit organizations rely heavily on universities. My question is that is there any other ways to recruit volunteers instead of going to universities directly?

Lease vs Buy?

One of the largest decisions facing non-profit organizations is the decision to lease or own the facilities in which they operate.  Leasing a property may provide the non-profit organization with flexibility in an environment of uncertainty, while owning the property would bring the organization greater stability and possible financial benefits.  The organization must take great pains to consider their options carefully.  They should forecast what future rents may be in their neighborhood, whether they have the capacity to handle the maintenance activities of ownership, and whether there are tax incentives given by their local municipality that may guide them towards leasing or owning.

However, in order to arrive at the best decision, according to an article on Nonprofit Quarterly, it is critical that the nonprofit understand itself and its mission before making any long-term obligations.  The financial factors alone cannot answer the question.  The organization must discuss what type of constituency they are looking to serve.  If they expect rapid and nationwide growth, leasing the property may be a better option so that they can dynamically adapt to their circumstances in the near future.  However, if the non-profit provides a service to an established community, buying the property may be the more attractive option.

Non profit organizations and social ventures are most successful when they are able to focus their operations down to where they have the highest comparative advantage, and where they can add the most value.  Non-profits that are just beginning should most likely shy away from the obligations of ownership, unless there are huge financial advantages to doing so.  Renting the property would allow the organization to move more freely if they develop a market in an region they had no anticipated.  Non-profits must decide whether they will buy or lease for all kinds of products and services with careful analysis, but it seems that there are more overall advantages to leasing for non-profits than buying, unless the non-profit is well established with a certain future

The Mobile Clinic 'Team'

The team article about the 'Founding Team' of an entrepreneurial venture stated that "Five  the magic number."  In addition to the Entrepreneur, who holds the vision of the venture, the Beermat Guide suggests the founding team will ideally have the cornerstones with the following specialties: Technical Innovator, Delivery Specialist, Sales, and Finance.

Our venture is specific to health care delivery, which will still require most of these cornerstones. In our case, the Technical Innovator will most likely be a Medical Expert, who can help us navigate as we expand and grow, and act as a sounding board for new ideas. In general, we have limited experience with health care finance, but from what we have done and learned it would be an easy thing to find individuals qualified to help us. As the article states, splitting the earnings of the company equally will provide incentives for future team members, and create strength and empowerment among its founding members. 

 I thought it was interesting to see how this article illustrated the importance of teamwork at the early stages of a venture's development. Understanding the strength and weaknesses of a team, and recognizing the time commitment necessary (not always needed full time) is an important lesson. 

How did this article strike you? Are there any unique differences in the cornerstones needed for your venture?

Social Entrepreneurs and Capitalism

This week’s topic is about making sure that your social venture has the capacity to fulfill the mission of the organization and maintain a sustainable model. Venture Philanthropy Partners state that the capacity framework includes seven essential elements. The three foundational elements that make an up the base of an organization is: systems and infrastructure, human resources and organizational structure. Other essential elements are: aspirations, strategy and organizational skills. An analysis of these components will allow you to know where the gaps in your capabilities are as an organization.

A supplemental article I found on Forbes.com for this topic is called “The Rise of Social Entrepreneurship Suggests A Possible Future For Global Capitalism.” The authors state that this recently formalized model under B Corp, ensures that the revenue support social impact. With that being said, it is no longer a strange idea to only invest in programs for social ventures but also the structure of the organizations as well, in order to create a bigger social impact. Also, last week Ian and Jenna from Thread talked about how they were planning on leveraging other established companies who needed to improve on their image to the public, which in hand would enhance their mission and business. This article calls this ethical capitalism, where ethical behavior is now a competitive advantage for companies. My question is though, would game theory come into play here? If only one company sells their social impact then that company will have an advantage but if all companies try to sell their social impact to consumers then their message is lost in the mass wave of advertisement…

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/skollworldforum/2013/05/02/the-rise-of-social-entrepreneurship-suggests-a-possible-future-for-global-capitalism/

Diversifying Teams for Better Results - TED Talk

Last week, Ian Rosenberger and Jenna Knapp of Thread emphasized how teamwork was an integral part in the success of their business, especially in the writing of their business plan. Ian stated that in order to grow his idea into a business, he needed to find business partners that were "smarter than him" in the areas of his business in which he was not an expert. The TED Talk below by Margaret Heffernan titled "Dare to disagree" supports Ian and Jenna's assertion that teams should be strategically designed to include a variety of perspectives and expert knowledge. 

Margaret Heffernan also claims that team members should challenge one another and that disagreements are healthy for optimal decision-making. Similar to Ian's argument that Thread's business plan would not have reached fruition if his team had not been diverse in their thinking and goals, Heffernan states that team leads should never recruit team members that simply "echo" each other's thoughts. As we charge through this month of writing our business plans, you should ask yourself: Should I be working alone, or would collaboration with domain experts benefit my business? Am I working with someone too similar to me in expertise or ability? Do I need to find someone who can evaluate my progress with a fresh perspective?  

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree

Teams and Personalities

A few pointers from last week's guest lecture by Thread International on team brought up a couple good points:

The product needs to be excellent. It needs to be something that you yourself would purchase/partake in/contribute to. As others have mentioned, "their ass has to look good first." For me, I need to spend a lot more time really tinkering around and developing a good product for the venture rather than focusing on how it will be marketed, sold, and how the profits will be spent.

The team you pick needs to be better than you. Jenna pointed out her observation that while I cared deeply about the social aspect of the venture (education), I cared very little about the product itself. Since my background and interests lie in education, I would need to build a team with someone who is knowledgable about the product and cares about its production, sales, etc. I would also need someone with (possibly) differing opinions on achieving the mission. I frequently get tunnel vision when taking part in something very important to me, so having that additional option or contradicting opinion would add debate and ultimately bring the venture to a better place. A team composed of people who have all the same ideas may not get very far...

As a side note, I completely agree with Yuzhe on the importance of a good leader or at least in a more bureaucratic environment a good manager. Many people have not been blessed with good managers and having worked with both an excellent manager and a horrible manager, being someone who can manager and/or can lead can make or break a team in productivity and morale.

Creating a Clear Strategic Position for Clip

Recently I came across an article called 'What is Strategy?' by Michael E. Porter (http://hbr.org/product/what-is-strategy/an/96608-PDF-ENG), which made me step back and think about Clip, and what is really the core vision of the venture. The article gave a clear distinction between Operative Effectiveness, which it defines as means of performing activities better, versus Strategy, which is doing different activities or doing activities differently than competitors.

It speaks about how a lot of companies focus on Operational Effectiveness and fail to create a coherent Strategic Vision for the company. I feel this is mainly because a focus on improving efficiency will ensure results in the short run, whereas an overall strategic vision is more about returns in the long run.

The article talks about the strategic positioning of Ikea, and how it is difficult for competitors to emulate them as all their activities are coherent with each other, and an application of just one activity by it self cannot create a viable business. 

"What is Strategy?' Michael E Porter

Here are a few key activities of Ikea, and I feel studying them will help us form a clear, coherent strategy for Clip which is not only well differentiated, but also difficult for competitors to emulate.

A lot our activities overlap with Ikea; like having a 'Modular Furniture Design, Limiting Sales Staff ( online purchase platform), In-house design focus on the cost of manufacturing, Self-Selection by Customers, etc. The next step for us would be to create a  similar activity map for Clip, but with certain key differentiation from Ikea. 

Some activities we feel would fit in our position, as well as be hard to imitate would be:

- Personalization and Customization

Contrary to Ikea where a piece of furniture in Dubai looks exactly the same in Milan and Pittsburgh. The ability to personalize and add character will add a benefit that aligns well with our target group, ie college students. 

- Focused target group

We have a much more focused target group, that is college students who need temporary furniture. Ikea on the other hand serves young professionals, students and basically a wider set of audience. Concentrating and fulfilling the needs of a small target group might be a key differentiator, and might open channels of distribution such as college bookstores, etc.

Our next steps would be to create a refined activity map, and develop more differentiating activities that will make us stand out.

Update: First Draft of an Activity Map:

Startup Lessons

We had a great chance to meet the people behind Thread on Monday. We met with Ian Rosenberger, the CEO and Jenna Knapp, the Director of Production. Thread is what you would call a great example of social innovation. They essentially make jobs in Haiti by recycling plastic bottles in landfills there and converting it into reusable plastic thread. That thread is what they sell to companies in the US to make consumer products by various companies. Its like taking unused plastic from one part of the world to make it useful plastic in another part of the world. This got me thinking that what if we could find other things like that around the world which are less valuable someplace but are very valuable somewhere else. For example, the leftover products in corn processing could be used as a fuel in another country where they don't have any.

Lets move back to what Ian told us the other day. He gave us invaluable lessons on startups and how to be grounded. There are just 3 simple rules of the startup - 1. Youre not as creative as you think. Do Better. This basically means don't think you have the best idea in the world and keep improving on the idea you have. 2. Show me the MONEY. This is telling us to remember that your investors need to know that the idea can make money. If the product cannot make money then it is just that, a product and not something out of which a company can be made. 3. Novelty doesn't count, But it matters. You might make a very cool product but if you can't scale it to a bigger market its pointless. Basically if only your 10 best friends actually buy it, it makes no sense.

Ian said the best advice he ever received was from a person who made eco friendly jeans who said "Their (the customers) ass has to look good first". I found this hilarious at first but very very intriguing later. So this person wants to make eco friendly jeans but no one is really going to buy jeans just based on the fact that its eco friendly. You need to compete with giants like Levis, GAP etc. to make jeans that look and feel better and plus giving the added benefit to the customer that those jeans are eco friendly. With LUVwater too, I need to make sure that the product is actually usable by anyone rather than just making something and sending it out there.

Another aspect of the talk was teams. As someone part of a startup you should always put your team ahead of yourself and always hire smarter people than you. Also you should be able to create a safe space to fight where people aren't judged and its okay to be wrong. You should always write everything down and make sure things are documented, something which I have not been doing to well regarding LUVwater.  And finally, get a lawyer.

He also spoke about how everything takes longer than you think it does. You may have predicted that you would be cash positive in about a year but it could easily stretch to 3 years. Also, you almost always need more money than you think you do. There will definitely be a point where you suddenly feel that the money you currently have isn't enough and its not going to work this way. Last but not least its passion that drives a startup and You HAVE to WANT it very badly for it to succeed.

I was looking at other people who have done great work in developing cheap affordable solutions for the masses and I came across a TED talk by Amy Smith who is the founder and co-director of D-Lab at MIT which makes cheap affordable but amazing solutions to common problems faced by people in developing nations. Its a great example of identifying a need for a problem and then developing iterative concepts to solve them and finally coming up with the best solution.

Motivating your core team

The Beermat Entrepreneur offered an intriguing strategy for assembling a competent and driven team.  He suggested to give each team member an equal stake in the company, which ran against my intuition of the founding entrepreneur retaining the largest share of the company.  However, this approach is consistent with other decentralization tactics I have come across.  Giving each cornerstone team member an equal stake gives them a huge incentive to offer everything they have to the company, and aligns their own self-interest with the success of the company. 

Decentralizing operations and allowing for each team member to execute an appropriate level of autonomy may be preferable than having the entrepreneur manage each team member too closely.  Ian from Thread appeared to have a solid understanding of his role within his team.  He hired team members with expertise in areas that he lacked, and deferred to their judgments.  He also allowed his team to argue endlessly in pursuit of a feasible solution, often refraining from entering the fray himself.  He also suggested that allowing his team to fail in order to understand the lessons more intimately was a critical tactic for developing understanding.  These goals may be costly in the short-term, but the overall objective of fostering a team that is both honest with their opinions, and trusting of one another would prove to be a hugely valuable asset in the long-term.  The entrepreneur must balance between micro-managing and anarchy, all while finding their appropriate niche in the larger team setting.

The entrepreneur must be aware of their own shortcomings, and must consequently rely on their team in areas where they are lacking.  If the entrepreneur has too much control over the company, they may resist important feedback from their team members, and lead the company down a unproductive path.  In short, the entrepreneur must retain the original vision of the company, yet their field of view is not large enough to encapsulate of the periphery.  Granting equal ownership to cornerstone team members will encourage the team to take their roles seriously and with initiative. 

Really figuring out what we do.

My co-founders and I had the opportunity to sit down and build a foundation to define what we do.  It was a great exercise where we focused on refining both the company (canvas and hide) and our products (bags) down to two sentences.

Business Description:

Canvas and Hide provides simple and durable equipment that captures the heart of the explorer, the requirements of the modern professional, and the mind of the lifelong student.

This really captures versatility while alluding to our core values.  We believe that this is a strong statement that invites the right kind of questions to drive dialog about what we stand for as a company, and the part of the human spirit which we are working to empower with our products.  We are making bags for adventuresome, discerning individuals who appreciate craftsmanship and materials, but also demand a lot from the things they own.

Product Description:

We are developing a multipurpose bag that easily transitions from a day at the office to a weekend adventure.

We feel that we are close on the product description.  We haven't worked in durability and reparability, which are key to our values.  We aren't sure that this is important enough to reside in our most foundational product description though.  There are many companies who offer life long product warranties (jansport for example will fix any jansport you send them with a few exceptions) but we see our impact in this area being based around our consumers wanting to repair their bags (i've never been terribly attached to a jansport.  I usually was just waiting for it to fail so that I could justify replacing it.)  What we have identified as a differentiation is the ability of our bags to seamlessly transition between home, transportation, work, and school.  We see bicycle integration as a key piece of this puzzle, but we do not want to limit our scope to cyclists, as this transitional quality has the opportunity to provide value to a wide range of adventurous individuals.

How Ya'll Feelin?!?!

This weeks reading discusses the aspects of capacity building in non-profits. Reading the table of contents I got pretty excited to get to the end of the PDF. More precisely I was “FIRED UP!!!!”. The reason for my excitement was not that as I approached the end of the reading I would be closer to being done with my Sunday school work, but rather the fact that the end of the reading examined an organization near and dear to my heart; City Year, the largest AmeriCorps program in the nation.

I am an alumnus of City Year New York (CYNY). At CYNY I got to work with a diverse and amazing group of people. Every weekday we would start our day at 7am with the daily warm-up activity, and then we would head up from our converted locker room offices to the entrance of P.S. 111 where we enthusiastically greet incoming students, doling out high fives like it was our true calling. This was a routine that is done by every City Year team at countless school across the nation.

This routine is in large part a product of CY’s capacity building focused on culture. Our reading defines a non-profits cultural aspects as: The connective tissue that binds together the organization, including shared values and practices, behavior norms, and most important, the organization’s orientation towards performance.[i]

Truth be told when I first arrived at CYNY I despised the cultural aspects of the organization. I thought of them to be wastes of time’s detracting us from engaging in our core mission of assisting at-risk students in their studies. I didn’t want to wear the uniform, I didn’t want to learn the starfish story, and I really didn’t appreciate not being allowed to jay walk; it was NYC after all. All in all I initially found the cultural aspects of CY to be bordering on cultish.

It was only towards the end of my year of service that I truly began to open my eyes to the positive aspects of the culture. I began to see the benefits of having shared values and practices which allowed anyone from any of the other CY teams across the nation to step in at a moments notice when they visited CYNY and feel right at home and confident in what they were doing. I saw how having a high standard of behavior norms allowed kids from across the NYC to feel confident in approaching anyone with the CY red jacket on for help. And most importantly I saw how all of these cultural aspects bound the organization together.  

In fact just the other day I was able to again experience the positive of CY culture when I ran into a fellow CY alum at a bar. We had served in different city's but it mattered not because instantly we were able to related on our shared experiences. More important then relating our shared experiences though was what we were both currently doing. We both were continuing to live the real mission of CY, which is to produce young idealist who never stop wanting to make the world a better place.  

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[i] http://www.vppartners.org/sites/default/files/reports/full_rpt.pdf

http://www.cityyear.org/about-us/culture-values

http://www.cityyear.org/about-us

http://alumni.cityyear.org/?Profile_PSchoffelen