“primum non nocere” = first, to not harm

This Latin tidbit actually comes from the Hippocratic Oath (the one doctors swear to).  But there is a lesson in there for all of us.  A business’s first goal every day should be to not cause our customers to feel harmed.   It doesn’t matter what your job or role, your real job is to make customers feel loved.  This manifests itself in many ways, but it should always be the centerpiece of your efforts.

Some people have a great deal of direct customer interaction, and some people have jobs where we rarely directly interact with a customer.  But as a rule, customer interaction should be a few things:

1. Clear and concise (i.e. don’t waste their time or confuse them)
2. Prompt (i.e. if a customer or prospect has to wait more than 24 hours for an initial contact, we failed)
3. Follow-up and Follow-through (i.e. if we don’t have answers yet, at least once per day, tell them we are working on it. And if we say we are going to do something, do it and let them know we did it)

Following these simple steps usually means you have very happy customers.  No matter what your role or job is.  Support is not a department, it is a mentality.

Primum non nocere….

I have traveled a lot.  In some years of my life, I have spent as much as 50% of the nights sleeping in a hotel.  But very few of those evenings have been spent in Hyatt hotels.  So, on a recent trip to Hawaii, I spent 9 nights at two different Hyatt properties - the Grand Hyatt in Kauai and the Hyatt Regency in Maui.  Besides being beautiful and amazingly well designed, the Hyatts also did a great job of showing what it means to deliver excellent customer service.

In one of the brochures for the hotels, the general manager had a note that every staff member was there to make our stay perfect.  And this statement seemed to be true over and over.  Every single staff person we passed during our stay would say “hello” or “aloha”.  They were always smiling.  They were always willing to give some local advice or direction.  In addition, they paid great attention to detail.  Things were constantly being cleaned and straightened.  Things were always in place and always looked fresh.  Customer service was an obvious focus, and it made us feel like we were important.

As entrepreneurs, it is our goal to make our customers feel as if they are important.  This is how you make customers become ambassadors for your business, just like Hyatt has done with us.

Government can do one of two things to business, it can expedite its growth by creating an environment with low taxes and minimal regulation or it can make taxes, permits, and regulation that are nothing more than roadblocks to entrepreneurs.  On a vacation to Kauai, Hawaii, this simple fact was demonstrated. Kauai is a beautiful island known as the “Garden Island”, and it is luscious, green and magnificent.

On Kauai, there is the Kauai Cigar Company, which was born out of the Blair Estate Coffee Farm.  According to the marketing brochure for the cigar company, the company is a place where “diversification and expansion are part of the intrinsic spirit.” You can read this to mean that they are an entrepreneurial group of people that run the company/farm.

But what really hit home was a message that you find later in the same brochure: “While it took nearly 6 months to obtain a federal permit to manufacture and sell cigars, the reporting, bi-monthly federal taxes, and whopping nearly 40% Hawaii wholesale tax made it financially impossible to hand make cigars in Hawaii.”  So what did these entrepreneurs do? They found a company in Nicaragua to roll and manufacture the cigars.  While a testament to the fact that the world is flat and that entrepreneurs will not be stopped by government silliness, it also demonstrates the backward thinking of many governments.  Instead of having jobs in the U.S./Hawaii for this work, the Kauai Cigar Company ships their cured tobacco from Hawaii to Nicaragua and then back to the U.S.  While we can congratulate them for their creativity and ability to make their business work, we have to shake our head at the stupidiy of the Hawaiian and U.S. governments.

I am not much of a “brand marketer”.  I am a firm believer that the only point of marketing is to expedite the sales process.  Too many marketers think that their job is to build a brand.   But branding is just one minor aspect of marketing, especially technology marketing.   In my opinion, brand is built by every aspect of the customer interaction.   And I saw this demonstrated to me again in an airport meal.

I am a burger fan.  I absolutely love the great American meal of a hamburger.  And one of the better chain places to get a burger is Fuddruckers.  So, when I was in Logan Airport this past week, my wife and I were hungry and stopped at a Fuddruckers.  My darling wife ordered a Caesar salad, and I ordered a big fat burger with a fried egg on top of it.   Unfortunately, the burger did not live up to my expectations as it was overcooked, undermeated, and generally disappointing.

As my wife and I ate, we discussed the fact that Fuddruckers was living dangerously by having a restaurant like this at an airport.  If I had never eaten at a Fuddruckers, I would think this is what they were all like.   Would I come back?  Doubtful.

In my world, this is branding.  Give your customers a great experience, and they will associate that with your brand.  They will tell their friends, and your success will perpetuate itself.  Branding is not a marketing effort.  It is a whole company effort.  You don’t have to spend money to brand, you just have to deliver a great product and service.

Wasabi Ventures has a friend, Hon, who has been unbelievably successful.  He has built companies and had huge windfall successes and because of these wins, our friend has a hefty bankroll.  But he also is uncommonly frugal — personally frugal and business frugal.  He is also the king of one-liners, so he has self-described his approach with money as being, “deep pockets, short arms.”

The “deep pockets, short arms” approach to start-ups is something to which every entrepreneur should aspire. Having “deep pockets” affords you to have as much flexibility as you can.  You can risk more of your time because you have a personal bankroll.  Salary and personal cash flow are not as important as building an opportunity into a sustainable business.  You also have the luxury of financing ventures yourself.

But you should also keep control of costs.  Being spend-thrift not only preserves cash, but it also forces operations to be efficient.  And it is in this efficiency that breakthroughs usually happen.  You find faster, smarter, better ways to run a business and beat the competition.

Grow your “deep pockets, short arms”, and build your company today.

We are in the midst of one of the great economic meltdowns and revolutions of our lifetime.  The financial markets crisis that has seen Lehman Brothers go bankrupt, AIG on the brink of collapse, and JP Morgan Chase sold at yard sale prices has sent reverberations throughout the business world.  The dollar is weakening on a daily basis, and the credit crunch is hitting main street.  This is an economic ice age.

And like the ice age that brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs and precipitated the rise of the mammal to the top of the food chain (note: this is the WV scientific take on dinosaur extinction), we believe the same thing will happen in this meltdown.  Small start-ups are going to be like the furry rodents that scurried around the jungles of the Jurassic Age.   As the large T-Rexs and other raptors (think large financial behemoths) fail to adopt and adapt to the change in climate, small, more agile creatures do find a way through.  The greatness of start-ups is that they can find holes in the cracks of an economy.  And like the early mammals, they also will evolve and grow into the dominant economic force.

So, as the bad news continues to grow and reverberate on Wall Street, think about the ways you can evolve and adapt.  Start-ups are just the small, furry, agile creatures of this ice age.

“Hannibal ante portas” = “Hannibal is before the gates” – from Cicero’s commentary.

The Latin quote above is used often when talking about not wasting time.

At a start-up, the second most valuable commodity behind cash is time.  Technology start-ups have to move fast, and there are only 24 hours in any day.  So every minute wasted is an opportunity lost. And in one of the biggest places time is wasted is in meetings not starting on time.  That usually has a multiplier effect of wasting multiple people’s time all at once.

So I have strict meeting rules:

• If you are going to be more than 5 minutes late, send a note.  I have SMS, IM, email, carrier pigeon available 24 x 7.
• After 5 minutes, the meeting will be closed.  If it is a 1-on-1 meeting, don’t bother coming, I will reschedule.  If it is for a group meeting, don’t bother coming, I will send an update later or you can read it on the company intranet.

The enemy is always at the gates as a start-up.  Save the fiddle playing for when you have won the war. (Sorry for the mixed Latin metaphor.)

As I was watching Michael Phelps last night in the 100M butterfly, I was struck by the life lessons that can be taken away from his performance.

For those that have not seen the race in question, Michael Phelps was unbelievably far behind and appeared to be in a hopeless situation with 10 meters to go. But somehow, he miraculously reached the wall first by .01 of a second. Every single person at the Water Cube and watching TV thought he had lost, but in the slow motion replays, he had won. It also showed that he had done something that most butterfly swimmers are told not to do, he shortened his last stroke in order to extend a little faster to the wall. He said, after the race, that he took the calculated risk because he knew he was behind and had to take a chance. Well, like most great ones, his risk paid off and he is now the greatest swimmer of all time.

The lesson learned from all of this actually play out at start-ups as well. Many are struggling behind large competitors, who have distinct leads in customer base, team size, funding, etc. But great start-ups have to think like a “great one” and find ways to win. In accomplishing this greatness, start-ups have to take risks. They have to use areas of advantage (e.g. large, happy user base or a nimble culture) to steal victory. There will be times when people think the chances that they have to take are daunting or even make their jobs less comfortable.

In taking these chances you will have your turn on the podium, and someone will be putting gold medal being around your neck.

There is a rule as an entrepreneur, “Don’t run out of money.” As long as you still have cash in the bank, you can adjust and change your plans enough so that you still can be in the game. Part of not running out of cash at your business is to be a personally frugal person. If you are wise with your personal money, you probably will be wise with company expenditures.

A great story about frugality comes from Josh Childress. Josh is a professional basketball player that shocked the world by signing a $10MM per year deal to play in Greece and by-passed the NBA. Besides understanding the fundamentals of a pick-and-roll, Mr. Childress also understands the power of watching every dollar, as demonstrated by this quote:

The next time you have to spend money for your business, maybe you can remember the monetary efficency of Josh Childress.

Many times, companies that are in the software business lose sight of how to maximize their chances for success. This is especially true of companies that serve multiple market segments. Sometimes it is easier to solve the problems of one segment that is not profitable than it is to solve the issues of a more profitable market segment.

This was the subject of an email that I sent to the management team of one of our portfolio companies that is on the verge of growing exponentially in the next few months. As they begin the path of growth, they will be looking to solve problems of businesses, which is where the core of their future revenues will come. With this on my mind I sent this email: