Recessions Favor
Emerging Businesses!

Winning Strategies for Emerging Businesses

It's a Great Time to Start a Business!

Six companies born during downturns

Think a recession is a bad time to start a company? Imagine if the founders of these major corporations had thought the same...

Procter & Gamble: Founded during the Panic of 1837
IBM: Founded during the Long Depression, 1873-1896
General Electric: Founded during the Panic of 1873
General Motors: Founded during the Panic of 1907
United Technologies Corp: Founded in 1929, amid the Great Depression
Fed Ex: Founded during the Oil Crisis of 1973

(Excerpted from CNN Small Business web site on 10 Feb 2009.)

Typical Faults of Emerging Businesses

Trying to Look Like a Mature Business

We have seen far too many examples of this fault. We call it combining the faults of an emerging business with the faults of a mature business.

Emerging businesses do not have enough customers. They must cover about the same geographic space as mature businesses, but there is a lot more space between the customers. They also do not have enough proven products. By definition, they are emerging businesses, probably bent on commercializing a new technology that they have created through research. Too often we see the people in the emerging business placing a far higher value on their intellectual property than their prospective customers do.

Their customers are often hard to find. They are also busy as bees creating something new for their companies, and they are often staffed with a handful of people buried in the superstructure of companies with hundreds of thousands of people.

To compensate for these shortcomings, emerging businesses too often try to look like much bigger, more mature businesses. Like a bank, it seems that everyone is a vice president, except the CEO of course. That kicks off the generation of silos, even if there is only one person per silo. The VP of Marketing and Sales seeks out the customers. The engineers trying to create new products from their excellent technology get their views of the customers second or third hand. The customers really want to see the people who are making the product decisions and creating the products, but they are screened by the marketing and sales departments. Everyone is far too busy trying to emulate the faults of a big business to waste time trying to analyze this almost comical situation.

We Can Help!

We help clients to create teams across emerging organizations with their focus on winning customers. The people making the decisions and creating the products actually integrate into their emerging customers businesses
to do things the way the customers really want things done.

Recessions FavorEmerging Businesses!