Sorry for the delay in updating – I got tied up in this tornado of exuberance called PubCon prep work.
Good friend digitalghost tipped me off to a fresh business quiz.
[webmasterworld.com...]
This one is by noted marketing guru Guy Kawasaki:
[blog.guykawasaki.com...]
Here’s a quiz to determine your “entrepreneurial quotient”. My intent is to test a person’s knowledge of entrepreneurship. However, scoring high doesn’t mean you’re the next Steve Jobs, and scoring low doesn’t mean you’re not. Some answers are debatable, so there will be many comments.
ok – haven’t taken the test just yet. I got to reading that page and several things besides the test freaking leaped off the page and need major comment.
- guy is pretty cool. We thought about him for a keynote at PubCon and may have him in the future. I saw him speak a couple years ago in Chicago and he is a very righteous speaker.
- <satire>What is that over on the right where the traditional trashcan blog roll should be? What is a Tag Zoom cloud? That looks brilliant! Where have I been on that one…wow. Take your tags and dump keywords on to the page and don’t call is page spamming – call it a Cloud! (grin)and people wonder why tagging teams are going at it?</satire>
- Another Text-Link-Ads ad on that page. Patrick Gavin of TLA is without-a-doubt this last years genius advertiser in the SEO space – he is EVERYWHERE with his product. What and excellent job of brand building with a sometimes controversial product. Nice Work! ok – back to the test…I missed 7.
- The foundation of a successful brand is: I still think should be A (Effective marketing). It was a trick question because a great product does NOT equal a great brand. But, a bad product can equal a great brand (eg: Ipod was 2 years late to the market, major under powered, 50% higher than competitors, and broke alot in the early days…)
- Ultimately, who positions a product or service establishing how customers will come to view it? The company positions a product from start to finish. What happens in the market place by the consumers – is not positioning. Any company that believes the product, the message, and the positioning is out of their control – is doomed – go home people – it’s over. You control EVERYTHING. Yes, there comes a point when every child leaves the nest, but even then, they can phone home to get money wired after that weekend bender at college. The point being, that a culture of accountability, resposibilty and total empowerment must live in the product from birth until death pulls if off the shelf. Nothing less than a employment force that takes total ownership for a products life cycle is acceptable.
- If you want your company to be successful, it’s most important to strive for which objective? Ok fine, life, liberty and the pursuit of a monopoly. Tastes like chicken…..meanwhile, back in the real world. Ya, i will cut Guy some slack on this one. I know where he is coming from, however I do not believe that you HAVE to be the sole provider of something people really want to be profitable, successful, or even retire early. All of that can be accomplished in a highly competitive market.
10: Which part of a business plan is the most important?
Well, he warned us that it was trick question in his intro. lol. executive summary. Have you ever seen a business plan that had an “executive summary”? (shrug – yes I have) In lieu of that – the competitive analysis is most important.
13: A company that is bootstrapping should avoid which management practice?
I suppose this is a little too close to home for me to see the answer clearly. I said C (Positioning against the industry leader), but b (Trying to recruit a “dream” management team of proven executives) makes very good sense. Chimps can manage in the early days and you need committed, passionate heavy lifters to lay down the schema and carry out the existing plan as growth overwhelms you in the early days.
15: You’ve just met with a key potential account. It could be a large sale and also bolster your company’s credibility in the industry. However, the account is afraid to do business with a “startup.” The best way to win them over is to:
15: I totally knew his answer was going to be C: Offer to do a pilot implementation at a deep discount.
Unfortunately, I know alot of companies that have held going out of business sales because they said C too. Just talk to companies like Novell, Stacker, Word Perfect, Lotus, Apple, or Geocities about showing people a “demo” at a deep discount. Never heard of some of those companies? Ya, they all are about dead or suffered extreme harm at some point, because they happened to give people deeply discounted demos. There is no better way in todays world to get your product ripped off than to give discounted demo. Where would Apple be today if Steve Jobs hadn’t given a mac demo to Microsoft and went with some other software house?
- BT
