Author Archive for Francis Moran

A year of blogging about bringing technology to market

By Francis Moran

This blog was launched one year ago yesterday.

On February 1, 2011, we officially re-striped our long-standing inmedia Public Relations blog to indicate that I was evolving — pivoting would be the verb if I was a tech startup — my consulting practice. While the (now) 13-year-old technology PR agency I founded in the heat of the dot-com and telecom bubble in the late 1990s would and does continue, I wanted to spend more of my time tackling the higher-level marketing issues with which every B2B technology company must grapple. “For too long now, I have been painfully aware of just how dimly acquainted technology is with marketing,” I wrote in that first post a year ago, and I set out to change that.

A huge part of my effort to start a more constructive conversation around technology marketing was this blog. We launched it with an ambitious special report series we called “The commercialization ecosystem,” something we anticipated might span a dozen or so articles. A year later, we are still publishing pieces in a series that now counts more than 70 entries. In the meantime, we have launched two additional special series of articles. “A startup story” is tracking three — and soon to be four — tech startups at various stages of their early lives while “Technology marketing 101″ is a running case study of best practices as implemented at one technology company. In between, we run posts on a whole host of technology marketing issues and solid tactical counsel.

Every metric has been achieved. Save one

Those of you who know me know that I am a measurement fanatic; I insist that unambiguous and readily measured objectives be established for all marketing programs. It was the same for our new blog. Recognising that it takes a long time for any marketing activity to achieve the only objective that really matters — new revenue — we began by setting targets for what we could measure.

In the first instance, as with most marketing endeavours, we measured activity levels — how many posts a week would we run, how many authors would we recruit, and so on. From the very outset, we have demolished our four-posts-per-week target, running a total of 252 posts, which translates into more than 4.8 per week. Similarly, we have over achieved on the contributors front — I wanted at least 20; to date we have had 28 different authors share their wisdom and experience with us.

BlogTraffic 3 A year of blogging about bringing technology to market

The next set of targets were around traffic levels, and I set goals for what I wanted those to be by the 90-day, 180-day and one-year mark. We blew through our 90-day target in our first month and our 180-day target by the end of the first quarter. Traffic dipped during July and August but recovered in the fall, hitting our one-year target in November. Numbers dipped again during the holidays but have been trending back up over the last couple of weeks.

BlogCountries A year of blogging about bringing technology to marketOur focus from the outset was to generate a readership beyond Canada, particularly from the United States and, to a lesser degree, Britain. We seem to have achieved this, with the U.S. accounting for 32.44 percent of all traffic, followed by Canada at 29.76 percent. Britain is third (6.75%), followed by India (5.29%) and Australia (2.7%). Altogether, our blog has been read in 176 different countries.

So much for interim objectives. I can almost hear you all saying, “Show me the money!”

Like any marketing program, this one must start producing a clear ROI. Again, generating new revenue is a process, one that begins with lead generation. I wanted the blog to produce one unsolicited new lead per month starting at the six-month mark. I wanted at least one of those leads to convert to revenue before the end of the year, and then convert one every six months thereafter. (This may sound like a modest objective. However, I wish to work more intensively with a much smaller number of companies, so having the blog generate two new clients per year, companies with which I would never otherwise connect, would be just dandy.) Here’s where I provide full disclosure. Our first lead came in halfway through month five, and we have had at least one per month since. Wonderful. However, none of those leads has yet converted to revenue, although some good conversations continue. (This is not to say that Francis Moran and Associates has been without clients, just that all of our new business this past year came from other activities, mainly referrals, word of mouth and networking.)

Now, setting objectives is not a guarantee that the desired outcome will be achieved; it’s a yardstick against which performance can be measured. Whether you hit them, overshoot them or fall short, objectives provide a frame of reference within to evaluate whether a program was successful, and why or why not. Our blog has fallen short on the most critical objective I set for it, and I have to ask why. The answer I came to, and one that has been borne out by many other people I asked, is that the blog is far too subtle a marketing tool. I am sure that many, many of our regular readers probably don’t even realise that behind this blog, there is a consulting company that can be hired. We’re going to get a little more assertive about that, without in any way compromising the very high editorial standards that have made our content so popular.

Thank you all for your readership, your many comments on the blog and your many encouragements when you talk to me about what you like about the blog. If you have any suggestions about how we can make it an even more useful tool for entrepreneurs seeking to bring their technology to market, please let me know.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on February 2, 2012

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Random thoughts, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

The camel’s nose marketing strategy

camels nose The camels nose marketing strategyBy Francis Moran

There’s an old Bedouin metaphor I love that says you should never let a camel get his nose inside your tent. The metaphor alludes to the reality that many small, seemingly harmless situations ought to be prevented whilst it is still easy to do so for fear they become very large and unwieldy situations. For wherever the camel’s nose goes, the camel is sure to follow and, once completely inside your tent, is an awful lot harder to dislodge.

For small technology companies whose product supplants larger and more established competitors, however, a camel’s nose strategy can be highly effective. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

I met with a great little Waterloo, Ontario, company week before last. The CEO told me that some recent publicity around his company had attracted the attention of a couple of very large enterprises, companies the size of which had not been part of his immediate game plan partly because they were already being served by large, well-established vendors and partly because his little company was not quite ready yet to scale to the size that such large customers would require. But nor did he want to pass up the opportunity to showcase his capabilities with such large and promising accounts.

The solution he was pursuing was to position his company as offering a high-value but quite small add-on that would allow these customers to better calculate the higher return on the investment they were already making with their large, established vendors. We hope to eventually displace the incumbents, the CEO told me, but we don’t want to go head to head with them just yet because they’d kill us.

“Brilliant,” I said. “You’re using a camel’s nose strategy.” He looked quizzical, so I explained. Your approach, I said, is to insinuate just a small and seemingly harmless bit of your full capability into the customer’s environment. Even if your competitor notices, they probably won’t see any harm in what you’re doing; indeed, they might even welcome the added impact your little offering adds to theirs. “You’ve stuck your nose into the tent occupied by your competitor,” I said. “Done properly, it’s only a matter of time before you’re wholly inside the tent and your competitor is out on the sand wondering what happened.”

It’s a strategy I’d encourage many new technology ventures to consider. Is there some subset of your whole product offering that constitutes a non-threatening, even complementary, add-on to what your customers’ established vendors already offer? If your prospect buys this initial product offering, what’s the path by which you’re going to gradually get more and more of your product set on board?

I’d love to hear some more examples. What was your camel’s nose strategy, and how well did it work?

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Posted by: Francis Moran on January 26, 2012

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Product marketing, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

How are you writing the story of tomorrow?

chris luebkeman 300x269 How are you writing the story of tomorrow?By Francis Moran

One of my favourite personal-development aphorisms is the phrase, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” On Wednesday, at an event organised by TEC Canada, a peer-to-peer mentoring program for business leaders of which I’ve been a member for more than five years, noted author and thinker Dr. Chris Luebkeman took it one step further.

“Change is constant. The future is fiction. Participation is what shapes our world,” he told 175 CEOs and other business people gathered for the event. “If you’re not participating in writing the story of tomorrow, you’re going to live in a story that someone else wrote.”

While I believe that every period in history could claim that change was happening more swiftly and more dramatically for the people of its time than ever before, I wouldn’t disagree with Luebkeman that today we are faced with an array of heretofore unthinkable trends and events that put a premium on the requirement to think deeply about how we are going to manage and adapt.

In a post-911 world facing almost-unimaginable disruption if even a fraction of the anticipated consequences of global climate change become a reality, “we are going to experience a far-higher frequency of high-impact, low-probability events,” Luebkeman said. We are going to have to be a lot more nimble in our thinking. Unfortunately, as Luebkeman put it, in a world where the unthinkable happens everyday, “fragilities in business and thinking patterns are revealed.”

As part of the event, we were then encouraged to workshop our way through series of change drivers to select those that we thought were most critical for Ontario. Change drivers were categorised as social, technical, environmental, economic or political, with each table analysing a number of drivers in a single category. After a huge amount of discussion and a whittling exercise that saw each table of eight people choose first 10 and then five critical change drivers in their category, we all then voted to further reduce all those suggestions down to a top issue for the entire room in each of the five categories.

Our collective wisdom suggested that Ontario will be most challenged to adapt to population aging, energy infrastructure, alternative fuels, the U.S. economic situation and the U.S. political situation.

It was illuminating how much discussion it took, and what a broad range of issues surfaced at the table-level of analysis in a room that might be expected to be far more homogenous in its perspective. It was equally fascinating to hear Luebkeman share with us the top issues selected by other groups. A gathering of African business leaders, for example, were most concerned about governance and political equality issues, with corruption dominating a word cloud of their results. In Norway, it was environmental issues such as over-fishing and sustainability.

Let me share with you a few more of Luebkeman’s pearls:

  • The population bulge being experienced in almost every society on Earth has profound implications. Population profiles are inverting from “pyramid-shaped” with larger numbers of young people to “coffin-shaped” where disproportionate numbers of older people will have to be supported by fewer and fewer young people. By 2050, most western societies will have 13 dependents per wage earner compared to five dependents per wage earner today. “What will that mean for their standard of living” when a wage earner must spread a single dollar among 13 people rather than five?
  • In just 50 years, Korea has progressed from a peasant-agrarian society that was little more than a food-producing colony of Japan to one of the most advanced societies in the world. “What’s our long-term vision?” Luebkeman asked.
  • “(Canada’s) southern neighbour (is a) pseudo-democratic society where there are oligarchies of just a different sort than in Russia,” the U.S.-born Luebkeman said.

And he ended with a series of questions to which I’d love to hear your answers:

  • If you think education is important, how are you taking individual responsibility, especially for inter-generational knowledge transfer?
  • Do you know where your things are made? How many “makers” do you know?
  • What is your long view? What is your succession plan?
  • Who are you teaching? How are you levering your success?
  • How are you writing the story of tomorrow?

Image: MYOO

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Posted by: Francis Moran on January 20, 2012

Posted in: Uncategorized — 2 Comments

The two-horse race most startups don’t even realise they’re running

20111221 203018 300x214 The two horse race most startups dont even realise theyre runningBy Francis Moran

It is an article of faith that startups need funding.

For most, that means chasing external investors, whether they be friends and fools, angels or venture capitalists. Any CEO who has gone this route knows it can be an almost all-consuming task that gobbles up an inordinate share of that most restricted of resources, time. The biggest risk, besides failing to secure the necessary dollars, is that focus on the most critical objective of a new startup, developing and bringing to market an actual product, can take a back seat whilst the funding search is so fully engaged.

Too many startups fail to realise that there could well be another horse in the race to secure the money necessary to fund a new venture, a horse that is often running neck and neck with potential investors and that could, with a little judicious jockeying, beat the field to be the first past the funding post.

That horse is called your first customers and I am always amazed that so little attention is paid to this option.

For some companies — our early clients that were developing new semiconductors or building new network boxes are obvious examples — the product-development cycle is simply far too protracted to expect a customer that won’t be able to take delivery of finished goods for two or three years or more to pony up much money at the risk-heavy front end of the cycle. But for many others, especially those with shorter development cycles, the benefits are simply far too compelling not to give this option very serious consideration.

As a marketer, the most obvious benefit I see is that getting early customers to help underwrite your product-development process compels a necessarily close fit between that process and real-world market needs. From the outset, you know that you are building something for which someone is willing to pay. Throughout the process, you get feedback at each product iteration from customers with an invested interest in your getting it right. So long as you can avoid the very real danger of building something only one customer wants to buy, you will exit this process with a market-ready product and established customers you can use as critical testimonials and use-cases in the marketing of it.

For entrepreneurs keen to hold onto as much of the value of their startup as possible, getting customers to finance your company has the sweetest of all benefits — it’s non-dilutive.

Are you furiously betting on just one horse to win the funding race for you or have you at least hedged your position by placing a healthy wager on this promising alternative?

Image: Jeffrey Bing

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Posted by: Francis Moran on January 5, 2012

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Posted in: Financing and fundraising, Marketing strategy, Product marketing, Startups, Technology marketing — 2 Comments

Merry Christmas, and best wishes for 2012

DSC 1327 small 300x199 Merry Christmas, and best wishes for 2012By Francis Moran

As is often the case at this time of year, I am reminded of the tiny mission church pictured here. It is located in Roma, a rural village in Lesotho, a tiny country in southern Africa. Besides being the gateway to Lesotho’s majestic mountainous highlands, Roma is also home to both a long-standing Roman Catholic mission and the country’s national university.

And it’s where my family and I celebrated Christmas in 1968.

Less than two months earlier, we had landed in Lesotho, which would be our home for the next four years. We were living in a grotty little hotel in the capital city of Maseru while waiting for a house and so for Christmas that first year, we went to Roma, about an hour’s drive away, to spend the holiday with an aunt who was both a missionary nun and a professor of physics at the university.

As was the case in 1968, this little mission church will be packed to the rafters on Christmas Eve as hundreds of people in this predominately Catholic country celebrate one of that religion’s most holy days. Afterwards, they will gather in the church hall where tables groaning under the weight of food prepared by the nuns for weeks in advance will disappear in no time at all into carrying bags to be brought home to supplement what otherwise would be, for most, a sparse Christmas dinner.

The church was unchanged from what I remembered from my childhood more than 40 years ago, to what I found when I was in Roma just over a year ago and took this picture.

The same can’t be said for Roma or for the rest of Lesotho, with the most critical change over the past decades being the impact on this small country of the global HIV-AIDS epidemic. Lesotho has the unfortunate distinction of having one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. One result is that a brutal swath has been cut through an entire generation, leaving families of children to raise themselves or to be raised by aging grandmothers.

Those who follow this blog know that for more than five years now, we have been enthusiastic supporters of Help Lesotho, an Ottawa-based charity that works with orphans, at-risk youth and grandmothers through grassroots, community-based programs that are building a foundation for long-term and sustainable change. As we have for the past five years, we will be making a donation to Help Lesotho in lieu of sending cards or gift baskets to our clients, suppliers and friends.

As is also usually the case at this time of year, we will not be at work between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We will have posts up tomorrow and Friday but our blog will also take a holiday next week. I’d like to take this opportunity to wish a very merry Christmas and the very best of 2012 to all our readers, our clients and our friends in the technology communities in which we work.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on December 21, 2011

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Posted in: Random thoughts — 1 Comment

New OCRI CEO shares his vision: Part 1

OCRI CMYK 300x116 New OCRI CEO shares his vision: Part 1By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

It’s fairly safe to say that I struck a loud chord with my post of a few weeks ago that took Ottawa’s major economic development agency to task for preferring cheerleading from the sidelines to playmaking that would actually move the ball down the field. It wasn’t quite the best-read post of all time; it ran on American Thanksgiving, a day that saw our blog lose most of our south-of-the-border readers who typically account for about one-third of our daily visitors. But it did garner one of the highest PostRank scores of all time, a yardstick that measures levels of engagement — comments, tweets and the like — around posts. With the exception of comments from the new OCRI CEO and from the head of OCRI’s marketing agency of record — neither of whom is exactly what you might call a dispassionate observer — every comment, tweet and other reaction I received applauded my characterisation and concurred with it. Some went even further with my analogy, with, for example, one widely involved local angel investor telling me yesterday that far from simply standing on the sidelines cheering, OCRI has often stepped onto the field to take the ball away and out of play from entrepreneurs and others who are trying to score real goals for the technology sector in this community.

Bruce Lazenby photo 1 214x300 New OCRI CEO shares his vision: Part 1In a long telephone chat the day after my post ran, new OCRI CEO Bruce Lazenby didn’t argue with much of what I had written. Indeed, he told me, in the two weeks between the time he knew he was taking on the job and the time it was publicly announced, he conducted what he called some “mystery shopping,” asking people far and wide in the community what they thought of OCRI. “You must have been just appalled by what you heard,” I said, and he didn’t disagree. Nor did he disagree with my statement that OCRI was “a terribly tarnished brand.”

However…

Lazenby made it clear in that call and a couple of subsequent conversations that everything I wrote about, and particularly the comments I attributed to a senior OCRI representative who criticised economic development agencies in Kitchener-Waterloo, were already or would, under his watch, soon become very much a thing of the past. He persuaded me that as the new guy at the top of an organisation with increased funding and a reshaped mandate, he would be sweeping clean with a very new brush indeed.

It all sounded so good to me that I offered to come in and interview him about his plans for OCRI. He took me up on the offer. And so my blog managing editor, Leo Valiquette, and I sat down with Lazenby for about an hour earlier this week at OCRI’s new offices on Aberdeen Street in Little Italy. Following is part one of a two-part series of extracts, edited for space and cohesion, from the question-and-answer session we had with him.

The strengths and weaknesses of OCRI’s relationship with the technology community of Ottawa

When we asked Lazenby about how OCRI has been regarded by the local technology community, he made the valid point that the community is not homogenous. It is divided into two broad groups, he said, and OCRI has done a better job of serving one than the other.

The first is the middle-aged crowd of individuals with more established businesses who make those breakfast events in the west end. The second is made up of the 20 and 30 somethings who favour the Market.

“With the older crowd, it’s 7 o’clock in the morning at the Marshes,” Lazenby said. “With that (younger) crowd, it’s 7 o’clock at night at a bar in the Market – we’d better know that … one of our challenges in the early part of 2012 is to rethink that whole thing.”

He acknowledged that OCRI has done a good job of catering to that older crowd by running the same event programs, steered by the same executive committees. However, the outcome has been lack of fresh blood as the younger crowd take matters into their own hands to create networking events more to their liking.

OCRI does not necessarily have to bring these two communities together, which probably wouldn’t even be practical or productive, Lazenby said. Rather, the organisation must understand how it can better serve both communities and reshape its programs and services accordingly.

“I went to meet Harley and Toby (Harley Finkelstein, Tobias Lütke of Shopify) in their office a month ago and they basically gave me shit for 20 minutes,” Lazenby said. “They said, ‘Where have you been, why aren’t you paying attention to us? Why do we have to go to Montreal to join Founder Fuel when what we would really like to do is have something here that we can participate in?’ OK, shame on us for not creating opportunity for them to do that here. So that’s some of what we’re going to try and do.”

There are several facets to the issue, Lazenby said. First, how should OCRI create opportunities for beneficial linkages between these two communities? Second, what message should it take to each community and through what platforms, such as social media? Third, how must it rethink its relationship with other programs and initiatives that have sprung up across the city to fill the gaps others have seen in its programs?

From cold shoulder to collaboration

It is no secret that, in the past, OCRI has given other networking programs and business incubator efforts a cool reception. Not only will this change, Lazenby said, it already has.

“I met Ian Graham (of TheCodeFactory). He came into my office, sat down and I said, ‘Ian, my objective is not to put you out of business. My objective is to try and help you find more business.’ I had the same conversation with Bruce Firestone (of Exploriem.org), and with Tony Bailetti (of Carleton’s Lead to Win program). (This week), there are about eight of us getting together … and we’re going to look at the programs they are running, and we are going to say, ‘How can we complement that?’”

He acknowledged that OCRI has done a poor job of collaboration in the past to steer companies that were not a good fit for its programs, such as those offered through the Regional Innovation Centre (RIC), to other organizations in town such as TheCodeFactory or Exploriem.org. But this lack of collaboration has been an issue within OCRI as well. For example, if a life sciences startup came into the RIC, little effort was made to connect its founders with mentorship or other support from experienced individuals who were part of the Life Sciences Cluster.

Lazenby is also considering how that collaborative approach can also be applied to what could be considered the third community of Ottawa’s technology sector – post-secondary students. In a recent conversation with the dean of engineering at Carleton, Lazenby said he was shocked to learn there are 4,600 undergrads in just that one university’s various engineering programs.

“That is a huge cohort of people coming our way,” he said. “If we want to make sure they stay here and start businesses, we have to reach into the universities and get a hold of these guys. I met the president of the (Carleton) student association. He said that, just that day, the student entrepreneurial council had come to him and talked about how they could better manage their entrepreneurial desire within Carleton. You know what? I am pretty sure we never knew that organization existed and I know from his reaction that he didn’t know that we existed. So how do we reach into that community?”

At last, a startup accelerator centre for Ottawa

Lazenby is confident that OCRI has already made great strides in the right direction with its recent relocation to a more central location at 80 Aberdeen St., which also houses a number of technology companies, the Ottawa office of Celtic House Venture Partners, and representatives of other programs such as Ontario Centres of Excellence and IRAP.

The next big thing on the agenda is OCRI’s accelerator centre, which will offer 75 seats for use by qualifying startup companies. The call for applications is expected to be issued before the end of December. Bailetti is already filling 30 of those seats with young people from his program at Carleton.

The key to any successful accelerator, however, is the right blend of resources, mentorship and performance metrics to weed out the non-performers.

While the precise details are still to be ironed out, Lazenby says the model will likely be that participating companies get their room and board for free, (which includes work and meeting space, and office services) and pay a sliding scale for access to a range of professional services and mentorship, including finance, legal and banking. The program will be delivered by a mix of volunteer mentors and paid staff made possible through funding from the City of Ottawa.

“This program is going to say ‘customized to each company,’” Lazenby said. “It’s going to be a very aggressive program. So we’re not looking at companies that want to come in and vegetate. We’re looking at companies that want to come in and grow like crazy.”

While there will be no fixed limit on how long a startup can reside in the accelerator centre, it will be considered mandatory for them to partake of the mentorship and professional services being offered. They will also be subject to quarterly performance metrics. If they fail too many metrics a couple of quarters in a row, they are out.

While a certain number of companies will fade away due to lack of funding or failure to meet their marks, the preferred outcome, of course, is that they successfully graduate and need to relocate to accommodate their growth.

“The fly in the ointment here is going to be the financing,” Lazenby said.

In Part 2, we will talk more about Lazenby’s to do list for addressing Ottawa’s funding gap, how OCRI will work to support later-stage technology companies and how the organization will measure its success.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on December 15, 2011

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Posted in: Startups, Technology marketing, Uncategorized — Leave a comment

I’m sick and tired of hearing that Canadians don’t take risks

oh optimistic 300x145 Im sick and tired of hearing that Canadians dont take risksBy Francis Moran

More than two decades ago, I was working with a public relations agency in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that was helping a resource development company counter considerable opposition within fishing communities to its proposal to drill exploratory natural gas wells on Georges Bank. It was a classic case of a clash between a critically important but fading industry — the fishery — and a new and incredibly promising industry — offshore hydrocarbon extraction. We mounted an open and consultative information campaign in the fishing communities most dependent on Georges Bank. We held countless meetings in and around those communities. We hired a local lad, the son of a fishing family, who had become a geologist and had worked in oil and gas exploration to head up our community efforts. And we organised a critical political gathering — a dinner in Halifax to which we invited scores of influential business, political and community leaders to hear directly from the company CEO.

I wasn’t at the dinner but my colleagues told me what happened and I am paraphrasing in the quotes below.

The CEO, almost a caricature of the good old boy cigar-chomping American oilman, got to his feet after desert and, as part of his prepared comments, told the assembled dignitaries, “The problem with you’all is you don’t know how to take risk.”

The CEO of one of the world’s largest fish-processing companies was in the audience and he rose angrily to his feet. “My people have been going to sea for six generations, putting their lives on the line in small boats on the North Atlantic to harvest this resource,” he practically sputtered. “Don’t you dare tell me we don’t know how to take risks.” He stormed out of the room, taking with him a good chunk of the crowd and pretty much any chance our client now had of winning political support for its plans. (The federal and Nova Scotia governments shortly thereafter declared a 25-year moratorium on hydrocarbon exploration on Georges Bank and last year, they extended the ban for a further three years “to allow for more study.”)

I am always reminded of this story when I hear people in the technology sector and elsewhere in the Canadian economy repeat this shibboleth that Canadians don’t know how to take risks. In Deloitte’s recent report on productivity in Canada, ”business leader risk aversion” was cited as one of “six key issues that are having a significant impact on productivity.” The report said that Canadian and American executives “self-report levels of risk tolerance that are very similar” but that there is still an “action gap” that leaves Canadian business leaders less likely to invest in “activities that are required to improve productivity.”

I’m not sure I’m buying the cause-and-effect connection Deloitte is seeing here.

For as long as the Canadian dollar wallowed near the bottom of the global currency-exchange tables, it simply cost Canadian companies a great deal more than their international competitors to buy new machinery, invest in new processes, acquire new technology or recruit world-class talent. Now that our currency is on a resource-driven tear that has slashed the margins of export-oriented companies, the cash for such investments can only be far more difficult to find.

More critically, though, there are structural issues that go to the heart of the risk-reward calculation at play here. One area of Canada’s economy where we clearly have managed to get those structures right is in resource exploration and extraction. There can be no riskier venture than drilling a well or digging a hole in the ground in the hope that profitable quantities of a resource will be found. Our tax and investment structures in this sector have been so well optimised over the years that Canada is a world leader in the raising of capital to finance this most-risky of economic activity. And global mining and energy exploration companies flock to our public markets to raise the risk capital they need to go find and exploit new deposits. Imagine if investments in technology startups could enjoy the same highly tax-efficient status as the flow-through share structure at the heart of much of Canada’s burgeoning resource sector.

So don’t you dare tell me Canadians don’t know how to take risks.

Fortunately, this is not a universal mindset. I was surprised and delighted last month when I heard Google Canada managing director Chris O’Neill speak at AccelerateTO, a day-long mini-conference bringing together technology entrepreneurs and investors. Like me, O’Neill looks at the resource sector and says it is “bullshit” that Canadians are risk averse. What we do lack, he said and I agree, is a culture that both instills entrepreneurial values and publicly rewards them. “We need to embrace entrepreneurship (in Canada) like we do hockey,” O’Neill said. Like hockey, a new national obsession needs to cover everything from the minor leagues — school programs that teach kids that entrepreneurship is a career path — all the way up to the professional levels where entrepreneurial leaders and heroes are celebrated.

A new Canadian charity is in the process of being formed that will tackle a lot of this culture-building challenge. I’m hugely impressed by the energy, dynamism and vision of Victoria Lennox and her ambitious plans for Startup Canada, and I’ve agreed to help where I can as Startup Canada seeks to “celebrate, inspire and accelerate” entrepreneurship in Canada. I’ll be writing more about this over the next weeks and months.

Image: Robert Saric

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Posted by: Francis Moran on December 5, 2011

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Posted in: Startups — 1 Comment

Cheerleaders don’t move the ball down the field

5432620.bin 300x193 Cheerleaders dont move the ball down the fieldBy Francis Moran

When the British Columbia Lions and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers meet in the 99th staging of the Grey Cup, Canada’s professional football championship, in Vancouver this Sunday, both teams will have squads of cheerleaders jumping and shouting from the sidelines in a loud and colourful effort to get the B.C. Place crowd roaring for their side. But while the young women in short skirts waving pompoms might be interesting for some to look at, nothing that they do is actually going to move the ball even a single yard down the field. They will score not a single point. Their contribution to the spectacle will not be captured in a single game statistic.

This morning, I was at the second event in as many weeks where the whole game plan seemed to be on pumping up the volume of the cheerleading rather than on the fundamentals of moving the ball down the field.

Speaker after speaker at these two events — last week’s kick off to Ottawa Entrepreneur Week and this morning’s regular monthly execTALKS event, both organised by the Ottawa Centre for Regional Innovation — spoke of the imperative that more “buzz” be created around Ottawa’s moribund technology scene as though sheer enthusiasm alone could overcome the very real challenges that face this critical sector of the local economy.

Now, don’t get me wrong; both events were hugely successful if measured by the size of the turnout and the energy of the participants. Like many others who said as much, I haven’t been at such high-energy and well-subscribed Ottawa tech events since the heydays of the late 1990s and early 2000s. And full kudos to OCRI and its new chief executive Bruce Lazenby for making every good effort to reboot that sense that we can make great things happen here in Ottawa.

I fear, however, that the cheerleading is drawing attention away from just how badly our team is actually performing on the field, and what needs to be done to turn that around. In a somewhat frightening three-part series in the Ottawa Citizen this past weekend, veteran Ottawa tech writer James Bagnall detailed how the region has lost about 40 percent of its high-tech jobs over the past four years, with employment levels in the sector threatening to tumble further to the disastrous lows of the post-telecom-meltdown years.

More tellingly, we have lost ground to nearly every other significant technology cluster in the country. Over the same four years, tech-related employment has jumped more than 50 percent in Kitchener-Waterloo, more than nine percent in Toronto and about six percent in Calgary. Vancouver and Montreal have, like Ottawa, lost tech jobs but their decline has been nowhere near as steep as ours.

The second and third articles in Bagnall’s series sounded a more optimistic note with their profile of the next generation of entrepreneurs who are igniting Ottawa’s tech scene and a good prescription for what is needed to pull the region out of its profound slump. But these are still grim times. And yet, talk to some of the folk who turned out for the two events and to some senior OCRI people and you’d swear Bagnall was making stuff up and that the K-W region was mired in hopelessness. For example, many people I spoke to this morning dismissed out of hand the factual underpinning of the Citizen series in favour of a shoot-the-messenger attitude.

More critically, I recently had to listen to a very senior representative of OCRI tell a group I belong to that economic development in the K-W region is a dysfunctional mishmash of disconnected organisations that can’t work together to get anything done. By not being able to get anything done, he must have been referring to the Accelerator Centre that in five short years has graduated startups that have generated over $20-million in sales, raised $40-million in external funding and created more than 400 permanent jobs. By not being able to get anything done, he must have been referring to the Communitech Hub where startups, student entrepreneurs, established companies and the cream of the continent’s venture capitalists regularly collide in a process that, as previously stated, has driven a 50 percent increase in regional tech employment. By not being able to get anything done, he must have been referring to the innovative Velocity entrepreneurship residence at the University of Waterloo where a dozen or more student startups are incubated every single semester.

All these accomplishments might have been lost on the OCRI rep who spoke to my group but they most certainly were not lost on Deloitte Canada’s vice chair and Americas managing director of consulting Bill Currie, who was the speaker at this morning’s event. In the question-and-answer session that followed his thoughtful and provocative presentation of a seminal Deloitte study on the Canadian productivity gap, Currie praised the Communitech Hub and other efforts in Kitchener-Waterloo and said they were exactly what we needed to replicate in Ottawa.

I’m sure this post will do nothing to temper whatever reputation I might have as a nay-sayer and perpetual critic. It would be unfortunate if that were the lens through which what I’ve just written was viewed. I have lived in Ottawa for nearly 25 years. I have founded companies, created jobs and contributed wealth to this community. My PR agency over its 13 years has contributed thousands of pro bono hours to almost every technology group going, including OCRI. Ottawa is my home and it’s where my business and most of my employees are located. Unlike many in my sector, I have not fled for the safe harbour of government work as the tech sector has had its ups and downs. I am as committed as anyone in this city to the goal of seeing Ottawa thrive as a centre of innovation, technology and job creation. But we can’t let our enthusiasm for that objective blind us to the reality that we have been drastically losing ground and we need to reverse that trend. Building up our city doesn’t require that we tear down what others are doing; it requires that we study their successes and adopt the best bits for ourselves. And most of all, it means we must recognise that cheerleading is no substitute for a solid playbook full of fundamental strategies that are going to move the ball decisively down the field and into the end zone.

Photo: Vancouver Sun

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Posted by: Francis Moran on November 24, 2011

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Posted in: Startups, Technology marketing — 9 Comments

Masterclasses in entrepreneurship

EWlogo 300x73 Masterclasses in entrepreneurshipBy Francis Moran

Two of the many events at last week’s Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Week featured presentations by young entrepreneurs who were generous in the sharing of personal stories and business and life lessons learned. Ryan Blair is a self-confessed former hoodlum and street-gang member who eventually embraced “legal entrepreneurship” and has built and exited a couple of companies. Y Combinator general partner Garry Tan shared his journey from “born employee” to reluctant entrepreneur and the lessons he learned along the way.

Here are a few of the things I heard that I really liked.

“You have to figure out what the customer is afraid of and become a solution.”

Several times in his presentation, Ryan returned to the theme of listening to customers and building what they’re looking for. I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. This synched very well with Garry’s statement, “Most things are solved very poorly.” The key nugget here is, don’t go building something before you’ve figured out if anyone needs it. The good thing, as Garry noted, is that there’s a lot of opportunity to build things people need or to fix things that were built badly in the first place.

To put his conviction on this point to the test, Ryan said he “went and sat in my customers’ homes and had dinner with them” so he could understand exactly how to reach them.

“Be a contrarian. Conventional wisdom is useless to an entrepreneur.”

In searching for that problem to solve, an entrepreneur has to be way out in front of the curve. If a problem is already in the news, “it’s too late for an entrepreneur,” Garry said.

Setting and constantly measuring goals “is the number one reason for my success.”

Any regular reader of this blog will know that I am a measurement fanatic. Here’s the key thing about goals, however, something that I think Ryan also understood: They’re not a guarantee of anything and failing to hit them ought not to be an excuse for blame and finger-pointing. Rather, they are yardsticks against which we measure progress. If you don’t set them in the first place, you have no such measurement tool available and how the heck do you know if you’ve arrived if you never decided where you were trying to get to in the first place? And failing to hit them — either by over or under-achieving — calls for analysis of the assumptions on which they were based and an assessment of the activities that were undertaken in support of achieving them.

“The only thing that really matters is actually building stuff.”

While this gem came from Garry, both he and Ryan repeatedly sounded the mantra, get’er done. In Garry’s case, the key point is that you can learn entrepreneurship only by doing it. In Ryan’s case, it was a call to action. “It’s real easy to make sense of the world by making excuses,” he said, with a clear reference to a drug-dealing father and misdirected teenage years that would have given him ample reason to continue wallowing. When things go wrong, redouble your efforts. Ryan, who had days of runway left before turning around his current enterprise, said, “When you’re faced with extinction, it’s real easy to get disciplined.”

“The competition can copy us, [we] just can’t [let them] catch us.”

Don’t worry if competitors follow your lead, Ryan said. In fact, if no one tries to copy what you’re doing, you’re probably not doing anything terribly worthwhile. As a previous advisor of mine once said, you are never so vulnerable as when you are incredibly successful because that’s when lots of new entrants — or, worse, big companies with far more vast resources — will enter your market. They key, as Ryan said, is to stay ahead of those copycats and new entrants.

“Do everything.”

I loved this short quip from Garry. He told marketers to crack that Ruby on Rails book and expand their understanding of how code is written and products are developed. Similarly, he counselled designers and developers to put themselves inside a marketer’s head and “worry about how people are actually going to use the product.”

“The really dangerous thing about (business school)…is that people come out and just want to manage and advise.”

While I don’t fully agree with this statement by Garry — I know lots of business school graduates who are hands-on operators who get the job done — there is a danger that entrepreneurs will surround themselves with too many advisors and spend too much time and money on counsel instead of focusing on execution. At the same time, however, when entrepreneurial startups grow up, they need professional management, something for which not all entrepreneurs are well suited.

“Fanatical customer support.”

Any regular reader of this blog knows that a core belief of mine is that superior customer experience is the only sustainable competitive differentiator. Startups must hive all the closer to this wisdom; those first customers will make or break the entire venture depending on how well they are treated.

[I am grateful to Communitech live bloggers @TerreChartrand and @ajreinhart for tweeting some of the nuggets I used here.]

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Posted by: Francis Moran on November 17, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Startups, Technology marketing — 1 Comment

Marketing: Steady as she goes

Vourekas Captain on his ship LC G39 5673 007... painting artwork print 212x300 Marketing: Steady as she goesBy Francis Moran

If there’s one thing more difficult than persuading technology company executives they need a well-researched, well-funded, coherent and integrated marketing strategy, it’s persuading them to stick to that strategy.

Now, I’m not saying that course corrections aren’t in order as market winds buffet and blow. But in the main, once a strategy has been properly developed, persistent and steady adherence to the objectives, messaging and tactics it sets out is essential if the company is to arrive at its desired destination — more leads, higher sales and improved revenue and profit.

When I first came to Ottawa more than 20 years ago, the best part of my practice was researching and developing comprehensive integrated communications strategies for large national federal-government programs. I relished the intellectual and professional challenge of coming to grips with the audiences, issues and messages, and then solving what was often a millions-of-dollars puzzle crafting the right mix of communications programming within an established budget that would support the government’s objectives on a major public policy initiative. Then, the program would go into implementation and all hell would break loose. I did not work on a single program where the strategy was faithfully followed. A multi-million-dollar government communications program could be thrown entirely off course by a single afternoon’s Question Period, or by a minister or powerful political aide simply saying, “I think we should do this.” All the research, objective rationale and programming could go flying out the window on little more than a whim. No wonder I don’t toil in those fields any longer.

Even without the political and public-policy vicissitudes of government communications, however, technology company executives are still prone to what my wife and fellow marketing strategist calls “shiny object syndrome,” that tendency of attention-challenged individuals to be frequently distracted by the latest new thing they’ve read or heard about. The tendency also expresses itself in their inability to resist recommending random changes to campaign ideas and copy. And it is typified by those early-morning conversations we’ve all had with clients and bosses that start with that dreaded phrase, “I had an idea last night…”

So how do marketing executives, who are the navigators on these ships of commerce and venture, keep their captains steering the wise and sensible course that was mapped out before we ever left port? It ain’t easy, but here are a few key pointers.

Make sure the map is a good one from the outset

This sounds obvious, but it often isn’t so. If your client or CEO can’t see how the strategy you have developed is actually going to accomplish the sales and revenue objectives that have been set for the company, she or he is going to be reluctant to sail where you want the ship to go. A good map makes it clear that you understand where the company needs to go and how your marketing objectives support the broader corporate objectives. Most critically, it makes it clear, through objective business-case rational and not with mushy marketing doublespeak, that what you propose is going to accomplish what you say it will.

Make sure there are clear signposts along the way

It takes a long time to sail across an ocean and it takes a long time to charter a company from product development through to customers and revenue. Just as sailors will lose all hope and stage a mutiny if they can’t be certain they are going to make landfall before provisions run out, so, too, will your client lose faith if there aren’t clear indications that you’re sailing in the right direction and making good progress in exchange for the resources you’ve been given. While leads and revenue are the ultimate yardsticks of progress, your strategy needs to incorporate intermediate milestones that will demonstrate to your captain that everything is still on the right track. At the outset, these yardsticks measure nothing more than activity levels, which at least reassures executives that the right level of effort is being expended. At some early point, however, progress needs to be measured in other areas. Is web traffic up? Are we meeting with greater numbers of prospects at trade shows and events? Are the media paying attention to our story? Is our social media community growing and are we engaging with it? Keep hitting the intermediate milestones your strategy established and your captain and crew will continue to have faith in your navigational skills.

Stick to the plan, certainly, but maintain some flexibility

What happens if market forces blow you off course or an economic downturn leaves you marooned in the doldrums? How are you going to get back on course and regain momentum? A good navigator can read the signs and course correct as necessary, and the same holds true for marketing strategists. The early-warning systems I talked about in the previous point will tell you, before anyone else cops on, that things are or are not working out as you expected them to. You need to be incredibly well-tuned to such signs as well as to intelligence coming in from your salesforce and from other sources of good market information, and be able to suggest refinements and new tactics that will keep your program on course.

Don’t hesitate to monger a little fear

Sailing into previously uncharted waters is something we ask our clients and CEOs to do all the time when we propose new ways of doing things that the company hasn’t tried before. Before we propose such a course, though, we still need to have a persuasive case that it’s the right thing to do. That’s a whole lot different from making a random tack in an unknown direction, which is effectively what we’re being asked to consider when executives who lack marketing savvy suggest, “Let’s try this.” In such an instance, if there is no rational for such a move, or if it defies and works against the strategy that has been developed and agreed upon, don’t hesitate to ring an alarm bell. Redraw the map for everyone. Remind them where we’re trying to go and how this map will get us there. And warn them that going elsewhere on a whim or a fancy is dangerous. In the words of mapmakers of old, “There be demons.”

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Posted by: Francis Moran on November 3, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Technology marketing — Leave a comment