The MBET Experience

Wow, I am on a roll posting today. Something I heard in a presentation skills class that I took a while back was that the best presenters are the ones who tell the best stories.

That theme came up again today. Our speaker talked about entrepreneurs and story telling. You need to have a compelling story to sell customers, investors, and even yourself on your business. The business plan is a story! Just like when presenting, to be successful in business, you’ve got to be a great storyteller!

According to this afternoon’s speaker, the two most important things to define when starting your business are:

1) The Customer
2) Your Value Proposition

While this may seem simple, not having a clear definition of these two things is one of the biggest causes of failure for a startup business! Know your customer, and what it is that compels them to buy your product!

Click here for an article from Canadian Business about the MBET program. This is a couple years old, but interesting. I really like the line: “Students say they spend an average of 12 hours a day in their basement classroom. They attend lectures from nine to five and work late into the evening on assignments for courses in accounting, marketing and operations management.”

I’d say 12 hours a day might be underestimating things. 🙂

“They say that entrepreneurs never see problems, they only see solutions.”

A couple of months ago someone showed me this website, the Million Dollar Homepage. We are talking about “screen real-estate” in E-Business class, and how the screen can be broken up into different areas, each of which can then be sold to advertisers. I immediately thought of the Million Dollar Homepage – the creator went even further when dividing up his advertising space and sold off the real estate by the individual pixel!! At $1 per pixel, and 1024×1024 pixels, this website really is worth more than a million bucks!! Pure genius!!

My friend James just sent me a link to his friend’s blog, and a post titled “Best Job Description Ever”. Check it out here, it’s pretty funny. I’ll have to post job descriptions like that when I’m running a company.

Earlier today, just after we finished writing our law exam (which I think went alright), our practicum project groups were posted. I don’t think I’ve talked about the practicum much yet. This is our major project for the year, the MBET equivalent of a thesis. The general idea is that we get involved in the commercialization of a new technology – developing business plans, performing market research, and creating implementation or go-to-market plans.

This year, a number of outside parties had approached CBET with projects for us to work on. In addition to these projects, a number of students pitched their own ideas as potential projects. I presented one of my ideas, but it did not get chosen. This was mainly due to the fact that it’s the kind thing I could start with little outside investment – I think they wanted projects that will involve funding and a more complex startup process, where we’ll really get to learn a lot. In the end, two out of ten projects presented by students were selected, to go along with seven projects brought to us by local comapnies or faculty members of the local universities.

In previous years, I think there has been more than a little bit of controversy over the formation of practicum teams. This year, it was decided that the faculty would select the final teams. Once the list of projects was nailed down a couple weeks ago, we received more detailed descriptions of each project, and were asked to submit our choices last Friday. Our rankings, combined with our background and experience, would be used by the project supervisors to put us into teams. That’s definitely not a task I would have wanted – you’re never going to make everyone happy!!

From talking with people in the class, I got the feeling that people were a little nervous about the whole process. This is going to be a big project, and people were rightfully concerned about who they’d be working with and what they’d be working on. Today our groups were finally announced. I got my second choice. I was a little disappointed in not getting my top pick, but the project I ended up with offers me a great chance to learn about an entirely new industy, which is why I’m here. I believe a lot of people had this one quite high on their lists, so I feel pretty lucky. I’m looking forward to getting into it!

I know there were some disappointed people, but overall, I think the process for putting us into teams was fair. Over half the class got their top choice, and over 3/4 got one of their top two choices. Having the supervisors select the teams also helped ensure that there was some balance between technical and non-technical people on each project. I am part of a team of four, and we seem to have a good mix of talents.

I’ve started a new category for the practicum project, so follow along as we work on them throughout the year!

PS – I have been deliberately vague on what we are working on, because all these projects are new technologies being commercialized. I’m sure I would be violating our group NDA policy by describing the projects in detail on this blog!

PPS – If anyone from the class reading this thinks I’ve come anywhere close to breaking our NDA, please let me know and I will remove this!

Wow… October’s over. What a wild month. And we’re in the middle of a crazy-busy week. Eight hours of solid class yesterday and today, each with a TON of reading. Made for a rough E-Business class today, since there were a lot of people (myself included) who did not have a chance to read the case that we spent the majority of class discussing. It’s too bad, because it was an interesting case and we probably should have had more stimulating discussion than we did.

Right now (it’s 1am) I am procrastinating from studying for our law mid-term tomorrow and am posting on here instead – so at least that’s semi-productive! I have one more chapter to review, then look over last year’s test. Going to be a late night, I think. Just once I’d like to be finished studying for a test at 10pm and have a good night’s sleep! I don’t think it’s happened since I was about 13 years old though, so I should probably just forget about it…

I’ve been told that this is the busiest few weeks of the year, and it’s proved true so far. There’s a lot going on, with a couple more smaller assignments and presentations due over the weekend (yes, they make things due on Sunday nights), and then Phase 3 of our big accounting project due next Friday. For some reason I see a lot of late nights coming up… but that’s what makes it fun, right?

Anyway, all you future MBETer’s – get your sleep in September because you don’t get much of it in October!!

Every week, there’s at least one or two things that I pick up from this program that really make me think of things in a different way. Here’s an example from our Strategy reading this week.

The article, “Marketing Malpractice” quotes Harvard professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The authors then state that customers “hire a product” to do a job for them. Instead of focusing on market segments and demographics, marketers should focus on the jobs customers need to do, and position their products accordingly.

This approach results in creating “purpose brands” – a brand of product that is tightly associated with the job it is meant to be hired for. Examples include:

• FedEx – the “I-need-to-send-this-from-here to there with-perfect-certainty-as-fast-as-possible” job
• eBay – “help-me-sell-my-stuff” job
• Swiffer – the “I-need-to-clean-my-floors” job

I found it to be an interesting read, and this approach of looking at the job a customer needs to do really hit home. It definitely helped me look at creating and positioning new products in a different light!

Full Article (Harvard Business Review – December 2005)

Wow… I actually got comments on a post! I like it!!

In case you don’t read the comments, Martin said: “I think that the #1 role of the CEO, far more than the other roles is to be the leader and the closer when it comes to Sales and Marketing.”

This got me thinking and I added my own response. You can view all comments here. Feel free to add your own thoughts as well!