If there was a near-perfect analogy for all businesses, it would be the lemonade stand. Did you ever play the computer game growing up or did you ever operate a lemonade stand? It was pretty easy to get, right? Buy cups, buy lemonade, build a stand, advertise, and sell for more than it cost - make money. Shouldn

Striving for excellence in your business is absolutely critical in this environment. There are too many average companies out there. They are struggling. Excellence is hard to execute, but if you do execute - it becomes a huge competitive advantage. Here are some of my thoughts for creating and sustaining an excellent company:

1) Operational Excellence. Transparency is key. Do you have a dashboard? Do you know what

This is the 1st post in series written by Jason Cohen on the topic: Joy of Honesty in Business.

It’s always been popular to work on new projects while still employed, but the current global recession makes this idea even more attractive.

Bill Bryant, a Seattle area Partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, forwarded this “startup survival guide” this morning to the Seattle Tech Startup email list, with the following comment:

One of the partners at DFJ (based in Brazil of all places) pulled together this pragmatic, balanced set of tips and strategies to survive the lean year(s) of 2009. While it doesn’t apply to every situation, I wanted to share this with entrepreneurs on this list. Pass it on if you feel so inclined.

It is my pleasure to announce we have completed our search and identified a new Executive Director for NWEN.

Saw this at BizLaunch.ca and WOW did it resonate! Here are 15 signs that you’re probably an entrepreneur:

1. You business is your life and hobby
2. You often do and then think
3. You don’t like being told what to do
4. You often have dreams about your business
5. You constantly find ways to innovate everything
6. You hate small talk
7. You don’t REALLY read long contracts even though you say you did and recommend people should
8. You

Common marketing wisdom is: Benefits sell, features don’t.

Benefits are what the customer wants; features are merely the means to the end. Customers are interested in “saving money” or “saving time” or being “easier to use;” features aren’t interesting until the customer understands and wants the benefits. Everyone says so.

My instinct is opposite. But, not wanting to second-guess tradition, I’ve dutifully fought my instincts at the behest of marketing and sales gurus. Since the first advertisements at Smart Bear I’ve had conversations like this:

Guru: Why is this here: “Integrates with version control systems.”

Me: That’s one of our features.

Guru: Say I’m a customer. Why do I care that you integrate with those things?

Me: Well normally you have to collect files for review by hand, but with this integration we can collect the files for you. So a mundane, 5-minute task reduces to a few seconds.

Guru: So it’s going to save me time?

Me: Yes, and doing it by hand is error-prone and it’s boring and …

Guru: OK, OK, but mainly it saves time.

Me: Yes, it saves time.

Guru: Fine, than that’s the benefit. “Saves time.” I don’t care yet how it works, just tell me how it will help me.

Me: So that’s it? Just write “Saves time?”

Guru: How about “Cuts 80% of the time out of starting a review.” That will grab my attention.

We’d do this with each of my feature points in the ad. So what started out as:

• Integrates with version control systems
• Threaded chat in context with code
• Automated metrics and reports

Turned into:

• Saves time
• Easier to manage than email
• Eliminates manual tasks

Looking back now over the last five years and considering what worked best for us, this technique still doesn’t seem right to me because these benefit statements eliminate the interesting, unique properties of our product. Claims like “Saves time,” “Easier to use,” “Automates tasks,” these are things that almost all software promises to do. Although these might indeed be the ultimate benefits, it’s the same message as everyone else. I suppose I could claim “Saves more time than competitor X,” but is that really the strongest message I have?

I agree that customers are interested in end results. Furthermore they need to picture themselves using the product and achieving those results. TV advertisers have long recognized the power of visualization; nearly every TV ad shows someone using and enjoying the results of the product.

But statements like “easy to use” are completely unhelpful in visualization. Even if you trump it up as “Cut code review time in half,” I still cannot picture how that’s going to happen. If I’m already a skeptical person — quite likely with our target audience — I might not wait around for you to explain it.

If your potential customers are experiencing pain, they’ll automatically see how the feature achieves the benefit. Our customers already know code review incurs busywork and can be a huge waste of time. If I say “Writes reports for you” or “Collects metrics automatically” or “Packages and delivers code with one click,” it’s clear that the benefit is to save time and help with chores, but now you can visualize exactly how.

Jason Cohen wrote this post and allowed us to syndicate it. He is the founder of Smart Bear Software, maker of Code Collaborator, the world’s most popular tool for peer code review and recent winner of the Jolt Award.

As I

One of my biggest pet peeves is signing that check each month for our office lease. I might be ticking off my landlord and my commercial real estate agent, but talk about something that I perceive is a high fixed expense that doesn