Archive for January, 2010
Valuation Roundtable Part Two
Posted by: | CommentsIn the second session of our Valuation Roundtable with Gary Graco, partner at Nexia ASR, Scott Kilmartin entrepreneur and founder of Haul, and David Eedle, co-founder of Arts Hub and various other online businesses talk to Fiona Boyd co-author of Niche Content Millionaire about different ways of valuing an entrepreneurial business and also discuss the recent sale of an online business.
Gary, Scott and David join Fiona Boyd again next week for the third part of the Valuation Roundtable.
Brand and the startup transcription
Posted by: | CommentsBrand advocate, Michel Hogan from Brandology talks to Fiona Boyd about the difficulties of trying to identify and establish your ‘brand’ at the startup of your new business. This is a transcription of the original videopost entitled “Brand and the startup“.
Fiona: Today I’d like to welcome Michel Hogan from Brandology, who walks and talks brand and knows all there is to know about businesses and brand, I reckon. Thanks for coming in Michel.
Michel: Wow, what an intro, thank you.
Fiona: You’ve been a brand consultant for a long time. Maybe you can tell me exactly what one’s brand actually is. What is it really?
Michel: Sure…well, actually, one of the things that I call myself rather than a consultant is an advocate, and one of the reasons I do that…
Fiona: An advocate’s more involved?
Michel: Well, exactly. Well it’s, and it comes from this idea that I think there’s a lot of judgement around brands for people, for organisations, you know, whenever they’re bringing someone in to advise them around their brand, quite often it’s with this sense of judgement that it’s broken, that it’s already broken, there’s something wrong, it needs to be fixed, it needs to be changed, it needs to be redone. And so I really, that’s a point at which I really diverge from the traditional methodologies and ways of thinking about brand. Read More→
A truly extraordinary person
Posted by: | CommentsIn life there are some people who can be known by those who matter, but never register as ‘famous’. Who in some ways could be said to ‘fly under the radar’ and in being unobtrusive, not terribly noticeable and by remaining clear-headed and not influenced by the pack, are able to do quite extraordinary things on behalf of the human race.
One such person died recently – and hers is not a story that I had known until I read the obituary for Miep Gies in The Age last week. I’ve had a hunt around for it on The Age website, but can’t find it, suspect they’ve already pulled it down, so for some background on Miep Gies, what better place to look than Wikipedia!
Like many of my era I read “The Diary of Anne Frank”, the young Jewish girl’s account of being hidden in a secret annex at her father’s business premises and supported with supplies by Miep Gies and her husband Jan, in literature class as a teenager. I found it a wonderful, poignant book and was truly wrenched when our teacher informed us that Anne had not survived and that she had perished in a concentration camp, not a year after the last entry in the diary. Read More→
Valuation Roundtable – Part One
Posted by: | CommentsWhen you start an innovative, entrepreneurial business, it’s likely that you will focus on the ‘blue sky’ potential of that business and until you’ve been going for some time, it will be really difficult to work out what your venture is really worth. In this Valuation Roundtable, Gary Graco Partner at Nexia ASR, Scott Kilmartin founder of Haul and David Eedle co-founder of Arts Hub and co-author of Niche Content Millionaire, thrash out with Fiona Boyd the issues related to the valuing a business.
This was the first part of a three part business Valuation Roundtable featuring Gary Graco from Nexia ASR, Scott Kilmartin from Haul and David Eedle, co-author of Niche Content Millionaire.
Brandology – transcription
Posted by: | CommentsThis post is a transcription of a video interview Fiona Boyd co-author of Niche Content Millionaire conducted with Brandology founder, Michel Hogan, called “Brandology – what brand is and what it is not”.
Fiona: I’m talking to Michel Hogan from Brandology about exactly what is one’s brand and why this matters. Welcome Michel.
Michel: Why thank you Fiona it’s so great to be here, I really enjoy talking about brand any chance I get, so…
Fiona: Which is fabulous because that’s what I’m going to quiz you thoroughly about today. Now firstly you’ve written a manifesto on brand…
Michel: …I have…
Fiona: …it’s a long time ago but you’ve done a whole manifesto. How did you define brand in your manifesto?
Michel: Well, I defined brand in my manifesto pretty much the way I always define it which is this very broad based perspective that brand is both what you believe and what your actions show. And these are authentic things, they’re not something that you make up, and they come very much from the inside out. And so a lot of people struggle with that definition, because they say, well, but isn’t brand just about marketing. Not in my world. Read More→
The last two percent
Posted by: | CommentsLate last year, one of my business coaching clients asked me what was the best piece of advice I could give him on his startup. I’m not actually one to give other people specific advice on what they should do, but in having the Arts Hub adventure with David Eedle, there were plenty of key principles that we learned that I doubt you’ll be able to find in any business book, and our belief is that we should at least share some of these learnings with those who wish to tread a similar path.
The first thing I told this client was to narrow his focus down from the twenty plus objectives that he was looking at, to between one and three things that could form the bedrock of his new business. There’s more about the issues around trying to get the right focus in your business in the post “The One Thing”.
Over the holidays though I thought harder about this client’s position and business proposition and realized that once he was underway he was probably going to face the other big issue David and I faced during the Arts Hub journey, and that is what I call, ‘the last 2 percent’. We’ve written in detail about what the last two percent of issues were that held us back from having the ideal business in Chapter 4 of our book Niche Content Millionaire – and what we needed to do to overcome these. Read More→
Your personal snowball, start with a flake
Posted by: | CommentsLast October I had the very good fortune to join David in San Francisco, and enjoy a few days there. It was my first time in the US, and I enjoyed every minute of it, which is just as well as I’d been feeling rather flat at home.
I’d packed a couple of books to read on the flight, which I’d been warned by David and many others, is a real killer. Melbourne to San Francisco goes via Sydney and while the Sydney to SF leg is only 14 hours, there’s a longish wait in Sydney and the journey door-to-door ended up being around 20 hours.
Now I hasten to add that my last big plane trip of this kind was taken when I was 13 in December of 1979 flying unaccompanied Perth to London. I seem to remember the plane stopping a couple of times, once in Calcutta when the plane was searched by the military and I quaked as they poked around with rifles. All up I think the trip was about 32 hours.
Even though I was well-prepared with reading material on my San Francisco flight, I did, as I usually do at an airport, succumb to purchasing a couple of books at the airport bookstore. What is it with books, they seem so scrummy when you’re about to board a plane for a long trip? They also appear very delectable when you enter my favourite bookstore on the planet, The Avenue Bookstore, in Albert Park, but that’s altogether another story. One of those I bought and commenced reading immediately on the Sydney leg of the journey and then burrowed in with a glass of white wine and a very ordinary pasta salad at the food hall at Sydney airport, and continued for the first 5 hours of the SF journey was the biography of Warren Buffett, “The Snowball” written by Alice Schroeder. Read More→
Brand and the startup videopost
Posted by: | CommentsWhen a company starts up, there can be an idea of what it will be and where it will go, but defining a really clear brand could be a little premature. Brand advocate, Michel Hogan talks here to Fiona Boyd about why she advocates on brand matters rather than consults, and why startups should work more on a clear set of values in the early days, than a rock n roll brand.
Michel Hogan runs the brand advocacy firm, www.brandology.com.au. For her previous discussion with Fiona on brand matters, take a look at “Brandology – what a brand is, and what it is not!”
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