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Archive for Inspirational

Big apologies to all our Into the Mountain regular readers who have noticed that David and I have been somewhat missing-in-action from our blog for the past couple of months. Life took us off on a bit of a detour and we’ve executed a home/office move in that time off air. I’m happy to say that things are now settling down and we’re getting into the rhythm of our new place.

2010 has been an interesting one so far for us. We burst back from the summer holiday period in January this year and had decided that we’d launch a venture we’ve been cooking up in a relatively low key way with our friend and entrepreneurial colleague, Ed Dowling. The constraints we’ve worked with are that both David and Ed work full-time on consulting and contract work and therefore can only offer up snippets of hours here and there when working on the technology of this new venture. Even so, they’ve done magic and I’m happy to say that we’ll be launching this new venture, RushCrowds this month.

RushCrowds will be in beta mode for the first bit of 2011 and we’re issuing an invite to any small arts/event companies in Melbourne who have shows on over summer who’d like to test the technology with us, to get in touch. If that’s your company, contact me via the comments section at the bottom of this post. Read More→

A couple of weeks ago I was having lunch with a dear friend who came along with David and I on the Arts Hub journey, Shane Hewitt.

Shane started his online venture Middle Eight Music a bit before we started Arts Hub and David did his website work and generally helped get the technology side of the venture underway. Middle Eight is an online specialist music store, which had a bit of a foray into the offline world as well, but the GFC put paid to being able to do both. In recent times Middle Eight Music has returned to its purely online origins and continues to delight customers around the world with the latest in show, cabaret and other hard-to-get specialist music product.

In fact you can find out how Shane Hewitt became the first investor in Arts Hub in our book about the experience, Niche Content Millionaire.

At lunch Shane was telling us about the highs and lows of trading through the global financial crisis, including the incredible drop off in sales as loyal long-term customers tightened their belts and stopped buying the little music luxuries that were helping them to stay happy, interested and sane. And how as the grim times eased, customers from all over the world were gradually returning and restoring their love of and involvement in show music through Middle Eight Music.

But one of the intriguing ways that the Middle Eight team got by was by doing a favour for a friend. During the midst of the downturn a friend who imported a very lovely goat leather bag from India and who sold them in Sydney at various markets, asked the Middle Eight folk whether they’d like to be a Melbourne distributor.

Goat leather bags really don’t have a lot to do with show music but as Shane tells it, the bags walked out of the Middle Eight Music store like hot cakes. Not a similar product, but a product nevertheless that traditional Middle Eight customers really connected with.

And so it was that a goat leather bag helped a specialist music retailer survive the volatile times of the global financial crisis. And since the bags are still selling like hotcakes Shane and Max (the other Middle Eighter) see no reason not to keep selling goat leather bags.

Just wondering if you run an online business, what your equivalent of the goat leather bag could be? Let me know in the comments section. I really enjoy hearing about the tricks of business that are really effective, but so unusual you’d never find them mentioned in a Business Plan.

Yesterday I was at the doctor’s for my 4 year old’s immunizations and her rather wonderful doctor Andrew and I had a bit of a chat about running. He’s out there running the same route as me along the bayside foreshore of Melbourne most days. I see him from time-to-time and we wave to each other and cheer each other on. Read More→

If you read my last blog post  you would know that David and I recently had a four night getaway at Hayman Island in the Whitsundays, a venue which is also hosting a major Australian leaders forum this week, that you can read all about at Business Spectator.

Our trip though was for R & R and not business thankfully though while we were there I couldn’t help but notice how many things done by the Hayman team and in delivering the Hayman experience, provided some unique insights into concepts that could be deployed in other places and other businesses.

One of these was the notion of offering a ‘peak experience’ to the customer base, not something that everyone will want to do, and the cost of it can be one of the factors that makes it exclusive, but something that can be nevertheless considered a pinnacle experience, a really neat thing to do. Read More→

When David and I sat down at the offices of our mentor Dr Terry Cutler in the warm summer days of January 2009, our goal was to draw up a mud map of our experiences starting up, growing and then selling Arts Hub.

However, we didn’t just want to map out and then tell the Arts Hub story, we wanted to condense the journey into some key lessons for those who wanted to venture into niche publishing. It was our belief then and it still is that one of the great frontiers online that has only partly been exploited is that of niche content.

What we mean by that is that if you can provide content of a high quality in a specialist or niche field for a bunch of people who are interested in or work in that area, then you can create a product that those people will pay for. Many of us understand that it’s important to keep abreast of the trends and challenges in our industry or even in an area that is a hobby for us, and pulling this sort of information together for people has a value. Read More→

One of the things that happens when life starts to speed up again and all systems are starting to crank up is that as an entrepreneur it’s really easy to get stressed and feel the strain of a zillion balls all being juggled at once.

I mean you’re the one at the top of the company leading the charge, everyone looks to you for a decision, and if there’s just you rolling out a big vision, well then, when do you get time to sleep? Read More→

There are some days when pursuing what appears to be a safe business practice or concept is really little more than recycling something that is known, has worked before but there are no guarantees that it will continue to work going forward.

More interesting for me are those businesses that build on what’s been done in the past, but do it in such a way that they create something quite new. Indeed if you’re breaking new ground you have permission to do things a little more out-of-the-box, the sides of the box have not yet been defined in fact you’re doing the defining as you’re going about things.

While it’s important not to reinvent the wheel, it’s also important to not be too derivative. Technologies and business that build on what’s known but take the opportunity off into a new, hitherto unnoticed direction are those who have the true potential to clean up big in my view.

Dr Terry Cutler in his time as Chairman of Arts Hub, often used to say to me – don’t follow the pack, be the market organiser. Do what you do differently enough that you can enforce a whole new way of looking at things in your market place. Even better, create that marketplace.

Just a little food for thought today. The word innovation is bandied around so often that I fear it sometimes loses its meaning. In my experience, you innovate when you build something new, interesting and useful beyond what is known and expected and accepted as being true.

Innovation can be jiggling old stuff around, but its more than recycling worn-out concepts

Innovation can be jiggling old stuff around, but it's more than recycling worn-out concepts

And one more point on innovation. Some friends of the Into the Mountain crew have recently started a new business aggregating the resources and opportunities in the customer service space and they’ve invented a whole new term for what they’re doing. The business is www.clienteerhub.com and hats off to Ray Brown and Matt and Tim McDougall for creating a whole new language and canon around the area of customer service. Redefining something in an existing area in such a way that you unlock it’s real importance and give it the sort of value it should have had in the first place is really, really clever innovation. We wish the clienteerhub team all the best and we’re sure we’ll be talking more about their content and what they’re doing in the near future. For now check out their first clienteerTV interview with Ben Watson, Principal of Enterprise User Experience at Adobe.

Photo: flickr miguelpdl

David and I have worked in online businesses and projects for the best part of 15 years now and coming from arts and media backgrounds we’ve both had somewhat of a bias towards running projects in an egalitarian, collaborative way. For us, this approach hasn’t always been successful and it is indeed cumbersome, takes time and you need to be supremely patient. In the meantime the competition can have the jump on you while you’re still fiddling around trying to get group consensus. Read More→

This post is a transcript of an interview between David Broughton, founder of www.mypet247.c0m and Fiona Boyd – 3 years and lots of learning. Read More→

I’d like to apologise to our regular Into the Mountain readers as you will have noticed that our blog posts have been a bit random over the past few weeks.

This does not signify a lack of interest or desire to write about what we understand or come to know in the entrepreneurial business space, but does indicate that David and Fiona have been up to our own ventures again.

In between consulting David and I have been putting our efforts towards a couple of new businesses we’re launching. Read More→

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