When Opportunity Knocks

Full Transcript:

Good morning. By a show of hands, how many of you would consider yourself an entrepreneur? By a show of hands, how many of you have a business right now that is bringing in money to help you do the things you want to do in life? How many of you are looking for a better outcome in your life through building means that you control? I hope every one. All right so when opportunity knocks, who here has asked for an opportunity? Whether that be a job opportunity, or an opportunity for something new in life, by a show of hands, how many of you guys have done this?

I’m a firm believer that opportunities are given to us each and every day, yet oftentimes we aren’t able to analyze them and actually act on them. Hopefully by the end of the presentation today, you’ll see just a couple of stories of where you can quickly analyze an opportunity, and turn it into one that can grow your life into the one that you want to do. Opportunity is defined two ways according to Google. It’s a set of circumstances that make it possible to do something, or a chance for employment or promotion. When we’re talking about opportunity, we’ll use this as a baseline. Either a new opportunity of employment, or promotion, or a set of circumstances that make it possible to do something.

Who am I? Why am I credible? Why should you listen to me? I started my first business at ten. I found out recently that maybe I started my first business at the age of like six or seven when my mom made me be a paperboy with her. Sorry, I learned about that this weekend, I forgot about that. My first company that I can really remember was at the age of ten. My mom and dad didn’t grow up very wealthy, really tried doing whatever they could to make my brother, my sister, and I have the best lives possible, and so my allowance money wasn’t that much, but my grandma would send me $100 every year. On my tenth birthday, she sent me $100 and instead of just putting that in the bank, or buying a video game, or buying cookies, or whatever a ten year old does, I bought a lawn mower, and I went around the neighborhood and looked for people whose yards needed to be mowed.

I did that for about two or three years, expanded that business and started doing other different things. Business can be that simple. People are looking for things to be solved, and oftentimes we try and over complicate things. While thinking throughout the day, think of the lawnmower effect. What can we do to solve a problem today? There are three types of opportunities. One that is given to us, one that we want to create, and one that we see fit. These are a different type of thing.

I started a swim team back in 2007. Worked at Domino’s through high school. Graduated from West Virginia university. Anyone go there? Yes. Good man. When I graduated college, moved down here to work as [a CVS 00:03:54] affiliate here, then helped grow a website consultancy from a little bit of money to over seven figures over a few years. While I was doing that saw a huge hole in the market for entrepreneurs. As someone who was becoming one again, the resources that were there weren’t the things that I thought were going to help me grow the way that I wanted to. I would call other entrepreneurs and say, “I’m going to buy you a case of beer. Come to my office and we’ll just meet.” What I saw was that people were looking for this thing that was curated, that wasn’t some government-backed initiative that said this is the thing you have to do. Instead it was for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, so I was getting the correct context instead of hearing what was read in a book by someone who had actually done it before.

I think context is extremely important. You can ask advice from anyone but if that person’s never done it themselves, it might not be as valid. An example I like to use a lot is if you’re looking to raise money, don’t ask someone whose never raised money or given money out that question. As crazy as it seems people love to give us advice, but oftentimes they don’t know what they’re doing or have never done it before, yet we take their answers and think that it’s the correct context, but actually it could be hurting us. Ask for advice all day, but get the right advice from the person whose done it before.

Those meetups went really really well. We turned that into let’s build a company in a weekend competition. We Did this thing called Start Norfolk. We’ve since retired it but we did it five times. A thousand people showed up. Four hundred different business ideas were pitched, and during that time saw a really huge hole for entrepreneurs and said what would happen if we created a company to really fill that hole for entrepreneurs? That’s when Hatch got started. Then since then we’ve done a lot of programs and initiatives to really hone in on business-like things. People are really good at once technical trait, and we’re really good at helping businesses start and make money, so we’re kind of that side of it. If you can build a car, you’ll probably come to us to try and give you the tools to help you sell it.

If you trade a 3D printer but you don’t know how to sell, you come to us and we help you with the tools to do that. We also invest in 13 companies. Ten to thirty thousand dollar checks for each of them. Some of those companies are doing well, some of them have realized that business isn’t their thing, and that’s okay, that’s the risk we take. We did this event last year called the State of the Startup Community Address which is our version of state of the region, state of the cities, and it’s the good the bad and the ugly of really where our local startup community is. Anywhere from Williamsburg to Emporia to the eastern shore down to Virginia Beach. Then recently, and I’ll tell you a little story about this later, became the host of a TV show called Hampton Roads Business Weekly. Anyone here ever watched it? Couple people. Thank you. Every Sunday at nine on ABC Here.

Customer discover. How many of you guys have ever started a company or thought about starting a company without asking a simple question? Anybody? Customer discovery is the process of learning as much about a specific topic or business as possible for you to do this thing by learning as much about how people use, or may want to use a specific topic or product, and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages. Questions to consider: what do I say? Who do I say it to? Really that context thing is really important. How do I learn as much as possible about them and how can I learn about their pain points? Oftentimes people will say, “I should just build this thing. They’ll come and I’ll figure all that stuff later,” and that sounds like a great idea, but how many of you guys change the channel on your TVs every time a commercial comes on, or scroll through an ad on Facebook, or don’t want to see that advertisement that you saw everywhere when you drove in today?

If that’s the premise, that ads are everywhere and I’m not in the mood to do that thigh, then why would we start a business knowing that that’s the case? Instead, find the people who are looking for what I can give them and provide them that information. Does everyone agree that we change the channels a lot on TV, or when we’re online that we aren’t always in the buying mood? Knowing that, don’t make the assumption that if I just put it on TV, or put it online, or just build it, that everything will work out, because what you’ll find is that you waste a lot of time, probably a lot of money, to find out that no one really wanted it.

Here’s what you don’t want to do. The number one question to never ask is this: don’t you think X sucks? I’ll change X to don’t you think QuickBooks sucks? Don’t you think that this company is terrible? The reason why is because you know what the answer is going to be there. The answer is always going to be yes or no. It doesn’t give you any inside information. The person probably doesn’t actually hate QuickBooks, they hate the process they have to do to figure out the management of the accounting, yet you didn’t dive deep enough into the question so that you’re getting an answer that is misleading, so you can’t really figure out the answer. Don’t you think QuickBooks sucks? Wouldn’t you like a solution that did all of your accounting stuff for you? Of course, but that doesn’t solve a problem. That just gives you an answer that you already knew the answer was.

Instead, you want to ask questions that get direct answers, or go on to message boards, or see where people are having questions online or in person, that are looking for solutions for a specific topic. The purpose of this is to gain as much detailed information about how a business or consumer is using a specific product, tool, or service. Oftentimes people think something is a big pain point. A pain point is I hate doing this thing everyday. It’s really difficult for me to get through this specific thing everyday. How can I find the solution to fix it? I’m a firm believer that if something is a big enough pain, the money associated with it, anyone will pay. If something is that bad, they will pay for it.

A lot of people think about, how do I price this thing? How do I do all these things? Don’t worry about that right now, pick a number. Break even, make a little money on it, that’s fine. Pick a number, but when starting a business, figuring out what people really need is extremely important. This is a picture of myself, my brother, my sister, and my mom, and I like to call this the mom effect, back to context. In seventh grade my entire life I had grown up singing and I thought I was a wonderful singer. In seventh grade, chorus tryouts in April, super excited and practicing. My mom’s like, “You’re doing great. You’re awesome. You’re going to win.” I get up there just in front of a group like this, and the chorus teacher says stop. You’re done. I was terrible. I was a terrible singer. Imagine the worst American Idol tryout you’ve ever seen. I wasn’t that bad but maybe one point above it.

The reason I explain this is oftentimes we’ll go talk to people and think that they are our customer or potential customer when they’re really your mom. I went home this weekend and saw my mom, and she did it again. I even tell her this story. I’m bringing in a slideshow, I’m doing a presentation on Tuesday, I’m going to talk about you, this is what’s going to happen. She’s like, “But you are a great singer, Zack.” I’m like, “Mom, I’m not a good singer.” It’s really easy for someone to say yes, or I will give you this thing when you do this thing. It’s really difficult to say give me a dollar for that. No really, give me the dollar for it. It’s really difficult to get that transaction, that dollar out of someone.

People love to say yes. It’s easy to say yes. It’s really easy for someone to sign up for your e-mail and do nothing with it. The transaction piece of money happens when someone values what you do, that you solve the pain point enough that they’re willing to go for it. When you talk to someone, really understand if they’re ever going to be your customer or not. I’m not saying that you’re not going to have moms in your lives that do things, because you absolutely will, but try to analyze and realize when your mom comes up, that she’s not your customer. That is unless you’re selling to moms obviously. If your selling to moms, go for the moms. The mom effect is when you get context wrong. You’re asking the wrong person the right thing, getting an answer and building a business off of inaccurate information.

I’m going to tell the story of three ideas for businesses and then we’ll take question. Back in March of 2013 there was a young lad named Ian, and he was at home. It was late at night, and he was lazy and was playing video games, and ran out of pizza and ginger ale, and wanted more of those things, and didn’t want to call the delivery, or the delivery thing was over, and didn’t know how to get that stuff delivered to him. He said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get things that I don’t normally get delivered delivered to me at any time of day?” The premise that he came up with was: people are lazy is the assumption, right? People want things delivered. Those are the two assumptions. Take that and saying, “Well, I could potentially build a courier company that would deliver anything to anyone so that when they need something they can get it.” Think Amazon Prime but localized on a bike. This is what he came up with.

Instead of spending a lot money or going out and printing an ad campaign, he went where people are, printed off this piece of paper, and said, “Get anything that you want delivered.” This is what he’s going to do to validate his idea. There’s the phone number that he created, so he created a Google Voice account. What tools are in your pocket that you can figure out if you can validate something immediately? By doing this, he went on a college campus where it was very dense, and found people that were very bus that needed things to be delivered, and in one weekend made $250. Five dollars a transaction. I love this story because he used something that we all have. Whether or not we have a printer, ink and paper, or not, we all have a pen and paper. He figured out if people really were lazy enough that they would pay for something. Ian is actually right here. This is him, he started it. This went on to have about twenty employees, and did very well up until this past summer when he sold it to one of his writer’s to focus on another pain point that he saw building the software that was needed to actually develop this at a later time. From a piece of paper to twenty employees, to now focusing on software, start small. Stop thinking of the big idea, stop listening to what the news is telling you, stop watching Shark Tank, focus on the core, because that’s what it is. Don’t think about what Facebook is today, think about what Facebook was in 2004 when none of you were on it. Start small.
There’s three questions to be thinking about in this process. What problem are you solving? How do you solve it? Who can you immediately serve? We put on this event last year called The State of the Startup Community Address. Went well, 150 people went to it. We printed off two shirts, two shirts, spent $40 on this shirt. A lot of people come up to me afterwards like, “I want this shirt. I want this shirt, I’ve got to get that shirt,” so we could have done, we could have printed off shirts and sold them at the event, or we could have spent a lot of money to print them out, create websites, or you can do what you did which was send out an e-mail that said, “If you want this shirt, go to this site and buy it.” There’s a site out there that already prints on demand. It’s called TeePublic. For us to have printed this off we would have had to have printed at least 32 shirts at about $10 a shirt, $320 to do all those things. Figure out the marketing behind it.

We just sent out the link through social media a couple times, and to the people who actually went to the event that asked for it, and then kind of vocalized to people who went to event and we sold three shirts. In theory sometimes people say I want that shirt. We could have spent money to do it and only a couple people have bought it. Tim is one of them. Thank you, Tim. Again, context is so important. Just because someone says they want to do this things doesn’t mean they’re going to do it. Some people will probably say if it was there they might have bought it. Yes but have any of you guys ever tried selling T-shirts at a conference? “Oh this isn’t the right size,” or I want haggle prices. I want this to be $15 instead of $20. We just want to give someone a shirt and make it easy and streamlined as possible.

The reason I tell you this story is because people were telling us this is what you want. The link is still available right now. We haven’t sold any more shirts. Don’t waste your time on something that people really don’t want. Don’t confuse something that’s cool with something that isn’t needed. A lot of people say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had this”, but when they develop it, no sales, no transactions are made because it really didn’t solve a problem, or people didn’t value it that much. You need to ask a lot of questions. Really figure out who your target market is and what they’re looking for. About this time last year, we came up with this idea that instead of just investing in companies like we had for the previous two years, or just do events for people, what can we do to have an ongoing kind of ecosystem of content that we curated that we would provide to people?

We came up with this idea called one thousand four, which the number is our goal. We’re being very transparent. We’re trying to start and grow one thousand four employee companies. The reason this came up was because I was at an event similar to this and someone said, “All our region needs is four 1,000-employee companies to move here and we would be golden.” Literally, this is what the leaders of our area are saying. If we could just recruit a big company to move here, all of our problems would be solved. I said I’m going to call BS on this, and say I think we should create a more fertile environment that is more startup friendly, so let’s try and start 1,000 four employee companies, so that when those big companies come, they have a talent feed to buy off of. We started a program called one thousand four that basically delivers curated content to our members, and that’s it. That was the premise. We have educational things that we can give you and we don’t know how we’re going to get it to you, but we’re going to put together this e-mail and people who are in our wheelhouse that we think might be interested in it, and see what happens.

We sent this e-mail out in a series of texts to people that we had ties to, and offered lifetime value for $125 to be a part of this thing that we had no idea what it was going to look like yet. We had an idea but we really didn’t know what it was going to look like. Ten people signed up in seven days. We made whatever ten times 125 is, $1,250. To us, we validated that idea because enough people had bought this thing that we felt that we could continue moving forward with it. Had no one signed up, kind of like the whale hunting T-shirt, here’s what we would have done. Here’s your money back. Don’t spend the money if you haven’t validated something yet, but it is that simple. Once you validate something then you continue to do it. If you don’t validate something, give people the money back.

For about six months we were trying to figure out what does this thing really do? We figured out the process and we figured out what this program does. It’s basically webinars on demand, workshops on demand, so Netflix for business. People are busy, but people need knowledge, so how can we give them curated business workshops at any time? Basically this is what we gave them from this. We had no idea what it was but we knew the people were there, and we started getting customers. We asked them: what do you want more of? We came up with the idea of on-demand workshops because that’s what our customers basically were asking for.

Last story is, I’m pitching a business to a Channel 13 ABC here in the market to buy a company called Tunnel Traffic so obviously there’s a lot of traffic in tunnels in this area, and it’s an application that tells you where the traffic is or not in kind of a fun user-friendly way. The TV station traffic department is using this app to say whether or not you have traffic or not in the mornings. We said maybe there’s interest to buy this company. Jeremy and I go and meet with the president who I have a relationship with, and say, or she says “What do you guys really want out of today?” We said, “Maybe we want to buy the company.” Jeremy throws out a number, I don’t remember what the number is. It wasn’t too crazy, it wasn’t like ten billion dollars. I say this is what it is. She balks at that, she says no no no, we can’t do that.

Then she said, “We’re starting a TV show, I’d love to get your feedback about what we’re doing.” She tells us a little bit about it, thirty minute show, weekly business show. Who could be a host? Who do you think could be a host? I have two seconds to answer this question, and I think the key to opportunity is analyzing situations as soon as they come. Remember the first thing I said was: who here has asked for an opportunity? I raised my hand and I said, I think I could be a good host. I have no idea what that looks like, I have no idea how much money it would be, I have no idea how I would do it, still have to manage a company and employees, all that stuff, but I see an opportunity, and I raised my hand.

I think oftentimes in life we don’t raise our hand enough. We need to be more selfish. I told this story to my mom recently. My mom’s getting a lot of love today. She said, “Someone was praying saying, ‘God come get me,’ in a storm. Three people, three locals in little boats came up to try to save this person. The person at the home said no every time.” The story goes on, this person dies and says, “God you never brought the person.” He goes, “I gave you three times, you didn’t take it.” Whether you’re spiritual or not, opportunities are coming in front of us, we don’t really know what we’re going to do with them, but that’s for us to do, that’s for us to raise our hands. What can you do when an opportunity comes up?

Opportunities happen every day. It’s what you do with them that matters. The next time someone asks you to do something or something could potentially happen, raise your hand, don’t just say no. That’s it. If you guys want to find our stuff online, this is where you can find us. I’m on this big kick about Netflix and chill real quick. There’s a big thing on Netflix recently where people say Netflix and chill. Go kick back, watch Netflix, and do all this stuff, it’ll be great. If you want to be successful in life it’s about the activity that you put into it. If you put in one hour and expect to get a million dollars in return, you’re not going to. It’s about taking the opportunity that is given to you, and busting your tail until you receive that end goal.