I’ve been working with start ups for the last 12 years. Some of the startups I’ve been involved with are:
- An E-learning product for 3-5 year olds
- A Surf School in the Caribbean
- A [sun] Tanning Studio
- Promotional Merchandise Businesses (manufacturing, wholesale distribution and online retail arms)
- Mobile phone services (online business)
- Holisitic Health and Wellness Web 2.0 Community
- Various others that didn’t get traction
The typical Situation: Somebody else has a business idea they want help with.
How I contribute:
- Identify what the most important things are to making money.
- Build a minimum viable product and run it by potential customers/users.
- Iterate to find an offer that people buy into.
- Develop and operate a fulfilment system or the product, often with many manual steps
- Scale marketing using direct marketing to grow number of customers.
- Automate fulfilment systems and make them scalable
- Put in place financial controls and reporting
- Recruit staff to assist growth
- Prepare and present training materials to them so they can run the business
- Work myself out of a job. A business is left behind.
Obviously not all businesses require all the steps as some won’t get past stage 3.
You can also find out more on my linked in profile
Rory Ford 