Entries Tagged 'Startup' ↓

 

Sam Walton, the legendary founder of Wal-Mart, followed these rules for growth. And based on our experience from running both online and physical brick and mortar businesses, we confirm their value even today. So it’s worth taking the time to think about them for your own business.

1. Commit with passion to your business. (this is often missing in many teams that seem to be not growing)

2. Share profits with your employees. (this was a rarity a few decades back, but today it is the expectation)

3. Motivate your partners. Money and ownership are not enough.  Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. (the feeling of challenge is very important, and your business partners should feel they are working towards something important and worthwhile – relationships can’t build on financial performance alone)

4. Communicate everything to your employees. The more they know, the more they will understand. Information is power and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets any risk of informing your competitors. (all the IT systems including ERP and CRM systems are exactly about this point – given the a full picture, your talented staff can produce more business growth than you have planned. of course, there will be confidential information and IP which you need to share on need-to-know basis, but the essense is to share with all the right people, so that they are aligned)

5. Show appreciation for a job well done. (this is especially important in those cases where you don’t expect repeat business transactions to happen – and by taking this approach, you will see new business leads coming from unknown areas – it has happened to us often!)

6. Celebrate success and in those inevitable failures, find some humor. Don’t take it so seriously.

7. Listen to everyone in your company, especially the ones who actually talk to customers. They really know what is going on out there.

8. Exceed your customers’ expectations and they will always come back.

9. Control your expenses better than your competition. (cost control and cost cutting is among the most difficult things to do in a business, and really stresses the entire company, but it can be constructive if approached well and with sufficient communication about why jobs or perks are being cut, or why salary is not being raised this quarter or year. On of the interesting things we observe is that investment in systems and processes often leads to reduced labour costs in medium-term to long-term, so it is worth evaluating on regular basis for business cost control)

10. Swim upstream. If everyone else is going one way, there is a good chance you can find your business niche by going the opposite way.

 

Here’s the timeline of events: 

• March 22, 2007: Oracle filed a lawsuit on SAP in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleging that SAP, through it’s third-party application provider TomorrowNow, illegally accessed and downloaded thousands of customer support documents, software and other confidential information from Oracle’s online customer support system.
• July 2, after over 3 months of no-response, SAP declared they will present their defence on July 3.
• July 3, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, in a dramtic U-turn, accepted that employees of TomorrowNow had indeed downloaded more info than they were entitled to!

Regardless of right or wrong doing (which could only be known after some investigation), SAP made two blunders in it’s response to the Oracle suit:

(1) When you are accused by your topmost competitior in the market of wrong-doing, it’s already a dangerous situation, because there is a strong chance it’s true, because your top competitor would not want to lose face for baseless charge. SAP needed to respond within a a week or two (it’s more than enough time for any kind of investigation when it involves IT systems). Plus SAP owed it to it’s business partners/investors/sales teams to prepare a fast response…not wait for 3 months like it did – 3 months of open wound on reputation is not good for any industry leader. It just creates a perception that you have actually something wrong, and are finding ways to juggle out of it – and in this case the perception turned out to be true. Such a law suit…anything over 2 weeks of time would have provided good ammo to Oracle’s teams…and it surely happened.

(2) Multiple messages and U-turns: this is the kind of error acceptable from a small business when the business plan is still evolving, and not at all expected from an experienced player like SAP. It just looks like the folks in head quarters at Walldorf, Germany have less control/transparency on what their units in the US are doing. In a way, this lawsuit may just be a symptom of a more serious operational issue in SAP’s US vs Europe vs Worldwide operations. As an executive, any U-turn in messaging is damaging for the ground level teams, who would have used your previous message to get some progress in their work. But SAP chose to do it, probably because they say a bigger danger in trying to defend the case, with facts going against them. So Blunder 1 led to blunder 2.

You could be facing a similar situation at your own business. While most execs won’t have a clue, our members are equipped with some tools and answers. You can get started too – with a free copy of our Difficult Decisions Guide.

Here are the background articles:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2154584,00.asp

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2154139,00.asp

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2107280,00.asp