Risk Mitigation
At Start Co. we advise companies to think through risk before they launch and several times each year throughout the lifetime of the business. This ranges from covering specific threats through competitive analysis and planning how to mitigate risks that could be fatal to the business or put the business on the decline. Identify and Organize Risks The article, “The Startup Entrepreneur’s Guide to Risk Management,” posted by Business Insider by Nicholas Carlson does a great job outlining categories of risks — nuisance risks, ignorable risks, insurable risks, and the company killers. Follow their advice to organize your company killers into a table that displays clearly what you are up against and what specifically you’re going to do about it. Creating this table will help your business think through the following: Risk Factor What type of risk is it? Likelihood of the risk occurring The consequences of the risk occurring What are your mitigation tactics? What is it going to cost you to mitigate? Time, money, resources, opportunity… What is the current status of the situation Critical risks can come from a variety of areas that include: market, financial, technology and operational, competition, people, legal and regulatory, and systemic risk. For many businesses, their critical risks from multiple areas have shown up at the same time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now and for the future of your business, it’s imperative that you prioritize your critical risks. The obvious need today cannot blind side us to what is coming down
COVID-19 Sprint Program
The pandemic has forced businesses to reevaluate their fundamentals and reinvent themselves to overcome the new challenges that COVID-19 has brought forth. We are offering a Sprint Program for 10 selected minority owned businesses to run experiments and develop strategies for the future. The simple, 6 week, action-oriented program will ensure that the businesses will not be overly burdened and have new opportunities to grow. It starts March 1 and the application closes February 23rd. Learn more here: Here is a link to the application: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSehqNJz5udM2ZdyErDHPu7AgDUnUBGbQVe4a8ZkxpKENo_k6w/viewform?gxids=7628 Feel free to reach out to us here or on any of our social media if you have any questions. #NeverStop
COVID-19 Forcing Your Company to Revisit Everything
Overnight, COVID-19 put all businesses in a state of uncertainty, one where it is necessary to reflect and question everything. As a result, we must revisit the fundamentals of our businesses — the customers and markets that are critical to our success. We have defined four key areas that are imperative to talk about with your clients or potential clients as we work to build back our businesses stronger in 2021: Problem: Is the difficult problem you are solving for your customers relevant now and will it be in the future? Solution: Is your solution a fit for the current needs of your customers? Price: Does COVID-19 affect the difficulty of the problem you are solving? Can you charge a premium? Go to Market Strategy: Have you re-evaluated your marketing and engagement channels? Do these channels match the behaviors of your target clients in today’s environment? Getting Back to the Fundamentals Now is the time to check-in with your clients and discover any new priorities, behaviors, or challenges that have arisen from COVID-19. Reaching out to your clients during this period of uncertainty can help you mutually find comfort and hope in the future. Start Co. has made it a priority to reach out to hundreds of businesses since the beginning of the Pandemic, to find out how they are addressing challenges arising from COVID-19. The majority of them needed a process for addressing these challenges, real or perceived, and most faced these problems in a silo, alone. We recommend
The Digital City: Unpacking the Smart Entrepreneurship Engine
Bringing about change means bringing a theory of change to bare. One of the core strengths of Start Co. and our partners is working at the fringe of two disciplines to uncover insights and opportunities. For The Digital City, the Smart Entrepreneurship Engine is our key insight that has created a new opportunity for Memphis and beyond. The Smart Entrepreneurship Engine is our approach in combining and implementing Smart City thinking and our entrepreneurial processes (read about Zero Based Entrepreneurship and the Commercialization Framework). Smart City infrastructure and technology provide the solid foundation for innovation and entrepreneurship. If in the end, we are to scale insights into innovations, and talent into entrepreneurship, we’ll need a process and a framework to execute against. That’s the Smart Entrepreneurship Engine which we unpact more here. Infrastructure: Touched on in a recent post, the foundation for this entire project will be the Smart City infrastructure that includes advanced Fiber and WiFi capabilities. Access to high bandwidth and high fidelity internet is essential in powering the smart, IoT (Internet of Things) devices and the intelligent, connected buildings that collect the data. Devices: Devices will include the likes of cameras and sensors. Each device will be connected to the internet, allowing the Digital City to store the data in real-time in cloud and enterprise systems. There are many devices that can provide a beneficial service. For instance, a smart door that opens when a computer instructs it to do so or a parking sign that switches
The Commercialization Framework
The process of building a startup from a novel idea to a market competitor is difficult for sure but tracking the steps and the stages shouldn’t be. To gauge where a startup is in their lifecycle, Start Co. utilizes the Commercialization Framework which was first introduced to us by Mike Mozenter and his company BizLogix. Their system, now used in Cleveland and beyond, defines a business in terms of its technological and commercial capacities. The Commercialization Framework: What is it? The Commercialization Framework is made up of five phases: Imagining, Incubating, Demonstrating, Market Entry, and Growth & Sustainability. Each phase has a defining set of commercial and technological capabilities, goals, and objectives. Each phase’s unique sources of funding help a company move from idea, to proof of concept, to a working prototype, to paying customers, and beyond. Let’s explore each phase briefly: Imagining: The Imagining phase begins at the conception of a new idea. Entrepreneurs must estimate the potential viability of the idea as well as what resources may be needed to move to the next phase. After thorough customer and market discovery, creating an acceptable proof of concept is a major checkpoint in the Imagining phase. Capital is primarily either self-provided or acquired through corporate research and development efforts, university funding, or government funding. Incubating: During the Incubation Phase the skeleton idea moves into a prototype modeled after the proof of concept. The startup tests the functionality of their product in a controlled setting. The testing results in finding
Hi, I’m Carter
You might have noticed that an unfamiliar name has appeared as the author of the last few posts here at Start Co. That would be me, Carter King. I came onboard to help with sharing the stories of what Start Co. and our great community partners are doing to transform the Memphis community and beyond. These efforts go beyond helping to scale startup companies and include focusing on opportunities that advance our community and society. The work is about creating innovation, impact, inclusion, equity, and economic opportunity that will last beyond our lifetimes. In just the first three weeks on the job, I’ve found a wealth of business acumen, spirit, and definitive process among the Start Co. family that I hope to share with the world. Here’s a little more on my background. I am at Rhodes College majoring in Computer Science. You’re wondering why a CS major can write anything other than code. I can because of another passion, history, in which I am getting a minor at Rhodes. In history, we learn, we read, we summarize, and we write. It has honed my enjoyment of the writing process, one research paper at a time. It’s one of the reasons that I reach out to join the Start Co.: digging into the nuts and bolts of the projects and partnerships that Start Co. is involved and telling those stories sits at the corners of history and computer science, societal change and technology advancement. Beyond this passion and education, in
Leading with The Digital City
Becoming a Smart City Cities are becoming smarter by adopting connected technology and using data to solve community challenges. We believe that by combining smart city technology with an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship, Memphis can leapfrog decades of disinvestment and realize the benefits of being a Digital City – increased efficiency, improved quality of life, and enhanced equity and economic prosperity. The Walk on Union is poised to become a first-of-its-kind Digital City. By designing it “smart from the start” and welcoming partners from government, industry, startups, academia and the social sector, we can design, create and test new solutions. This investment in innovation and entrepreneurship will drive economic development including closing the digital divide. By supporting new technology job growth with startups and building opportunities for creating new innovations, our work is relevant to creating new economic opportunity in Memphis. How and Why Build The Digital City? Building The Digital City means creating a network of data-collecting devices enabled by a high-speed communications network (Fiber, WiFi). Data will be ethically collected, managed, securely stored, and shared to provide insights and solutions to many stakeholders and partners. This will yield compounding testing opportunities. The Digital City will improve services, increase revenue, decrease costs, and improve satisfaction in the lives of Memphians. With this unique asset, Memphis will be a leading U.S. city for innovation, known as a place where problem solvers can explore, create, and activate solutions. Who and What? The Digital City, which relies on its backbone of
Introduction to Zero-Based Entrepreneurship
We go beyond the lean startup method pioneered by others. Our Zero-Based Approach to Entrepreneurship does not ignore this method, but rather incorporates lean startups into a larger framework for building that has worked especially well in producing durable businesses in a resource scarce environment. Through this framework we have come to realize the benefits of this deeper approach. Zero-Based Entrepreneurship gets its inspiration from Zero-Based Budgeting, an accounting method whereby each and every line item in a budget is reset to zero on an annual basis. When this is done, each of the expenses added back from the zero point have to be fully justified, eliminating carry-over expenses from prior years that are not helpful to the overall business goals. Zero-based budgeting by its nature is detail oriented and can’t rely on blind assumptions and blanket increases. It is certainly done with the assumption that nothing is sacrosanct. It is time-consuming, but favors direct results nevertheless. The advantages are very flexible budgets, greater focus on operations and impact, lower costs, and more disciplined execution. There are downsides in that it takes more time and intensity to implement and it tends to bring the focus to the short and medium term. Our founder, Eric Mathews says that “entrepreneurship is the art of subtraction and not addition” and this method is living proof, our philosophy at work. Here is how we go about Zero-Based Entrepreneurship at Start Co. The Method: We focus holistically on the startup, taking into account all aspects
Should We Further Define Case Management
We are all in the business of advancing our communities and doing it by means of targeting the most underserved populations who are dealing with challenges we will never truly know. We provide a variety of services addressing food insecurity, financial assistance, mental health, education and workforce, advocacy, and connection to resources that are too many to name. The case manager sits right in the middle dealing with all of this, doing a job that is rewarding but never truly appreciated fully. There is so much demand; both in numbers and in need, that dealing with the day to day is extremely difficult in terms of providing a pathway to stability. So, it begs the question, what type of stability are we talking about, and what type of stability are we actually executing towards. Who are we able to get to stability and keep them there? I have spoken with many of you through webinars or meetings about thinking through the extremely poor, poor, and less poor; and who we are actually helping to get to stability. Those in the extremely poor to poor category are exceedingly difficult to help. And so many case managers have told me that they are helping to manage an immediate need, but when you extend the timeframe beyond that initial need, they have not had the time, money, or resources to even think through (yet alone execute) what is needed beyond that in terms of services and programs, their intensity, duration, frequency, and needed
Sometimes Upstream Interventions Are Needed
In some of the webinars we have been doing for the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies and in our individual discussions with groups across the country, we have been discussing not just how to build new programs and services, but also other interventions that may better enable those programs and services. Sometimes it is hard to pull ourselves out of the day-to-day work and take a macro look at the social landscape in which we are building. In Memphis, we had a challenging time keeping up with the number of persons suffering from mental illness then ending up in jail. In jail it is extremely difficult to serve this population, especially since they spend 3-5 times longer in jail, than those who don’t have a mental illness. In 1987, police were called together to an area of public housing where a young man who had a history of mental illness was threatening others with a knife. He was shot several times after he refused to obey orders to put the knife down. He was black and the police officers were white. Sound familiar? This was an eye-opening moment for the Memphis community where we saw groups come together to begin strategizing better solutions. Led by the Mayor of Memphis who reached out to the National Alliance on Mental Illness and others, a task force was created. What emerged from this initial task force was the Memphis Police Department Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) that would become known nationwide in later