Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, May 31, 2017

An entrepreneurial mindset benefits everyone in all walks of life. Employees are better at adding value to their company if they think like entrepreneurs. For employees, especially those paid an hourly wage, starting a part or full time business; there is a specific aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset essential to their success. It’s one of the most difficult concepts to grasp-how to get the price of their products and or services “right.”

There are two areas where new entrepreneurs fall short in the art of pricing their products and services. The first is an error in strategy, the second, a shortcoming in the self-perceived value of their worth in the marketplace.

Many times, the budding entrepreneur will want to offer the best selection, best service and best experience at prices below those of the dreaded “box store.” The idea of offering great service is the best strategy for most products and services. The problem is that offering best selection, service and experience costs more to offer. The reasons the “box stores” generally have lousy service and experience is that their low prices won’t support great service and experience. So, box store shoppers have to accept the take-it-or-leave-it strategy. For a certain segment of the market, the low price/lousy service strategy is good enough. There’s a smaller but growing segment of people, tired of lousy service, who are willing to pay more if the combination of selection, service and experience are superb. Those are the people most of the new entrepreneurs should be targeting.

The second problem is that of self-worth. As employees, we become conditioned to the idea that we are being paid what we are worth and that the amount would apply whether we’re working for another company or we’re working for ourselves. If we’re making, say, $20 per hour at a job and, in a side business, it takes us one-hour to create an original art poster for a customer we think charging $20 is good enough. The problem is that when you’re on a job at $20 per hour, you are paid for each hour you work. In a business, you won’t be able to produce income for each hour that you work. You’ll have to spend time marketing, invoicing, cleaning up and doing all kinds of other activities. To further complicate the problem, some people have told me that to do something they love, they are willing to take less than their hourly wage. In 2005, a woman told me she’d be happy if she could make $5 – $6 per hour after all the bills were paid. One of two things will happen to these new entrepreneurs if their mindset doesn’t change. They will either go out of business, not able to pay their bills, or they will burn out after a few years, asking themselves “why am I doing all of this for no more money than that.”

A CPA in Garden City gave me some advice, a rule of thumb, in the early 1980’s that remains valid today. He said that when a CPA firm hires an accountant, they figure on charging their clients three times what they are paying the accountant; one third to pay the salary, one third to pay benefits and overhead, and one third for the benefit of the firm.

Using this rule of thumb, the price for the original artwork poster above (that took one hour to make) would be around $80; $20 for materials used and $60 for the time. The goal would be to use this price structure in the part-time business while keeping the “day job.” At a point when there is enough business you could be spending two-thirds of your time producing sales, it might be time to take the leap, quick your job and become a full-time entrepreneur and business owner.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, May 24, 2017

There is something seriously wrong with the way we hire and fire people in America. And we do way too much of both in a situation where high employee turnover rates cripple our ability to best be competitive in the global marketplace. Companies need to promote an entrepreneurial mindset throughout their organizations in which every challenge is framed as a problem waiting for a solution. Everyone needs the opportunity to come up with solutions, not just the few people at the top of the org chart. Employees and job seekers need to use an entrepreneurial mindset too.

Only 29 percent of employees in the typical American company are actively engaged, that is actively working with purpose for the betterment of the company. Of the others, 45percent are not engaged while 29 percent are actively disengaged. (These dismal figures resulted from a survey of 1,500 employees by Dale Carnegie Training and MSW Research.)

A good analogy is that of a company with 100 employees all in a big row boat working together to cross a river. The other side of the river represents success for the company. The flow of the river represents the relentless pressure of global competition on companies to always innovate and stay competitive.

In the boat, you have 29 people rowing like crazy, 45 that are slapping their paddles against the water and 26 that are actually paddling backwards. Companies obsessed with the “bottom line” work really hard to keep employee wages low while the 26 percent of their employees paddling backwards are much, much more devastating than would be a $0.50 or $1.00 per hour raise to their production workers.

Some companies have begun to realize that success in the future will require that 100 percent of their employees be actively engaged and rowing in the right direction. They are working to value their employees and include them in the innovation processes toward increasing customer service and lowering the cost of doing business. These companies make much more fulfilling places to work but how do you find them?

To find the best places to work, job seekers have to change the way they think about presenting themselves to prospective employers. Using an entrepreneurial mindset helps us understand that every time they seek to hire someone they have a problem they need to solve. If a company advertises for an accountant, they have a problem in that they need their financial data organized in a way that allows them to fulfill their financial obligations and use the data to make better financial and management decisions. But the companies, i.e. prospective employers, have bigger problems they are trying to solve with each new hire, regardless of the job description.

Companies are looking for people that can solve not only the specific problem of the position description, but also people that will show up consistently, when they are expected and to be actively engaged in moving the company forward.

Using your cover letter to describe how you can provide the best solution not only for the job being filled, but also for the problems of “not engaged” and “disengaged” employees is what will get you in the door of the best companies for the interview where you can further reinforce your ability to provide the best solution.

On June 7 from 6:30PM to 7:30, we’ll be hosting at Fab Lab ICC, a free Cover Letter workshop to help people craft a cover letter that will get them in the door of the best employers.

 

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, May 17, 2017

What if we had to study sports for twelve years before we could actually play? Would people even study a sport for one year before actually playing? Of course not; I’ve never even heard of anyone who read a book about golf, let alone studied the game before attempting to play. Nothing would collapse the American institution of sports like a requirement that potential players spend time studying the game before playing.

Although the sports analogy sounds ridiculous, we expect our young people, for the most part, to study math and science for several years before they actually get make use of the knowledge in making real-world solutions; i.e. projects.

In today’s world, we hear a lot STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and finding ways to get young people interested in STEM, especially young girls. The answer is simple. If you want to get a young girl interested in STEM, help her start making things of her own design in solution of her own or other people’s problems. The answer is the same for young boys. Making things provides the answer to interest youth in STEM. Making is an equal opportunity concept. Making does not discriminate based on gender, age, social status or any of the other protected classes.

Making something that is a personal solution to a real problem is a more valuable learning tool than just following an exercise in a book or downloading some 3-dimensional drawing from the Internet to 3D print. Designing and prototyping a dog umbrella or retrofitting an electric drill with a crank so it can be used to charge a cell phone are examples of making something to solve a problem.

When people make something to solve a problem, they are willing to learn whatever they need to learn from any of the STEM disciplines in order to make the solution work. This includes increased interest in reading skills so they can better understand the written information available to help with the project. Students improve their writing and communication skills as they seek to share information about their projects with others. The lessons learned from each project build an ever increasing personal knowledge base available for solving more problems with increasingly complex solutions.

The concept of “making” as a learning tool has been around for a long time, but very, very slow to catch on. On August 25, 1912, a minister named Frank Gunsaulus preached a sermon in Chicago about what he’d do with a million dollars (that was a lot of money back then). He thought education should be more experiential, where students would learn by doing instead of just reading information in a book or listening to a professor’s lecture. He said, in the sermon, that if he had a million dollars, he’s build such a school. American meatpacker-industrialist Philip Armour was in the congregation. After the service, he asked Gunsaulus if he really believed what he had just preached. Armour gave the million dollars for the creation/enhancement of the Armour Technology Institute.

Way back in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, there were people working at Stanford and MIT that recognized the value of the personal computer as a learning tool. Not as a way to merely digitize the boring content of text books, but as a tool to spur making. One of the early  pioneers in the maker movement, Seymour Papert, envisioned personal computers with many input and output ports so that children could connect all kinds of sensors for input and all kinds of relays and motors as outputs so young people could build all kinds of machines. Today, we have a microcontroller called the Arduino (cost is about $10) that does just what he envisioned with the expensive personal computers of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Making should be a part of all education, starting in kindergarten and remaining through college. Once we get young people to a basic level of reading, writing and math, we should throw out the standardized testing and the obsession with outcomes assessment and make problem/project-based learning a substantial part of everyone’s education. Combine all of that with an entrepreneurial mindset and we’ll start cranking out graduates that can change the world and we won’t be sitting around talking about how to interest young people in STEM.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, May 10, 2017

We encourage Fab Lab ICC members, students and visitors to think about using the Fab Lab to “make things and make money.” Another way is to say “People will pay money for the things you can make here.” People in business and in their personal lives have wants and needs; i.e. problems to solve, and they are willing to spend money to fix those problems. That’s the whole premise behind this new way of thinking about entrepreneurship, finding better ways to solve problems.

For entrepreneurs and inventors with new product ideas, Fab Lab ICC is a great place to develop prototypes in a quick and inexpensive way. At any given time, there are from one to five people working in various stages to bring new products to the marketplace.

But wait. There’s more to introducing a new product than just making a working prototype. We have to have a pretty good idea that there are people that want the new product and that they are willing to pay for it.

Here are five questions that need to be answered before talking to (i.e. spending money, time and/or effort to talk to) bankers, lawyers, patent attorneys or accountants about that new business idea you have. The answers can be informally written out and shared with a business coach, another service we provide through Fab Lab ICC.

1. Describe the product or business idea, i.e. your solution.
2. Describe the want, need or problem that your solution will solve.
3. What are the current solutions?
4. How is your solution different; i.e. better?
5. How many people have the problem?

The best way to answer these questions is to “go out into the world” and find those people that have the problem you are trying to solve and see if they think your solution would be preferable to whatever method they are currently using to deal with the problem. We believe this self-derived, informal method of determining whether or not potential customers are interested in your solution is far superior to formal market research.

Framing your business idea in the context of how it will solve a problem is an essential first step in understanding whether or not anyone will actually buy your solution when it becomes available. It is also important to examine current solutions. Most problems are not new so one way or another people are dealing with them in some way. It is important to know as much as possible about current solutions so you can ask people if they think your solution will be better. How many people have the problem is not really a quantitative question for which you need a definite number. Another way to phrase the question might be “How wide-spread is the problem?” In a random gathering of 100 people from all walks of life, how many might have the problem you are trying to solve?

Answering these five questions, especially after discussions with potential customers in the “real world” will most always point out that the solution you envision, in its current form, is not quite what people want. Use these five questions in an iterative process, answering them again and again after each tweak to the business or product idea. This is the best way to bring a new solution to the market without exhausting all your financial resources on a solution that most people will not buy.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.