If you’ve seen the power of social media in entrepreneurship and small business, can you afford to ignore Google+? I think not. Plus already has more than 100 million users, and some business press is predicting more than 400 million by the end of this year. 

But even if you’re already working with social networking for your business, maybe especially if you are, you may be feeling like I did, initially, about another social network. I like Twitter a lot and I’m there a lot, and I’ve tried to keep up with Facebook and LinkedIn, so my reaction was a lot like what Guy Kawasaki says was his first reaction to Google+:

I need another social media service like I need more email or my dog to throw up on the carpet.

That quote is from the introduction to Guy’s latest new book What the Plus. Yes, I recognized the feeling. But What The Plus goes very quickly from that initial hesitance to why you want to deal with Google+ at all. Guy Kawasaki is known as the original and quintessential Apple Evangelist, which makes this quote particularly significant:

“From my perspective, Google + is to Facebook and Twitter what Macintosh is to Windows: Better, but fewer people use it, and the pundits prophesy that it will fail. As a lover of great products, this rankles my soul.”

I liked this comparison too, part of an opening chapter called Why I Love Google+: Twitter is about perspectives, FaceBook about people, and Google+ about passions:

“Ask yourself if you want to enhance and expand the number of people who share your passions. If the answer is no, stick with Twitter and Facebook until Google + reaches critical mass. Or, you may decide you need multiple services: Twitter for perspectives, Facebook for people, and Google + for passions. That’s OK too.

I ended up reading the book from cover to cover on one weekend morning, loving it, and reviewing it last weekend on Small Business Trends as A Quick Practical Guide to Google+. I said:

a short, practical to-the-point book on Google Plus by Guy Kawasaki. It’s all about tips, shortcuts, and step by step to taking more advantage of Plus, and doing it better. Don’t judge it by my presence on Plus, because I’m writing this fresh after reading the book, before implementing. I’m not going to take long, though, to implement this books suggestions for modifying my profile, my profile pictures, my posting strategy, and my approach to circles. 

Often the best spend in business, dollar for dollar, is a good business book. You can get this one on amazon.com as an ebook for only $2.99.

Conclusion: As I said in that review: “It’s a lot easier to learn from a well-written and practical book than my trial and error.”

Over the weekend I discovered Guy Kawasaki’s 10-minute YouTube video version of his new book Enchantment.

When the book came out I reviewed it on my blog. I loved it, I recommended it, and bought some extra copies for people I work with. It’s very easy to read, and full of good advice. I concluded there:

Guy is preaching what he practices. And, following his own advice, being a mensch, he wants to help you figure it out. And, since he is a gifted communicator, story teller, and simplifier, the book is one of those that I want people I know to read.

And here is Guy himself, with a 10-minute summary:

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If for any reason you don’t get the video here, you can click this link for the YouTube original. You might also like Guy’s own collection of slides and interviews, which is where I found it (with thanks to Guy on twitter).

Books: falling out of fashion, perhaps, but – business books, for sure – still so amazingly practical. What’s an hour of your time worth? How much time can a business book save? I posted here last week, in this context, about John Jantsch’s new book on referral marketing. And today it’s Melinda Emerson’s Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months. I love the book, I’ve got mixed feelings about its title, and I particularly like its real-world common sense.

Real-world common sense like starting at the beginning, not how to go out on your own, precisely, but on whether you want to: Melinda starts with a chapter called “So You Think You Want to be an Entrepreneur.” That’s right, really, and very important in this topic area. So she challenges you to think about what you really want, and whether your idea will work, and do you love what you want to do.

Here’s a great quote from that chapter:

Suddenly becoming a one-salary family is tricky. Make sure that your spouse is behind your decision. If not, your dream can turn into a nightmare.

And another, highlighting Melinda’s offering of real-world hard-nosed “been there done that” insight:

Of course, the best business idea in the world isn’t worth anything if you run out of money. There’s no way around it: starting a business is expensive. It will be a while before you see a return on your investment. That’s why, before you hand the boss your walking papers and box up the personal things in your cubicle, you’d better make sure you and your family are on solid financial ground.

So what don’t I like? Nothing serious; actually, I admit it, these are petty complaints:

• The phrase “become your own boss” in the title. It’s actually a pet peeve of mine: you start a business, you aren’t going to be your own boss; your customers become your boss. But that really has nothing to do with the book. That’s just me.
• The 12-months time frame: Sabrina Parsons and I wrote 3 Weeks to Startup (2008, Entrepreneur Press), so I feel like I have to say that. Still Melinda explains the 12 months extremely well in her second chapter (titled “Why Does it Take Twelve Months”). And I really like the way she schedules the tasks through the months, giving things time to simmer. It goes very well with her overall tone of good practical advice.

What do I like? Lots:

• Melinda is extremely good at keeping the business in the larger context of your whole life. That’s an excellent reminder. Her third chapter focuses on “your life plan” and it’s dripping with good advice, things you really should be considering.
• Her 12-month plan presents a process very well. At the beginning, three months of getting reading, including your life plan in the first, then financial plan, business model, lawyer, accountant. I’ve been there. This is how things really work. Then nine months of getting set, including focus, niche marketing, of course business planning, financing, building a team, recruiting, branding, and so on. Then comes the actual launch, with good discussions of bookkeeping, maintaining marketing, and so on. Throughout, it’s good advice, well organized, clearly written.

So where do I get to the post title above about 4 essential books? This post is about the newest of the four, Melinda Emerson’s Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months. And I’ve already mentioned the one I co-authored, 3 Weeks to Startup. So the other two are two books I like so much I can’t post on this topic without including them. I’ve posted on both of these before: Pamela Slim’s Escape From Cubicle Nation and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. Each has a different point of view, each covers different elements.

Starting a business is a big deal. If you’re serious about it, read all four of these books.

Are you teaching a class on starting a business? If you are, then I’d like you to be aware of course.bplans.com.

That’s where I’ve put up a full curriculum/syllabus including lesson plans, exercises and assignments, online videos, and more than a dozen PowerPoint slide presentations complete with slide-by-slide notes and distribution-friendly photos and graphics.

This is material I’ve worked on for years, originally just for my own use as I taught a course in starting a business for undergrads at the University of Oregon. I’m not going to be teaching that course this spring, after 11 years of it, because I’m more involved with angel investment via the Willamette Angel Conference. But I do want to make it available to others. Why not?

The whole curriculum is free to professors on that site. And, just so you understand the motivation, yes, the coursework requires Business Plan Pro, Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and my books the Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan and 3 Weeks to Startup (co-authored with Sabrina Parsons). So my company, Palo Alto Software, does make money by selling those to your students. But we have academic pricing, so your students can get all three for less than the $130 average cost of an entrepreneurship textbook. I’d like to think everybody wins.

That’s at course.bplans.com. You’ll find instructions there to get your free registration as a teacher. This was done especially for SBDCs, members of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, community colleges and undergrad business education classes. We’ve been a sponsor of the ASBDC network for 15 years now and of NACCE for two years; so we like to think we understand those needs.

Consider yourself one of the first to know about the new Bplans.com pitch site at pitch.bplans.com. That means you can be one of the first to pitch and one of the first to get posted.

No, it’s not about putting your business in front of investors, although maybe it could be partly related to that. Instead, it’s about the art of the pitch. Free publicity perhaps, too, and tips or comments. What it is about is the art of the pitch. Doing it right, doing it well and getting yourself and your business up and showing up. (And let’s pause here to note that The Art of the Pitch is a chapter in Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start book. Click here for his reading of that chapter.)

Take your browser to pitch.bplans.com and you’ll see the “Add pitch” button you can use to upload your pitch. What follows is a page of basic information (name, address, logo, etc.) and then a second page where you can add a YouTube video URL if you want, or short texts to deal with 10 key topics.

This is all free to the users. What do you get out of it? A dedicated URL you can use to refer people to your business summary, plus the possibility of comments; this is free publicity, and publicity is assumed to be good. What do we get out of it? Bplans.com is about starting, growing and planning a business, so we get more interesting stuff on our site.

And me? I like business pitches. That goes from the 60-second so-called elevator pitch to the 10- to 20-minute business pitch with slides. To me, business pitches, when well done, are fascinating. I see a lot of them. I see them in my role as a member of the Willamette Angel Conference, and I get to see them as a judge at venture competitions, including Forbes’ and several business school contests. And I’ll be watching them on this site, too.

Like they say in the commercials: Do it today. Do it now. Click here.

Remember the (stupid) “out of the box” cliché?  Yeah, I hate it, too . . . but a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities involve fixing broken things. Disruptions under way, and disruptions needed. I’m just thinkin’.

1. Disruption there, waiting for you: YouTube is free, powerful and extremely easy to embed in a website, and almost universal. Can Google support it forever? Can it support itself? Are you working with it yet? Will your competitors work with it?
2. Disruption needed: Textbooks are too expensive. When setting up my start-your-business course, just as an example, my students can get Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start for $18. Most textbooks on entrepreneurship sell for about $120.
3. Disruption disorganized, struggling to be born: something to bring entrepreneurs and investors together that isn’t illegal, isn’t haphazard and works. I’ve posted on this before. Angelsoft.net and thefunded.com are on the way. But seriously, investment falls, recession . . . isn’t it time for something new?
4. Disruption and now what? Doing the hard work in journalism, like investigative reporting, digging and getting paid for it. How’s that going to work in the future? Related note: the Huffington Post has full-time journalists on staff now; is that the news media of the future? (and disclosure: I’m biased; I post (proudly) on Huffpo).
5. Disruption needed: all those good blogs nobody notices. Finding needles in a mountain of needles. The scarce resource is not finding, but sorting through.

Do what you love and the money will follow? That’s been true for me in my life. And within reason, at least, it might be for you, too. Watch the video. Let Guy Kawasaki explain. (And if you don’t see that here, then click here to go to the source.)

This three-minute reminder from Kawasaki is what we baby boomers would call “an oldie but goodie.”  I found it over the weekend on Stanford’s eCorner entrepreneurship video site–which is an excellent resource. It’s a collection of talks, broken conveniently into segments like this one. It’s from 1993 and, despite recession and a lot of changes, it’s holding up just fine to the ravages of time. It’s as valid today as it was then.

I do have that one reservation, however. I hope it’s obvious. If you take this idea too literally, and do what you love without any regard for what other people will pay for, then it doesn’t work. You need empathy and common sense. Love skiing? Teach it, make gear, do a store, build a website, do something related that people will pay for. Does that make sense?

It’s nice when Guy Kawasaki writes about/alludes to/makes cursory mention of the product or service into which you pour a significant portion of your waking hours.

It means more than enjoying an influx of traffic to your website (a handy side-effect, no doubt). It’s also an encouraging validation that you’re taking some steps in the right direction. This is especially true when the praise comes for the method of evangelism as well as for the actual product or service.

Guy has built an ecosystem of success based as much on evangelism methodology as on the services he creates. Truemors, for instance, is a cool concept. But the story of how it came to be might actually be better known. Kawasaki built, developed and registered the site for a few thousand dollars.

So it’s nice when he folds your technique into his own as he did in this article that features Email Center Pro.

It’s an added bonus when the topic at hand is something about which we’re so passionate: Telling the story of our service as quickly, succinctly and creatively as possible. This is something on which every small business should focus. The marketplace is more crowded than ever. It’s vital to explain in two minutes or less what you do and why that matters.

Jason Gallic
Product Manager
Palo Alto Software

I noticed this very plan-as-you-go post by Guy Kawasaki on the American Express Open Forum. What I like about it, particularly, is where Guy says “set goals” and then lists these four desirable qualities of goals:

Measurable. If a goal isn’t measurable, its unlikely you’ll achieve it. For a startup, quantifiable goals are things like shipping deadlines, downloads, and sales volume. The old line “What gets measured gets done” is true. This also has ramifications for the number of goals, because you can’t (and shouldn’t) measure everything. Three to five goals measured on a weekly basis are plenty.

Achievable. Take your conservative forecasts for these goals and multiply them by 10 percent; then use that as your goal. For example, if you think you’ll easily sell a million units in the first year, set your goal at 100,000 units. There is nothing more demoralizing than setting a conservative goal and falling short; instead take 10 percent of your forecast, make this your goal, and blow it away. You might think that such a practice will lead to underachieving organizations, because they aren’t being challenged. Yeah, well, check back with me after you don’t sell a million widgets.

Relevant. A good goal is relevant. If you’re a software company, it’s the number of downloads of your demo version. It’s not your ranking in Alexa, so telling the company to focus on getting into the top 50,000 sites in the world in terms of traffic is not nearly as relevant as 10,000 downloads per month.

Rathole resistant. A goal can be measurable, achievable, and relevant and still send you down a rathole. Let’s say you’ve created a content website. Your measurable, achievable, and relevant goal is to sign up 100,000 registered users in the first ninety days. So far, so good. But what if you focus on this body count without regard to the stickiness of the site? So now you’ve gotten 100,000 people to register, but they visit once and never return. That’s a rathole. Ensure that your goal encompasses all the factors that will make your organization viable.

What I like about this, as you might guess, is that it’s a very close match to what I’m saying here, in this site, and in the Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan book. Goals are about business, getting things done, and they do you no good unless you follow up on results and manage accordingly.

Tim Berry
President and Founder
Palo Alto Software

Guy Kawasaki’s recent repost of his “The Art of Bootstrapping” reminds me how much I liked it when it first came out, along with Seth Godin’s “Bootstrapper’s Bible” and Thomas Frey’s “10 Rules for Bootstrapping Your Business.” This is the real world. Bootstrapping is often the only way to start, build and grow your business.

And I probably don’t have to remind anybody about the obvious fact that we’re going to be seeing a lot more bootstrapping in the near future.

For years now, I’ve complained every so often about how we (in blogs, business plan contests, academia and entrepreneurship in general) tend to idealize the venture capital-financed startup, the SBA loan and the more formalized and carefully planned financial strategy. This is especially true in venture competitions.

And, frankly, I’ve earned the right to post about bootstrapping because Palo Alto Software, my company, didn’t get outside financing or even a straight business loan until it was already 13 years old and didn’t need it. We grew it from zero to 30-some employees the old-fashioned way, meaning we had to sell something and get the money from it before we could spend something.

It wasn’t easy. At one point we had three mortgages and $65,000 in credit card debt. That’s a nightmare.

On the other hand, having built a business through bootstrapping means that when you do it, you don’t have co-owners, investors or partners as quasi-bosses; and you don’t have to repay the bank, either. It’s yours.

There’s a lot to be said for not having debt when you get to the hard times.

And also the simple fact that the best financing is sales. Money from customers. You get to spend it, and it validates your business at the same time.