Posts

Showing posts from February, 2019

There Are Two Ways You Can Kill a Startup: Too Little Business and Too Much Business.

Image
A couple of years ago, our five month old custom cabinet business, New Beginnings Custom Woodworks, was featured on our local news station. In our exuberance, we signed up too many customers with an unrealistic view of how quickly we could complete jobs. In less than a month, we had upset customers and significant cash flow problems as we made mistakes in our rush to complete jobs while also missing deadlines. For any new venture, I believe there are three top factors that protect a business from failure: A good fit between the product/ service and the market it serves. A complete understanding of the company's cash flow position with daily projections. Marketing, marketing, marketing ! In the case of our cabinet business misstep, we were able to recover our financial footing through the three key factors. Our product ultimately was a good fit with customer demand, so after apologizing and then completing jobs satisfactorily, we were able to refine our product

If You Are Doing Business as Mission, You Are Doing Marketing.

This has been a big theme of this website for many years. And it is the foundation of a marketing class I’ve taught for YWAM for 5 years. Recently, the importance of marketing came to the forefront while I gave a tour of Belay Enterprises to a friend interested in mentoring for our Venture Partners program. He is a business broker, who is hired by individuals looking to sell their businesses. And he notes that nearly all of the businesses approaching him for sale have significant room for growth in the future, simply by implementing better marketing. Effective marketing is the key to a thriving venture. And marketing is more than advertising, as it is often, mistakenly limited to. When done at its best, it is about defining the minimally viable market for your good or service and then making appropriate decisions about price, place and people. For the faith venture practitioner, marketing done well provides an opportunity to redeem the promotion piece of marketing, which som

Seeking Ranch Land to Change Lives

Image
Do you know someone with an available small plot of ranch land in the Denver area?  Belay Enterprises , has identified a great opportunity for a business that both employs and serves the refugee community in Colorado.  A local Nepali pastor has approached us with the employment needs of his community. There are a number of older members who are struggling with learning English, which is negatively impacting their ability to find work. The pastor has also noticed that his community prefers buying whole farm-raised goats over pre-packaged meats at the supermarket. He's also discovered there is a great price spread between purchasing the goats in other states and then selling them individually in Colorado. But the difficulty with the model is finding an affordable place to ranch the goats close to Denver. This goat business model is also an opportunity for other communities in the U.S. and in the right developed nations. Our research shows that even non-immigrant communitie

Europe's Growing Desire for Third Wave Coffee Creates Opportunities to Employ Immigrants

Image
Over the last decade, coffee culture has undergone a big change in the United States. It is a movement often referred to as the third wave of coffee. And this new approach is opening up big opportunities for business as mission (BAM) ventures, especially in places throughout Europe. Right after World War II, the first wave of coffee culture hit the American shores when the industry was invented with uniform roasts, mass produced for people less concerned about taste and more interested in price and a morning jolt of caffeine. In the 1990’s, Starbucks grew second wave coffee from a small shop in Seattle to locations all over the world. Second Wave coffee was defined by mass produced dark roasts emphasizing good taste that could by uniformly experienced in any of its stores. We are now in the middle of the third wave coffee movement where specialty stores are producing high-quality coffees of different styles and tastes. These coffees are roasted to the specific profile o