entrepreneur Archives and Blog Posts - Entrepreneurs with Denis Oakley

Entrepreneurs with Denis Oakley

I HELP BOLD LEADERS TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESSES AND THE INDUSTRIES THEY COMPETE IN

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Positioning and Category Creation

Positioning and Category Creation
Photo by David Hofmann on Unsplash

I was talking to a customer this afternoon about positioning and category creation after he read this article on strategy. He was fairly blunt in what he thought of me: Steve Jobs would have thought me an idiot and I should take myself off and read the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. As it happened I’d read the Al Ries back in the day and it was also on my 2017 reading list.

Positioning and Category Creation

Our disagreement was simple. He believed that I did not understand the category that he was trying to create and the position that he wanted to occupy in that category. As it happened I do. It’s a powerful position that he wants to create in the customers mind. I believe it. The issue is far more about how we get from where we are now to being established as the leader of a new category.

Creating New Categories

As my client pointed out to me an entrepreneur has to approach creating a new category totally differently to launching a new product. A product has fairly standard tools to get itself established. Look up digital marketing and you will see a raft of them. In contrast a new category can be created in one way and one way alone. That is by selling the idea.

I have a dream

Martin Luther King stood up and sold his dream of racial equality. Marc Benioff stood up and sold his dream of

No software

Selling the Dream

There are different ways of selling the dream of a new category. You can use speeches, books, blogs and tweets. In fact you can use anything that inspires people to change. The core is that you have to be reaching out to your tribe of followers and asking them to believe. As they believe and you believe a new category starts to be born. As the mother of it you then move into the position in the consumer’s mind.

Positioning and category creation is first of all about creating the dreamspace in people’s minds. They will not do that unprompted. To abuse the UK patent test. The dream is not something that the man on the clapham omnibus would ever naturally think of. That’s what makes you and it special.

Creating a New Category Starts with Creating a New Thought Leader

The dream has to be crafted, optimised and distributed. The second two are technical aspects of the marketers tool kit. Modern marketing knows how to identify an audience, reach it and convert it. It doesn’t know how to create new categories. It does know how to create a thought leader who can espouse the need for a new category. That is a tried and tested path that any entrepreneur can follow even if he is doing something utterly and entirely unique. If he does not make himself into a thought leader he does so at his own risk, and that of his new category.

 

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An Entrepreneurial Start to The Day: Morning Routine

An Entrepreneurial Start to The Day: Morning RoutineEntrepreneurs start each day bounding out of bed and getting on with saving the world. They get up and start blasting through their emails, slack, jira and social media messages. This is a terrible Morning Routine

That’s why so many burn out. Unless you have a balanced start each day it is hard to be consistently productive over time. Mine is still a work in progress but having been involved in startups for over 15 years I have confidence that it is a lot better than diving in. I will cover each aspect of my morning routine and let you know why it is important.

TL:DR – Start Gentle and Focused and Build a Resilient Foundation with a Strong Morning Routine

Wakeup

When at all possible I will sleep in until I awaken naturally. My target goal is 8 hours each night. When I don’t get this it’s important to let the body decide how much it needs to get. So I let it happen. When I need to wake up for a set time then I use an app to assist. My favourite is SleepBot on iOS which has a movement sensor and will wake me up up to 30 minutes before my target time if I am showing signs of light sleep. This helps avoid the muzziness of being woken up by an alarm when in deep sleep

Morning Ritual Mediation

I then start off my morning following a morning ritual by Jason McGrice on Insight Timer. This is a 10 minute gratitude and focus meditation that has wonderful and appropriate music. I keep on thinking of retiring it as the next step does much the same. Habit keeps me on and it delivers the results. “Today is wonderful. Namaste!” How’s that for the last moment before I open my eyes

6 Phase Meditation

This is absolutely awesome. It is a key part of my morning routine. It’s designed by Vishen at Mindvalley to deliver massive benefits very quickly. Think of how Tim Ferris would hack meditation to got all the benefits in the fastest time possible.

It starts off by getting me to think about love and compassion. From a start thinking about how much I love my wife and children it then spirals out to get me to think about how much I love everyone and every creature in the world. That’s pretty powerful and moves you into a much calmer place before the day even starts.

Next is gratitude. I think of 3-5 things in my life, then in my work, and then about me that I am grateful for. most of the time I think about things that have happened in the last few days. This is super powerful because it helps me to remember what has gone right in my life. This helps keep me strong under the mountain of setup backs entrepreneurs can often face. We often think about the negative 5-10 times as often as the positive. This counteracts that.

Forgiveness comes next. I’ve made a list of several hundred people who have been nasty to me. Well they may not have been but for each of them there is some imagined hurt that I nurture deep in my psyche. Each day I think of one and visualise them. I remember the hurt that they did to me and forgive them and ask them for forgiveness. This is all inside the mind so no loss of face is involved. It kills off so many quarrels with my wife before she even knows about them 🙂

Then it’s onto looking at one of my big visions. I think of one of my big plans and imagine myself in three years time. I try and touch, smell, taste and see exactly how it feels to have achieved the success that I am dreaming of. The point of this is that if I imagine the dream during the day the next steps on the way to achieving it will come far more naturally.

After this I imagine the day. The perfect day where everything that I have to do goes right. I imagine perfect emails to customers, my children getting dressed perfectly and having a great time in the car on the way to school. I visualise eating the right food and pushing hard up the hills when I go out on my bike. It’s a great way to set the standard that I expect from myself for the rest of the day.

Finally I ask whatever it is I believe in to give me a helping hand. (I am an atheist/agnostic/theist/deist depending on how I am feeling). Something usually does which is cool.

News

I gave up reading the news a while back and this is my daily fix. I read the Espresso app from the Economist. 6 articles with a 2 sentence summary of 10 other stories. Its probably all that is important in the world. Dispassionate it rarely gets negative emotions bubbling up.

Shower and Music

Then it’s onto the floor to do 10 pushups. I’ve put on my awesomely uplifting Dawn Awakening soundtrack on spotify. I struggle through the pushups (I can run for 12 hours but upper body strength has never been a priority – so starting from a weak base) and then head into the shower. It’s cold. I don’t have hot water. So the first big test of the day is to nerve myself to get under the freezing water (it’s not really). Generally that is the hardest thing I do each day. After that most other stuff seems trivial

Preparation

Then I head downstairs and make my breakfast. At this point I’ve still not thought about work or opened any electronic devices. I quite deliberately move my thought on from any attempt of my mind to chatter about work. I need to get a firm stable foundation. So I clean the kitchen listening to an audio book. I read a bit as I have my breakfast. Then when I am finally grounded and have everything set I sit down at my desk and get things done. When I start the day like this it seems that I am twice as productive as when I do not.

Why does this work

My morning routine works because I spend the start of the day building my self esteem and my self confidence. By the time I let the outside world into my bubble I am the person I want to be and I deal with the world on my own terms. It’s like putting on a suit of armour. Go into battle without armour and sooner or later your blood will be flowing. This is like that. Actually it’s more like being a Zen master and flowing through all the sharp pointy things without them coming close. Whatever it is it works.

How do you start your day? What is your morning routine? What other things could I incorporate in mine to make it even better? Use the comments below

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What are the hardest things about being an Entrepreneur?

Fear and Failure - the foes of entrepreneursThere have been two incredibly hard things in my life as an entrepreneur. They both begin with F. Failure and Fear.

Failure

Success is commonly seen as creating a unicorn and having a bank account bulgin with billions. If you don’t achieve that, if you stumble and fall along the way then it sometimes seems if you are a failure. The mistake here is that if you take this view then you are relying on your achievements as myour measure of success. Achievement is fickle and rarely under our control. The activity that you put into creating achievements or otherwise is a far better measure.

Much of my best work never delivered. The market changed. The company went bust. We pivoted. Was I responsible for the market changes? No. If it hadn’t changed I’d have a shiny medal. The reality is that I don’t. The reality is that as an entrepreneur this is really really common. We look at the stars and expect dreamlike rewards. The truth is that we mine diamonds and we need to shine and polish them as they are the true measure of our value.

What we do is incredibly valuable; then, we do it again and again.

Fear

Or we try to. Fear is a brilliant tool. It is super power at stopping us doing stupid things. If it hurts, fear kicks in and stops us doing it again. Great for teaching us to stay away from cliffs, bicycles and rivers in flood. The truth is that as entrepreneurs we need to go to these places. We need to go back to them time and time again and the fear makes it harder for us to do so. Worse we get platitudes that tell us to overcome fear but don’t tell us how to cut through the scar tissue that forms over time.

For me the secret lies as much in sidestepping the issue as in facing it directly. Does it scare me? Yes? Will it kill me? No (if yes – such as downhill biking I put on the brakes). Then try it. Push to overcome that discomfort at every moment. I’m always in awe of how Napoleon and other generals ignored canon and musket fire, appearing unconcerned as they got pelted with dirt and had horses shot from around them and aides mutilated. Fight the little battles first and then big ones are easier. The epiphany in my life was mundane. Cold water. I used to scrunch myself up before having a cold shower. it was a horrible experience. Now I just walk into the cold stream of water and accept the sensation.

Each battle with fear gives us confidence

 

What are the hardest things about being an Entrepreneur?