Ready Fire Aim in an Entrepreneurial World

Now that I’m helping build a new business from the ground up I’ve got my entrepreneurial spirit back on over-charge. So when my friend Carlin tweeted this recent article in Inc.com it caught my attention.

It talks a lot about how entrepreneurs think differently, act differently, plan differently than people who excel is large corporate environments. It’s not necessarily saying one is better than the other. Just that the approaches are quite different.

Having lived successfully in both worlds, I agree. I love the quote of one entrepreneur in the article in particular. He/she said “I always live by the motto of ‘Ready, fire, aim.’ I think if you spend too much time doing ‘Ready, aim, aim, aim,’ you’re never going to see all the good things that would happen if you actually started doing it.”

And permeating the whole article is a theme I swear by. Keep in constant touch with your customers. Whether you do it via fancy research projects (as you are aiming and re-aiming) or rather ad hoc, keep you hand on the pulse of real, live paying customers. You’ll be glad you did.

Good Use of Time

I hate to waste time.  I’m a nut for starting a meeting with “what are we here to accomplish today and what will we decide?” If we can’t answer those questions, we should not hold the meeting.

So, in the spirit of not wasting your time or mine, I want to document the purpose for this blog. I have long had a mantra that we should have “no random acts of marketing” and now, as a 40-something marketing professional located in RI of all places I want to share some of the wisdom, or at least perspectives and lessons learned through the years.

After spending more than 20 years in high tech marketing, including 11 years in Silicon Valley, I believe these lessons can help entrepreneurs and other technology leaders think a little differently about the marketing of their companies and solutions.

Many entrepreneurs don’t have enough time to dedicate to marketing. They are too busy worrying about the bits and bytes, and increasingly important today – the cashola to fund their enterprise. So, if taking a few minutes to read this blog can give you one lesson learned or one actionable step you can take, your visit here will have been a good use of time.