New Year with Cannon :)

Ok, totally irrelevant to an MBA, but I finally figured out where the original video of the guy playing Cannon is. I wanted to give a link to his Youtube video just so it gets proper respect.

Click for the best and original Electric Guitar Cannon video by FunTwo.

Ring in the New Year with it!

I had to do some projects on Youtube for my internship and this has bugged me for a little while.

Marketing Mix

I'm working on a few projects and just wanted to get Marketing's 5 C's & 4 P's in front of me.

Marketing's 5 C's

1. Customer
2. Company
3. Competition
4. Collaborators
5. Context
   

Marketing's 4 P's

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion
5. People (some like to throw this in there as well)

lot's of snow

Utah Valley has gotten lot of snow this week. Actually its pretty awesome timing for Winter Break.

I've been living in apartments for many years now so this was the first time in years that I've had to shovel. Not Bad, actually--I liked getting forced outside. BYU's MBA Program wants me inside in front of a computer all day. :)

Here is how my car looked about 5 minutes ago.

Execution & Strategy

I've been thinking about what I've learned from my internship and classes. I've gained a lot of technical skills over the last few years, and this has not helped me to start an internet company--- so what will?

I think it boils down to execution & direction. One needs to have a direction to go. Just after college, I worked for 2 different small companies whose owners were just winging it day to day--it was easy to see they were not going to stay in business long.

I've been pretty good at planning out the internet product, but then have had very loose plans for how I was going to advertise it. The internship this summer definitely taught me a lot about executing a go-to-market strategy.

Courses I've had this year like entrepreneurial strategy and entrepreneurial marketing (FYI, this professor is going to release a pretty good book on startup marketing so watch for it) have shown what to base a strategy on.

So now I can create a much more robust and useful strategy. Anything left? Oh yea, execution! Tom Hopkins used to say that the salesman with enough desire will succeed, but he now says he has changed his mind and its the salesman with the most discipline.

And I really think that discipline is one of my greatest weaknesses. Its fun to dream of the future-I love that part! But working for it? I get bored pretty easily. I'd rather just hangout with friends.

Of course seeing that I've got a good strategy and knowing how to define one should help me to trust it better and be more willing to give it my time.

MBA 669 - Entrepreneruial Strategy - The Wrap Up

My most useful class this semester was Entrepreneurial Strategy taught by Gary Williams. Great class taught by a man who has been very successful but has also had longings to be teaching in academia--I don't think you get a lot of people like that in business schools.

So we had to read 3 books for this class. Inside the Tornado, Innovator's Dilemma, & Good to Great. Looking for some Christmas reading material, I also asked about other potential reads and he suggested the popular books by the author's of the books above and also: Execution, and Blue Ocean Strategy. Looks like a great list of ideas and models to know before going to raise funding.

In separate teams we analyzed for different companies very deeply. This week, we had to give them a final strategy that we felt they should follow. Most of us anlayzed using G2G's Hedge Hog Model and ITT's Bowling Alley Model.

I've got Good to Great down pretty good, but ITT was packed with info. I've got to go back and learn this stuff a little better-- I think it will make me infinitely better at startups.

I also learned a higher degree of professionalism in this project. We were dealing with very busy professionals and had to earn their trust in order to be taken seriously. Sad to say, but I only give myself a 5 out of 10 on my professionalism & earning Allegiance's CEO's trust.

Oh yeah, Allegiance was the company we did this report on.

The learning of professionalism and modeling was great and I think it will serve me as I become a stronger business developer.

Putting a lot of thought into it this semester at BYU, I definitely want to get into Biz-Dev after my MBA.

Good Luck with Finals

I haven't written much lately.... so why start now?

Just wanted to say good luck with finals to everybody!