Posts Tagged ‘new york entrepreneur week’

One of the entrepreneurial buzzwords I have heard in recent months has been “elevator pitch.” Many networking groups have been pushing elevator pitch events as can be evidenced by the 45 upcoming meetups scheduled for elevator pitches or pitch parties. And 35 groups talk about elevator pitches in their description. But as someone who has attended many networking events and heard just about every entrepreneur at New York Entrepreneur Week pitching their idea, I think that the elevator pitch is no longer the key but rather the “pitch to pitch” is.

Lets face it; we no longer have the attention span we did 5 years ago. Twitter has shortened our attention span to 140 characters, TiVo has taken away our ability to sit through a commercial and all these blackberries, Iphones and Ipad like devices have destroyed our ability to do one thing at a time. Think back to Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a great article from Careerbuilder.com on people taking on internships at various stages in their career and why they do it. I am featured in the article for my work with New York Entrepreneur Week. The read the article, please click here.

Recently, I saw a post on twitter by Gary Whitehill, founder of New York Entrepreneur Week, “One of the hardest things to understand in life is: You’re not what you are, but what you’re perceived to be.” In this day and age of social media, I think this is one of the most important things for people to remember. First impressions last a lifetime and in today’s day and age, our first impression is made with the information that people see about us online. Let’s be honest, when we connect with a person at a meeting or are introduced through a mutual contact, the first thing we do is go to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to learn more about this person. If the individual has no information available or a spotty resume on these sites, part of the excitement of the initial introduction is lost immediately. The person will now have to overcome this void in order to make a great first impression.

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Recently, I wrote a blog for NY Entrepreneur Week entitled Becoming an Entrepreneur: Things to Consider. This article deal with things that people who are considering starting a business should think about before they make the jump. One of the points I mention is deciding whether or not to give up full time employment to focus on the new company. I personally went the route of starting a business while having a full time job. It helps keep cash flow going and provides for the important things, like health insurance. I know many others who chose to just jump right in and devote 24/7 to their new venture. There is no right way to do it and each person decides what is best for them.

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Here is a link to a great post by Gary Whitehill on sales: Click here for blog post

Gary Whitehill is the Founder of The Relentless Foundation and New York Entrepreneur Week. he has become an accomplished social entrepreneur who gauges success by the thousands. His in-the-trenches entrepreneurial credibility reaches back over a decade, having started his first entrepreneurial endeavor at age twelve in the confectionary sector. As founder of New York Entrepreneur Week, Gary is credited with having the vision to create the first and only statewide entrepreneurial event ever held. NYEW is the largest aggregator of entrepreneurial events in New York State. In November ’09 the event brought together 120 speakers from 18 states and 3 continents.

Most people start their entrepreneurial ventures when they are young and single for the very simple reason that you end up being married to your business. From the day you start your business until the day you exit from it, as a founder and the visionary, you need to be involved in every decision, idea and meeting critical to the success of your organization. You are on call 24/7, especially in this day and age of the SmartPhone.

As someone who started dating my future wife while she was working at an early stage startup and married her as I was starting my own company, I was lucky that my wife understood the life of late night emails and phone calls, working on weekends and a non-existant paycheck. However, despite my wife’s understanding and high tolerance for the risk of entrepreneurship, being an entrepreneur with a family is not an easy task.

As someone who has been through it, I believe that the following are some of the keys to making it work (Note: I am often guilty of not following through on these myself, but working towards them will make a big difference!)

• Family hour – 1 hour a night with no answering calls or emails and just sitting with your family talking.
• Shared calendar with your spouse/significant other – Let them see when you have meetings and events so you can plan time together, even if they need to call your secretary to schedule it.
• Bring your spouse to events – If you go out to a fundraiser party, bring your spouse. Let them have fun too!
• Take advantage of you being your own boss – Don’t use entrepreneurship as an excuse to miss important events or vacations. You can work from a laptop almost anywhere in the world and can answer emails from your smartphone in real time. When your family needs you somewhere, make sure to be there.

New York Entrepreneur Week (www.nyew.org) will be having a panel entitled “Entrepreneurial Ventures: The Impact at Home” in their April 2010 conference where there will be much more valuable insight into this topic. But it is most important to remember that most startups don’t succeed and it so it is most important to make sure your family will still support you whether you go big or go bust.

I just read an interesting post on the philosophy of the sale by Gary Whitehill, founder of New York Entrepreneur Week (www.nyew.org). Please click here to read the post.

My father has been in sales all his life selling office supplies and is still one of the top sales people in the industry. My first experience in sales was working with him for a summer. I remember going from client to client and learning the art of the sale and the subtleties involved. My clearest memory is of him being flat out rejected by a client and on the way out, my father mentioned that his company had Yankee tickets that clients can use. The guy turned around and placed an order on the spot. When I walked out, I asked my father what had just happened. He told me he noticed a Yankee necklace under the guys t-shirt and knew all along he had him at the mention of Yankees.

I took an important lesson from this. Most people sell similar, if not the same products. The difference is how you sell it. How well do you know your customers? Do you know if they have a family? Have kids? Or do you only know their email addresses. In today’s environment where it is so easy for anyone to get your client’s contact info, you need an edge that will make them think long and hard before they consider switching suppliers.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and stories!

While discussing the pros and cons of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter with some friends, it occurred to me that Twitter could be a short lived fad following in the footsteps of social medial sites like MySpace. I know everyone uses Twitter nowadays and it’s great to know what your friends are doing in real time or to publicize some new work you have done. However, is there truly anything that makes Twitter unique?

I know many people will jump down my throat and say “look how many people are using it so it is extremely relevant’ or “to Tweet became part of our dictionary so it is not just a fad.” However, I recently heard someone speak  at New York Entrepreneur Week (www.nyew.org) about social media (I forgot who) and when people brought up twitter as an example, his response was “Don’t even talk to me about Twitter until they make their first dollar.” In thinking about that, I realized that the problem isn’t figuring out the revenue model for Twitter, it is that all of the revenue models are already part of Facebook or LinkedIn. In the most basic form, Twitter is Facebook lite. It is Facebook with just status updates. Twitter’s advantage used to be in the “real time” updates from your phone and tagging people in statuses. But now, Facebook is integrating those things as well into their platform. And LinkedIn provides much better information about the people you want to follow and connect with.

So at the end of the day, Twitter is  just a pipeline that delivers content, and something may replace it soon, or it may thrive. But with all the new functionalities of other sites, if Twitter disappeared, would it really make a huge difference in our lives or would people just gradually forget Twitter even existed?

Please share your thoughts as I know I am probably in the minority!

In the past few weeks, I have had various discussions with people regarding a shift in how people network. When I was in college just 7 years ago, every professor and career advisor taught you the importance of walking into a room, giving a firm handshake when you meet people, looking at them in the eye when you talk and asking for a business card so you can follow up via email or snail mail (for all kids out there, that is when you wrap the paper in an envelope and the guy at the post office brings it to the intended recipient). These days, I am attending networking events where everyone says “I will tweet you” or ‘What is your Facebook fan page so I can follow you and talk to you on your wall.” Even those who do remember to ask for a business card and follow up, never get in front of that person again because they lack the skills needed to network correctly and make an impact. The average attention span nowadays in less than 5 seconds and people do not have the skills to ‘hook” someone in that timeframe. How many times a day do you find yourself deleting emails from people you met once that want something from you, a reference, meeting or to discuss a new opportunity, because they didn’t make an impression when they met you.

While social media definitely opens many doors and avenues that were not available just a few years ago, they are also diminishing the social skills of the next generation. The inability to type a message in proper English and grammar and general lack of people skills is a big problem facing the next generation. I am sure the model of how people do business will change with technology, as it already has, but the inability to socialize and lack of people skills will have a longstanding effect on who will succeed. Remember, business deals don’t get done via twitter, they get done with a firm handshake.

I would love to hear other people’s opinions and thoughts on virtual networking and social media vs. in person meetings and attending real life networking events. I am hoping to start some kind of blog to deal with these issues and would love for some people who are interested in being part of it to email me through this site so we can get started on putting some content together. I am not the best writer but think it’s a hot button issue that will have long standing ramifications. I look forward to hearing your feedback.