Ahabwe Collins

What one small step you take today could lead to a multi-million dollar chain reaction? That’s what happened to Susan Wojcicki when she was 30 years old: “I had just got out of business school and bought a house. So I needed to get some renters in order to help pay the mortgage...” So she rented our her garage to two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used it to start up their new  company, Google. Susan remembers the first year, with many “late nights together in the garage eating pizza and M&Ms, where (Larry and Sergey) talked to me about how their technology could change the world." They finally convinced her to join as Employee No.18 and their first marketing manager, when she was four months pregnant. First job? Relocate them all to a proper office. Called the “Mom at Google”, Susan was the first in the team to have a baby, and her “family first” philosophy led to Google topping the ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For’ list. The “family” grew, lite...

Four things make up 79% of all business failures: TOP TEN STARTUP MISTAKES #1 - Building something nobody wants (36%) #2 - Hiring poorly (18%) #3 - Lack of focus (13%) #4 - Failing to market & sell (12%) How to best avoid these failures: #1 - Always start with the customer, not the product. Get your beta group / user group of customers and work with them to deliver what they love. People will pay you to do what they love, not to just do what you love. #2 - Outsource to experts who manage themselves, not workers who need to be managed. Hire people who let you do more of what you do best, not people who take you away from your talents because they need to be managed. #3 - Once opportunities begin to grow, don't get defocused. Anything that doesn't add to your customer's experience isn't worth doing. #4 - Don't fail by having a great product that no one knows about. Don't rely on someone else to sell your product until you have more sales than you can h...

__ Your marketing strategy. When I first got started, I sure knew how to sell, but I didn't know how to market… I must have been in business for about five years when I first really got into marketing. It happened during a particularly difficult time in our economy, when things were really down and business wasn’t really moving. I tried to run some adverts in a local newspaper to create awareness of the things I did, but things did not really move as I had hoped. And when people did call, I seemed to get the wrong type of customers to the ones I wanted. "I really need to teach you about marketing," my friend Enoch Hwande said to me. "Oh, you mean I should advertise more?" He was the Creative Director of a major international advertising agency. "No I'm not talking about advertising. I am talking about marketing." "What’s the difference?" "There is a huge difference, and you will not get very far in developing your bus...