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Marcus Buckingham’s book “Now Discover Your Strengths” offers some interesting insights on how to succeed by building on your strengths. The basic concept is that you will progress much further if you build on your strengths rather than try and shore up your weakness. While knowing your weaknesses and improving those areas is important there is more to be gained by building on your strengths.

The example in the book that I wanted to share with you is related to the shot putter and the sprinter. The shot putter and the sprinter have different skill sets. The sprinter can become world class in their area with a training regime built around improving their natural sprinting abilities and likewise for the shot putter. If you tried to set up a training regime for the sprinter to become a world class shot putter they would never achieve the same level of mastery. Granted the sprinter would become a better shot putter, however, they would likely not become world class because their natural skill set is in sprinting.

If you want to become world class in your field spend most of your energy building on your strengths.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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There are plenty of start-ups in the Ottawa area and it is difficult to keep tabs on them all. Jeff Pappone from OBJ recently wrote an article on start-ups to watch in the Ottawa area and I thought what a great idea. They say copying is the highest form of flattery so I thought I would pay Jeff Pappone a great compliment and highlite three Ottawa start-ups that in my opinion have great potential.

Ian’s picks are:
- RaceDV
- Terralogik
- Triacta

RaceDV is committed to enriching the motorsport experience for enthusiasts at all levels. RaceDVhas two cameras that can mount anywhere on your racecar and a data acquisition system that keeps track of all pertinent information. The output is a video from the driver’s perspective in the car with HUD like data over laid on the video. Really cool stuff.

I meet two of the RaceDV team Kareem Sultan and Rob Villeneuve at democamp in Ottawa. They presented at Democamp2 in Ottawa this past fall and I had the opportunity to chat with them afterwards. What I like about the RaceDV team is they have purpose, passion and a kick ass product that has great potential. Keep an eye on RaceDV.

Terralogik is a full spectrum solution provider in the GIS market space. I meet Todd Lewis at Barcamp2 in Ottawa and had a good chat with him. I grilled him according to the Litmus Test and he passed with flying colours. Terralogik has a good understanding of where they are now, where they want to go and how they plan to get there. They have a solid strategy coupled with the ability to execute. In my opinion Terralogik is a company to watch in 2007.

Triacta is a company that specializes in smart meter technology. I interviewed Rob Brennan the CEO for an article I wrote in the Ottawa Business Journal. I was very impressed with Rob his business strategy and the direction he was taking the company. Triacta is a company with vision, a strong executive and board. Their timing in entering the smart meter business couldn’t be better and they have recently received a $1M in VC funding. Triacta has a great product, great timing and the ability to execute. This is a company to watch in 2007.

I will endeavour to have a top three picks on a monthly basis.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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Being a good Canadian I like to use hockey analogies. Arguably the greatest hockey player of all time is Wayne Gretzky. The story goes that when Wayne was a young lad his father would sit him in front of the TV with a pencil during Hockey Night in Canada and have him predict where the puck was going to be. Not to where the puck was but, to where it was going to be. When asked what made him such a great player Wayne humbly stated that “I go to where the puck will be”.

Marketing is a whole lot about determining where the market will be in the future. If you target what is happening today there is a good chance that you will miss the mark because markets change and evolve. What you want to target is where the market is going and how to capitalize on that evolution. Taking stock of what is happening in the market today is important, informative and can help you in the decision making process. However, being able to extrapolate and predict trends is far more valuable than a static analysis of what is.

The product development process can take months or years to complete. So remember you will want to be where the market is when you product or service is ready for introduction NOT where it is today.

If you want to target tomorrow don’t aim at today.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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One of my favourite authors is Stephen Covey. I have recently started doing some serious goal setting in my life and have found the second habit extremely powerful in this respect. The second habit in Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” is begin with the end in mind.

Begin with the end in mind is all about creating a mission vision and values for your life, which is closely tied with goal setting. The essence of begin with the end in mind is to think of yourself at your funeral and there will be four speakers eulogizing you about different aspects of your life. One speaker eulogizes your family life, one speaker from your friends, one from your professional life, one from your community. What would you want each of these people to say about you? If you think about how you want to be remembered it can have a powerful impact on how you live your life on a day-to-day basis.

What I have started to do is to develop a spreadsheet that has my high level goals for each of these speakers or more accurately aspects of my life. Each Monday morning I sit down and review my goals and then draft a set of tasks for that week that will move me closer to achieving these goals. I keep the tasks on a separate sheet and then enter them into outlook and my day timer for action. What I have noticed is that I am much more focused on achieving my goals now and they are all directly related to my personal mission statement.

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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The forth stop on the CI Data Gathering process is Security exchange or annual report filings. This type of information applies to public companies that are legislated to file quarterly and annually. The information in these reports is intended to protect shareholders and investors by requiring the public company to disclose their business strategy and financial position. These reports also contain all kinds of useful information for intelligence gathering. With some creative Internet searching you can often find financial and other information on competitors that are not public yet.

Sounds great, but where can I find these reports? Every major stock exchange will have security exchange filings at some level of detail and you can find them at the following websites: Canada and United States. I have also used filings from other countries including UK, Belgium and Singapore; however, these tend not to have the same level of detail as the North American reports. Another good source for obtaining annual reports or security exchange filings is MSN Money (country specific) and Yahoo Finance. Both MSN and Yahoo have Word, PDF and HTML versions of the reports.

Ok, great now I have the report what do I do with it? Generally I like to read through the overview and company business strategy first. This provides an overview of the company, their performance and direction. Often the companies business units break out the reports so you can get a sense of the performance of each unit within the company. Toward the end of the document you may find more detailed information on the performance of a particular product line or portfolio of products. If there is something specific you are looking for you can use a search tool to go through the documents for certain keywords. For example, when I reviewed the Bell and Rogers annual reports I was interested in the number of subscribers for Internet, Wireless and Landline services so I searched on the keyword subscriber. Be creative and use the language of your competitor when searching the documents this will improve the probability of finding what you are looking for.

Finally I will look at the financial results and peruse the income statement (statement of operations), balance sheet and cash flow statement. I have a financial metrics template that the data is entered into to check trends over time and percentage of spending in different areas year to year. Last but certainly not least have a good review of the notes to the financial statements. The notes to the financial statements is where you will tend to find the most interesting information such as sales by product, sales by geography and notes on acquisitions and such.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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There are so many Internet resources it is difficult to know where to start. Generally I start my searches based on information from the competitors website review.  Most of the resources that I have listed in this post are with respect to Canadian small business and how to find information on them.

Your competitors website will often list their partners. Therefore a quick trip to the partner(s) website is often in order. You can form an opinion of the competitor-partner relationship based on a comparison of how your competitor and their partner position each other on their websites. If the partner prominently displays the competitor it is an indication of a strong relationship, lack of prominence is a sign of a possible one-sided relationship.  The partner site may also have additional information on the relationship in their web content or press releases. The other item of interest at your competitor’s partner web site may be pricing information.

You can also use other information from your competitor’s site for refining your Internet search criteria. Search for their senior management contact details is fairly straightforward. Search on the competitor’s senior officer name (first and last in quotes, ie “John Doe”), title (CEO, CFO, VP of Marketing) and “@companyname.com” and you will find their contact details. Senior executives tend to present at associations, tradeshows and other events and often leave their contact details on presentations and event sign ups. The competitor’s executive contact details are useful for contacting them directly. The same search can be used to find contact details for your competitor’s partner’s executive information. Chatting with your competitor’s partners is a good way to learn first hand about their relationship and if there is potential for you to work with that partner. Some companies have the executive contact information, however, smaller companies often do not.

LinkedIn is a very useful tool for finding contacts at your potentials customers, competitors and partners. I know of one person that uses LinkedIn to find Directors of IT at companies they plan to market their products to for technical information on their competitors. This is also a great tool for finding contacts within almost any company in North America.
Other resources that I often utilize include:

Canadian Specific Resources
Branham 300
CFIB
MERX

The Branham 300 site lists the top 300 Canadian technology businesses in a number of categories. The information on this site includes revenue and number of employees. A handy tool for looking up many small and midsize Canadian technology companies.

CFIB is the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. This group is really an advocacy group for small business, however, they also regularly survey their members (Canadian small businesses) and produce some great reports, many available to the general public. A good resource regarding Canadian small businesses.

MERX is the Canadian online government tendering system. Merx provides an online tendering system for all levels of government (Federal, Provincial, Municipal) in Canada and some private companies. There are a couple of uses for Merx in competitive intelligence. You can use MERX to see who has been awarded specific contracts after the award. More interesting is the ability to see who has downloaded a specific RFP, this can give you an indication of who bids on what type of contracts.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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The leading edge of the product life cycle, or product introduction is shinny, new and exciting. Less well known or understood is the trailing edge of the product life cycle or those of which we do not speak, product discontinuation. While the leading edge is all about time to market and maximizing revenue the trailing edge is all about limiting liability and minimizing cost.

A well-managed portfolio will have products at various stages in the lifecycle; therefore knowing how to retire or obsolete a product is essential. Some of the best practices in terms of the end game, are in my opinion; Microsoft, Cisco and Tellabs. 

There are a couple of key points to consider for the end of life of a product:
- Providing adequate notice of discontinuation
- Allowing customers time to make a last time buy
- Reviewing Customer Support Contracts, determine your commitments
- Provisioning inventory for support after end of life, to meet your commitments
- Repair of product after discontinuation, provisioning component inventory and spares

The three key milestones to accomplish end of life are; Future Discontinue, Manufacturing Discontinue and Support Discontinue. Future discontinue provides a notice to your customer base that the product will be discontinued at some future date, usually a year is adequate notification period, but this depends on your customer support contracts. Manufacture Discontinue is the date at which product manufacturing will stop. Customers need to place their last time buy orders between future and manufactures discontinue. The period of time between manufacture discontinue and support discontinue will depend on your customer commitments but is typically one to five years. Between manufacture and support discontinue product is no longer manufactured, however, you will be required to continue to support the product. At support discontinue all support obligations of any kind are now expired and you have successfully obsolete your product, congratulations.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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This weekend I attended Barcamp2 in Ottawa. Great day with a good turn out. One of the sessions I attended was a session by Mitch Brisbois on “Great Technology Terrible Products”. Mitch is a very entertaining presenter with wonderful anecdotes and a lighthearted delivery. His presentation was thoroughly enjoyable.

The presentation focused on three products developed in a Nortel sandbox during the 1990’s. As the presentation progressed a theme started to emerge in the market failure of the three products, or at least to me. The theme was that products developed in isolation with an R&D focus are very likely doomed to failure. The first product was a fixed wireless solution where the customers wanted and tried to use the product as a mobile wireless product. The second product suffered from significant feature creep and had lots of cool stuff but very little of what the market expected or wanted to pay for. The third product had a dogmatic industrial designer that generally ignored customer feedback to keep the design as he wanted, rather than what the customer wanted. The overall theme was that there was a general mismatch between markets needs and product feature set.

This is a great lesson for start-ups and entrepreneurs bringing products to market. The lesson is know thy customer. The focus early on in the product development cycle should be to address the customer needs rather than adding those cool features that Engineers like to add in. Wendy Kennedy has a very interesting post on When “Good Enough” is Great related to avoiding feature creep early in the design cycle. Another good rule to keep in mind is Scott Lake’s 85% rule. Designing a new product should be done with the end customer in mind rather than an exercise in developing as much cool features as possible.

Cheers,

Ian Graham

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There are 4 key sources of information that I find provide the greatest value when starting to gather information for competitive intelligence. These sources are:

Part I (This post)
- Networking
- Competitors

Part II (Next weeks post)
- Internet
- Security Filings

Networking
Your network of friends and associates is an excellent resource to leverage if you want to check out the competition. Odds are you will be working in an industry that you are familiar with and have some history. Be sure to utilize your friends and contacts to see what they know about the competition.

One of the most useful resources I have found is having a friend that works in purchasing. The purchasing community within an industry is relatively small close knit and the agents tend to talk with each other. They will know who is buying what and in what quantities. This is extremely useful in determining what your competitors are buying and with some reasoning you can usually gain valuable insight into what type of products they are developing by the type and quantity of parts they are buying.

Former colleges that now work for companies that purchase your competitors products can also provide valuable information. These colleges can provide you with information regarding the competitive products limitations and possibly pricing information.

Tradeshows are an excellent source for gathering competitive information. These events typically have your competitor, suppliers and end customers all in one place. I will discuss in a future post how to prepare a tradeshow intelligence plan. In my opinion tradeshows are probably the best way of getting lots of valuable information quickly.

Competitors
There are a number of ways to scope out the competition directly. For example:

- Phone or visit your competitor
- Check out their website

The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) provides some guidelines on ethical conduct when talking with the competition.

The competitors website is usually one of the first stops when I start my research and the first spot I check out on their website is their “About Us” or “Company” page. This page will have their senior management team, company history, press releases and possibly partners. This information is golden and can be used to get information for making those phone calls directly to the competition management or developing more precise Internet searches. Partner and press release information provide additional sources to check out the competition. Check out the partners website to see what they have to say about your competition or call the partner directly. If you are doing product or service comparisons then the “Product” or “Services” page will have technical information you can use. The “Investor” page can be used to check out the competitor’s financial performance, or learn more about who has invested in them. Check out their investor’s websites. The Careers section can provide useful information on the type of people they are recruiting and with a bit of reasoning which product lines are expanding.

Internet data gathering and Security Exchange Filings review to follow in a post next week.

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