Category: ceo

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How to get venture capital

 Every year when Outskirts Press appears on the Inc 5000 of fastest growing private companies we get a deluge of calls, letters, and proposals from investment bankers, venture capitalists, and the like. It’s easy to become flattered by all this attention from companies offering to give you lots of money, but the reality is that most of these companies are simply using the Inc 5000 as a source for approaching possible companies of interest. I used to take it more seriously than I do now, because in some cases I’ve had follow-up conversations with firms who have expressed an interest in Outskirts Press only to discover that they really don’t know anything about us – other than the fact that we are profitable and growing quickly and consistently.  True, in this day and age, those characteristics alone are worth the phone call. But you would think, since those corporate characteristics are so rare, that those firms would take a moment to learn at least some talking points about the firms they are pursuing in advance of sending out letters.

It reminds me of that old axiom, when you need a credit card you can’t get one. The same holds true for investment capital. You can’t get money when you need it, but once you don’ t need it, everyone is offering it to you. That’s why I prefer the bootstrapping method of starting a company rather than the investment method.  If you bootstrap a successful company venture capitalists will literally come out of the woodwork to find you.  Why? Because you’ve already demonstrated you have what it takes to be successful.  A venture capitalist would prefer to work with an established, profitable company than with an unknown because venture capitalists are gamblers, and gamblers like to hedge their bets.

How hard is it to find an analogy in the above paragraph fo today’s authors and publishers?  A publisher would prefer to work with an established, profitable author than with an unknown, because traditional publishers are gamblers, and gamblers like to hedge their bets.  Self-publishing is the “bootstrapping” equivalent to starting your own business.  You aren’t having something given to you. You’re so confident in your own offering (whether it be a book or a business) that you do it yourself.  It’s a viable key to success.

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What is a “gazelle” in the business world?

I received a letter in the mail from a company that identified Outskirts Press as a “gazelle.”  Apparently, gazelles, by definition, are companies that are growing at least 20% annually for at least four consecutive years.   According to the Financial Times Lexicon gazelle corporations  are quite scarce in most economies, comprising about 5% – and at the most 10% – of all new entrants in a given cohort entry. They are of major political and economic interest because they are seen as potential large employers and wealth creators of the future.

By definition, almost any successful small company is bound to be a gazelle at the start (from a tiny base) and are therefore usually excluded from discussions of gazelles. And this is the same economic reality that makes it difficult to appear on the Inc 5000 list multiple years in a row.  The majority of companies do it by getting investors to give them money, rather than by getting customers to pay them for their services or products. I’ll talk about that more next time…

ceo, marketing, Social Networking Sites, start-up

Social media polls – looking ahead

Over the last couple of weeks we have held two different Web 2.0 polls on our Outskirts Press blog. The first poll determined that our clients wanted us to add a Social Media Market Research option to our growing selection of publication services. This option helps authors make the best, market-based decisions regarding their covers, titles, beginnings, endings, or marketing tactics, for example.

The second poll determined that our new and potential clients wanted us to offer a $300 “Mad Money” publishing promotion in October, which rewards new publishing packages with a $300 “line of credit” to use toward any pre-production service/option the author desires, including editing, professional custom cover design, Kindle edition, iPad edition, ghostwriting, or what have you.

But in both polls, the margin of victory between Choice #1 and the runner-up was fairly close. In the poll determining the next option we should launch, Market Research won by only 10%.   It earned 50% of the votes while the Featured Book-of-the-Week option earned 40% (author apps earned the remaining 10%).  And in the poll asking what promotion we should offer in October, Mad Money won by a margin of just over 1%. The instant 10% discount barely came in #2.

So while these polls helped us prioritize, the results certainly don’t prohibit the other options and other promotions from being offered. In fact, the Featured Book of the Week option’s showing with 40% demonstrated to us that it’s a highly-valued option also, so we are already working on it and will most likely have it available for our authors in October.   We’ve always known the instant 10% discount to be a valuable promotion, so we will more than likely offer that promotion before the end of the year as well.

The poor showing of the Author Apps option did surprise me, frankly. But, to be honest, it was also kind of a relief.  I was involved significantly in its pre-development here at Outskirts Press and now I feel confident re-prioritizing some of my other responsibilities and putting the Author Apps a little lower on the launch list, which will probably push it out to 2012 sometime.   I’m loving these author polls. They help us give our authors exactly what they want when they want them.  When you have so many things you WANT to do but a limited pool of resources with which to do them, this sort of insight directly from your  clients is invaluable.  

So if you’re a business owner, manager, entrepreneur, author, or other professional, I encourage you to start using polls on your blog or website, too.  They’re easy content, fun for your visitors, and provide you with actual useful feedback that validates your customers and helps your business.

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Brent Sampson interviewed by Business RadioX

I was in Anaheim last week for the National Speaker’s Association “Influence ’11” conference, so this update about a recent radio interview I conducted is a bit late. I don’t mention all my interviews, but this one came about as the result of a seminar on self-publishing that I spoke at in Atlanta (the host of the radio show was in attendance), so I thought I would mention this one. Maybe another one will come about as a result of attending the NSA meeting. So a general comment for those starting businesses or publishing books – attend as many events as you can. You never know what it can lead to.

The folks at Business RadioX wrote this press release. Here’s a portion of it, and the whole release in its entirety can be found by clicking here, along with a link to listen to the actual interview, provided you have 40 minutes to spare.

Business RadioX Host Dr. Tim Morrison Interviews Brent Sampson Founder of Outskirts Press

Dr. Tim Morrison, Host of Write Here, Write Now on Atlanta Business RadioX interviews Brent Sampson CEO and Founder of the award winning Outskirts Press.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) August 01, 2011 – On July 26th, 2011, Atlanta Business RadioX Host Dr. Tim Morrison had the opportunity to sit down with the CEO and Founder of one of Inc. Magazines Top 5000 fastest growing businesses in 2009 and 2010. Brent Sampson founded Outskirts Press in 2003 and has turned into the premier source for full service self-publishing.

Morrison talked to Sampson about his own desire to become a published author and the frustrations he experienced that motivated him to develop Outskirts Press…

To see the whole press release and the link to listen to the interview, click here.

branding, ceo, compare self publishing companies

3 Tips for Conducting Research Online – Tip #3

Over the last couple of posts, I have suggested that the problem with conducting research on the Internet is that it is difficult to find facts. Even Wikipedia uses “social opinion” to shape and shift information; although they also require corroborative evidence or support from encyclopedias and/or newspapers for much of their new content. Isn’t that ironic? I wonder what Wikipedia is going to do for corroboration when it puts encyclopedias and newspapers out of business.

Until then, any potential customer or client researching a product or service online finds herself or himself in the wild, wild west. All you can really do is follow a few simple tips. I posted Tip #1 (determining the legitimacy of the source) and Tip #2 (Look at the date of the content) previously.

Tip #3 for Conducting Research Online: Analyze multiple sources

If you were thinking about buying a new BMW, would you go to the Mercedes Benz website to conduct your research? Perhaps. But you certainly wouldn’t stop there. You would probably also go to the BMW site. And then you would look at some car review sites and/or magazines.  Then you might read testimonials from people who had purchased the same BMW.  And you might read testimonials from drivers of other cars.  In other words, you would locate multiple sources and analyze all the information.   Rarely would one online comment that “BMW sux” be enough to completely sway your $60,000 decision.   And yet many people allow a single random comment on the Internet to sway their decisions on less expensive decisions all the time.  When you consider going to a new restaurant, does one negative YELP review point you in a different direction?   “Hamburger Joes SUX.”    Isn’t it the same concept as “BMW sux” — one person with one opinion? In fact, if anything, the LESS expensive a product or service is, the MORE it requires many different opinions to reach a worthwhile consensus.  This is because the barrier to adoption for less expensive things is so low, there will be many more opinions of it, so statistically speaking, you need a larger sampling to get an accurate average.

With the cost of our most popular publishing package coming in at $999, I wouldn’t necessarily say we were “less expensive” (although when you compare that to the average cost of independently publishing your book yourself with the cost of a professional book designer, cover designer, and off-set print-run, we certainly are).  Since our services fall in the realm where comparative research is important, I recently compared four sources to arrive at an average score for 20 self-publishing companies, and those results are here, where Outskirts Press received an average of 33.41 points out of a possible 40.

But the point of all this is that, even if the service/option/product you are considering is “cheap” or “free,” comparative research is a must.   The opinion of the person who writes “Hamburger Joes SUX” isn’t any more or less valid than the opinion of the person who writes “Hamburger Joes ROX.”  For authors, it comes down to this: After the months or years it took to write your book, do you really want to rest the fate of it on “cheap” or “free” or on the opinion of one random “Hamburger Joes SUX/ROX” individual?

So, for readers of my blog who are in start-up mode themselves, or running/managing/operating their own business, my piece of advice is this:  Get mentioned and reviewed in as many sources as you can. One might be bad. Others average. Hopefully most are good.  And get lots of testimonials. Your satisfied clients are your best advocates.  I’m pleased to say that we are in wonderful position as far as author praise is concerned; we get so many heart-warming and touching comments about our services and company every day, it just reinforces my personal drive to keep delivering even more value for them.

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An author’s experience with Outskirts Press

Yesterday I referred to a letter I received in the mail regarding Amazon.  Today I’m going to refer to another letter I received in the mail recently, one I received permission to share in its entirety.  This letter refers to our book publishing and book marketing firm Outskirts Press and, more specifically, to one of our Publishing Consultants and one of our Author Representatives:

Dear Mr. Sampson,

When I saw one of your promos praising Outskirts Press I thought yada, yada, yada. Then when I began to struggle through the labyrinth of the self-publishing world, I encountered two angels. They are both extremely modest which is why I am going to the top. Tinamarie and Jodee are every manuscript author’s answer to the critical junction of publisher or dumpster.  At 70 years of age, the cyber-world has left me behind, but each of these wonderful gals was amazingly patient until we got every “i” dotted and “t” crossed.

As a retired high school teacher, I know first-hand that complaints outnumber compliments 10:1. Therefore, it is both my honor and privilege to offer these two women my sincerest praise and thanks for helping Biodesign Out For a Walk come to life. If the rest of your staff measures up to their standards, you must have a fine company indeed.

Sincerely,

Lowell H. Young

Thank you, Lowell, for the wonderful letter.  You’re right, Tina and Jodee are great! Thank you for giving me an opportunity to join you in singing their praises.

branding, ceo

Apple customer service

So finally we got the Apple Developer Certification done. You’d think it would be easy street from here, but no. You see, I had already created an “Outskirts Press” relationship with Apple for the purposes of distributing ebooks through the iBookstore for the iPad and iPhone (more on those developments soon).  But, therefore, my iTunes Connect account wasn’t “capable” of managing applications, nor was it set-up to do so. It could only manage e-books.  There didn’t appear to be a way I could “combine” the two objectives into one account.

So I called the Apple Customer Service number and spoke with a nice person named Holly. She ultimately ended the call with “I need to consult with one of my colleagues about this. May I call you back in 15 minutes?”  Sure… and I hung up.

The next day I received a call from Nicholas at Apple Customer Service (or I guess they call it Apple Provisioning Portal Service, or something equally odd), and he first apologized for not calling back the day before. That was a nice touch.   He then began speaking softly and quickly, presumably on the topic I needed assistance with. But I interjected with a polite, “I can’t quite hear you or understand you, can you speak louder and slower?” 

He apologized and said, “I have an out-of-date boom mic.”

I playfully replied, “An out-of-date mic? At Apple?!”

Our cordial conversation continued with a long monologue on his part about the current issue we were facing with my account. About 3 minutes into it, I’m afraid I interjected again and said, “Nicholas, those words all sound like English, but I’m afraid I didn’t understand most of it.”

Long story, short — we set up two accounts. One under Outskirts Press, Inc. for our ebooks. And one under plain ol’ “Outskirts Press” for our applications (which, ironically, if you’ll remember the start of this whole fiasco, was the name of our App account I wanted anyway).

So why all the fuss just to get Apple Developer Certification? Next time I’ll show a sneak peek of our free Outskirts Press app which (hopefully) will be available soon, pending some successful testing. You have to complete all these steps I’ve just outlined in order to test your own applications, even if you only want to perform ad-hoc testing on a local iPhone or iPad device.  I may or may not get into the nitty-gritty of doing THAT in the near future; it’s a  pain in the rear-end, too, and I’ve been blogging about Apple for quite a while. It may be time to move onto other OP CEO stuff…

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Hardware Upgrade Complete

Over the past week Outskirts Press has been involved in a major hardware upgrade for both our file servers and our website servers. I wish I could say that process went off without a hitch, but as anyone who has been involved in a hardware and data migration of this magnitude would tell you, the likelihood of it going off without any complications are pretty slim.

Since the new servers were in a different physical location, we had to physically move the data, which required a time intensive process of actually copying it from the “old” server to a temporary migration drive, confirming the successful copying of the data, uploading it to the “new” server and then reconfirming the successful uploading of the data again.  It was a 4-step process that literally took days, considering the amount of data that we were moving.  And here’s where we ran into a hiccup.  The data did not successfully upload to the new server the first time we attempted the data migration. 

The security and maintenance of our author’s data was the most important component to us, which is why we engaged in several different double-checks throughout the process.  And when one of those checks failed, we opted to be “safe rather than sorry” to ensure all our author data was maintained properly, and exactly right. As a result, we lost 4 days in this migration and needed to begin anew with a different temporary drive.

Our authors have been extremely patient with us through this week-long hardware upgrade.  Our website, by contrast, was only down for a very brief period of time early Sunday morning.  As a result, it was probably difficult to tell that such a massive technical undertaking was taking place at all. 

The good news is that all servers and back-up redundant drives are now running optimally, and much, much faster than their predecessors. 

Overall, this hardware upgrade will result in a better experience for our authors in the long run. Their experience on our website will be even better and their production timeframes should be even faster.    It’s never “fun” having to confront a hardware upgrade, but among all the problems any business faces on a daily basis, the one that is caused by being successful is among the “better” problems to have.  I thank all our authors and all our production personnel for that.