Gear Up E-Book

Lena Ramfelt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 154

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Transform your business idea into a high potential venture

Big, bright and brilliant, Gear Up is an engaging and practical workbook for anyone looking to pursue a fresh business opportunity or grow an existing one. Developed at Harvard Business School and Stanford University, it's a bootcamp with clear, easy-to-follow steps to test your business idea, assess its potential and make it work! Based on a revolutionary 9-component framework, Gear Up offers entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, innovative executives and business students a toolkit to bring their ideas to life and transform them into high potential ventures.

Gear Up offers a useable business tool for assessing the needs of a business idea and helps you create a plan of action to promote business success. By working through the chapters of the book, you get to create a winning strategy based on recommendations tried and tested by executives around the world.

Gear Up offers:

- A step by step guide to help you build a foundation for your business opportunity

- Solid business framework formulated from entrepreneurs, academics and real life experience

- A highly practical workbook with visual, full-colour design and compelling layout

Gear Up also comes with educators' support materials available at gearupventures.com

• PowerPoint presentations with teaching notes
• Online course materials
• Course Schedule
• Evaluation Forms
• Certificate for students who complete the course

Coming soon! - An innovative, interactive digital toolkit

Gear Up Virtual Toolkit (powered by You Noodle): A digital platform where participants can present their enterprise idea, work through the framework, answering questions and get real-time feedback from their facilitator/educator. The tool will even generate a ready-made PowerPoint presentation at the end of the process!

Gear Up Mobile App (powered by We Chat): This app allows students to answer questions from their lecturers or vote in real-time from their phones within the classroom. The app promotes student engagement and class participation.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Copyright page

Title page

Some Companies Succeed, Others Fail

First There Is Confusion

Then There Is Structure

Create Your Business Opportunity

Customers

Are You Solving a Problem?

How Will You Know What Works for You and Your Company?

Interact with Your Customers!

From Pain to Product

Here's How It Usually Goes

Oh, The Pain!

Crossing the Chasm

The Shift

Delight

Pay Attention to the Pyramid of Needs

Innovate, Don't Imitate

But How Do I Delight?

The Power of Storytelling

Friction-Free Storytelling

The Story of Delight

Do You have Promoters?

Customer Acquisition

Sales: A Numbers Game

The Pipeline Model

Delight Is Part of the Pipeline

Patch the Leaks

Always Delight the User

Sales Is a Team Effort!

Always Be Closing

Profit

Create a Unique Sales Formula

Example of a Good Sales Formula

When Delight Declines, Do You Increase Frequency?

Business Model

The Zero Game

Examples of Playing the Zero Game

What Is the Customer Prepared to Pay?

What Is Your Profit? How Big Are Your Losses?

Customer Acquisition Data

What Needs to Be Done to Be Successful?

Set Goals

Partners

No Company Is an Island

Who Loves You? Who Hates You?

What Can You Give and What Will You Get?

Every Partnership Starts with a Yes!

Make Sure the Shoe Fits

Playmate Partners

Learning Partners

Spam Partners

Ammo in a War

Jurassic Partners

Love or Hate Partners

Strategic Partners

Poison Partners

Competitors

Does the Big Beat the Small? Or Does the Fast Beat the Slow?

Red Ocean

Blue Ocean

Are You an Outperformer? Or Are You a Game Changer?

The Innovator's Dilemma

Go Global

Scale Your Business

…Go Global for a Game Changer and an Outperformer – Huge Difference!

Going Global Means Understanding Players, Stakes and Code

Players Are the Vips

Players Bet Their Stakes

Learn the Provincial Code to Gain Acceptance

Your Customized Lonely Planet

Team

Think World-Class Talent!

Ability to Deliver

Non-Linear Creative Thinking

Five Key Personas

The Innovator

The Evangelist

The Producer

The Administrator

The Integrator

Building a Dream Team Is not Easy

Reality Check

Hit Where It Hurts: The Brutal Truth

Identify the Risks

Customers

Delight

Customer Acquisition

Business Model

Partners

Competitors

Go Global

Team

High Stakes, No Prisoners

Be Prepared to Shoulder the Blame

Sync Your Gears

Is There a Pain for Your Delight?

Sync Your Sales Formula

Is Your Unique Sales Formula Made Even More Unique by Your Way of Working with Partners?

Are You Ready to Go Global?

Spin the Gears!

Take Action

Make Mistakes

Celebrate Success

There Is No End

You Don't Have to Trust Us

The People on the Bus

Tom Kosnik

Lena Ramfelt

Jonas Kjellberg

… The Creative Guys, Ulf and Johan

And the Wording

The Journey

More Inspiration

Partners Using This Framework Include:

“Business Is Simple. In the End It's All About Winning.”

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

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GEAR UP IS FOR ENTREPRENEURS AND LEADERS WHO WANT TO BRING A NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY TO LIFE OR SHARPEN AN EXISTING BUSINESS.

GEAR UP WILL HELP YOU CREATE NEW MARKETS OR DISRUPT EXISTING ONES.

© 2014 GEAR UP VENTURES AB

Registered office

John Wiley and Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-857-08562-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-857-08564-1 (ebk)

ISBN 978-0-857-08565-8 (ebk) ISBN 978-0-857-08563-4 (ebk)

ISBN 978-0-857-08566-5 (ebk)

Original design by Ulf Öman

Illustrations by Johan Röstwall

Some Companies Succeed, Others Fail

WHAT MAKES SOME BUSINESS IDEAS FLOURISH WHILE OTHERS WITHER AND DIE? WHAT COMPONENTS SHOULD YOU FOCUS ON WHEN DEFINING A NEW IDEA OR SHARPENING AN EXISTING ONE? WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT THAT ABSOLUTELY MUST WORK FOR A BUSINESS TO SUCCEED? (CAREFUL; THAT WAS A TRICK QUESTION!)

If you are planning to pursue a fresh business opportunity or grow an existing one, you may be looking for some answers. Gear Up can help. Use this guide to determine which of several new ideas you are exploring has the greatest potential. You can also use it to decide whether to push ahead with your current business opportunity, or toss it aside and develop something even bigger and better than you first imagined.

Gear Up does not offer solutions to specific problems. Rather, it is a framework for assessing the needs of your particular situation. Your responses to the questions raised in each gear will create an outcome, a strategy, that is unique for you. Think of this book as your personal trainer. It will help you define a training program based on your objectives, but you will need to put in the hours at the gym yourself. It will tell you to do the push-ups, but it will not do them for you. If you stick with it, the payoff for your dedication will be worth it. As you work with the program, you will learn to leverage your most precious possessions: Your relationships, reputation, talent, time, and money.

Gear Up is intended for entrepreneurs in new ventures, and leaders in established organizations large and small around the world, to decide which new ideas are worth pursuing. Once you have chosen your opportunity, Gear Up will help you create a new market or disrupt an existing one. Gear Up is the result of a joint effort between entrepreneurs and academics, and every recommendation in the book has been tested in the trenches by entrepreneurial leaders around the world.

Gear Up is also a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students. The academic roots of the Gear Up model can be found in Harvard Business School and Stanford University, and the book is already in use at Stanford and Stockholm School of Economics.

First There Is Confusion

Tackling a new business opportunity often leads to confusion. You don't know where you're going, the risk seems enormous, and the idea might not even work. You want to test it, but you're not sure if you have the guts and the patience to try, and there are no shortcuts.

Then There Is Structure

But that's the nature of the beast. As Winston Churchill once said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” In fact, many entrepreneurs believe that the first heady rush of plunging into a new venture is the best part of the whole process. So, take heart! Gear Up will guide the development of your business opportunity by helping you create a customer acquisition-centric strategy. As you begin to follow the program, you'll discover that there is indeed a supporting structure amidst the confusion, and your path to success will emerge.

Create Your Business Opportunity

So what are the gears that you're supposed to “gear up” with? There are nine of them, and they represent the most critical components for launching a high-potential company. The gears are Customers, Delight, Customer Acquisition, Business Model, Partners, Competitors, Go Global, Team, and Reality Check. You have to go through all the gears and make sure that they are in sync. If you have done that, and you find that you still have the passion to cure your customers' pain, then you will know that your business opportunity is worth pursuing.

Here's how it works: You need customers—usually a lot of them—and the ones you want to attract are those with a particular “pain” that your product or service can get rid of. For that you need a unique delight, which is some wonderful thing about your product that distinguishes it from your competitors' offerings. But that is not enough! You also need a method of customer acquisition and a sustainable business model. These three gears – delight, customer acquisition, and business model – together make up your sales formula.

As your business begins to grow, you will most likely need to find the right partners. And since you are not launching your venture in a vacuum, you will have to handle competitors who are perhaps tougher, more experienced, and better funded than you are. If your business really takes off, you will go global and take care of customers' pains all over the world. Last—but certainly not least—is your team, which is the linchpin for innovating, delivering, and challenging other companies in all the gears.

People with exceptional talent and the ability to deliver will become the heart of your business, and you won't get anywhere without them. Just make sure you do a reality check once in a while to stay on track.