Overcoming those knock-outs
Most of us try to avoid mistakes and eliminate problems both in our lives and work. But wouldn’t it be ironic if constraints were essential ingredients of business success?
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time,” said Leonard Bernstein, the late composer and conductor. Could “not enough time” be the catalyst that brings out your best work?
It’s a lesson you could take from the latest cohort of The Next 36, a Toronto-based entrepreneur-development program that brings together 36 “best and brightest” university students to build businesses and learn to think like high-impact entrepreneurs. The candidates who built this year’s most impressive businesses stumbled through latestage pivots and do-overs.
Candidates are selected in December and grouped into three-person teams, each expected to build a high-growth firm that can be pitched to investors at “Venture Day” in mid-August. The other highlight of Venture Day is the selection by the program’s founders of one firm as the year’s outstanding business,
This year, the four founders couldn’t agree on one winner, so they picked three — each with a late, bone-jarring pivot that might have knocked lesser people down and out, but re-energized these teams.
Here’s how they turned hardship into advantage:
Seamless Mobile Health aims to solve the $ 27- billion- ayear problem of high hospital readmission rates for surgery patients, by catching complications sooner. Its mobile communications and monitoring apps target hip and knee replacements, where recidivism is such a problem the U.S. health-care system will soon start penalizing hospitals with high rates. But first, Seamless has a pilot program this fall with colorectal surgery patients at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Co-founder Joshua Liu, a recent medical-school graduate from the University of Toronto, admits Seamless started on the wrong foot, targeting chronic diseases. When his team realized in March that the U.S. government was focusing on hips and knees, they pivoted the company to match.
While the Baylor pilot no longer addresses Seamless’s target market, Liu says the study will provide key data on how patients and medical staff use the app, and how well patients follow care recommendations delivered digitally.
Boxit owns the low-tech end of the Next 36 spectrum. It aims to solve a big problem for urban condo owners: a lack of affordable storage space for “stuff ” like winter coats. With the average condo getting smaller, and many builders now charging high rents on storage space, Boxit offers speedy, flexible pickup and delivery to off-site storage facilities for $7 a month per rugged plastic carton.
The founders were impressed Boxit already has paying customers and its own off-site storage space. Especially since it only got going eight weeks ago. Co-founder Lauren Long says the three pivoted twice since being put together last December.
In mid- June, just eight weeks from Venture Day, the team pivoted again. Knowing that Next 36 co-founder Reza Satchu had made a big profit in the sale of his Storage Now chain, they decided to target that sector. By eschewing complex technology solutions and focusing on a market that included lots of people their age, the founders were able to develop a business plan and logistics system that could be tested and implemented within two months. “Constraints just pushed us to get it done,” Long says. “We had our first customer in a week.”
Needlehr.com is an online platform for finding and hiring designers. Unlike most talent-based services, it is visually based, allowing clients to search for designs and styles they like, and then contact the individuals whose talents they already understand.
The company doesn’ t need designers to sign on to the service; it automatically “scrapes” art and style samples from websites around the world, and then serves them up to businesses looking for help in particular industries, styles or disciplines.
Needle’s problem was scraping a little too much of its data from one site: Behance, a designer showcase owned by Adobe Systems Inc. In July, Needle got a “cease and desist” letter ordering it to divest itself of Behance’s images and data.
“We never expected to get so much attention so quickly,” says co-founder Michael Cheng, a designer and former agency owner. Still, he says the founders had worked so hard they realized they were no longer dependent on Behance’s data. The team spent two sleepless weeks rebuilding the website with new content. “Sometimes starting over isn’t a bad thing.”
Roll the clichés. That which does not kill you makes you stronger, and your future is defined not by the problems you face, but by how you respond to them.