Springboarders Blog: A refreshing view on business planning

This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

“The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur” is what Forbes called Zoho’s co-founder, Sridhar Vembu. He’s become a little less unknown since that article came out, but when it bubbled to the top of Hacker News recently I read it I wanted more details about how he bootstrapped Zoho into a profitable online application provider.

So I invited him to Mixergy to tell us the story of how he built his company.

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This interview first appeared on Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.

Oprah showed how dramatic the transformation was for internet entrepreneur, Gurbaksh Chahal. In the before pictures, she showed a tiny Indian kid with a turban, who was picked on by other kids and how’s family struggled financially. In the after shots, she showed an adult with a stunning penthouse, hot car and confidence to spare.

I invited Gurbaksh to Mixergy to talk about how he did it. In this program, you’ll hear how at 16 he got the idea to create ClickAgents, the ad brokerage business. And how he funded it by selling ads before he could even run them. You’ll hear why he sold the business. And how he made his next startup, BlueLithium, profitable within 3 months. You’ll hear why he sold that company to Yahoo! and about his vision for gWallet, his latest startup.

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I really appreciate the comments and emails from many of you about the usefulness of this blog. I know I’ve been inconsistent with my posts lately and have none to blame but myself. Part of the reason for this is that Springboarders, my business planning company, has been commanding much of my attention lately. And of course that’s a good thing – business is terrific and no complaints! However, I am a bit frustrated at my inability to post interviews frequently and don’t want to let you down, especially those of you who enjoy reading my interviews with successful entrepreneurs. So, today I am going to try something different.

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We’re back with the newest edition of ‘Fireside Chats with Fiery Entrepreneurs’! Our topic for this interview is “How to blow your customers away by delivering exceptional customer experiences”. The reason I chose this topic is that I believe that one of the best ways small companies can stand out and compete with larger companies is through personalized, caring customer service. Most large companies are too slow and bureaucratic to make sure every single customer is treated well and taken care of. So – no matter what industry you’re in – there’s always a great opportunity for your young company to excel at customer service when you’re looking to build and maintain a loyal customer base.

To learn more about this topic I invited Ali Asaria, founder and CEO of Well.ca, Canada’s largest online health and beauty store, to join us and picked his brain on how his company delivers exceptional customer experiences. Well.ca, widely known for its strong customer service culture, ranked No. 19 in the 2009 issue of Profit Magazine’s “Top 50 fastest-growing companies in Canada”.

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And so…we’ve reached the final interview in our current business planning interview series. It’s been a fascinating series filled with amazing insights on entrepreneurship from really talented and successful entrepreneurs; if you missed any of the interviews, check them out here. The next series of interviews will start in a few weeks, so check back regularly. Or better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates.

In Part Six of Fireside Chats with Fiery Entrepreneurs™, we welcome Banu Khurana, serial entrepreneur and owner of Toronto-based 3 Sprouts, a highly differentiated children’s accessories design and wholesale company with eco-friendly product lines that include hooded towels, canvas storage bins, placemats and art smocks. While Banu was an MBA student at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in 2001, she was also building the foundation of Khurana Inc., a luxury lingerie label she co-founded in 1998. After this successful stint in the fashion business that included clients such as Bergdorf Goodman and Holt Renfrew, Banu co-founded 3 Sprouts in 2007.  Read on for Banu’s insightful thoughts on business planning, along with her story about how 3 Sprouts tackled some serious challenges during the ongoing recession.

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Maggie Fox brought forth some essential business planning issues in her recent interview with Springboarders. Here are my top three takeaways:

1. “You need to understand who the competition is and align your value proposition against weaknesses in the competitive offer.”

It’s interesting how SMG has broken down the social media competitive landscape and positioned themselves as a ‘one-stop’ social media shop with end-to-end capabilities. This is a great example of how new companies create new market space, especially during technologically disruptive times. Here’s what SMG has done, based on what Maggie told us:

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For Part Five of Fireside Chats with Fiery Entrepreneurs™, our ongoing, six-part interview series about business planning, I am pleased to have spoken with Maggie Fox, Founder and CEO of Social Media Group. Here’s a profile on Maggie from Social Media Group’s website:

Maggie Fox is the founder of Social Media Group, one of the world’s largest independent agencies helping business navigate the new socially engaged Web. Pioneers in their field, Social Media Group has developed social media strategies for some of the best-known brands in Europe and North America, including; Ford Motor Company, SAP Global Marketing, Yamaha Motor, Corbis and Harlequin Publishing. Maggie has been interviewed about social media by The Washington Post, CBC Radio, The Globe and Mail, CTV News, The Toronto Star and Marketing Magazine, among others. She was recently included in Women Who Risk, a listing of influential women who head up Internet-based firms, and is a member of both The Social Media Collective, an invite-only group of “the web’s best thinkers on media, marketing and web 2.0″ and the Enterprise Irregulars and she was also named one of the Top 100 Marketers in the 100th anniversary edition of Marketing Magazine. Maggie is frequently asked to speak to the media and business groups across North America about Web 2.0, and sits on the Advisory Board for SMToday Media, operators of the Social Media Collective and MyVenturePad sites. She also has a seat on the advisory board of Humber College’s Public Relations program.

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Bas Van Berkel and his business partners look like they have their hands full and are enjoying the challenge of building StormFisher into a great company. Click here if you missed my interview with Bas last week. What impresses me most about Bas is his ’straight-talk’ and humility, both of which are terrific leadership traits. Many of the takeaways from this interview revolve around leadership. Here are my top three:

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In Part Four of Fireside Chats with Fiery Entrepreneurs™, our ongoing, six-part series of business planning-related interviews, we talk to Bas Van Berkel, Co-founder and President of StormFisher Biogas, a renewable energy company in Toronto that builds, owns and operates biogas plants across North America. Working with the food processing and agricultural industries, StormFisher processes organic by-products and turns them into natural gas and electricity.

Bas co-founded StormFisher Biogas along with Christopher Guillon and Ryan Little, whom he met while pursuing his MBA at the Richard Ivey School of Business. Bas and his team recently negotiated a strategic partnership agreement with Denham Capital Management, a Boston-based private equity firm, to develop a $350 million portfolio of biogas projects. The relationship with Denham makes StormFisher one of the most well-funded biogas companies in the world. For more on StormFisher, click here.

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I don’t know about you, but the interview with David Kincaid, CEO of LEVEL5 Strategic Brand Advisors, simply blew me away. Almost every sentence makes you stop and think. This is a great interview rich with insights about entrepreneurship and business planning. If you didn’t get a chance to read the interview, click here. Although I can go on and on about David’s various insights, here are the top three that resonated the most with me:

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