Communications strategist Caroline Kealey has, over the past 10 years, marched to her own drum as the founder and chief executive of Ingenium Communications.

Her consultancy has carved a niche for itself in the nation’s capital and across the country in the “art and science of communications and marketing strategy” providing, in addition to its strategic communications and marketing services, facilitation, training and organizational development.

As with so many other consultancies, regardless of their discipline, this meant that Ingenium’s intellectual property resided almost entirely within the grey matter of its people, and especially of its leader, Kealey herself.

Six years ago, Kealey decided to change that. Despite being a busy single mother with a full-time business, she set out to lever the insight and expertise developed over a 20-year career into an educational resource for professional development and training. The Ingenium team, with a substantial amount of goodwill and in-kind support from friends and allies, set to work. The outcome is the Results Map, deemed by its creators to be the most comprehensive online tool for strategic communications planning available in the world.

Kealey took the time to share her thoughts on the tenacity required to launch her new venture, the challenges of bootstrapping, and the strategic marketing that has turned a largely local consultancy into a global play within a matter of weeks.

Q: Where did you get the idea for Results Map?

A: I think the idea came from my experience in having written now close to 400 communications strategies across a wide range of sectors and clients. I realized that much of the process is quite repeatable and that we had quite a lot of expertise in this specialized area. I also realized that, while seemingly a bit odd coming from someone who makes her living as an external consultant, optimally this process is most beneficial if it’s done in-house. So, I came up with the idea to package what we’ve learned from experience and create a methodology that communicators can easily apply within their organizations, tapping into their unique knowledge and experience with their subject matter and audiences.

Q: How did you go about validating the idea?

A: This whole project has been bootstrapped on the back of our traditional consulting practice and therefore integrates hundreds of conversations as part of regular client engagements and workshops. We carried out extensive market research to establish if there is anything like this … we looked at comparable solutions for other disciplines and went through an extensive process of one-and-one interviews in 2008 with people in different facets of the industry – academia, public, private, para-public sectors. We used all this to map out a business plan and worked with a focus group of 30 people to validate the concept from both a business and marketing point of view.

Q: What key challenges did you face turning this into a commercially available product?

A: This was far and away the most significant and complex project I have ever managed. The process has been ongoing over a six-year period and has been self-financed. The sheer tenacity and the focus required was a major challenge since the project had to run alongside our regular work and business development. Stitching this together into something coherent with an end goal in mind was a very significant challenge. This is not for the faint of heart.

Q: Where did you turn for sources of funding and other support to develop and launch Results Map?

A: One of the most extraordinary experiences throughout this process has been the generosity of the community in providing expertise (and) resources and offering to make valuable connections. I was really moved to the extent to which people are willing to support an entrepreneur who has a dream. That was a big part of our success - tapping into a lot of local in-kind support, and connections. We wanted to self-finance as much as possible, but did call upon the BDC and a private investor, both of whom have been extremely supportive.

Q: How do you characterize your experience, as an entrepreneur, in trying to secure funding and other key pieces of the puzzle?

A: As is often the case, it’s hard to appreciate the sheer volume of work and energy that this has required. In terms of lessons learned, you can’t underestimate the time and effort that isn’t immediately visible when you set out - the complexity of translation to another language, finding an online payment solution that works, developing a marketing plan, and addressing innumerable technological challenges. It all takes deep consideration, analysis and quality decision-making to position the company for success, and adjust in real-time to dependencies and changes in the development plan.

Q: What key entrepreneurial lessons did you learn through this? What would you do different next time?

A: If you roll back the clock, this could have gone in many different directions. Early on I became concerned by time-to-market and that other people would come in and scoop us. But that was fairly short-lived because I had trouble imagining that there would be too many others who would have the passion to drive through such a difficult task … call it stubbornness or stick-to-it-ness, it was clear that it was the road less travelled.

Most of the development work I did on this was between 5 and 7 a.m. before I got my kids up to get ready for school; that’s obviously not everyone’s cup of tea.

The technical development of the product took place over six months. This was very aggressive and in hindsight could have been done more comfortably over a year or 18 months. However, we had committed to complete and present by June 2010 at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Toronto. As a result, we licensed our training platform from Telesto, a local development firm. Again, my whole orientation was on niche expertise, not on developing a tool in-house, from the ground up. This proved to be a good decision because the time and cost required to create a platform from scratch would have been prohibitive.

Q: What has been the market response to Results Map?

A: A few weeks ago I was running a local consulting company. Now our technology is on four continents and we are writing proposals for Fortune 500 companies … We have reached into some spheres that would not have been possible two weeks ago. We even have the government of Tanzania interested in our methodology.

This is precisely what we wanted to do with this product, have a global impact, and so far it’s off to the races.

Q: How did you take advantage of your attendance at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference to launch of Results Map?

A: We had a whole strategy to make a splash at that event to capitalize on the fact that there were 1,500 communicators there from around the world. We ran a Twitter contest, a guerilla marketing campaign, exhibited with a booth, and I was a speaker. We very much took our own advice on having a plan and executing against that plan on a shoestring budget. People told us we were one of the highlights of the event, and that is entirely the result of our careful planning in terms of marketing, planning and positioning.

Now the challenge is chasing down all of our leads. The scope of our business has exploded in the space of a couple of weeks so while I’d thought the product development was the end of a goal, it really is just the beginning.

Technorati Tags: marketing, startup, entrepreneur, Results Map, Ingenium, Telesto, online tool, Fortune 500, strategic communications, communications strategy, bootstrap, BDC

Last night, I had the honour of attending the Canadian launch of the C100 in downtown Ottawa at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada.

What is the C100? It’s a group of those ex-pat Canadians who we refer to when we lament the “brain drain.” They have stepped up to put their time, money and Rolodexes into helping our strongest early-stage companies acquire the mentoring, business contacts and exposure to potential investors they need in North America’s hottest technology nexus — Silicon Valley.

Or to say it another way:

C100 is a non-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment, comprised of a select group of Canadians based primarily in Silicon Valley, including executives of leading technology companies, experienced start-up entrepreneurs and venture capital investors.

There are Canadians that fit that bill all over the Valley said Chris Albinson, one of the founders of the C100 and co-founder and managing director of life sciences and technology investment firm Panorama Capital.

Last fall, overwhelmed by stories from disheartened Canadian entrepreneurs who were struggling to stay afloat as investment dollars dried up due to the economic downturn, as well as the demise of Nortel Networks and the impact this would have on the entire Canadian innovation ecosystem, the founders of C100 decided to do something. They looked to the examples set by other ex-pat communities in the Valley, notably the Israelis, and the networks they had set up to help start-up companies from back home make a name for themselves in the Valley.

At a dinner where 65 guests showed up despite only 50 invitations having been sent out, the audience was challenged to step up and commit to doing something. By the end of the night, 64 guests had endorsed the idea that would become the C100 and each had committed $800 to its creation.

Five months later, the C100 has earned the support and sponsorship of government, economic development agencies and technology incubators across Canada, from EDC and DFAIT, to OCRI, MaRS and Communitech in Ontario.  Seventy Canadian companies have been introduced in the Valley and provided with crucial mentoring and exposure from those who have been there and done it first.

After only five months, five of those 70 companies have secured venture capital investment — a total of US$45 million. And this is just the start.

Incidentally, one of the companies that has benefited from C100’s help is cloud data governance specialist PerspecSys of Waterloo, a new inmedia client. Only last week, PerspecSys was one of 20 Canadian companies that were part of 48hrs in the Valley, a C100 initiative carried out in partnership with the Consulate General of Canada. 48hrs is a fun and intense two-day mentoring and business development program designed to help Canadian entrepreneurs connect with the advice, resources and networks they need to grow their businesses.

While on the junket, PerspecSys competed in the elevator pitch sessions before a judging panel of hard-nosed Valley investors and other tech sector players at the Plug and Play Spring EXPO. It beat out about 40 other U.S. and Canadian companies to take top honours due to the strength of its go-to-market strategy and an innovative solution that lies at the confluence of two key growth markets – cloud computing and securing sensitive corporate data to meet compliancy requirements.

So, hat’s off to the C100 — yet another example of how adversity breeds creative leadership and opportunity. It is this kind of grassroots community effort that will drive a bright future for Canadian entrepreneurship and innovation.

Technorati Tags: C100, DFAIT, Foreign Affairs, PerspecSys, entrepreneur, Silicon Valley, Plug and Play Expo, venture capital, brain drain, cloud computing, OCRI, MaRS, Communitech, Chris Albinson, EDC

The news last week that major international news agencies, including Reuters and Agence France-Presse, were going to boycott the news conference launching this year’s Cannes film festival in a dispute over restricted access to the festival’s fabled red carpet is an uncomfortable but not wholly unexpected consequence of both the blurring lines between the editorial and commercial departments of large media conglomerates and of the recognition that there is still a lot of money to be made from news content — at least, from certain kinds of news content.

Here’s the back story. The fabled film festival, which is the world’s largest and this year runs from May 12 to 23, signed a sponsorship deal with French broadcaster Canal Plus and with European pay-TV company Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom. The deal, part of a growing trend by media properties to extract more than just exposure from their sponsorship of events, gives the two sponsors a level of exclusivity over video footage from the red carpet, where the world’s stars and starlets preen for the attention of paparazzi as they arrive for screenings, and from news conferences, where the stars and directors of the movies meet the world’s journalists covering the festival. The festival has said that other news organizations would have restricted access to these venues for video-shooting purposes. The world’s largest wire services, which are well paid to serve up this video to their clients around the globe, have cried foul.

I’m not sure they should be.

I realise that media outlets, especially reputable media outlets, have always maintained opaque Chinese walls between their editorial and advertising departments but many of them in this modern era have been tearing down those walls themselves. The trend is most advanced in broadcast, where, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars are paid every two years for exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. An unchallenged outcome of this is that while non-sponsoring broadcasting companies can certainly cover the games, they accept that they will face restrictions on camera placement and access to athletes, and quite severe limits on how much they can actually broadcast.

Not all that much different from what the Cannes festival has imposed.

I suspect the news agencies are crying foul less out of wounded journalistic ethic and more out of a hit to their bottom lines. You see, event organizers like the Olympics and, now, Cannes have figured out that the pictures media companies acquire at such events are worth a lot of money. And they want a piece of this action. I believe we will increasingly see event organizers charge the media for access to this valuable content.

In a way, this has long been established practice on election campaigns, where journalists who want to travel on the leader’s plane or bus must cough up substantial amounts of money to cover the costs. While nobody would ever suggest this is any sort of cheque-book journalism, it does lock out the less-wealthy media organisations and, thereby, make more valuable the stories and pictures that those with access publish and broadcast.

As I said, I’m not sure I object to this trend. While the purist in me is concerned about a world where media have to pay for access to events and the implications that holds for media freedom and other vaunted values, the realist (cynic?) in me is obliged to concede that most media today are indistinguishable from any other commercial enterprise, producing and packaging the product they know will sell while leaving aside the stuff they know won’t.

Why shouldn’t they have to pay for the raw material?

[tags] Cannes, Olympics, journalism, cheque-book journalism, media ethics [\tags]

Last week, a new angel investing network launched in the National Capital Region to support new business initiatives, mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs, and of course, generate great returns for investors.
The Capital Angel Network (CAN) is an informal network sponsored by the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) where angels can view potential investments and discuss them as a group. The goals are to increase the quantity, quality, and success of angel investments in Ottawa, to create a greater pool of capital for innovative start-up companies and to complement existing angel groups.

Laurie Davis, a long time angel investor in the Ottawa area and a member of CAN’s board of directors, took a few moments to share his thoughts.

What was the impetus behind the creation of this new network?

Davis: I meet with entrepreneurs all the time and they tell me they have a great deal of trouble raising money. It’s always been difficult, but much more so in recent times for various reasons. It takes a lot time and effort to find enough angels to give you the amount of money you need. So if you can gather a number of angels together in a group, it saves the entrepreneur a lot of time and effort.

From the angel’s point of view, I enjoy working with others in a group and hearing their perspectives on things before agreeing to commit money.

What are your key objectives and goals?

Davis: Obviously this is only a useful exercise if companies get funded. In the end, the goal is to have people fund companies they find useful and interesting. We are going to track what happens and see if by the end of the year we have four or five companies that have been funded.

How is CAN different from other angel investor organizations that we have seen in Ottawa over the years, such as Purple Angel, Band of Scoundrels and the Ottawa Angel Alliance (OAA)?

Davis: I am a member of Purple Angel, a founder of OAA and friends with members of Band of Scoundrels. What are we doing different? We got some feedback when OAA wound down that there wasn’t much appetite for a formal organization. With OAA, you had to pay membership dues and commit to a certain level of investment. People didn’t like that level of formality. The bottom line is to try something different until you find something that works. The challenge of course, is to make sure you have real investors, as opposed to the room getting filled up with lawyers, accountants and other service providers looking for business. With the informal model that becomes a little harder, but we’ll be watching it.

Where do you think we have the most significant gap in turning great ideas into competitive commercial products that make it to market?

Davis: In general we have people who know how to go about building a product, but that whole go-to-market strategy, to know how to get a product to customers and to identify real customers – that’s the problem we have.

How will CAN help early stage companies overcome this hurdle?

Davis: We are not going to be tackling it directly. The key thing is, if you have a group of smart people in a room, the expectation is that someone will step up and help. The whole idea of angel investing is not to just provide money, it is to get involved and help where you can. We hope to see a lot of that.

What do you think of Terry Matthews’ recent announcement of his new commercialization fund?

Davis: It all helps. None of us are competing. There is a problem out there that needs to be solved and anything that can be done to solve it is a great benefit to the community.

What is the future of the venture capital model?

Davis: I wish I knew. It certainly is not pretty out there right now. If you look at it from an entrepreneur’s perspective, it is painful. And they are trying to address that by creating companies that need less capital. There are some businesses that you can launch with a few hundred thousand dollars, but others you simply can’t without tens of millions of dollars – and those are the companies no one wants to start right now. This is a huge problem and I don’t know how it’s going to be resolved. There is talk that institutional investors will invest directly in companies, as they once did – that would certainly help, but I haven’t seen this happen so far.

Technorati Tags: angel investor, angels, Purple Angel, National Angel Capital Organization, NACO, Capital Angel Network, Laurie Davis

When Iain Christie, president of Neptec Design Group, took the stage this morning as the keynote speaker at OCRI’s first Technology Executive Breakfast of the fall season, he made one thing clear: he wouldn’t presume to tell his audience how they should run their business, since it was challenge enough to run his own.

Nonetheless, as he shared anecdotes of the lessons learned over Neptec’s almost 20-year evolution from a one-trick pony whose continuance relied on the “stroke of a bureaucratic pen” to a more diversified technology play, it was clear that certain fundamentals crucial to business success apply no matter the industry; they simply manifest in different ways.

Neptec’s big break came in the early 1990s, when it developed an Advanced Space Vision System for NASA to help astronauts assemble the International Space Station. While this crucial contract for the company generated spinoff business, by the start of this decade, Neptec was challenged by the simple fact that it was still living from program to program with one dominant customer — obviously not the best way to build a sustainable company over the long term.

And while additional opportunities have come from NASA, not the least of which is the 3D Laser Camera System now used to inspect the Space Shuttle exterior for damage after launch, Neptec has diversified its expertise in intelligent three-dimensional data collection and processing for multiple applications in the defence and industrial automation markets.

Iain shared the following lessons that have come of the company’s growing pains and emphasized that it is still far better to learn from one’s own experience than from the mistakes of others:

1. Always have a backup plan. Before you jump in and claim to have the solution to a problem, make certain you have a complete understanding of its dimensions and its constraints. ”You’ll get a lot further ahead.”

2. Never let them see you sweat. “Amateurs talk about technology, professionals talk about process.” Technology is great, but if there is not a proven process to govern implementation and operation, and effectively troubleshoot any problems, the best technology in the world will not yield the desired result. You must be prepared for the unexpected.

3. The Perfect is the enemy of The Good Enough. In one instance with NASA, Neptec went from concept to a fully realized system that flew in space in only 16 months. The key from the outset was having a clear and unambiguous objective statement of what they had to achieve. The team had to refrain from the temptation to exhaust time and resources on making something that was already good enough even better. It was an exercise in distinguishing the “truly important” from the “merely urgent.”

4. Stick to your strengths. When the Neptec team embarked on its campaign to diversify its customer base, the key was not to chase after what the market wanted, but to instead remain true to its core strengths and focus on opportunities where it could deliver value to the customer. In other words, find problems they could solve with a solution the target market was willing to buy and could afford, rather than attempting to muscle in where larger and better-funded competitors were already well-established.

5. What gets measured gets done. Case in point: Iain was swimming against the current with his management team trying to argue in favour of expanding the workforce. The central issue was Neptec’s utilization rate: how much of each worker’s time was actually being applied to billable client work. Iain put the spotlight on it, but his managers on their own initiative tackled it and staff efficiency shot up in a matter of weeks. Which led to his next point: as the leader, his job is to ensure the management team is focused on addressing the right problem, set goals, then get out of the way and let them figure out the solution. He should not get bogged down in the day-to-day operational stuff, but . . .

6. Stay focused on what’s next. Change isn’t always desirable, but it is inevitable. While it is easy to fall into the trap of never looking past the end of the current project, or the current fiscal quarter, the person at the top must have their attention focused on what’s just over the horizon to maintain growth and profitability.

Technorati Tags: business development, R&D, product development, leadership, Neptec, NASA, Space Shuttle, ISS, International Space Station, Iain Christie, OCRI, TEB, Technology Executive Breakfast, data collection and processing

A weekend-long, competitive startup boot camp in October that will see the winning team take away $5,000 in seed funding was the most interesting piece of a coherent new programming line up announced last night by The Ottawa Network, the city’s grassroots networking club for the technology sector.

The startup camp, which will be repeated in the spring, was the second of four “program pillars” revealed by TON president Rick O’Connor. The first pillar, Network, will see TON continue to hold business networking and educational events, although at two a month, these will happen only half as frequently as last year’s somewhat over-ambitious weekly schedule. The third pillar, Finance, will feature a repeat of last year’s popular Founders and Funders dinners that saw angels and venture capitalists rub shoulders for an evening with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Details of the final pillar, Grow, will come later.

TON will also start charging a membership fee for the first time since it was founded in 2001 by a cohort of down-sized refugees of the telecom crash who gathered together to commiserate and help each other found new ventures and find new jobs. General membership will cost $25 per year in a move O’Connor said the organization hopes will lead to a more committed, targeted and involved membership.

The first startup boot camp is scheduled for October 23 to 25, and TON hopes to attract up to 75 participants who will self-categorize themselves into the various functions a new company needs, such as development, marketing and so on. On the Friday evening, as many as a dozen of the participants will pitch their ideas for a startup and teams will be formed based on who else wants to join them to work on that pitch for the weekend. On Sunday evening, each team will make its pitch, with the winner coming away with $5,000 if it incorporates as a fresh start-up.

TON’s new programming line up is a welcome evolution for an organization that significantly revitalized itself last year after a couple of years of fairly moribund existence. We’ve been big supporters of the network almost from the beginning, and I saw several instances last year where exciting new ventures got a solid helping hand as a result of a TON initiative.

Even better, in my view, is the introduction of a membership fee. As Shopify founder Toby Lutka said at a different event a few months ago, “Twenty four dollars is a slightly more annoying version of free.” His point, which I thoroughly endorse, is that if you have created something of real value, people ought to be willing to pay you something to use it. Not incidentally, in the process of charging for something, you also find committed customers, rather than just tire kickers. Those who can’t afford the fee — TON has always been attractive to those looking for work or operating ventures on a shoestring — can still attend up to three events a year without paying anything.

I’ll be a regular at TON events both for its inherent value to my own business and so that I can continue to bring its news to readers of this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Ottawa Network, startups, startup boot camp, Founders and Funders, technology

(Mark Sue is managing director of RBC Capital Markets. This blog post is a summary of his report from the recent RBC Technology Conference.)

• There’s a sense that the worst is behind us, according to key executives who presented at the RBC Technology Conference. Focus companies included Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, JDSU and Sigma Designs. We noted various encouraging trends dependent on the end markets. The consumer segment seems to have led while we are also seeing firming trends in the enterprise. Service-provider-centric companies seem to be lagging, although specific names are noting improving order trends.

• Ciena CEO Gary Smith highlighted that although carrier customers remain cautious and are still budgeting month to month, sentiment has improved and orders show encouraging trends. Orders turn into deployments and, subsequently, revenues and Ciena has already endorsed sequential revenue growth for the current quarter. New products like CoreDirector II should also contribute to revenue growth in early 2010.

• Our read on F5 was encouraging, and the stable environment may provide for product revenues to start growing again. Recent F5 potential customer meetings in NY pointed to a more positive tone. F5 has a major operating system refresh (TMOS v.10) and CEO McAdams said initial feedback from customers was favorable.

• Brocade pointed to the overall health of the business and the relative strength in storage spending. Brocade has the added benefit of gaining market share, according to CFO Richard Deranleau. Brocade remains very pleased with the reception with its new Ethernet partner IBM and partnership benefits are expected in fiscal Q4.

• JDSU may see a full recovery later than some, in our view, yet CFO David Vellequette reminded investors that the March-April period marked an improvement from the January-February period. That said, inventories are lean, down to 4-8 weeks in optical components from 12-16 weeks just 18 months ago.

• Sigma Designs CFO Tom Gay pointed to modest improvements in visibility, healthy subscriber growth at AT&T and the resumption of international IPTV projects in 2H09. Positive themes on video growth were echoed by Bigband’s CFO Castonguay who pointed to opportunities in SDV and digital ad insertion.

• Samsung’s SVP of strategy Justin Denison reiterated the company’s market-share goals and its dominant position in the US in terms of units. Samsung is keenly focused on touch, which grew 10% in 2008.

Technorati Tags: RBC Capital Markets, Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, F5, JDSU, Sigma Designs, Samsung

A Cutting Edge Focus on Social Media for Business was the thrust of this week’s Ottawa Network event, but while each of the presenters offered useful insights on the abrupt paradigm shifts in customer and media engagement driven by Web 2.0, what struck me was that no matter how much some things change, they remain the same.

Chris Biber, president and CEO of SearchingWorks, started off the evening by reiterating that social media, be it Twitter, Youtube or a blog, is simply another set of tools in the marketing toolbox, while marketing itself is simply the “consistent application of common sense.”

It all begins of course, by taking the time to research and understand your customers. Who are they? Where are they? What interests them? And what are their needs and expectations? The same basic foundation that’s always been a requisite for an effective marketing program. The difference now, of course, being that social media allows for a much more candid and informal two-way flow of communication between company and customer.

But this is a conversation that cannot be dominated by a “me, me, me” approach. While companies and brands can make themselves part of the conversation and attempt to direct it, they can’t expect to control it. Nor will their audience respond favourably to anything that is blatantly self-serving or promotional.

Rick Radko, president of R-Cubed, drawing on his software-engineering background, took a different perspective and focused on the application of social media as an internal, rather than external, communications tool set. From online tools for document sharing and collaboration, to wikis, Rick talked about how “Enterprise 2.0″ is becoming the norm for organizations with teleworkers and remote offices, to keep staff in touch and part of a common corporate culture.

In particular, Rick touched on using a wiki to keep staff informed on everything from new corporate directives, to who down the hall is offering to car pool. It’s the digitization of that ubiquitous cork board that adorns staff lunch rooms everywhere, plastered with pushpins and dead-tree notices.

Lastly, Natasha D’Souza, founder of Virtual EyeSee, talked about the distinctions between the social media release, versus the traditional news release, an example of which she offered for a recent Mother’s Day event she held. As her example illustrates, the social media release tends to be less formal and directly addresses the intended audience. It also moves up the contact information and incorporates multimedia elements to support it, from pictures, to video and links to other relevant sources of information.

Two things in particular struck me about the structure of a social media release and how she used it.

First, is the volume of supporting content that can be added, in terms of pictures, video, links and so forth. In the good ol’ days of tree slaying, a comprehensive package such as this was called a media kit. Is the social media release, in its fully realized form, in many ways not simply the digitization of this traditional public relations tool? (Editor’s note: Actually, long before the term “social media release” was ever coined, savvy PR practitioners have been offering their contacts multimedia-rich content. And we’ve been hosting or delivering that content via electronic channels for decades. The web has made it easier for practitioners to do it all themselves but there are still some media formats — broadcast-quality b-roll, for example — that you probably don’t want to host yourself.)

The second point came when one attendee asked Natasha how she distributed this social media release. And this is where another classic and intrinsic element of marketing and PR came in. She researched the influential bloggers in the Ottawa area who would be interested in her Mother’s Day event and contacted them to pitch the event and direct them to her release. Proving once again that they’ve yet to come up with a social media tool that is a suitable substitute for hard work and old-fashioned solicitation.

Technorati Tags: public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, Twitter, wiki, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

If last night’s standing-room-only three hours of drinking-from-a-firehose delivery of hard-core business education was anything to go on, Ottawa’s entrepreneurs are hungry to learn from experienced veterans just how to manage, finance and market their companies.

Entrepreneur’s Edge, or e2, is a professional-development program that the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation has offered for four years. In an inspired cross between effective promotion and community outreach, program manager Peter Fillmore decided to offer a stripped-down version of the five-day curriculum. That gave rise to last night’s staging at TheCodeFactory of e2-Lite, an intensely concentrated introduction to the joys and perils of founding and managing a technology startup.

More than 50 people took up every available seat in the room, and all but a very few stayed right through to the end of a trio of presentations by Jim Roche, Rick O’Connor and Rick Norland. While the condensed nature of the content meant that bits of it were somewhat fractured and the presentation slides were densely packed, the staying power of the audience was testament to both the quality of the material being delivered and the ready appetite for it.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurs Edge, e2 Lite, OCRI, TheCodeFactory, entrepreneurship, professional development

Ross Video is not as well known as some companies in the Ottawa area. And yet, it employs 300 staff between its operations in Ottawa and the small community of Iroquois about an hour south, and has enjoyed average annual revenue growth of 20 per cent since 1991.

Ross Video makes a variety of video-production equipment used for broadcast and live events.  Its products ship all over the world, with customers that range from major television networks, Scotiabank Place and the Vatican to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The company’s success has earned it some kudos. It won an OCRI Technology Company of the Year award in 2005, a Gemini Award for Technology in 2007 and an OCRI Product of the Year award in 2008. Still, it doesn’t command the immediate name recognition as other names in the Ottawa tech sector. Perhaps that’s due in part to the fact that the Ross Video name lacks the infamy associated with some of those other names.

As an Iroquois boy myself, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony as second-generation chairman and CEO David Ross talked about the company’s obvious staying power at this morning’s OCRI Technology Executive Breakfast.

For anyone who knows it, Iroquois is a quiet village on the shores of the St. Lawrence River with fewer than 1,500 residents. It greatest claim to fame was its wholesale relocation to higher ground during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s. This humble setting is the hometown of a success story that has more than a few lessons to teach to the Ottawa technology community about what it takes to build a global player.

The company was founded by David’s father, John, in 1974 with seed money earned from the sale of his prized Second World War twin-seat training airplane and a bank loan for a grand total of $8,000.

John Ross founded the company with two guiding objectives:

• Have a family-owned business
• Maintain control of his own destiny indefinitely

The emphasis has always been on building a company to last, rather than one to sell, which, as David stressed, is a tougher road that requires a far different mindset. It’s not enough to think a fiscal quarter or a year ahead, but a decade ahead. It is this emphasis on private control without diluting ownership through external investment, and the long-term business strategy this demanded, that has helped build a company well prepared for any economic downturn.

Among Dave’s best practices to build an enduring company:

• For its first 18 years, Ross Video sold only video-production switches and was hammered by recessions in the ’80s and ’90s. This taught the value of diversifying the product line to help make the company more resilient to downturns. One way was to develop more economical and stripped-down versions of its products. The Lamborghini model may sell well when times are good, but the Kia version will still sell well when times are tougher.
• But . . . don’t wait until a recession has struck to design the Kia model. When times are good, re-invest profits in research and product development. About two-thirds of Ross Video’s product line has been introduced within the past three years.
• Make sure your products touch on as many edges as possible with common markets, customers, materials, manufacturing processes and so forth. This drives a lean and efficient operation.
• Diversify the customer base, both by market and geography.
• Don’t sit on a pile of cash. Again, invest in new product development and diversification. “If the downturn is long term, the cash will eventually evaporate and only postpone layoffs.”
• Spread your technology bets. For example, don’t bet the company on some new emerging technology at the expense of older legacy products that still have a solid market. Again, diversify.
• Partner. Partner on marketing, sales channels, product development, manufacturing — whatever it is where your company is strong and another is not and vice versa. Ross Video has built a partner channel with more than 20 other smaller companies in its space that, for the most part, are in some fashion a competitor. And yet, these partnerships are beneficial on both ends.
• Consider carefully where there is the most benefit from outsourcing a process versus keeping it in house. Ross Video still prefers to keep its manufacturing inside the company and has taken advantage of new technologies to improve the cost efficiency of these operations.
• Take advantage of government funding, such as through IRAP or the SR&ED program.
• Customer service is critical, especially if you are second or third in your market. “People buy from people they like.”
• By the same token, “People work for people they like.” Treat staff with respect, invest in them and have regular celebratory events.
• Manage growth. Don’t be greedy and look to grow too fast. Ross Video has walked away from more opportunities than it has pursued.

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