The Entrepreneurial Experience with Jack Benson

When an entrepreneur is approaching investors, there's a couple pieces of advice I would have. First, it's do your research. Take a look at other investments that these investors have made. What businesses, what's their investment strategy, what's their time horizon? Try to talk to some of the firms that they've invested in and get their perspective on what kind of partner they've been. Secondly, simplify your story. Be very clear about what your value proposition is. Know who your customer is. Know what your business model is. Know what your path to profitability and making money is. The third piece of advice I would have is confidence. Investors are looking for entrepreneurs who are thoughtful, who have an appreciation for the complexities of the marketplace, but are decisive and have a focused path to growth. Social media over the last decade has changed dramatically. It's moved from sort of a fringe or novelty to an integral part of any sophisticated communications campaign today. It's particularly helpful for smaller and emerging brands where you have lower barriers to entry, lower upfront costs, allows you to get closer to your client to target very specific audiences based on actual behavior and interests. It allows you to ramp up and deploy much quicker than a lot of the traditional media channels. But I think we're also seeing a number of major brands in particular rethinking the mix and the role of social media in their campaigns. You see organizations like Unilever and Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson starting to rethink where social media fits in their plan because of some of the challenges around social media, the loss of control over message, where your message appears, how it appears. I think loss of context. Your message oftentimes is delivered without context around it now. You can have a 15 second video appear with no context around it that suddenly defines your value proposition, your brand, your approach to customer service. So there's also this expectation of immediate responsiveness online and there's a real investment required in that. I mentioned a little bit about the lower upfront costs, but there's a much heavier maintenance cost associated with social media. So I think social media for sure is here to stay, but a lot of marketers are trying to think how do they effectively maintain a presence online, protect the investment they've made in their brand and provide more context around the information that's out there. When we think about direct marketing and marketing at all to audiences, we use the phrase or the analogy that the bait has to taste good to the fish, not the fisherman. And really what that forces you to do is put yourself in the mindset of the customer. And that really starts with clearly defining who your customer is, being very as specific as you can about the group, the type of individual that you're trying to reach. Once you know who your customer is, then really understand what channels are they using, what voice is gonna be credible and authentic to that audience. And then building a campaign, being very clear about how you define success. What are your calls to action? What are the actions that you want your audience to take? And then using data to measure that. And data is your friend. Use data to understand what's working, what's not, and take an iterative approach to this. Test, refine, repeat, and continue to go through that cycle and invest behind the things that are working and get rid of the things that aren't. In terms of financial advice for entrepreneurs, I think it's a pretty simple proposition from my perspective. The most important thing is to treat capital or cash and equity as precious commodities because they are. And at the end of the day, cash is king. No matter what the multiple is in the industry that you're approaching, cash is the pathway to success. And if you don't generate cash in your business, you're gonna have to give up more equity, which means you're gonna have less control over your business. So treat that as exactly what it is, which is a scarce and precious commodity. Focus on a path to profitability. Focus on that path to conserving cash, generating cash for your business.