How to be a better Angel, Board Member, and Investor
In business, angels are individuals who invest their own money in early seed stages of new companies when the risk of failure is very high. They also guide the founders and actively help them navigate all sorts of cliffs in building and running an early-stage company. (In this, they're not unlike angels in many religions, often depicted as benevolent protectors or guides of humans.)
The members of Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards are often paid professionals and their companies are usually well established (sometimes for decades) but their roles are similar: they guide, they check, they support and unblock the management teams they work with. This is true for companies of all sizes and all industries. Since Boards of Directors exist to protect the interests of stockholders (i.e., investors) in companies, their ultimate interest is the commercial success of their executive teams.
If you're one of the above, a company owner, a General Counsel or another type of investor, such as a Venture Capitalist, Strategic Investor, or a representative of a Family Office, you all share that desire for commercial success.
Guiding your team to commercial success
Making your company a winner and achieving commercial success is no easy feat. In very high-level terms, executives have to
assemble the team to
build the product and then
convince the customers to purchase it.
Maintaining commercial success, once achieved, is often even harder because growth becomes harder to realize the larger the base, copycats will bring new competition, and the larger an organization grows the less nimble it gets. You all know this.
You also know that to achieve and maintain 1, 2, and 3 your companies need
Purpose
Focus
Clarity
Everything else flows from that.
Creating Market Leaders
Striving to become the leader in a market is good business. This applies across the globe to any variant of market economy and it holds true even if a product or service is fundamentally altruistic. (If your aim is to "survive" or to "make a living," you're setting different priorities, which is totally fine, of course. It's just not the primary focus of this post.)
It's important to understand that market leadership is not something that happens by chance. You can choose to pursue it and frameworks such as category design (aka category creation) help you achieve it. (These names are used interchangeably. We like "design" because it hints at the intentionality of the process.)
The iPod, Uber or Netflix are well-known examples of successfully applied category design principles in the consumer space. A newer space is what the New York Times recently called “A ‘New Category’ of Health”, the intersection of medical and beauty products targeting women around menopause. Another category with massive growth potential is the plant-based food sector, recently projected to hit $162b by Bloomberg. You get the idea: a well-designed market category is a gold mine.
For the results they produce these projects are surprisingly lean and efficient: Full-scale category design projects usually run 3-6 months for the research and strategy phase, followed by marketing and communications phases of varying duration (depending on the specifics of your market and what's right for your company).
Even stripped-down versions of category creation projects produce the above-mentioned purpose, focus and clarity that so many companies need.
Holistic strategy as a path to success
Your company will end up with a foundational whole-company strategy that sets everyone on the path to market leadership. It will have articulated why employees and customers alike should be excited about the company and its products in a point-of-view document. That helps attract the right employees that help build the products that the customers crave.
Bonus: commercial success usually sets in quickly; certainly long before the company reaches the goal of market leadership.
When to think about category design
Category design as a formal practice has been around for a number of years but most managers don't have it front of mind, so they often won't be asking you specifically for your connections or an introduction to a category design firm.
Here's what to listen for:
When they say "we need a new slogan," think category design.
When they look for help renaming, think category design.
When they mention rebranding or a new logo, think category design.
When they contemplate a pivot, think category design.
When they see their growth flatten, think category design.
When they see their decades-long profits erode, think category design.
Any signal that says "what we've been doing isn't working anymore" is the moment you should reach out to experienced category creators for an assessment. Good ones will tell you when they can't help and steer you towards other options, such as an ad agency or other forms of management consulting.
The right way (and a wrong way) to do this
The right way to get started on the path to commercial success and market leadership is to work with experienced category designers. Those could be freelancers, massively large consulting firms or specialized boutique firms who provide customized services, such as Forward Momentum.
The key here is that you need external help and guidance, not just for their experience with the process but also for their outside view into your company. For the questions they'll ask. You know, the ones that seem so obvious that no one ever asks them anymore.
The wrong way to attempt this is to convene an internal team led by someone who read a few books about the subject and attended a seminar on change management. We know of painfully numerous examples where executives thought they could do this in-house. One CEO was advised by their board to "save the consulting fees." Another company told our sales team "bringing in consultants will slow us down." (After more than a year they all produced results that immediately fizzled out. Time and money wasted.)
Don't be that company. Call us.
