Bruce’s advice from TD Small Business Advice Series

Recently, a special Small Business Advice event was host by TD Small Business Banking in collaboration with Financial Post. Bruce Croxon , one of the dragons in CBC’s Dragon’s Den, was invited as keynote speaker for the event . If you don’t know about him, let me give you some intro. Bruce is  one of the amazing entrepreneurs in Canadian business world. Before we all get to know the names like eharmony.com, pof.com, etc., Bruce co-founded the online dating service called Lavallife back to 1988. After  more than 10 year’s hard work,  Lavallife was sold in 2004 to U.S. based MemberWorks Inc. for U.S.$ 152 million in cash. Amazing ,isn’t it? Many small business owners are interested to know the secret ingredients in his success.  

Here are some highlights:

When asked how to find the billion-dollar idea in a start-up, Bruce’s advice was:

“Try to solve the problem from the people and business. What kind of problem is there that you are trying to solve? How painful is the problem? The business gets momentum when you’re solving a problem. ”  Another point he raised,” get to know the people, have a conversation and building up the relationship” by this way, you will know more about your customers, and most importantly, you understand the problem, the pain better so that you have the leading edge to solve them, bring value to your customers and client.

My reflection:

Do you use Pinterest? Pinterst  is a  web and mobile application allowing users to create a catalog of ideas and inspire users to do it.  Similarly, One of the key Pinterest’s success is to get to know the users well. At the early stage, Ben Silbermann, one of the founders of Pinterest , stopped users at the coffee shop and asked how the user-experience was to better improve the application. Now, Pinterest is valued at $12 billion. Coming back to the business around us, we find that one of the common questions is how to grow the business.  I think the answer is here.  It is all about how much do we know about our clients, how much do we spend  time in understanding our clients.  The more we understand the clients in terms of needs and challenges, the better we can serve the client and build the products. Now a lot of services and products are in common due to small market and competition, what makes you different is uniqueness of your product and personal touch of your service. But remember, all success starts from a genuine conversation.

When asked if he would take client by giving up one year profit, Bruce’s advice was:

“Do the math. If I give up one year profit for exchanging a client for 40 years, I would do it.”

My reflection:

Short term profitability versus long term strategic play. Sometimes it is a tough call. For a lot of small business owners, it is a question about how to identify loyal customer base and how to convert one time customers to repeat customers. One of the strategies that I learn from other successful businesses is: keep the conversation going with customers after they finish the purchase/make the payment through providing updated information as well as value-added services. By this way, it will keeps you and consumers connected. Always keep that in mind, as many marketing experts say, a new customer may cost five times as much as keeping an existing one.

Final words

It was an inspiring event that Bruce shared  a lot of valuable insights for small business owners. I think the key message to  small businesses is that success never comes easily, start from the conversations with customers first  and stay focused. Utilize the network around you, build solid relationships with your accountant, lawyers and advisors. professionals  from the network. Now it is time to take action.

Lastly, thanks Kitty Iu and Angel Tso from TD bank for inviting me to such a great event.

 

 

 

Featured image used photography courtesy of BNN.