by Loren Feldman
Dinner Lab’s idea was to take promising No. 2 or No. 3 chefs and give them the opportunity to create their own menus in pop-up restaurants: “In New York City we hosted an event in a church where we used a propane burner. A neighbor thought the building was on fire. Twelve fire trucks showed up. We fed a lot of firefighters that night. In Denver, the health department threw out all of our food before one of our events. We had to get the state attorney general to write an opinion letter saying that what we were doing was safe.”
A landmark Manhattan art shop decides to close down: “The new towers are remaking 57th Street at ground level. Longtime fixtures of 57th Street like Steinway and the Rizzoli bookshop have moved. Now there is talk in real estate circles of finding a single retail tenant for the Lee’s building that would take a page from the Ralph Lauren RL -1.25% flagship store on Madison Avenue at 72nd Street. ‘What’s going on here is destroying New York’s sense of place, particularly for an artist,’ said Kate Simon, a photographer who has lived around the corner and up the block from Lee’s for 38 years. ‘What would Truman Capote write now, ‘Breakfast at Nordstrom JWN -0.24%’s?’”
Startups
The automakers are trying to cozy up to the ride-share startups: “The alliances are the latest in a string of pairings between technology companies and traditional automakers that are scrambling to reposition themselves. For decades, automakers had abided by the well-worn formula of making bigger and more powerful cars to fuel their growth. But start-ups like Uber and Lyft and technology companies like Google GOOGL -0.63% and Tesla have disrupted that cadence. These companies, mostly located in Silicon Valley, have in the last few years sped the development of self-driving cars, electric vehicles and ride services. Automakers have become increasingly concerned about those technologies and their potential to help people travel easily and cheaply without owning a car — or even without knowing how to drive.”
Finance
Uber and other gig economy platforms may be having a surprisingly positive impact on the entrepreneurial economy by removing certain would-be entrepreneurs from the mix: “The sharing platforms cull the people least likely to succeed from the ranks of entrepreneurship. Moreover, the researchers locate another benefit, this one to the entrepreneurs who remain. ‘Campaigns on crowdfunding platforms must compete for attention and capital, and thus the presence of low quality campaigns is likely to increase search costs for potential campaign backers or redirect funds that might have been better spent elsewhere,’ they write. ‘The entry of gig-economy platforms appears to help separate wheat from chaff, reducing ‘noise’ in the crowdfunding marketplace.’”
John Warrillow talks to Katherine Hague, founder of ShopLocket, about what she’d do differently if she had it to do over: “Hague’s story came to an end when she sold ShopLocket to PCH, a billion-dollar Irish company who cut a big enough check to make her investors happy with their return on investing in Hague. Hague gambled and won, but when I asked her what she would change if she could do it over again, Hague said she would have tried to self-fund more of her startup. Even Hague, who is one of the success stories, would have preferred not to be so keen to take outside money.”
Pricing
How one company lost 13% of its customers — and increased its revenue: “Brandon and I made one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever had to make: We increased our pricing for our existing customers (a pricing plan that still holds true to this day; we haven’t upped it since). As expected, we lost about 13 percent of them, and don’t get me wrong, we mourned those losses. Hard. But we added nearly $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue as a result of it — which was just enough to finally start breaking even. A pulse! For the first time, our company had a steady heartbeat.”
You’re probably not charging enough for your new product: “There are several signs that can tell firms they’re not pricing a new product aggressively enough. One is a sales force that is easily meeting its targets with the product. Another is watching channel partners reap big margins from selling your product. A third (especially in B2B circles) is having too few customers asking salespeople to escalate discussions about their purchase to higher levels in your company because they are dissatisfied with your price. … The most important step is having in-depth willingness-to-pay discussions with target customers long before the product development team begins to draw up the engineering plans. … You’d be surprised how rare such discussions with target customers are in most companies. A survey we conducted in 2014 found 80% of 1,600 companies in more than 40 countries didn’t have such discussions with customers before bringing a new product to market.”
Subscriptions
How one entrepreneur rents jewelry to millennials by subscription: “Rose’s twist on the subscription model borrows a little from Netflix, a little from Sephora and a little from Birchbox. Rather than selling her customers a box filled with jewelry, she rents it to them, at a cost of $19 a month for three pieces. Whenever a customer wants something new, she simply packages up the old baubles, sends them back and receives a new box in the mail. Customers who like a necklace or ring can buy it – and about a third of Rocksbox’s members buy something each month.”
Human Resources
Here’s why John Deere measures employee morale every two weeks: “Deere’s marketing group has found such check-ins vital to staying competitive in its industry. George Tome, a manager of the rapid development methodology in the Enterprise Advanced Marketing group at Deere, told me that continuous improvement is built into the product development process: at the end of every two-week development cycle, teams review what went well and didn’t go well, and what should change. But as part of the retrospective, leaders also ask team members to answer this telling question on a 10-point scale: ‘How do you feel about the value you were able to contribute in the last cycle?’ While this question is ostensibly about each employee’s concrete contribution, it importantly tests how they are feeling about their work. Deere managers call it a ‘motivation metric’ or even a ‘happiness metric.’”
And here’s how to empower your people and save yourself from burnout: “Dwight Strayer, chief operating officer at Service Express, was on the fast-track to burnout until he made an important realization: by giving his team members the answers to their questions, he was preventing them from developing their technical and leadership skills.”