NWEN was the first organization for entrepreneurs I heard about after I left Microsoft. I went to pretty much every single event they put together from mid-2004 to late 2005 and continued to attend many events throughout the years. It was great on the beginning but then the value started to fade for me mostly because of where I was on my own startup, but also because some of the events start to become less useful in general. At the end, how many (stales) talks about Angel Investing, IP protection, Writing a Business Plan can you really afford to go?
Given that Rebecca Lovell – a fantastic contributor to the Seattle 2.0 blog – has been named the new Executive Director of NWEN, I thought about asking some of my friends entrepreneurs a simple question: How can NWEN be better for entrepreneurs? And got lots of great and thoughtful answers.
Rebecca, this is our welcome gift to you: The 10 things for you to fix. Enjoy it…
#1 - Clean up the Board and Committees
How many members of the board are entrepreneurs themselves? Wait… how many members of the board are entrepreneurs and *not* service providers? How can you create an organization that tackles entrepreneur’s needs if most of the board members bring an agenda to the table? It's like the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation be made up of mostly men. I’m not questioning the integrity of the individuals themselves, and a lot of those are very altruistic on their giving back to entrepreneurs, but do create a board where at least 50% are made of entrepreneurs that have no personal gain from other NWEN members. Good intentions or desire to help not ways correspond to real value being added.
#2 – The Entrepreneur is the King
Trying to serve too many masters never work. Yes, the lawyers, consultants, accountants and other service providers pay a good portion of NWEN’s bill, but if you don’t serve your customer first (entrepreneurs) you will weaken your position (and brand) with them and slowly start losing the sponsors as well. Do what’s right for the entrepreneurs even if that’s not the “good” thing for the bill-payers. If the entrepreneurs come, the sponsors will be there not matter what.
#3 – Don’t Bucket All Entrepreneurs Together
Not all entrepreneurs are the same. Someone opening a nail parlor has different needs from someone creating a Web startup, which are different from someone opening a consulting service. Very different needs. NWEN has for the longest time put all entrepreneurs on the same bucket. The broader the scope of an event or service the less appealing it’s for anyone. Either, NWEN needs to pick sides (services vs. product, tech vs. non-tech) or it must understand the differences between those and try not to serve everyone with the same solution.
#4 – Focus On Your Strengths: Events
If you treat NWEN like a startup, you know that you can’t be good at all things, so skip doing all this “side projects” that are barely successful (if not failures) and focus on being really good with your events. Professional Directory? That’s called LinkedIn. Announcements? That’s called TechFlash. Forums? That’s called STS. NWEN Blog? Well, keep that one. NWEN should not try to be all things for all entrepreneurs (see #3), but it should try to be the best organization at providing entrepreneur education and networking through events.
#5 – More Value Per Hour
A consistent message I hear from entrepreneurs is how busy they are – no surprises here – and how NWEN doesn’t “respect” that fact. Not everyone can have a 5-hour workshop, or a full-day event. The problem is not the duration alone, but the amount of value you get per hour. If you give someone 50 minutes to do a presentation, the person will talk for 50 minutes even if the talk should have been 20 minutes, hence Entrepreneur University feels very weak on that front. The First Look Forum (the replacement for ESIF) will suffer a similar issue: It’s a 5 ½ hour event. How many angel investors will have the stomach to sit through that?
#6 – Events *to* Entrepreneurs
I’m echoing a sentiment of many entrepreneurs in Seattle. NWEN became a service provider organization. It’s not like NWEN asks what entrepreneurs want to learn about and then go setup workshops and find speakers on that topic. It’s the other way around: A sponsor that wants to give a talk about something, then they give the place, pay for the food and NWEN gets the proceeds, but did anyone ask entrepreneurs what they wanted? If you look on the last 4-years of NWEN events it’s pretty much the same thing over and over and the common thread is the service provider giving the talk. When did NWEN gave a talk about how to setup a blog? Or what’s Search Engine Market? Or Google Analytics? Or how to cope with the market downturn? Or how to tap into Obama’s focus on Green-Tech and Health-care? If you put up a schedule of events 6 or 12 months in advance, you are not able to adapt to the current world events/conditions.
#7 – Is it Northwest Entrepreneur Network?
Why is NWEN called NWEN? And not SEN (Seattle’s Entrepreneur Network)? All events are in Seattle (or Bellevue) and all their focus are on those locations. From time to time I meet someone from Portland, Spokane or Vancouver at some event, but NWEN has never (to my knowledge) made any effort into becoming a truly Northwest organization. The fact is that the workshops, seminars, events and other resources put together can be seamlessly reused on other places of the Northwest. And since NWEN has “network” on the name, it can certainly benefit of a large network base.
#8 – The Membership Fee
I’ve got multiple entrepreneurs telling me they are either too “cheap” to pay for the NWEN membership or they don’t know what they would get from that. NWEN should put some serious thought into their membership mentality. A lot of organizations measure their success by the number of members they have. Maybe it’ll be on Rebecca’s annual performance review to grow membership by X%. Well, make membership free that it will grow significantly. It’s a pretty hard sell to make someone pay for a “club” membership if they are not certain that price will convert into value. How about you automatically become a member after the first paid event you attend? How about you get a free membership for the first year? Or how about Startup entrepreneurs pay $0 for membership, while service providers and investors pay twice as much? I don’t have an answer, but NWEN should be questioning their strategy to become more valuable to entrepreneurs.
#9 – Deepen Ties with Other Organizations
NWEN should be partnering with (or outsourcing to) the other organizations to bring best of breed solutions. It should deepen its relationship with the regional universities, it should be representing startups on local, county and state government to bring up issues that need to make this a better place for startups. It should join WTIA (not compete with it) to bring discounted services to cash-strapped startups. It should co-host funding events with AoA, Keiretsu, Seraph and others.
#10 – Clean up the Website!
As I said on #4, NWEN should be primarily about events. I’d be super happy with a homepage that highlights the upcoming events, who is targeted to, what’s the topic, how much it cost and a link to “register now”. What I see today is an un-cohesive attempt at being too many things at once. I was going to suggest using some of the great services of local startups to improve your site, but I think what you really need is to clean up everything, start small and simple and build it over time, versus a grandiose plan to remake the website. And remember that “Forums” is something from the 90s. Don’t do it. This is the place where less will be more.
The only thing left to say is good luck Rebecca! There’s some work to be done.
Appreciate feedback and input from: Josh Petersen, Brian Dorsey, Matt Hulett, John Schrest, Kelly Smith, Rajeev Goel, Mike Koss, Ksenia Oustiougova, Todd Humphrey, Brent Lamphier and others.