Opportunities everywhere

This post has two parts: first a really messed up situation where rules collide with reality resulting in an unacceptable outcome and the second is about the opportunity this provides.

Last week there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about schools that have had their federal lunch funding withheld due to 'egregious' violations. You can read the whole story here, but here are some of the examples of what appear to be clueless bureaucracy:

• No adult is allowed to hand a tray of food to a child, no matter how young the child.
  
• Teachers cannot handle the students lunch cards, or if they are more wired and have touch screens, they cannot touch the screen for a child, again no matter how young.

All I can say is, really? Do the people who make/enforce these rules know what it is like to serve lunch to younger kids, to expect them to navigate through school lunch without anyone helping them? How many moms/dads would be sanguine in their kids' ability to turn in a lunch card (without losing it) and select the right foods (as defined by the powers-that-be) entirely on their own? And I don't even want to think about those little ones who are new to the school systems and/or the language. (It doesn't help the divide that this is not a problem in private schools.)

The bureaucrats are not evil. They are trying to make sure that there are no abuses like kids being marked as having lunch when they didn't, or being forced in their food choices. All valid goals. And they have chosen the standard method of letting the 'consumer' make the choices and confirm the transaction - except that they forgot that the consumer here could be a distracted and overwhelmed six-year old. It appears that whole school lunch program, especially the free lunches, could be ineffective for older students too. As I have been mentoring teens recently, I learned that the ones who qualify for free lunches often do not want to get them as doing so requires 'special' handling, like picking up cards after an announcement on the PA system. High school is hard enough, and teenagers would rather starve than make their straitened circumstances visible to their peers.

Which brings me to the second part. This is a situation where the solution may benefit from some classic design focus, the kind many entrepreneurs bring to their products. There are many stakeholders here, federal agencies, state agencies, school districts, schools, staff etc., but ultimately there's only one goal - children need to given a healthy lunch. It needs to be such that it's easy and appropriate for the children first, and then one can add on all the accountability, auditability and other requirements to ensure fiscal and operational integrity.

Maybe this is an opportunity for a startup. It is entirely possible, with today's technology, to build something user (read 'kid') friendly, discreet (for the teens) and providing instantaneous and accurate reporting on usage. It could be a money-maker, given the number of schools that need to be served. Of course, it would help if VCs could be persuaded to invest in ventures outside the beaten path, or if someone would step up to some strategic philanthropy or mission-related investing. Most of all, it needs a passionate entrepreneur and a socially-minded one who'd love the idea of making it easier for kids to get lunch. Maybe the solution is already there - that would make a great follow up story.

Entrepreneur idols

A little news item that caught my eye: Junior Achievement conducted a poll among 1000 students between the ages of 12 and 17 and asked them to pick their most admired entrepreneur from a list of famous ones (all US based). And guess what, Steve Jobs was top of the list, way ahead of Oprah!

This poll is both fascinating and frustrating. It is amazing that Steve, nerdy though brilliant, outshone 'traditional' celebrities. He is an entrepreneur (and design genius) who became a celebrity instead of an entertainment celebrity who used his/her fame and fortune to build a business. And even more interesting is the fact that a third felt he made a difference in people's lives and a quarter felt he made the world a better place - and these are among the qualities that they most admired about him. Wealth and fame were way down the list. Steve Jobs as a do-gooder is unusual image for most techies, which leads to one of the frustrating things about this poll: the pre-selected list of entrepreneurs. It would have been interesting to see how Bill Gates would have fared in this poll. Apart from creating the Microsoft behemoth (the 'evil empire' bit is softening a little with competion), Gates continues to help improve the lives of people in a major way - but do teenagers know about it?

You can read about the poll here - there's not much to it, but it raises all kinds of interesting questions about the impact that iPods and iPhones (and maybe Macs too) have had on teens' worldview. But the good news is that JA is focused on teaching entrepreneurship to teens and is one of the handful of organizations (check out this previous post for another one) using business training to boost academic performance. What I find encouraging about all this is that so many teenagers are drawn to entrepreneurship, not just celebrity, which bodes well for more innovation and risk-taking in the future. Who'd have thought that the iPod could inspire so much by being the coolest personal music player ever?

Words Shape the Venture

No, it's not the other way about, even though it seem counter-intuitive. Ideally, you should write down your business plan early enough in the game just so you can makes sure that you've answered all the obvious questions and you know there's a business there. You think of your idea, you start to build it (whether it's a product or service) and somewhere along the way, you have to write down what your idea is all about, either to get funding or to market to customers. But apart from the plan, there's the description, often the elevator pitch or one-liner or even the tag line, that you start working on the moment you're ready to talk to other people about your idea and you'll soon find out that these words are more than just 'marketing', they're critical to your business.

First, the very act of trying to describe what your business is about turns out to be a most challenging exercise. It could take you weeks of creating, analyzing and re-creating to come up with something that you believe represents what you are doing. And doing it in clear language takes a little bit more (help from more 'literary' types). Finally it's done and you're excited as you can now build 'a widget that keeps people from losing their marbles'. (Maybe the figurative kind? That would be something.)

So what you have is a nifty way to track marbles, and you think you have a great way to distribute to a large market and make money so you're marching along. And one day, you are putting together a brief summary to send to a business acquaintance who knows someone who is involved in a fund where a partner is super interested in marbles (this is how it often goes). You read your description again and decide that all this time you've been working on the tracking but haven't paid attention to how people would use it. So now you decide you need to focus on the user experience of using the tracking to find the said marbles. Still, it's early enough in the game and it's all good.

And you keep going, and you're reviewing your presentation that you'd be making to a VC soon and the word 'people' hits you. Do you really want to say 'people' which may mean individuals, consumers, or are you really focusing on selling to organizations which may then help people with their marbles? This warrants a sit-down with your team and discussions on which would be the better market, and you decide to focus on individual consumers, especially since your sales and marketing guy assures you that there's not much profit in selling to middle-men. By this time you feel that your team knows exactly what to do and you've laid it all out, and you can confidently answer when the VC asks you 'which people?' or anything else about your product.

You are getting deeper into your business and now you find that there are others out there who are also positioning themselves as having marble trackers like yours and, crushingly, it's not just a startup or two, but a big gun (or two) with the means to take you out before you get established. Since you're a true entrepreneur, you don't just throw up your hands in despair, but you go back to the fundamentals and look at what you set out to do: provide a widget that keeps people from losing their marbles. And the bells clang in your head - your differentiator is in 'keep from losing' - you're not just going to track marbles and help find them once lost, you are going to keep people from losing them in the first place. Maybe that would take not only a widget, but a service, but your team thinks that's great because the big guns aren't going to bother with that and would leave the field to you and the other smaller fry. And as an added bonus, you now have a new exit strategy as maybe one of those abundantly sized guns could buy you out in the future.

Articulating your business and vision in clear terms is critical, not only for selling it to others, but to keep you and your team on track by providing a solid touchstone for every strategic decision you have to make. Not to mention, it may keep you from losing your marbles!