Bootstrap Business is ready to ship!

September 3, 2009 SEVIERVILLE, TENNESSEE — In the summer of 2008, Chicke Fitzgerald, consultant, keynote speaker and author, was selected from a nationwide search to be featured in Bootstrap Business; a highly successful book series from Tennessee based Insight Publishing. The book is now available for sale (http://www.solutionz.com/publications.asp).

The book features best-selling authors Tom Hopkins (How to Master the Art of Selling), Jack Canfield (One Minute Manager), and John Christensen (FISH!). Chicke Fitzgerald, Hopkins, Canfield, and Christensen are joined by other well known authors and speakers, each offering time-tested strategies for success in frank and intimate interviews.

As the founder and CEO of Tampa-based Solutionz Group, Chicke Fitzgerald has spent the last 13 years solving business growth challenges for corporations, nurturing early-stage companies and coaching top executives and entrepreneurs around the globe.

With 30+ years in the travel industry, Chicke is a recognized authority on distributions models, whose expert perspective is frequently sought by the investment community and media. Fitzgerald is currently affiliated with the Gerson Lehman Group and has been among the top investment advisors for the internationally renowned GLG Expert Network™.

She is also passionate about helping others master the use of technology and social media to foster growth through her Solutionz Media division. Since January of 2009 she has interviewed more than 150 authors and experts on her Solutionz Live! show on BlogTalkRadio.com and on the Executive Girlfriends' Group (http://www.executivegirlfriendsgroup.com).

When she is not coaching, speaking or consulting, Chicke enjoys spending time with her family in Tampa, Florida. She also dedicates time, energy and resources to a local organization known as Real Estate Lives, mentoring displaced employees hard hit by the mortgage banking crisis and working with the organization’s leadership to build a similar model for other industries and communities to replicate.

To discuss speaking opportunities with Chicke Fitzgerald and to order your copy of Bootstrap Business, contact:

Chicke Fitzgerald | 813-925-0789 | chicke@solutionz.com or visit www.solutionz.com

Bootstrap Business - The $7m Question about early stage investment risk

Excerpt from Bootstrap Business - My favorite question

Do you believe that entrepreneurial ventures are high risk because they are generally not well funded, or do you believe that they are not well funded because they are such high risk?

This is my favorite dialogue to have with my investor and I believe the former, even though the latter is conventional wisdom.

I actually believe that a good idea is a good idea whether it is found in a garage, a small startup, a corporate think-tank, or if it’s just a new idea within a department in a traditionally run corporation.

Risk comes in a whole lot of forms. There are external risks—those things that you can’t really can’t do anything about such as geo-political, economic, competitive issues, and sabotage. Then there are also the internal risks. The internal things are generally under your control or influence.

Money alone does not reduce entrepreneurial venture risk. Risk is actually reduced by applying smart money “smartly” and reacting quickly to problems and challenges. Again, that’s true whether you are in a corporation or you are in a bootstrapped business.

Finding money that brings with it entrepreneurial experience and a great entrepreneurial network is my personal definition of smart money. It’s also my belief that smart money follows smart money. And if more financiers were willing to come in earlier and play an active role in getting new companies off the ground, I think it would indeed reduce risk for everyone.
If you’ve got money that is being invested in a business, but you don’t put enough money in early enough or you don’t spend it wisely once it has been invested, then the risk goes way up. For instance, whether you are an entrepreneurial venture or a major company, if you spend nearly 100 percent of your investment in technology and spend nothing on sales or marketing, unless the pockets are very deep, the venture will fail. When you make that mistake in a startup, even if the technology is amazing, not having sales, or in our case the funds to drive traffic, that creates risk. As a result, another investor may not want to come in and put in good money after what would be perceived as bad money. I think it then becomes a self-fulfilling, downward spiraling prophecy.

I think that investors, again, have to find good ideas and find good people to execute them. Then find every possible way to make them succeed.

BOOTSTRAP BUSINESS features best-selling authors Tom Hopkins (How to Master the Art of Selling), Jack Canfield (One Minute Manager), and John Christensen (FISH!). Chicke Fitzgerald, Hopkins, Canfield, and Christensen are joined by other well known authors and speakers, each offering time-tested strategies for success in frank and intimate interviews.

Bootstrap Business - What we absolutely nailed

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Bootstrap Business that tells the story of my latest startup venture. This is the answer to the question "What were the three things that you absolutely nailed?"


The first one is easy. We absolutely nailed the product requirements for RoadEscapes.com. We filled a gap that exists for people who travel by car—marrying trip planning, booking, mapping, routing, and navigation. While each of those things exist independently and you’ve got sites like Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz on the trip-planning side and you’ve MapQuest and GoogleMaps and even AAA’s TripTik that handle mapping and GPS devices doing the navigation, there was nothing that did it all in a single integrated tool. I told our patent attorney that this is a little like coming up with the iPhone—taking individual components, such as a phone, a camera, a GPS unit, and a personal organizer and coming up with something that together is just unbeatable, as well as integrating them for maximum productivity and ease of use. The patent for our product also covers a
new type of personalization and intelligent search capability, which corrected another major flaw in how travel search has worked for the last thirty years.

The second one was a little bit painful. We elected to listen to consumers when we first finished the product and conducted usability testing before going live. Many people do that just to tick a box that they have done it. What we found was that we had been really enamored with the original user experience that we designed, but it just plain didn’t work. The consumers couldn’t figure it out. While that cost us another four months and another couple of hundred thousand dollars,we took the time and invested the money to get it right. That one was, as I said, a mixture of the bittersweet and the sweet.

Lastly, and again, this was another painful lesson, was what I will call “knowing when to fold ’em.” After launch, within days, I knew that the original business model and hence the projections were wrong because the product was geared for e-commerce (e.g., converting visitors to a sale) versus advertising (e.g., monetizing traffic to the site with ads and sponsorship). While people were using the tool and we got good feedback, we just weren’t seeing any conversion at all. That error required retooling the business model and the product, but by that time, we just
didn’t have the funds to keep going without the projected revenues.

Although it was a very painful decision at the time, less than forty-five days after launching our first online product, we had to basically close down the company and look for either a buyer or a strategic investor.

The good news is that we kept a small team on board, I stepped back into the company on an active basis, and we retooled everything. In the process, we discovered a third, highly differentiated and unique way to monetize the system. Plus, during that time, we were able to do limited tests of what the “right” consumer traffic looked like and saw amazing metrics that proved to us that we had accomplished the retooling goal. Now, once we are able to get the proper investment to get the company over the last five yards to the goal line, I am confident that the product will perform even better than originally designed to a broader market with more sustainable results.

We are fortunate that we don’t have to have a “fire sale” or worse yet, just watch the product go to the Internet graveyard, never to be seen or heard from again, chalking it up as a very expensive learning experience. We still have a very powerful and unique product as an asset to be sold or relaunched when market conditions improve and we find the right strategic partner.

Bootstrap Business - The Three Big Mistakes

First, I believe that mistakes are the biggest gift that we have as entrepreneurs because they force us to focus on what to do right the next time. Plus they humble us, which is also a tremendous gift that helps us grow—if we are smart and pay attention to the bigger lesson!

Lesson number one for us was about how to manage the build-out of our technology, both from a people and a partner perspective. In this day and age, there are many ways to build a business. You can build and own every one of your technology components or you can use a mixture of your own intellectual property and/or that of other firms. In any venture that relies on technology to succeed, you have the choice of outsourcing not only development, but also using external components to “accelerate” development, or to bypass development altogether
and use existing services to provide those components. If you choose to build and own the intellectual property as we did with LeisureLogix, don’t be fooled into thinking that you will save money by deferring the hiring of the CIO or CTO role. In a technology business, this really should be the first position that you fill.

Because I had a lot of technical expertise myself and had some very good product development people on board, we entrusted this role to an outsourced technology provider. That’s a little bit like letting the wolf guard the hen house. Even of you have a competent partner, you don’t have a way to make sure that the architectural decisions that are being made are in your long-term best interest. An internal CIO or CTO would have taken responsibility for building a product
that could scale and that was affordable moving forward. It’s easy as an entrepreneur just to look at the up-front cost and not to concern yourself about the long-term total cost of ownership.

I am happy to say that I have now learned this lesson and in starting Solutionz Media Group in 2009 and launching the Internet-based radio network known as Solutionz Live!, I determined that this time around I did not want to own the technical infrastructure necessary to deliver the shows. I am now using BlogTalkRadio.com’s highly functional platform. And did I mention that they are well funded? More simply said, this lesson is “let others do commodity functions
that they do well and keep the core competency and differentiation of the venture (including the management of the partners) inside.”

The second lesson, and the most interesting one to me personally, had to do with the role that I played with my first non-consulting venture from beginning to end. There is often a conundrum, particularly with outside investors, of what role the founder should play, particularly if the founder is also an inventor. Quite often, the founder is the visionary and also deeply in love with the product and sees its capabilities both in the short-term and in the long-term. It is not unusual for that person to be a bit of a free spirit, without some of the professional discipline that would come from being an operational executive. I was no exception. Although I had been the CEO of my consulting firm for ten years, I didn’t have experience as the CEO of a corporation and hadn’t had to manage an investor or a board of directors. In the end, at the leading of our investment bankers, once I had seen the company through the initial build phase, we brought in an external senior management team, including a new CEO, to take the company to the next level.

In short, even though the people we hired were highly competent individually and they had tremendous experience in the travel industry, put simply, I moved out too soon. And, particularly since we had hired individuals without significant startup experience, it left the company without the much-needed entrepreneurial spirit when we hit the inevitable bumps in the road, not meeting the original projections and missing the mark on the key business model elements.

In my new media venture, I will be using the knowledge gleaned from this important lesson to craft a seasoned entrepreneurial team moving forward, but will see it through to profitability before handing over the strategic leadership of the company.

Lastly, I didn’t recognize the importance of putting an external board in place that could propel us forward through making key introductions and providing the added credibility we needed beyond getting the launch client signed. We did this as an advisory board, but I don’t believe that advisory boards have the same strength or motivation to actually build a company. If I had it to do over again—no wait—I do have it to do all over again! With Solutionz Media Group, I’ve asked two highly seasoned broadcast executives, each of whom has tremendous entrepreneurial spirit, to be on my board moving forward.

This is an excerpt from Bootstrap Business, being published in August 2009. The book features best-selling authors Tom Hopkins (How to Master the Art of Selling), Jack Canfield (One Minute Manager), and John Christensen (FISH!). Chicke Fitzgerald, Hopkins, Canfield, and Christensen are joined by other well known authors and speakers, each offering time-tested
strategies for success in frank and intimate interviews.

Bootstrap Business - Getting by as an early stage company

How do needs change for an early stage company as you mature and how can you meet those needs during tough times?

When we launched LeisureLogix, nearly 3 years ago, we were fortunate again to have the Solutionz infrastructure, including a five thousand-square-foot office, phone/computer systems, and administrative support in place, so we didn’t have to go out of pocket as a new business for that.

We were able to get folks to forgo a salary for a time. Eventually we had to take on the burden of a regular payroll, including benefits. To do that we really had to get outside funding, as our own personal resources were dwindling pretty quickly and clearly not going to get us to the finish line. So the final step was finding an investor who would believe in our vision enough to provide sufficient capital resources to pay for those things we couldn’t defer, barter for, or afford on our own out of the resources we had in hand.

During the time it took to secure outside funding, my husband and I had tapped into all of our resources—savings, insurance policies, taking out a second mortgage, and establishing a line of credit on our consulting business. And yes, even our credit cards provided some of the funding. In the end, there was precious little more that we could leverage personally other than the Solutionz office building, which we held onto as long as we could, but eventually had to sell.
Fortunately, the commercial Real Estate market was strong, so we sold for a solid profit.
What we learned during this phase was that it is no accident that banks and financial institutions own the largest buildings in every major city in America. We had no idea then what the consequence of being highly leveraged could be and that all over the country other families and businesses were over-extending themselves right along with us.

We were still a long way from having a revenue stream that would replace what we invested, so were lucky in early 2007 to find a local investor who took the lead on funding the business and moving forward. As a result of his investment, we were able to get caught up on all of our financial obligations and get the product completed and ready for launch.

The scariest part of establishing a new business is that moment when you shift from being able to meet your own needs with what you have and knowing that in order to be able to get to the next level and achieve your original dream, you have to attract external money. That is a precipice that closely resembles stepping out ofa boat and walking on water. There is nothing that prepares you for the things that come in giving up what you perceive to be control of your own destiny.

Stepping out definitely requires faith.

This is an excerpt from Chicke Fitzgerald's new book Bootstrap Business, coming out August 2009.

Resources to start a new endeavor

I was really fortunate that in mid 2006 when I started LeisureLogix I had the consulting experience garnered from 10 years consulting as the Solutionz Group to draw on. Not only did I have the experience, but I also had a group of colleagues/friends who were willing to risk right along side of me in getting the business off the ground. Having trusted allies who are willing to work for equity and to cheer you on during tough times as your true advocates is one of the most important resources that an entrepreneur can have.

Since we were building technology to fill a gap that I had seen in my consulting within the travel industry, the next key ingredient to the plan was to have a launch partner lined up. The alternative is going the “if we build it they will come” route, which only works in the movies and if your name is Kevin Costner. Due to our relationships in the travel industry we were blessed to able to line up a major online travel agency that agreed to put our product on its site once it was built, without seeing so much as the mockups of the screen design.

The next step was finding a technology partner who would work on a fixed price with payment terms that we could live with. It is so easy in a technology project of this magnitude to let scope and your budget spiral out of control once you get started. It’s even easier to miss the total cost of operation beyond the build phase of a project. (More about that in another blog.)

On the funding front, my initial partner and I began by putting in matching funds each month to meet the operating cash requirements, which we continued through the end of 2006. Pretty quickly, however, we realized that we had to find outside capital to make it the whole way. Anyone who has sought external capital during the build phase (also known as “pre-revenue”) of a project knows that it is a very tall order. But at that juncture, it was “do or die.” We had gone too far to turn back.

Excerpt from Bootstrap Business - Available August 2009

When did I know that I was an entrepreneur?

I knew as early as grade school that I had inherited that leadership gene from my dad. I definitely learned and emulated what I observed. In grade school, I was a treasurer in the Girl Scouts and as I entered middle school, I ran for president of the student council in the seventh grade (and won!).

When I was in my first semester of college, I wrote a paper on the value of experience versus education. At Thanksgiving, I went home and convinced my parents to let me quit school at the end of the semester. I jumped right into corporate America, at that point, working for Miller Brewing Company in their accounting department.

Throughout my more than twenty-year corporate career I saw all kinds of signs of my entrepreneurial bent, but didn’t recognize it then for what it was.

I was always more comfortable thinking outside of the box than my corporate peers were, which is why I was singled out for nearly every special project. Normally they began with a concept and a blank sheet of paper. I was in my element! I also felt tremendously stifled by having to make decisions by committee, particularly when I knew that I was capable of weighing the pros and cons independently and arriving at the same answer in a fraction of the time.

Thirteen years ago, I moved out of corporate life and formed my own consulting firm. I knew that I enjoyed project work and it was great to find out what I did quite naturally (and really without a lot of effort) was valuable to other people. It was a perfect first venture, as it did not require any up-front capital. While I spread my entrepreneurial wings, my husband took a safe sales job with a good salary, upside commissions, and health benefits, which gave me the room to grow the business slowly without pressure. One of the shows that I host weekly is titled “Corporate Escape Artists”. That show is a joint venture with Pamela Skillings, the author of Escape from Corporate America and having an exit plan to make the transition from corporate life to your own business is a common theme on our show.

Later, we moved from Atlanta to Tampa and my husband began to work with me, providing all of the administrative support for the company. I didn’t realize it, but when he came to work for me, we moved into Stage Two Entrepreneurialism—no safety net (formerly provided by the spouse’s salary and benefits)!

Three years ago, following ten very successful years in consulting, we had our biggest year ever—forty projects for twenty-five clients. And for the first time ever, we lost money due to the increase in overhead needed as we grew. I was totally burned out, physically and mentally, and ended up having to take three months off to recover from major surgery. While I was off, I realized that I had a lot of great business under my belt and amazing experience but no retirement plan or a way to sell what I had built. It is amazing the reflection that is possible during times like these.

What happened next was the realization that it was time to build something that was lasting so we could sell it, whether it was five or ten years down the road. That was going to take the “I” word—investment. What I really learned was that Stage Three Entrepreneurialism is when you have to master bootstrapping. That is, if you are going to build enough value to get to the end game and retain enough value before you have to take in outside investment. While I thought I had been an entrepreneur for thirteen years, now I say that until you have paid payroll with MasterCard or Visa you can’t really call yourself an entrepreneur.

excerpt from Bootstrap Business, published by Insight Publishing

Are Entrepreneurs born or are they made?

I really believe that you are born with a set of talents and that your environment and the various experiences you have along the way can either allow those talents to blossom or it can stifle them. One example of that, which is critical to entrepreneurialism, is the propensity for risk or, said more plainly, your willingness to try new things where you may not have the appropriate background or all the answers of how to move ahead.

Case in point is my launching a series of Internet radio shows in January, when I had absolutely no broadcasting background and frankly, no idea of the mechanics of doing such a thing. Yet three weeks later, after securing the former CEO of CBS radio, Nancy Widmann, as my first Solutionz Live! guest, I was on the air. Nancy said after our interview that I was a “natural.” Without taking that risk, how would I have known?

I really do see risk-taking as a critical talent for an entrepreneur. With the new media network, I had to just dive right in and do it. I had no choice but to bootstrap it, as this is not the environment to be raising capital on an untried idea with an untested talent. So three weeks from idea to inception, a new, new thing was birthed—a social broadcasting network!

No one who knows me well is surprised. I’ve been accused of being an idea factory. This time I’ve hit on something that is not only necessary, but I’m having a blast.

On the environment issue, I think that we have all seen examples of an entrepreneur, or what used to be called a “self-made man,” trying to force a child to take over the business, only to find out that the child doesn’t have what it takes. Handing over the legacy is just not enough. I think that those fundamental talents have to be there as a base to build upon. Even with the right environment, you can’t shape people into entrepreneurs if they don’t have those key talents, including risk-taking and of course, leadership skills and some creativity.

Excerpt from Bootstrap Business, coming out August 2009

Bootstrap Business being released in August

11JUL09 - Tampa, FL

Chicke Fitzgerald, consultant, keynote speaker and author, has been selected from a nationwide search to be featured in Bootstrap Business; a highly successful book series from Tennessee based Insight Publishing. The book will be released in August.

The book features best-selling authors Tom Hopkins (How to Master the Art of Selling), Jack Canfield (One Minute Manager), and John Christensen (FISH!). Chicke Fitzgerald, Hopkins, Canfield, and Christensen are joined by other well known authors and speakers, each offering time-tested strategies for success in frank and intimate interviews.

As the founder and CEO of Tampa-based Solutionz Group, Chicke Fitzgerald has spent the last 13 years solving business growth challenges for corporations, nurturing early-stage companies and coaching top executives and entrepreneurs around the globe.

With 30+ years in the travel industry, Chicke is a recognized authority on distributions models, whose expert perspective is frequently sought by the investment community and media. Fitzgerald is currently affiliated with the Gerson Lehman Group and has been among the top
advisors for the internationally renowned GLG Expert Network™ to the investment community.

She is also passionate about helping others master the use of technology and social media to foster growth through her Solutionz Media division. Since January of 2009 she has interviewed more than 100 authors and experts on her Solutionz Live! show on BlogTalkRadio.com.

When she is not coaching, speaking or consulting, Chicke enjoys spending time with her family in Tampa, Florida. She also dedicates time, energy and resources to a local organization known as Real Estate Lives, mentoring displaced employees hard hit by the mortgage banking crisis and working with the organization’s leadership to build a similar model for other industries and communities to replicate.

For more information on Chicke Fitzgerald contact:

Chicke Fitzgerald | 813-925-0789 | chicke@solutionz.com

To order your copy of Bootstrap Business, click HERE