Pivoting Is Hard Work (Change Management)

Pivoting is very hard mainly because it requires change management, which means product management, and changes in your life and general habits.

Change management is one of the more frustrating aspects of being an entrepreneur, especially, if you don’t have a good system for managing your product or business, it can truly become a nightmare.

Change management is one of those skills that are extremely important and undervalued; imagine having to re-align your team and then informing them that they must learn a new language, or learn a new process or making sure a lead programmer or officer understands that their requirements have been suddenly altered.

In our experience, most people hide from change because it’s stressful. To you it could mean, new relationships, new tasks, starting work at a different time, increased workload or using a new database.

In fact, change is one of the main contributors to most start-ups failure.

Good Change Management

-Leadership support (This will always be a requirement)

-Alignment of company culture (Make change part of your companies culture)

-Communication systems (Visible to everyone)

-Continuous support (From change leaders, until habits, are formed)

-Consistent feedback (From people who are most affected by change)

-Continuous support (From leadership on the organizations)

Good change management means less friction between staff, more sleep and most important fewer surprises and more consistency.

Bad Change Management

-Lack of leadership (Leadership not making change a priority)

-Continuous support (Who is reinforcing what you’ve learned?)

-No feedback (How is your team adjusting to the workload? what changes are working?)

-Poor planning (Poor planning produces inconsistency and wasted time)

-Bad culture (Bad cultures are resistant to change, and have wrong priorities)

Bad change management can leave you mentally exhausted, burn you out and worse of all unproductive.

Summary

Change management is an art form, which few start-ups understand let alone emphasize. Unfortunately, change management has a lot to do with experience and organization for both problem and solution. Planning for change management is your best bet.

Best Regards,

Upropos Team

Research Importance

I’ve been researching, studying and comparing our business model and business environment for a number of months now.

This is extremely essential in any business, but even more so in the tech industry where at times you’re literally making a concept up out of thin air. The research that we’ve found has been essential and at times hard to come buy because we aren’t a large organization, which has access to library databases.

In school, I learned about primary and secondary research. I learned that primary research is essential in the start-up world. Asking the right question is essential to your start-up’s success, and allows you change your perspective and actually get your customers feedback, while secondary research in my experience is better at gaining insight and understanding statistics.

Primary

Asking the right question is essential to your start-up. This allows you to change your perspective and actually get your customers feedback, which is much more important than finding any kind of online statistics you can find.

Getting an online database and finding key research is not affordable to a start-up unless you know someone. Going out there and asking the right question is the way to go and can save you countless hours reading, copying, and pasting; instead, you get to build a key relationship with your customers which is gold.

Secondary

I’ve, me (C.E.O) used secondary research for mostly understanding complex concepts like the exempt market, or mutual funds, or better understanding exempt market dealers, so I can better understand how they work as I have no experience in those industries I can research my way to understanding it; although this requires a lot of time and energy to sit down copy, paste and store key information and data.

Our website believe it or not has been built this way; even our main concept was built this way and works on a tight budget.

Pivot

The best part about being excessive about your research is that when you need to make a pivot you can actually see where your business model would fit in, regarding other industries or technologies. We are going to have to make a pivot in the near future and that’s what has allowed us to do it! Secondary research.

Summary- Primary research is great to get a first-hand perspective on things, while secondary research is extremely good for understanding complex concepts or topics and supporting your arguments.

Best Regards,

Upropos Team

The Phoenix

Well, It’s official we have recently been defeated by Canada’s regulation.

So the reason why I decided to include Phoenix in the title is simple.

We are going to pivot and be reborn, we are changing our business model.

I don’t want to disclose exactly how we are going to change, but I’m very confident in the direction we are headed. I’ve already done a ton of research and have a new business model in mind to hopefully plug most of the regulatory challenges that we’ve had to deal with.

Overall the model we currently have will change and it may be unrecognizable in the end, but we aren’t giving up.

A Phoenix doesn’t die they are only reborn a new.

We will be reborn, you can guarantee that; it will take about 2 days maximum to change the business model and couple more to test the viability of the new concept.

So to summarize- We need to pivot our business model to something less restrictive due to challenging regulation we face in Canada.

In my perspective, this shouldn’t take that long as I’ve gotten a real feel for the industry.

I’ll also be following up with a post this week on the importance of RESEARCH and why it’s so important.

Yours Truly,

Upropos Team

 

 

More About Us

So here’s how we came into existence. It started with a meeting of college friends.

Me failing at a past start-up in the financial technology industry. And my partner climbing the corporate ladder. We met one day in a coffee shop just hanging out 2 friends.

My friend in Finance pitched me on a crowdfunding concept.

I thought about it for a minute…  I then told him I’d need 6 months, provided it’s legally possible.

 

He went to school for financial economics at York University.

The key decisions we had to make was regarding if our concept was legally possible. This meant creating a simple pitch deck and finding an appropriate lawyer who specializes in finance. So I set up a meeting with a financial lawyer of a reputable law firm and he approved our concept, which is when my eyes began to light up as I felt the hardest part of our start-up was behind us. I was wrong about it being the hardest part, but I have to do 2 months of research in an attempt to find competitors.

That’s how it all began…

We are a 2 man team I have a background in start-ups and my co-founder has a finance background. Our web developer is a friend of mine he’s not officially on the Upropos team, but that could change.

Best Regards,

Mario Mclaughlin

Pivot on its way!

Well, it definitely happened we’ve had to change our business model for the better, which means our core strategy must change to support our new business activities.

We’ve been working on this concept for over a year now and at times things have been great, dull and straight up nerve racking as we’ve attempted to bring our business model to life.

While our business model does work, we need highly experienced skill set (+10 years), a ton of money close to a million, and some licenses.

So a couple of months ago we have been re-engaging in digital currencies, (I the C.E.O used to be in that industry a couple of years ago and it wasn’t kind to me so I left).

Things have changed though, but I’ve (C.E.O) recently been following digital currencies a lot more.

Our business model is fin-tech based.

A couple of years ago I (C.E.O) wasn’t very knowledgeable about the financial environment or types of organizations that exist or even how they make money.

Now… things are different and I (C.E.O) have a greater understanding of the financial environment; combine that with my understanding of bitcoin & digital currencies and we have a solid opportunity on our hands.

For me the (C.E.O) I believe you always need to have an understanding of where you’re headed in life, start-ups are no different, when you don’t know where your headed things get really scary.

Our pivot has officially begun and we are reforming, changing the very nature of our business model.

See our “Phoenix” previous post for more perspective. http://wp.me/p7nLu1-4v

Best Regards,

Upropos Team

Next Couple Of Days

So following my last blog post about it being the end of our start-up. We had a meeting yesterday both of us co-founders.

It went something like this…

So I’ve been doing research and I found out our business model has compliance issues…

What can we do about it?

Well, we are going to have to change our business model…

What! I don’t believe that’s a viable solution.

Well, I’m not building and testing a new revenue model. Forget THAT!

I have a better idea.

What is this better idea?

Simple our business model won’t work in most western economies because of Canadas amazing financial policy, instead, let’s take advantage of different economies…

Well in the coming few days there will be an opportunity to network with government officials and investors of a foreign economy; so we are going to get our pitch right and begin applying to as many accelerators as possible.

The good thing though is we do have a backup plan for a new business that’s in an entirely new industry, new market/geographic location in I.O.T.

And I’ve already begun the sales process for that.

 

Best Regards,

Team Upropos

 

Comply or Else

Times are getting difficult…

Currently, we are in a situation with compliance, though it’s not something we didn’t expect to happen,  we just believed that we could possibly squeeze through or find some sort of loophole, which in my experience is the case with every industry I’ve been in.

But fin-tech….

Combined with my unfamiliarity of the industry with ever-tightening regulation it’s causing us to have fits! We are in a really tight spot right now.

They’re is a pivot going to happen soon, which direction we’ll have to keep you up to date with that. Just know that we could pivot to the start-up graveyard as well.

The companies operating in the space are massive and there are a hand full of key players.

What we need right now is to sit down with a mentor or someone with industry knowledge who can make magic with us.

Wish Us Luck,

Upropos Team

 

Long Weekend & Missed Posts

Long Weekend Thoughts

I don’t like long weekends in a start-up it messes with your pipeline and your execution, not to mention everyone wants to party!

This week has been very great! We got a lot of clarification on our market through research and working with some of our hidden customers.

Believe it or not, we are still attempting to find product-market fit, which is actually one of the biggest challenges start-ups face. Fortunately, I’ve found an extremely helpful UI/UX book with the best questions to ask.

Creating and replicating your revenue model is extremely challenging and it gets even harder if you aren’t confident in yourself, confidence is key!

Asking your customers the right questions to gain insight is heaven, not speaking with your market is death.

This is even more challenging with financial technology.

Finishing Up

I can literally see the light at the end of the tunnel; we are so close I can taste it we just need to focus and turn up!

I also missed a post last week so I’ll try to make the next post interesting.

Best Regards,

Mario Mclaughlin

Upropos

 

Last Week Today

So I was supposed to be posting last week’s blog on Sundays but, it’s a lot more convenient to blog during the week as Sunday’s for most people even start-ups is a rest day.

Last week was a great one my co-founder and I decided that we would launch our M.V.P this week but, unfortunately, that didn’t work out; we have so many things that need to be done.

We are now creating our go-to-market strategy and finishing up on our landing page and completing some editing and that’s it!

Last week we also met with one of our advisors from college, he told me a lot of things about what the next step should be and believe me I listened closely.

One thing we did find out last week was more legal problems that have to be dealt with.

Last weeks overall mood is comparable to coffee.

#We got the jitters

We’ll see what happens…

Best Regards,

Upropos Team

Quick Update

This will be a quick update as nothing major happened this week.

• Weekly Positives- Getting a lot of work done fine tuning the platform. Met with co-founder and agreed on a new company direction. Confidence is building.
• Weekly Exhausting- Realistically everyday is tiring, but making flowcharts is another story.
• Up & Coming- Hopefully we’ll have some special news at the end of the week and updates.

 

Weeks like this…

I was going to show you the new page we’ve completed, poof!

This has been a very difficult week we’ve been trying to get everything rite on our platform. I’ve made a number of changes only to accidentally delete everything. I was working on a page for 3 hours and accidentally pressed the delete button on one of the pages.

I always need to save everything in the original state before I change anything or delete it.

Start-up grind is difficult as I want to launch, but we are nowhere near ready to do so.

Focusing is also taking its tole as I need to plan, lead, control, organize I’m mentally getting tired and frustrated with the lack of growth, but another week is here and with that, we have another opportunity #staying #positive #strong.

 

Best Regards,

 

Team Upropos