Intangibles, The Building Blocks in todays Competition

A little exhausting but very fruitful day as I had the opportunity to interact with about 20 visiting cultural exchange business students from Asia today.

As expected the question was raised on why I think my company differentiates from all the rest as after all our products at http://www.affordable-booksonline.com/ was not unique and a commodity.

So I had to respond with my endless stories again. A few years ago I helped some dot.com businesses who were business friends of mine achieve the so called "Business Model innovation". It started when as I recall we had just written a statement to the APEC Economic Leaders Summit in November of 1997. In that statement, I had the opportunity to make a statement on how important young emerging business leaders are to the then powerful APEC Business Advisory Council. Of course, I had the confused faces on this young leaders visiting group suddenly.

I then proceeded to say that my role was to take a product which was free yet combined with different product variations and services that can be offerred with this free product.

On my past business endeavors at that time, winning the Design Plus Award in 1993 from the Frankfurt Premiere Stationery Show was a big deal and am extremely proud. We outlived our competitors as we were the first to offer the so called "Sinamay" ribbon or Abaca fiber ribbons used by so many florists' today. I pioneered on having the honor of working with my team a very great German Expert on Merchandising Design named Hannelore Riedner. We tap other experts from the United Kingdom, Japan and France through the help of technical grants from foreign governments as we were start-up small business then.

From a buy and sell trader, we became a manufacturing brand known all over Europe and the United States. Then came our distribution companies who help us to form alliances with a lot of people to make sure that our products are well concentrated on places it can be useful.

Companies can easily emulate the business model, distribution or even the profit-zone innovation. However, my brand management and strategic leadership will just make everyone crazy for this in an inherent culture, behavior and lifestyle.

The ability to engineer, adapt to crisis at all levels and extremes regardless of what people think and perceived you or me shall and will be the driving business performance metric.

http://www.alexesguerra.com/
All rights, copyrights, trademarks and branding belong to Alex Esguerra and it's affiliates.

Sustainability 101 for Start-Ups

Today was a very informative yet joyful day.

A greek journalist met with me today for an interview with a major European Daily. He immediately proceeded in asking me, " Mr. Esguerra, did you again joined the saga of merchandising trends by having "GREEN" as your color motiff for your blogs and your new venture, http://www.affordable-booksonline.com ". My entrepreneurial trait would have readily responded yes or no but my analytical side rephrase to him the question, " Why do you think I did that ?"

He then replied, is that what is in right now in the US market being and going green? Then I asked, why are you here today meeting with me? He said because my friend in the European Parliament recommended that you be a good source sensing start-ups in North America.

Well just to cut the chase here, the friend he refers to was once a student of mine in Environmental Sustainability. What needs to be clarified is that we have used the green concept because we had one of the most brilliant web designers on the bookselling industry.

And he did not come up just with the idea, he had to study me and make a few weeks of more in depth research even before presenting the idea to me. Only when he knew that I would allowed it executed was the reason why he had presented it. People don't know although our mission is affordability, when it comes to delivering the service to the customer, I pay more than the industry standard as I don't employ directly and indirectly un-intelligent beings as value, quality control and customer service will never be sacrifice in my world.

In 1987, when we formed the then DLE International Group out of our garage and after selling my used car for $25.00, we were already an exhibitor at the 107th California Gift Show in January 1988. Our first sales was $5,000 and our first order came from the master of the christmas decor importers, Kurt S. Adler. A year after the company was born we had $60,000 in Export Sales having been two International Frankfurt/Nuremberg and Manila Shows.

By 1989, I became President of the Christmas Decor Exporters Assn, awarded as Young Entrepreneur of the Year and co-founded the Federation of Handmade Paper Makers Assn. All this while a company grew to $300,000 Sales, had intangible assets, machineries, even own our factory beside the initial garage, employed 20 direct workers and had a subcontracting network that employed about 3,000 Filipinos by 1993.

You might be wondering what and how does this makes sense about the topic of "Sustainability 101 for Start Ups"? If you have not yet understand this, I suggest that you go and refocus what ever business plan you have in mind.

Sustainability is the lacking ingredient why a lot of businesses closed down in a recession climate like today. If you are a master on this subject then here is your chance to becoming rich. This is the way America has to come to terms so that it can come back as one of the global mighty nations that Asia now enjoys.

Being smart in business and expert in numbers or marketing are essential but if you do not know how to use this great tool that is not thought in a normal college life then you need to start working on it now. This is why some of my best allies are Germans, Canadians and Japanese.

If you have not notice, the amount of businesses starting does not compensate for the amount of businesses failing whatever advertising gimmicks are there in this world.

Go Green, Act and Save the Planet but if you are not a true environmentalist, don't even try niche marketing as this subject has been here for ages and milleniums.