Uploaded by frozenchipmunk on
20 Aug 07.

Not about a portfolio of businesses, but rather for a business to have a portfolio of income streams from a single (or small number) of core products / services.

Several recent conversations in Bristol, Leeds, London and elsewhere have shown that a winning business model could be through diversification of income. A number of excellent projects have been initiated with funding from the Government or charitable foundations. These usually have a section on sustainability, but they tend to be very light.

When the funding ends, the crunch bites. Obviously you don’t want to kill the service, goodwill and community that’s been built up, but without a cash flow, any service will end or at best stagnate.

I’ve found examples of deep community knowledge and solid data even without Facebook / Phorm style tracking. The challenge then becomes how to identify income streams to sustain the service/community once the grant funding runs out.

The models that are intriguing me most at the moment are blending sponsorship models (basically brand association), membership fees, and the possibility of consultancy / expert witness type activity.

If you’re managing a community (however lightly) then you know the demographics, levels of engagement, patterns of engagement, areas of interests, what’s current, what annoys, etc. And that’s valuable knowledge, knowledge that another organisation wishing to work with that group, or develop products/services for that group may pay for. This is not about selling your email list / registration database, there are good data protection laws in place to stop that.

So that’s part of what’s interesting me at the moment; mixed business models blending sponsorship, membership and consultancy. The other two two oft-cited business models (freemium services & advertising) are also of interest for commercial clients, but less so in the situation of many foundation initiated projects.

What are your experiences of transitioning from grant funding to revenue funding?

On the 8th April, I blogged about an article being accepted for publication in the International Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Today I received the digital object identifier (DOI) can be used to cite and link to electronic documents. The DOI never changes which makes it an ideal medium for citing articles. The DOI my article is - doi:10.1016/j.ijom.2008.04.004. Depending on your institutional or personal access you maybe able to access the whole article from this link. If not you should be able to view the abstract, although I have written it out below (with permission from the journal).

Abstract:

From 2001 to 2005, 66 patients referred for perioperative hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO₂) for debridement of necrotic tissue or prevention of radionecrosis were assessed with quality of life measures, before and after completion of HBO₂ and surgery. The Medical Outcomes Short Form 36 (SF-36) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) showed no significant changes. The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Core (EORTC-C30) questionnaire showed significant improvement in pain, global health, and dyspnoea (p = 0.011; p = 0.027; p = 0.008, respectively). The Head and Neck sub-module (H&N35) identified significant improvements in teeth, dry mouth and social contact (p = 0.002; p = 0.038; p = 0.029, respectively). The University of Washington Scale (UW), showed significant changes in relation to chewing and shoulders (p = 0.031; p = 0.047). When sub-group analysis using ‘osteoradionecrosis’ and ‘dental extraction or implants’ was performed on the EORTC and UW data, variations in the patterns of significance were found. Adjunctive HBO₂ should be considered for the treatment and prevention of some of the long-term complications of radiotherapy.

Uploaded by klauspost on
29 Jan 06.

Another great OpenCoffee with more new faces to the OpenCoffee networking scene. Yesterday we welcomed Katie More from Business Startup Community. With over 500 subscribers and the prestigious conference series in London, Katie promises to be a valuable addition to the Bristol entrepreneurial ecosystem.

James Gareh was back from South Africa where he’s been specialising in company turnaround projects. It’s good to have him back in Bristol where his skills in identifying and driving growth plans will be put to good use I’m sure!

I had to leave a bit early but the conversation around supporting company growth and connecting business needs with solutions was in full flow.

Next OpenCoffee Bristol is on 3 June, from 8.30 in Starbucks on Park St.

Disclosure: As well as Managing Partner of jbsh LLP (the business behind this blog) I also work part time for the University of the West of England on the Knowledge West project managing their QuickMark® service.]

Today was an important day for jbsh, I gave our first unsuccessful pitch. Obviously in writing research grant applications and funding proposals, I’ve had unsuccessful submissions and I’ve talked a couple of clients out of engaging me in favour of more appropriate (and cheaper or free) options.

What was different today was that I really felt that this was a great business that I could add value to.

With most funding applications you don’t get great feedback on why you’re unsuccessful. When the negative email came through there was an invitation to explore why we weren’t proceeding with the plan as discussed.

The discussion brought an important point home, you need to constantly evaluate every message across every medium to make sure it’s effective and conveying what you think it is. I’ve been working on building the QuickMark service, taking on new Researchers and more clients. I’m actively seeking ways to grow and build the service as a sustainable offering outside the funding that has provided stability so far. In doing this I’ve significantly refined the proposition, carefully positioning the service between the core activities that the Universities offer and those that are provided by commercial market research organisations.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t spent quite so much time on this blog evaluating what message I wanted it to convey. Originally it was a place to share thoughts, talk about events I’d attended and give jbsh LLP a presence on the web. This has all be augmented by LinkedIn, Facebook, MyBlogLog, Twitter, etc. Since that launch (almost exactly a year ago) the message that this blog is being used to convey has changed. Sam is using it to promote, explain and disseminate her research, and I was using it to build confidence with potential clients to trust their businesses to my advice and guidance. This last bit hasn’t worked, because I haven’t developed the blog, I’ve just used it to a different purpose (one it wasn’t designed for).

The other messages are still important, so we won’t undergo a complete redesign, but there will be some changes. Most critically I’ll be putting more references to existing jbsh clients and stories from businesses I’ve helped in the past.

It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s survival of the most adaptable and appropriate to the environment.

[Note on the photo: I grew up in Gibraltar and have fond memories of walking across the runway to catch planes to 'exotic' locations like Southend where my Grandad lived. My first thought was say something about stopping and re-evaluating, hence the flickr search for stop signs. Searches for failure weren't as nice so I'm sticking with the image.]

I’ve been a MyBlogLog community member since Dec ‘06 and have the sidebar widget to personalise and put faces to visitors (at least those registered with MBL). In the last upgrade to WP2.5.1 the widget didn’t get turned back on so was missing.

Then Google announced the launch of their FriendConnect (here on TechCrunch and all over the blogsphere).

I’ve pre-registered, see we get access, but that triggered me to see how MBL was doing (and the fact that the widget wasn’t there any more). So it’s reinstated, I like that it’s more personal that ClusterMaps (though that gives a nice global feel to the web). I don’t have a need or desire for folks to register with jbsh, so its nice that there are 3rd party services that can take care of that and show who’s dropped by in person.

I should admit that I do all my blog surfing via Google Reader so probably have a much smaller blog footprint than I did even 12 months ago, despite reading a much larger number of blogs, twitter streams, etc.