Paul Cheek, executive director of the MIT Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, has first-hand experience leading successful startups. Over the past six years, he has also advised hundreds of his MIT entrepreneurs launching their own ventures.
Those experiences have helped Cheek, who is also a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, narrow down entrepreneurship to its core elements. In his new book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: Startup Tactics, Cheek provides an action-oriented framework to help entrepreneurs turn ideas into business success.
The book, released on April 2, complements Trust Center Managing Director Bill Ouellette’s 2013 book Disciplined Entrepreneurship, which has been translated into more than 20 languages since its release. and is the basis for three edX courses. A new edition of Ouellette’s book was also released in April.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology News We spoke to Cheek to find out more about his book.
question: Why write this book?
answer: I want to help entrepreneurs get their ideas out there and make an impact. At MIT, we care about impact, and entrepreneurship is one way we can take the research, technology, and science on campus to the world and help others.
Entrepreneurs don’t always know how to perform functional areas that can free up additional resources to grow and scale their businesses. The three things he often hears from entrepreneurs are: “I need help building a product,” “I need help building a team,” and “I need help raising money.” My reaction to that is almost always: “Why should someone join your team and not another startup?” Why would investors choose to invest in you over another startup? What steps will it take to get there? Need more traction? ” These are questions I want entrepreneurs to consider.
The way they get that traction is through action. It doesn’t just mean developing new business strategies and plans. It means actually implementing that plan and introducing it into the real world.
This book features 15 functional tactics, so each tactic can be effective enough to help you reach your next milestone. This book is based on the curriculum we use to support entrepreneurs at MIT. I want to help entrepreneurs learn this entrepreneurial spirit and lifelong skill set. Today, we are not just focused on commercializing research and building companies. We want to help them become highly effective throughout their careers, whether in industry, academia, government, or other fields, whether in startups or established organizations.
question: How is the book structured?
answer: We like to think a lot about entrepreneurship at the Trust Center and at MIT. There is an order of operations known as PEMDAS that is used to solve math problems. Entrepreneurship also has an order, and that is the structure of “startup tactics”. It starts with establishing a really strong foundation. The first section covers goal setting and the systems you can use to track your progress toward those goals.
We all think we’re good at setting goals until the rubber meets the road. We recognize that sometimes goals need to be revised. In large organizations, you are given goals and structure. But when you become an entrepreneur, you need to find your own structure. To work toward a long-term vision and avoid investing resources in the wrong places, you need to set your own goals.
Once you have these goals in place, it’s time to market test. We don’t start by building a product. Let’s start with a test. Does the market want what you believe? We’ll show you how to do key market research, how to use visual assets to communicate the value you can create to the world, and how to do market testing. Discuss marketing and sales. Marketing within a large organization is very different from marketing in a zero-day startup.
Also consider how to attract your precise target audience and how to market your value proposition rather than your product. Will the market respond when we present our value proposition? Let’s move on to development.
The saying “If you build it, they will come” is generally not true in entrepreneurship. Even before we start building a product, we want to build a customer list, a list of people who want what we have.
Product development is about designing products with a highly efficient approach, testing the product with users before building it, and designing the simplest, bare-bones business product. Once the customer is queuing in the street and the product is complete, proceed to acquiring resources. Because we have traction, we look at the process of incorporating a startup, splitting stock, building a financial model, building a pitch deck to tell your story, and raising and hiring capital as an early-stage startup.
This order of operations is important for entrepreneurs. This allows you to use your resources as effectively as possible and ultimately earn more money and time.
question: Who is this book written for?
answer: ‘Startup Tactics’ is aimed at those who want to make an impact through innovation-driven entrepreneurship. It’s about building a business that has the potential to scale and impact the world. Although we generally focus on high-tech businesses, “Startup Tactics” is also a process that entrepreneurs can follow to start any type of business.
We take an engineering approach to the entrepreneurial process to increase the chances of success for individuals embarking on an entrepreneurial journey. [Aulet’s book] “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” provides a strategy and framework for entrepreneurship. It tells you what to do and why. My book takes you a step further in how to build a business, how to go from an idea and technology to a business plan, and how to get that plan out into the world. What action should I take?
This goes back to some of the things I often hear from entrepreneurs about needing help. Startup Tactics is based on my experience building businesses as an entrepreneur, but it’s also a combination of things I’ve heard from other entrepreneurs building their businesses. Much of what is in this book is the basis for the courses I teach here at MIT, 15.390/15.3901 (New Enterprises) and 15.388 (Venture Creation Tactics). The product of this book is also the result of a semester-by-semester iteration of that course.
What I felt was really important was to have an integrated approach. We now have full-stack entrepreneurship education experience. That means we have entrepreneurship theory, entrepreneurship practice, and entrepreneurship tactics. It is that integration that makes entrepreneurs successful. This is what I have seen as I work with many students.
