A New Approach to Business, Marketing, Strategy & Entrepreneurship

Bill Hillestad

I’m Bill Hillestad and I’m a strategic business planning and marketing coach, as well as a lifelong entrepreneur.  I can’t even begin to tell you how I love practicing my craft of creating strategic advantages.  Problem is, I don’t seem to be able to shut my brain off in between projects.  Every unmet consumer need I spot seems to send my mind searching for a solution. I always say that I’m really just a very empathetic consumer representative and it’s true, my encounters with businesses, products and services reflexively start me thinking about what’s missing.  I’m maybe a little too in touch with my unmet consumer needs.  I’m constantly asking myself how things should work and could work to lower cost, remove friction, improve usability and improve the overall user experience and relationship.  If I blogged about all of the business concepts and epiphanies that invade my idle mind, I’d have no time left for anything else, so I decided to just post the ones that scored well on the Venture 3.0 scorecard.  My hope is that the low capital requirements and heavy risk mitigating factors will increase the number of them members of the entrepreneurial community will bring to fruition.

What’s a 3.0 Business or Venture?

It’s pretty simple really.  Just as the web has evolved from 1.0 to 2.0 with all the user generated content and social medi and is now trying to evolve to web 3.0 which will bring some context to all that content to make it more relevant and usable, entrepreneurship is do the same thing.  With a 3.0 venture we are rejecting the complexity, risk and huge capital needs of legacy approaches deciding instead to hone in on the critical factors necessary for businesses to start faster, profit sooner, require less capital and represent far less risk of catastrophic failure.  The goal is business planning that results in the maximum possible Reward to Risk Ratio.  Check out the simple 10 point scorecard we use to evaluate the 3.0 potential of a business plan or company and it will all start to make sense. Whether you’d like to claim one of these existing 3.0 business plans, want to evolve your existing business in a 3.0 direction or are just curious, I appreciate you taking the time to look around and would love to hear your comments or questions. All Best, Bill Hillestad