Bill Atlee is Founder and Chief Strategy Officer for iPipeline. @iPipeline

“Get your idea on the court. A friend of mine told me once ‘you can sit on the bench and tie your shoelaces all day, or you can get on the court and figure it out.”

For Bill Atlee of iPipeline, that court is the insurance business. After starting out at Fidelity Mutual Life, he founded iPipeline in 1996. Today, he is also Chief Strategy Officer for the Exton-based company, which has 500 employees and 9 offices throughout the world. The iPipeline platform streamlines the way that life insurance carriers, distributors, and agents sell and process insurance. “Hundreds of thousands of insurance agents use our software. But it took us 20 years to get to that point.”

Bill shares some of his tips for being a successful entrepreneur.

It All Starts with an Idea
“Everything starts with an idea. It doesn’t have to be yours–find someone with a great idea you can add to. Then, validate your idea by talking to the people who have the problem you’re trying to solve. For us, it was finding insurance agents experiencing that same problem.”

Hone Your Idea
Bill advocates making sure people get what you’re talking about. “Look at people’s faces to see if you’re explaining it right. If they’re confused, your message is too complicated.”

Good storytelling is essential to your message, and less is generally more. “People are more successful when they take words out rather than put words in,” Bill says. “Write out the whole story. I’ll pick out the words I want to use, write them down and practice so I can say them over the phone, over Webex, or any medium.” 

“Show and Tell” your Idea with a Believable Prototype
“Create a visual workflow that fakes your idea so well people don’t know it’s a mockup. It needs to look like they can buy it today. Make sure you refine your idea using the feedback you receive. Don’t give up on it, but improve it.” 

Re-pitch Your Idea
“Decide what you want and ask for it. Go for the close–do you need an office or to borrow a computer? Remember that if no one wants to pay for your idea, it’s not a good idea.” 

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap
“Move your ideas quickly and don’t spend a lot of money of them. Be careful what you borrow. Venture capital is different than getting a loan at a bank or from your family. Avoid doing things like using your house as collateral.” 

Create a Business Plan
“Business plans are a way to weed out all the riff raff. Nobody likes to make them, but you can’t get anybody to listen to you without a business plan.”

Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Bill worked for 4 years at iPipeline with no salary, selling insurance by day and working on iPipeline in his free time. At the same time, he advocates knowing when you need to commit. “Sometimes you need to ‘burn the ships.’ Retreat is easy when you have that option. It makes you not fight very hard.”

Paul Keogan, Principal and Founder of BackOffice Thinking

@pkeogan
@BackOfficeThink

Paul Keogan’s got quite a collection of baseball cards left over from his first entrepreneurial enterprise.

Back in high school, he and two friends started a company to sell baseball cards. “We got giant cases of cards, sorted and put them into sets, and then sent the sets out to people who’d ordered them. We marked them up 30%. I probably made about $15. And I still have like 50,000 baseball cards.”

Today, the principal and founder of BackOffice Thinking shares the journey he’s been on since those baseball card days.

Origins
Paul started out at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, majoring in chemical engineering. “My roommate had a crazy idea in the entrepreneurship class we were taking. It was the mid 1980s, and he thought we should start assembling personal computers for people. Around the same time, Michael Dell did the exact same thing. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Why would anyone want to build PCs?’ It just goes to prove you never really know what idea is going to take off.”

After school, Paul moved through DuPont and then ARCO Chemical, ultimately leaving the chemical engineering world when he had a big-company epiphany. “No matter what I did at that company, it didn’t really matter. It didn’t change the stock price, it didn’t change anything. Unless you’re making decisions, you don’t matter.”

Denis started Fusion Technologies, and Paul joined later on. Fusion Technologies is a technology consulting firm primarily serving financial services firms and software companies. During Paul’s tenure, the bootstrapped venture grew 100% a year almost every year.

After eight years, though, it was time to move on. They sold the company in 2006.

BackOffice Thinking
Founded in 2006, BackOffice Thinking works with midsize nonprofits throughout the U.S. They help nonprofit clients with everything from customer/constituent relationship management (CRM) support to social media strategy and business intelligence. Additionally they provide free services to nonprofits like the Chester County Community Foundation, the Volunteer English Program, and Longwood Gardens. With BackOffice’s help, Longwood is launching a new, improved website in a month.

“Working in a consulting space with the nonprofit world has been so fulfilling. I’ve been able to work with all types of nonprofits, from faith-based to environmental and grass roots. If I was CFO or CIO at a big company, I think I’d get bored.”

What He Does. And Doesn’t Do.
Paul doesn’t code anymore. “I don’t do design either. If you see anything I’ve designed,you’d know why,” he says. “It’s embarrassing.” Instead, he focuses on creating connections. “If I can get clients to connect with each other, that’s a home run. For instance, I have two clients going through some hard changes in their organizations. Having them talk to each other is important.”

He also creates connections within BackOffice Thinking. “We have 14 people in our back office, all with a heart for nonprofits. In this sector, you have to be a good technologist, but you also have to love the nonprofit space. I spend my time learning about new tech strategy, working with executive directors at our client sites, and helping our organization deliver the best solutions we can.”

Failures
Paul’s endeavors haven’t all been successful. Take startup Luminent Solutions, for example: “We were going to do online-based advice for people. It’s a space dominated by psychics, with something like 80% of online advice dollars going to psychics.”

The business didn’t take off, but Paul was hopeful for the technology side of things. “We had good technology. We almost had AT&T purchase our technology, but then the person we were working with left the company and the new person couldn’t care less about it.”

Lessons Learned
On partners:
“In the past, we hired partners more interested in getting cash than growing the business. Today, I would never partner with someone who needs to make a significant amount of money right now. That pressure forces you to make different decisions.”

On diversity of ideas:
At Wharton, Paul learned the power of diversity. “At Wharton, I couldn’t believe who was in class with me. It’s the engineer mindset–how could these non-engineer people be smart enough to be in this class? But I learned those people are thinking of things you never thought of.”

On getting involved:
“If you’re in the tech space today and not working with a nonprofit, you need to get involved.”

Dave Mann, Founder of VisualCMS

www.sector43.com
@MannD

Right now, Dave Mann’s coveted “shiny object” is a red and white RV nicknamed “the Beast.”

The giant vehicle will carry him and his family on adventures all over the country. A part of Dave’s evolution toward semi-retirement, the Beast perfectly embodies his family-centric balance of freedom and innovation. It’s the next stop on a journey that spans philosophy, retail, consulting, and more.

Origins
Dave started his consulting career in 1996, but not until after he experienced a job in retail over the Christmas holidays which made him realize the retail industry wasn’t for him. His English major/Philosophy minor degree, although “perfect for arguing both sides of a point with myself,” wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be. So he jumped into consulting, becoming an MVP for Microsoft’s SharePoint platform at the just the right time, watching the technology explode exponentially soon after joining the space. Today, Dave is one of only 215 SharePoint MVPs in the world.

The grind of the consulting lifestyle began to wear on him, though. “With consulting, If you don’t work any hours, you don’t get any dollars. I didn’t want to do that anymore.” It was time for a change, so Dave sat down and put together a 3-year plan.

In the Startup World
For the first part of Dave’s plan, he decided to build a marketing channel that would leverage his SharePoint knowledge. Enter “Office 365 Concierge,” a weekly newsletter covering all the developments surrounding the cloud-based Office 365 platform. He hired a contractor to write and categorize content, after which Dave would review and publish the newsletter.

The second part of the plan included developing some training videos and starting to work on a new product. Things were moving along as intended….until the app that Dave had designed to generate his newsletter started capturing its own attention.

VisualCMS
Dave’s newsletter publishing app creates HTML that can be published to WordPress. Information is stored on Trello cards (online index cards) that can be managed visually by dragging and dropping from one list to another.

“Someone approached me about selling it. I thought, ‘Do I make it a SaaS application? Might people want to buy it?'” It became a shiny object that distracted him from his original plan. “The problem was that it was completely outside my wheelhouse. I had zero credibility in the space.”

But the diversion was tempting. “I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I move from one interesting thing to another. It’s been my biggest problem in the startup space.”

Must. Resist. Shiny. Object.
Dave had an epiphany. “The mailing list was only supposed to be a marketing channel. VisualCMS was only ever intended to be a prototype. I would run it when I needed to and it would do its thing. It took me maybe 20 minutes to make the newsletter. I would put an RSS mail feed from mail chimp and send it out to my mailing list.”

He sold the usage rights to a company that manages content in the Office 365 space. “I still own the code and I get some advertising income from the newsletter. But it keeps my name out there.”

The plan is working. “At the end of January 2015, I had 23 subscribers. In the middle of April, I had 7,412. And that’s just from jumping into bed with this company.That number is what convinced me I was making the right decision.”

Remember the End Game
Dave says the moral of the story is to know when to pivot, and know when a “shiny object” is distracting you from your original purpose.

“I don’t want to work so damn hard. I don’t expect any of my products to be my single source of income. I want to have 3 to 4 smallish products, little plugins for Office 365. Each one brings in an ok amount of money, and I’m good. I don’t need to have that one huge single product.”

Today, Dave’s working on an umbrella product (code name: Blackburn), an “intranet in a box for small to medium businesses. A family of products that will allow small-medium businesses to spin up their intranet quickly.”

He’s also self publishing some ebooks and creating software products and packages, as well as speaking and teaching. “Everything is repurposed,reused, and recycled. I do things one or one and a half times, but I get multiple uses out of them.”