The No. 1 factor that prevents entrepreneurs from starting a new company or meeting goals is fear. Simple ways to check your fears at the door.

I interview entrepreneurs every week for my radio show. I also coach business owners over coffee and cheap bar food. The recurring theme across these conversations: overcoming fear.

We all have fears. But the good news is they're generally easy to overcome. Just look beyond them. Think it's easier said than done? Here are the common entrepreneurial fears I see and how to attack them:

Fear of Failing

This is the most obvious entrepreneurial fear: What if the business isn't successful? What if it doesn't work out? What if I end up living on the streets? The stats you hear about the likelihood of company failure would put this fear into any entrepreneur's mind. It's also the one you are most familiar with from the days of taking tests and turning in projects at school.

What to Do About It

Understand that every start-up is a failure at some point. If you look back on the original business plan, a company rarely, if ever, follows the plan as it was conceived. The difference between companies that succeed and those that fail is their ability to course correct. Make sure you pay attention to what's working and what's not, and continually work to capitalize on the positive.

Fear of Success

Believe it or not, success is some entrepreneurs' biggest fear. A hesitant salesperson is actually afraid that if he makes the sale, the company won't deliver on the promise he's made. Success brings the requirement to perform, to fulfill the obligation, and to manage scarce resources in an attempt to satisfy demands. Many companies fail because they simply can't service the demand, and their customers move on to a competitor.

What to Do About It

Find a fellow entrepreneur who is in a similar space. He or she has been there before and will have connections and advice to help you through. Look for resources you can borrow: an industrial kitchen if you are making a food product or a company's excess office space; or rent another company's equipment to get the job done.

Fear of Starting

One of my colleagues once gave me some great advice about getting started on a big task. She told me, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer, "One bite a time." OK, it's a little creepy, but you get the point. Often we are so overwhelmed by the task ahead of us because it looks too big and daunting that we just don't start.

What to Do About It

It may sound simple, but just simply start! If you are going to write a book, write 350 words a day and you are writing about a page. If you are going to start a company in a space you have never been before, find a mentor or spend some time interning with a company you respect. Do something small today for the future you want tomorrow.

Fear of Loss

This fear grips entrepreneurs who have built something up and are afraid to make a change or go in a new direction. They are afraid that the new direction will put what they already built in jeopardy.

What to Do About It

Realize that the second you stop innovating your company, you are already slipping. There is no such thing as maintaining the status quo in the entrepreneurial or small-business space. If you think you are afraid of losing what you already have, then know that unless you take some risks, you are already headed down that path.

Entrepreneurs are a resilient breed. You know how to take a need, problem, or bad situation and capitalize on it to build something great. If you can remember that your entrepreneurial instincts make you more likely to succeed and to learn from a failure, you have nothing to fear.

What’s the best kind of Push Notification? One that tells you you’ve made more money of course.

Stripe Push is a little side-project that sends you Apple Push Notifications whenever you get a new charge or transfer via Stripe.

You can configure what type of notifications you want to receive and their frequency. I’ve open sourced the Sinatra and Mac app behind it on GitHub.

Get it from the Mac App Store.

Focusing on a smaller number of customers might actually fuel your growth instead of impeding it. Here are four ways to make it work.

Growing means expanding your business, right? That's what many entrepreneurs and CEOs assume they need to do. But, in almost every successful growth story we've seen, the CEO has done exactly the opposite.

In a recent article, Growing Like Gangbusters?, we discussed the three things that companies need to do to adapt their business as they grow. As they move from a start-up to an established company, they need to adapt their organization and leadership model. But, at the same time, growing companies need to find a way to create more value for their customers, and then scale that customer value.

Small entrepreneurial companies need to adapt to their customer needs, adjusting their business model accordingly to grow revenue. But once you've built a successful company, you've also likely built a reputation and distinctiveness around a specific product, service, or customer segment. CEOs who are able to sustain this growth actually get more narrow in their focus, which allows them to scale the business around that key strength.

The CEO of Rise Interactive, Jon Morris, recently told us, "We focus on doing one thing well: Helping companies drive traffic to their website."

Duncan Barbaro Sant, a director at Alberta, a 200 employee fire, safety, and security company based in Mriehel, Malta, shared his plan of action. "Rather than focusing on winning all the projects we come across and trying to spread our wings further than we possibly can, we have taken to choosing carefully the projects that make sense for us and that can sustain the company's healthy growth," Duncan told us. "This will give us the time to monitor and exploit all the projects we are being awarded/accepting whilst keeping our clients faithful to our company."

Here are four things CEOs can do to narrow their customer focus and create more growth:

1. Find your most profitable customers. Do some back-of-the-envelope math to rank order your customers in terms of high to low profits. The customers that pay more and cost less to serve are creating the most value for your business.

2. Understand the unique needs of your most valuable customers. How are they different from your less profitable customers? Identify the drivers of why they rise to the top.

3. Understand what you are doing for these customers that no one else can do as well. Determine your key strengths and the offerings that they find the most value in.

4. Ruthlessly prioritize and focus organizational resources and investment on these customers. Always choose projects and investment that favor your most profitable customers. Challenge yourself to free up time and resources to devote more to these customers.

Creating a narrower customer focus is somewhat counterintuitive to growth. But when it's done right, this approach typically results in more growth rather than less.

Send us your experiences with focusing on your core customers. We can be reached at karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.

Ice
Skating Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, February
16, 2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 7:00pm

All Guests = $10

Ticket #: 37 of 48

Philly
Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, February
23, 2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 9:00am

All Guests = $20

Ticket #: 16 of 50

Kenan
Thompson Comedy Show

(seb)

Sunday, February
24, 2013

7:00pm

Retriever Activity
Center (RAC)

All Guests = $12

Ticket #: 1240 of
2700

New
York City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, March 2,
2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 8:00am

All Guests = $30

Ticket #: 21 of 103

OZ Midnight Premiere

(seb)

Thursday, March 7,
2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 3 of 260

Medieval Times Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, March 9,
2013

Bus departs The
Commons Circle @ 6:00pm

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: 5 of 49

If you find yourself putting things off, the culprit may be a weak sense of identity rather than a weak will.

When you put off tasks that are important for the betterment of your business, do you beat yourself up for having a weak will?

It may feel like your inability to push yourself to do the unpleasant but unnecessary is to blame when you procrastinate, but psychology suggests there actually may be another culprit: your identity… or lack thereof.

Timothy A. Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Canada's Carleton University, has written on Psychology Today, that identity is "knowledge of who we are. Knowledge that is hard won through a real 'exploration' of possible selves (perhaps those crazy teen years or campus life in your 20's) and finally crystallized with a 'commitment.'"

What does identity have to do with procrastination? According to research done by one of Pychyl's grad students Matthew Shanahan having a less firm sense of the one leads to more of the other.

"Ego identity development was negatively correlated with procrastination. That means, the more achieved the identity, the more the participants knew who they were, the lower their scores on the measures of procrastination," Pychyl explains.

The moral of the story for Pychyl is that "we all have to 'grow up' a bit to decrease our procrastination." That's good news for frustrated parents of teens and deadline-challenged college students, but what does that have to do with business owners? You are, after all, not some teenager currently experimenting with a new goth look or vegan diet.

But while your fundamental identity as a person in general may long since have been sealed, if you're relatively new to entrepreneurship, your sense of yourself as a genuine business owner could still be tentative. When embarking on a new career path, it's common to feel like you're somehow faking it—that you don't really have the right to the identity you're claiming.

This discomfort with your new identity, at least in mild doses, isn't something to worry about, according to the New York Times, but it just might make you more prone to procrastination. The good news: as you get more comfortable with your identity and commit fully to seeing yourself as a business owner, your tendency to put things off should fade.

Conclusion: it's time to start believing in your identity as a business owner.

Does this connection between identity and procrastination make intuitive sense to you?

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Analytics for Cancer Survival Time

Dr. Shujia Zhou and Ran Qi
CSEE Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00 pm Friday, 15 February 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

With advent of new medical technologies, more and more prognostic factors are discovered and used in predicting cancer survival time. Consequently, the number of cancer patient types increase significantly. However, there are limited therapies available for cancer patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accurate algorithms in grouping cancer patients so that a doctor can choose the optimal therapy for a cancer patient. In this talk we will introduce current grouping algorithms, discuss new approaches in improving their efficiencies, and present a prototype of prognostic system for cancer patients.

Dr. Shujia Zhou is a research associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC. He received a Ph.D. from Washington University at St. Louis in 1993. He held a Director’s-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and became a LANL technical staff member in 1996. At LANL, his researches in large-scale molecular dynamics simulations were published in the Journal of Science and reported in the journals of both Science and Nature. In 2000, he joined Northrop Grumman Corporation and worked on NASA Computation Technology Projects. He is a pioneer in accelerating climate and weather applications with multi-core processors such as,IBM’s Cell B.E. processor. His current research interests are big data analytics, in particular in finance and health.

Ran Qi received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Lamar University in 2009 and started her Ph.D program in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2010. In 2011, she worked on train monitoring system development at Norfolk Southern for 4 months as a co-op intern. In January 2012, she worked on personalized medicine in IBM Toronto Lab for 3 weeks. Her current Ph.D research focus is data mining in health analytics and personal medicine including cancer survival analysis and developing a cancer prognostic system.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer publicly said that she constantly thinks of who should replace her top execs. Cold blooded?

During the recent Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer said something that raised my eyebrows.

According to Business Insider, Mayer said she "constantly thinks about who could do a better job" on her management team. "I think about who could be a better COO. I think about who could be a better CFO."

Since coming to Yahoo in July of last year, Mayer has replaced much of the company's senior management team with her own, having brought in Henrique De Castro as COO and Ken Goldman as CFO, among others.

Goldman was apparently in the audience when Mayer made her remarks, which she then followed up with, "Sorry Ken, it's just a thought experiment I do."

Now, I'm not going to say that kind of thing doesn't happen all the time in the boardrooms of corporate America. It does. I've had far worse things hurled at me by a CEO or two when I was a senior executive in the tech industry. But always in a private conference room; never in a public forum. Never like that.

A board director once told me a story about a well-known high-tech chief executive. He said the guy would sit in his executive staff meetings and imagine each of his top execs with their compensation emblazoned on their forehead and ask himself if they were worth it or not.

Sure, that's cold-blooded, but he kept it to himself, which is no big deal.

What is telling is that the kind of behavior Mayer exhibited at the Goldman conference reportedly was often on display when she worked for Google. I believe that.

In any case, Mayer's comments at the conference were probably humiliating for the executives in question. They don't reflect well on her or on her potential for retaining executive talent at Yahoo.

When I was discussing this with a colleague, she said, "I sure hope those guys are paid plenty to put up with that kind of crap." Indeed, they probably are.

Still, that's no way to treat employees. I don't care how much they make.