Tom outlined that there are 4 ingredients that make money fly to you.

Flying Money Ingredient 1: Know what pain your customers are experiencing, and ensure you can provide a solution that is better than the one the customer could come up with themselves, and better than your competitors. Be the best. This could be the cheapest, fastest, highest quality, most convenient, most fun, most admirable values – whatever sets you apart.

Flying Money Ingredient 2. Be the best solution for the pain, don’t under-price it – position yourself appropriately. Talk about your solution in the terms of your customer pain. All sales are emotional. Make sure your customer understands why you fix their pain as they know it.

Flying Money Ingredient 3. You have to have the best brand (not just the best features). This means people believe you have the best stuff (even if you don’t). Perception is reality. Make sure that your potential customers understand that you are the best.

Tom also told everyone a real truth – Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams was wrong. “If you build it, they will come” isn’t true. You need to get customers aware of your product when they are feeling the pain. Advertise! Word of Mouth is through social networks becoming far more powerful. It’s timely, it’s strong. It uses someone’s existing relationships to help sell your product. And they do it because they love your product. You can’t buy their love. Be proactive and ask any customer who’s had a good experience to tweet, blog or Facebook about it.

Flying Money Ingredient 4. You don’t need a big ad budget, you need vocal, raving fans. The fans who will tell other people about their love for you and your brand. You build them not by pontificating but by conversing with them. You don’t get to tell them to love you, instead you need to give them a reason to love you.

Tom then described how these four ingredients form a circle. When you have a group of Raving Fans, they then lead back to finding more customers in pain (step one), helping you drive the business.

For anyone who missed the workshop, some video clips are below and you can also find the entire audio file here.  Thanks to Joanne White for guest blogging.

How to Pick a Business from Paul Berberian on Vimeo.

The 2009 CU New Venture Challenge began Wednesday night with a full house in the Wittemeyer Courtroom at the CU Law Building to hear Paul Berberian deliver the rousing and interactive session called, “How to pick a business worth starting.”

Paul ‘s first slide, “how to pick a winner,” set the tone for the evening. A kid with his finger up his nose, nearly up to the knuckle, brought lots of laughter. Paul continued to describe the essences of what types of businesses were worth pursuing, how to choose one that suits you, and a few hard realities of working in a startup. He talked about his failures. His personal reflections on one business experience selling plastic name tags which resulted in him marrying with a “negative dowry” was one many entrepreneurs see as a reality. Luckily, that experience appears to be humorous when it’s eclipsed by successes. And Paul has had a few, to say the least.

Paul is onto his sixth business (solar panels), and admits he’s the guy who wants to have lots of money raining on him. For him, that’s a key aspect of the type of business he chooses. He said though, that there are other factors that weigh in for consideration when deciding on a business to launch, and that the audience should look for something that suits and fits in all areas of who they were, and what they wanted to achieve. He described the process of looking at 14 different companies over the last year or so. One example was a company that produced bulletproof vests. “I’m a pacifist,” said the air force veteran, “I did that stage of my life and want to move on to other things.” So, while the bulletproof vest company might have been a strong one, it didn’t go further on his list to investigate.

In a highly engaging presentation, Paul invited the audience to ask questions and be interactive throughout – and they did. Numerous times Paul was asked to offer more detail on specific process, and simply to ask additional questions. Paul answered everyone, and kept a perfect balance of information, entertainment and informality so no matter where you were in your business journey, there was value in his message.

The broader message that while you have nothing is the best opportunity to go out on a limb and start a business was directly aimed at the students in the room. Paul’s encouragement was a great beginning to CU’s New Venture Challenge for 2009/2010. Following the presentation, everyone headed upstairs to network, enjoy some refreshments, and chat with some local startups looking for interns.

Paul Berberian was the perfect beginning to the CU New Venture Challenge and fired up the anticipation for next week’s pitch evening. A number of people have registered their intent to present their budding idea at the event, being held in the ATLAS building at 6pm on Wednesday 18^th November. All members of the campus, and the broader community are invited to come along, hear ideas (or present their own), and network with others to hopefully start something that could be the next big thing. As long as, according to Paul Berberian, it isn’t selling plastic badges.