Mr Lewis

Tag: entrepreneurship

  • Validating Assumptions

    In 2010 I was asked to give a quick presentation to MEGA program participants,.  MEGA could be described was an early accelerator program in Australia. The title of my quick speech was “Is your idea commercially viable?”. But the thrust of the speech was really on understanding the difference between facts, assumptions, hypothesis and weasel words…

  • Can you have a partnership of entrepreneurs?

    A group of Scandinavian entrepreneurs caught my eye this year, so when I was in London the other week, I decided to look them up.  They had a local office above a shop in the fashionable shopping district around the Bond Street tube station and were a fascinating group, who seem to have built a…

  • revenue model innovation for service firms

    I have been buying and selling services for around 20 years, and during most of that period, have only ever seen two pricing models. Fixed rate or Hourly rate. Each with a couple of tweaks that are normally of benefit to the supplier, not the purchaser. Fixed Price – is normally used when the service…

  • The reality of online retail in Australia

    Not good enough! I read today that Myer intends to do away with shipping and handling costs for its online store, to stop the leak to internet shopping.   Apparently “Commonwealth Bank estimates that Australian consumers spent $9.5 billion online last year, with $4.2 billion going to overseas online retailers and the remaining $5.3 billion paid…

  • Don’t grade students

    Can business schools stop giving people marks from A-F or 0-100 please. Just give them pass or fail, so they are prepared for real life. One of the things I completely abhor, is business students fresh out of school with grandiose plans but poor execution combined with a loser attitude. The mindset seems to be…

  • the money plan

    I had breakfast the other morning with Scott Kilmartin of Haul. I like talking to Scott about the retail market because he has both heaps of experience, and quality insight. Scott felt that the small independent retailer was absolutely on the wane at the moment and on June 30th a lot of accountants would be…

  • Localisation

    Twenty one years ago, when I left Perth, I planned to return in two years because that was where my home was. Despite not being born there, I had become an adult in Perth and it was where all my “forever friends” are. You know, the ones you don’t have to speak to for years,…

  • What type of entrepreneur are you anyway?

    I spoke at the Startup Weekend last Friday night on building valuable networks, but got asked by three people before the event – “who is the target audience of the Churchill Club?”.   The simple answer is entrepreneurs, but the real answer is unsurprisingly, a little bit more complex, so I normally talk about the…

  • Revenue Model Innovation

    Over a decade ago, I made the acquaintance of CIO of a major Bank, and asked him to become involved in my small IT services business which was growing like a rocket; 0-$2M revenue in year one. He declined, and said that “he didn’t find our business model scalable”. After the rejection I thought “how…

  • Outsourcing Offshore

    Finding worthy topics to discuss was the highest priority when I started the Churchill Club 5 years ago, so I sought advice from a number of quite senior people on what they thought were issues that mattered to the technology start-up community. And like most advice in the world, it turned out to be horribly…