February 24th, 2008
Len Sklar is coming to our Friday March 7 breakfast at Hobees in Palo Alto. He will make a short presentation on “The Check is Not in the Mail” and answer questions on effective approaches to getting paid in full, on time, at less cost and without losing valued customers. Len offered the following bio:
Len Sklar likes to characterize himself as a serial entrepreneur. After spending 14 years with P & G, Dow Chemical, and IBM, he started a collection agency, about which he knew nothing.
After a year, he understood the business and started doing seminars teaching businesses how to avoid collection problems, in the first place, and then how to recover most of the money themselves, without losing good clients in the process.
From 1971 to 1990, he presented 600 seminars a year, in 200 U.S. cities, using himself and 12 others he trained. He wrote an industry standard book, “The Check Is NOT In The Mail” and started a collection temp staffing company that he grew to 12 offices nationwide.
Len sold the staffing business in 1994 and keeps busy as a private investor, helping non-profits, some consulting and, with the encouragement of Sean Murphy, he just completed a book on how to give great presentations.
Len was kind enough to let me review drafts and then the galley copy of his new book “Great Presentations: How to Keep Your Audience Awake–All The Time.” I found that he brought a dry sense of humor, an attention to detail for the customer’s experience, and an understanding of the economics of putting on a successful seminar to a short but very dense book. It has a number of excellent checklists and thought provoking insights to help the reader prepare and deliver compelling seminars.
February 19th, 2008
We had a longer than usual session this morning with a lot of good conversation. Two first time visitors were
- Peter Ackerson from Revoluminary (http://www.revoluminary.com/)
- Sara Hassani, a visiting scholar at Stanford studying entrepreneur relations and negotiations with VC’s
Revoluminary is an interesting new service that offers integrated voice, video, and whiteboard for one on one instruction. From their “How it Works” (href=”http://www.revoluminary.com/howitworks.php) page
- How Revoluminary Works: Revoluminary helps connect instructors and students by providing a directory of available classes, easy scheduling and payment collection, clear instructor ratings, and an easy to use online classroom with interactive video. Revoluminary members can sign up for classes they want at a time that is convenient, as well as creating their own classes and setting their own prices and hours of availability.
- How Revoluminary Pays: Revoluminary charges students using secure google checkout system to collect the instructors fees and the Revoluminary network fee (a small fee to cover the cost of overhead, bandwidth and credit card fees). Every two weeks, Revoluminary sends the fees collected by each instructor to their paypal account.
Sara Hassani dropped by to help get oriented to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial scene. We did a little brainstorming on some books that might help her get oriented and came up with four:
- Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely
- Regional Advantage by Anna Lee Saxenian
- Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region by Martin Kenney
- Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson (really more about the dotcom Bubble, but still has a number of interesting profiles)
Sara is interested in talking to entrepreneurs who have gone through the VC funding process for her latest research and can be reached at hassani@stanford.edu
Updated Aug-17-09: Revoluminary site appears to be shut down. I have removed links to www.revoluminary.com