Blogs

WashingtonVC National Rollout Strategy, Alpha

October 4th, 2007 by Mike Mann

WVC intends to establish itself and promote its parts in 6 major US cities, DC, NY, BOS, SEA, SF, LA, and eventually expand accordingly.

Within each of those cities, we will partner with local business leaders to permanently infect their communities with our charitable works and business offerings. At minimum, we will offer the service suites of MilitantMarketing, Phone.com, SEO.com, Graphics.net, Dial-a-Geek, Information Architects, and maybe networked X3O gaming centers and services. Plus, we may offer services from BrowserMedia, StrongTech, Podcast.com, Software.com, Yield Software, or other emerging assets if it suits our mutual strategies at the time.

Office environments will be set up in strategically relevant neighborhoods in our key cities. The offices will be staffed with a regional manager and sales and support personnel who will work together on behalf of every participating WVC Company or project. Some personnel will be expected to specialize in one particular company or subject area that warrants exclusive attention. Settlements, commissions, and custom arrangements between entities will be frequently required to make sure each has fairly balanced operational economics within this model.

We will also establish a Grassroots.org presence in each office, and therefore community, and ensure local 501c executives can easily access our people and free technology services. Also, Make Change! Trust will make strategic charitable investments and long-term commitments in each of the communities utilizing the same executive infrastructure, social/business networks, supporting entities, personnel, and office space. Moreover, Grassroots.org will expand its mentoring program with local university business schools, like the MBA project we have with Dingman Center at UMD, and launch business plan competitions within that structure.

We will also review the possibility of building Byte Back or similar technology training centers in each city. They have seven centers where they teach computer technologies and offer free help with job training in the inner city. I was the first Chairman of this organization ten years ago, and I remain a supporter of their work.

Moreover, we will set up an Internet expert speaker series once per year to go to each city surrounding the events and conferences that we help support. We can easily staff this with compelling speeches from WVC CEOs, CTOs, and marketers, as well as from our expanded community. And we will host an outstanding party during each conference period, which will be supported by sponsorships.

And we will heavily promote and recruit bands for RockConcerts.com in perpetuity at popular local rock shows and events and co-promote our charitable work, and possibly Podcast.com too.

We will also study and invest in select Internet companies in each community; we may establish community web sites in some of these communities using local domain names and our best of breed web technologies and ideas.

We will have our leaders join technology and venture capital networking and investing groups, entrepreneurs’ organizations, and chambers of commerce. The intention is for our leaders to establish themselves as long-term leaders in their communities and to establish WVC as a permanent and valuable fixture in the targeted region. We will make sure that we have all the leaders from each city receiving our newsletters, added to each of our LinkedIn accounts, and followed up within a structured professional sales system with extensive CRM and data mining support.

We will actively network with and recruit leading regional investors, so they can access our deals and projects. We will use MilitantMarketing to heavily promote all relevant activities for each of our entities in the press and business communities, in perpetuity, and in our target markets. We believe our best bet is to start by meeting and cooperating with the most established technology companies and investors in each region prior to expending significant additional resources on outbound sales campaigns. In each community, we expect to establish our position quickly and expand it steadily. I believe that each company and our overall strategy are unique and meaningful enough to garner considerable press attention, which makes the strategy even more likely to succeed.

There are many details to execute this strategy successfully over a long time, but this is the fundamental premise I intend to pursue sooner rather than later. I think it is a powerful and efficient way to build up our companies while simultaneously expanding our charitable work. I look forward to your feedback and participation in making our dreams a reality. Thanks for reading.