Instead, as I was watching wildebeests, lion, elephants and zebras in their natural habitat, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much of their behavior reflects the competitive nature of an entrepreneurial business.

I know this probably sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Watching these animals fighting for survival, I was struck by how they were able to not just survive, but thrive by using many of the same tactics that are used by successful businesses. Whether it was watching lions stalking their prey, zebras and wildebeests co-existing to each other’s benefit, or even watching a vulture patiently waiting for a zebra to die, there were strategies in place that would work for almost any business in the world.

Let me give you a few examples:

1. Strong and Decisive Leadership Is Essential to Success

In virtually every species I observed, leadership was in the hands (hooves, paws?) of an alpha male or group of alpha males.

This kind of leadership resulted in efficient and orderly behaviors that benefited the group as a whole. When it was time to move to new territory, when it was time to rest, when it was time to eat were all determined by the alpha male. The rewards of leadership? The alpha was always the first to eat recently killed prey and, of course, the first to mate.

While I am not advocating this kind of autocratic leadership in business, I saw compelling evidence of how strong, decisive leadership can work to the benefit of the whole team. Forgive the pun, but there’s a reason why CEOs get the lion’s share of the profits.

2. When Opportunity Presents Itself, Jump In

I had a chance to see a zebra that had survived a lion attack, but just barely. As it bled from a wound on its left rear quarters, a vulture dropped in and crouched on the ground, barely 10 feet from the zebra. The vulture waited patiently for the zebra to die, just sitting and staring. I didn’t see the end of this drama, but I have the distinct feeling that the vulture did not go home hungry.

While I’m not saying that entrepreneurs should be vultures, they should be ready to pounce on opportunities when they arise. Keep your eyes open, stay on top of your competition, and jump right in when you see a weakness to exploit.

3. Don’t Be Too Proud to Take the Leftovers From the Big Boys

Hyenas are often portrayed as one of the lowest forms of animals. They tend to follow prides of lions (at a safe distance) and get their sustenance by waiting for the scraps left behind after the lions are finished with the animals they kill.

There are dozens of other scavengers in the wild who rely on the scraps left behind by the animals higher up on the food chain.

As an entrepreneur, being a “scavenger” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is especially true when you are a service provider. You are going to have much larger competitors in your market, and they are going to get the bulk of the work from the largest clients. It’s a fact of life.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of opportunities presented when the big boys are satisfied. Big competitors often don’t want to be bothered by smaller projects, and big clients  always have smaller jobs they’ll give to smaller companies.

Entrepreneurs should see this as a chance to get your foot in the door. Take on the small project for the big client, do great work and you’ll find that the smaller projects will soon become bigger projects.

4. Find Ways to Survive in Difficult Times

Difficult times are built in to the life cycle on the Serengeti. Every year there is a dry season which tests the survival instincts of every species. Difficult times make for hard choices. Lions have been known to eat their own young. Elephants will cover many miles in a day just to find a drink of water. Weak members of the herd who can’t keep up are left behind to die.

No matter what business you are in, there will be difficult times. But even in the most difficult times, great entrepreneurs find ways to stay ahead. It may mean cutting down on overhead. It may mean being more creative with marketing and advertising budgets. It may just mean outworking the competition. Those who learn to adjust and adapt find ways to keep going.

Just as many animals fail to survive dry spells, so do many businesses. For the resident wildlife of the Serengeti, survival is a matter of life and death. Entrepreneurs who succeed in difficult times survive because of a “life and death” mentality.

5. Don’t Let Anything Get in Your Way

A common site on the Serengeti is acres of trees that are snapped in half or simply knocked over. Perplexed by this sight, I asked our Masai guide what the reason was.

“You’ll see soon enough,” was his cryptic response.

True to his word, he led us to a bend in the road where we could glimpse a herd of elephants coming in our direction. Because this was the tail end of the dry season, the elephants were in hot pursuit of water.

Nothing, I would soon see, would get in their way. Much larger than any elephants I had ever seen in a zoo, the males simply barreled through the trees, snapping them as if they were twigs. It was an awesome sight, but one that reminded me of the determination I had seen from many of the entrepreneurs I have known or worked with over the years. To get where you want to be, there are times you just have to push forward, having the confidence to knocking away obstacles as opposed to delicately sidestepping them.

6. Forge Mutually Beneficial Partnerships

One thing you learn about animals in the wild is that many species have natural partners. These partnerships (symbiotic relationships) work to the benefit of both species, playing a key role in their survival.

Any time you see a herd of zebras in the Serengeti, you are sure to find wildebeests close by. Why? The two groups work perfectly together. Both get their nutrition from grasses, but get it in very different ways. Zebras feed on tall grass, while the wildebeests eat short. The zebras clear away the tall grass for the wildebeests, which then munch on the shorter grass left behind.

Similarly, there are birds that get their sustenance by eating ticks found on larger, grazing animals. The larger animals are happy to be rid of the nuisance of the ticks, while the birds are happy for the meal.

As any entrepreneur knows, there will always be times when you need to rely on outside expertise to advance your business goals. While nature has chosen the “business partners” for the zebras, entrepreneurs have to be smart in choosing the service providers and consultants that work with their businesses. A great partner can be worth their weight in gold. A lousy one can damage or even destroy your business.

7. Cut the Deadwood

This may sound harsh, but nature can be harsh, and business can be harsh.

On the seventh morning of the safari, I had a chance to witness a large pond teeming with hippopotamus and another pond with just two hippos basking in a corner. Our Masai guide explained that the large pond was filled with a handful of alpha males and dozens of females, while the other pond was populated by two “loser males.”

The loser males had proved unable to protect the group and offered little in the way of getting food or procreating. As a result, they were forcibly banished.

Most every business, at one time or another, will have a few “losers” on staff. They don’t contribute, are usually unhappy, and are bad for the overall morale and performance of the company. While firing employees is one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do, failing to remove a bad employee is bad business.

Survival Skills

Survival in the Serengeti is a daily battle. Animals fight for sustenance, for power and for their very lives. In the wild, merely living to face another day is a victory.

In business, of course, survival has a very different meaning. But the tactics for surviving in the Serengeti can provide real lessons for those of us trying to keep our businesses not only afloat, but thriving.

From Small Business Trends

Seven Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned on the Serengeti

Thought leaders have myriad online avenues in which to broadcast their expertise and, hopefully, use those broadcasts to generate business. With the advent of social media, small business owners and experts now use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube (among other social media platforms) to get the word out.

Recently, Google introduced Google+, the search engine giant’s entry into the world of social media. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Google+ has a cornucopia of features and has been catching on like wildfire.

You may ask yourself, with all of the other social media platforms out there, do I have the time or inclination to get involved with yet another time-eating networking site? Is it worth my time as a thought leader to spread myself out even thinner?

My answer to that is simple and emphatic: YES!

The Google Brand
Let’s start with the obvious. If Google+ is the giant search engine’s social media platform, you know that it is destined to be a major player in the social networking world. In less than two months, Google+ has registered over 25 million members and has a demographic more attractive to businesses than Facebook. Over one-third of Facebook users already have a Google+ account.

If you do the simple math, it’s clear that Google+ is already taking visitor time away from Facebook. While Google+ is miles away from catching up to the scope of Facebook, don’t underestimate its ability to catch up.

Remember when people thought it would be folly to challenge MySpace?

The Google+ Basics
Google+ has tried to take the best features from all of the major social media platforms. For a full overview of the features, check out Google’s tour of the features.

Google+ gives you the opportunity to create a personal profile, where you can provide fairly detailed information on your work, family, interests and expertise. These profiles are completely searchable and, by using the appropriate keywords, can help a thought leader to reach a wider audience.

Once thought leaders have created their profiles, they have the opportunity to share their knowledge by posting content and links to content on their profile page. The content is fully searchable and will lead potential followers, customers and clients to your work. Unlike Twitter, there is no character limit to the content you can post. Google+ makes it simple to upload links, photographs, videos and slides.

Google+ includes a feature that can help to broadcast a thought leader’s content to a wide audience. When people see the content you’ve posted, they can use the “+1” function to endorse the content and forward it on. In other words, if a thought leader’s content is given a “+1,” that content is then broadcast to everyone who follows the person who liked your content.

So, now that you’ve created a profile and loaded content, how do you get an audience? Google+ has “circles” that allows you to segment other Google+ members into categories of your choosing. For example, you can create a “family” circle and include all family members. For thought leaders, you can create circles that pertain to your area of expertise or that include target members of the press and/or influencers.

My group of circles includes “business journalists,” “tech journalists,” and journalists working for specific outlets (i.e. Wall Street Journal). By creating these specific circles, I can see the content that these journalists are posting to the general public. When I see their content, I can offer my own expertise and get on their radar. If journalists choose to include me in a circle, it gives me a chance to put my content in front of them and may lead to them using me as a source for a story.

Another interesting feature of Google+ of particular interest to thought leaders is the “hangout” function. “Hangout” allows you to invite up to 10 people to join you in a video conference where you can make a small group presentation or hold any kind of meeting of your choice.

For a thought leader, this provides a number of interesting opportunities. You can hold seminars, client presentations, mini press conferences or roundtables. If you have a video of a prior speech or seminar you’ve presented, it gives you the opportunity to schedule small-scale webinars.

Business Pages
Because of all of the features discussed above, Google+ is extremely attractive to businesses. Because it provides ways of broadcasting your business’s messages to extremely targeted audiences, many businesses flocked to Google+ from the moment it was launched. At the time of launch, though, Google+ was open only to individual accounts and promptly took down the business accounts.

Due to the overwhelming interest from businesses, Google has decided to create a special mechanism just for businesses.

When this launches, it will present even more opportunities for thought leaders to generate business. As of now, thought leaders can talk about their businesses as individuals, but once the business pages launch, thought leaders will be able to better combine their messaging with the specific business goals of their companies.

How will this differ from the company pages on Facebook? For one, the Google+ brand pages will be backed by Google’s powerful analytic tools. It will be easy for thought leaders to monitor which content elements are getting the most traction and which ones aren’t resonating with their audience. Secondly, Google has a powerful ad delivery network that will allow businesses to better connect with their audiences. It is unclear what the advertising model will be on the business pages, but you can expect Google to exploit the power of Google+ to generate considerable advertising revenues.

Most importantly, Google+ business pages will have the power of Google search behind them. Again, it is unclear how Google+ results will be treated in the overall Google search algorithm, but businesses can’t afford not to have a presence on Google+.

In Conclusion
Google will always be the 800-pound gorilla in the online world. When Google dives into social media, then everyone — individuals, businesses and thought leaders — had better pay attention and not get left behind.

For thought leaders, Google+ represents a golden opportunity to gain the attention of an even wider audience and to serve your current constituency in even more effective ways. If you have real expertise to share, then Google+ is a necessary arrow in an influencer’s quiver.

From Small Business Trends

Google+: The Latest (and Perhaps Greatest) Platform for Thought Leaders

• Power: You can’t teach a 98 MPH fastball. It’s a gift that few people are lucky enough to have. But if you possess it, it gives you a huge advantage over the opposition.
• Variety: Even the guy with the 98 MPH fastball will get into trouble if he doesn’t have any other effective pitches. Nolan Ryan’s fastball looked a whole lot faster because he also possessed a devastating curve (check it out in Steven Ellis’s blog).
• Patience: If the batter fouls off seven of your best pitches, don’t get frustrated and throw one down the middle. Keep coming at him with your best pitches, and eventually things work out.
• Homework: A great pitcher knows the tendencies of every hitter he faces–which pitches the hitter jumps on, which ones make him uncomfortable and which ones he just can’t resist. Armed with this knowledge, you can make far smarter decisions regarding pitch selection and timing.
• Start small (and work your way up): It is the rare pitcher who bursts on the scene as a 20-year-old phenom. Most pitchers hone their craft in the minor leagues, going up against higher and higher levels of minor league competition until they finally reach the majors.

These same principles can be applied to pitching the press. Anyone pitching the press on a story idea had better come armed with power, variety and patience, and must definitely have done his homework.

• Power: When pitching the press, the real power comes in the quality of the pitch. The most powerful pitches come from sources who are real experts in their field, have a unique perspective on an issue, or have information that is pertinent to a trending issue. You can’t create expertise out of thin air. But, if you have truly useful information for the media outlet’s audience, then rear back and hit them with your best.
• Variety: Like a baseball pitcher, what you think is your best pitch isn’t going to work for every media outlet. Be prepared to pitch a number of story ideas, and be flexible enough to bend your pitch to each individual outlet. The same basic pitch can be presented in multiple ways.
• Patience: Getting your company recognized by the press (in a positive fashion) is a long-term proposition. Often, making a successful pitch is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  Remember, the same media outlet that ignores your first 10 pitches can suddenly jump at No. 11.
• Homework: Just as a baseball pitcher can get in big trouble by not knowing the opposition (i.e., the guy feasts on low and inside fastballs), a source pitching the media makes a huge mistake by not knowing everything he can about the media outlet and the specific reporter he’s pitching.  Nothing turns reporters or bloggers off faster than getting a pitch that has nothing to do with what they write. When you pitch a reporter, you should not only be familiar with their publication, you should read a number of the stories written by the reporter and see how your expertise fits with their beat.
• Start small: When starting out in your media outreach efforts, it is often smart to go after smaller publications and blogs. Odds are, you are not going to land in The New York Times on the very first try. Research the blogs that cater to your target audience and pitch them first. You’ll find that the smaller outlets will be more receptive. More importantly, the more you get your business out into the smaller media, the more likely you will get the attention of bigger and bigger media.

Like the legendary pitchers in the history of Major League Baseball, the great media pitchers are the ones who have the power of a great story to tell, the variety to hand media outlets multiple options, the patience to know that nobody is successful 100 percent of the time, the discipline to do the homework required to make the perfect pitch at the perfect time and the humility to start small and work their way up!

From Small Business Trends

The Baseball Guide to Pitching the Media

An effective business blog, on the other hand, take a commitment of time, resources and intellectual energy. Unless you are committed to producing a quality, well-written blog and are committed to updating that blog on a regular basis, don’t even bother starting.

The worst business blogs are the ones where it is clear that the writer is winging it, just writing whatever comes to mind. A business must approach its blog in the same way it would approach any other marketing or branding campaign: with planning, staffing, execution and monitoring.

By following these seven steps, your small business can take the first steps towards a highly successful business blog:

1. Define the business goals of your blog
2. Identify your target audience
3. Allocate resources
4. Create your editorial calendar
5. Carve out time to write
6. Listen to your audience feedback and adjust accordingly
7. Get the word out

1. Define the Business Goals of Your Blog

Don’t blog because everybody else is doing it. Blog with a plan. Some business blogs focus on products and services, while others try to humanize the company by putting a face on employees and executives and providing a look into the company culture. For service providers, a blog can be a great way of demonstrating your expertise (you can demonstrate your capabilities through thought leadership or actual client histories).

2. Identify Your Target Audience

While this may sound crass, you are not blogging for your health. You are blogging for the health of your business. As a businessperson, you should know who you are trying to attract. If you throw out too wide a net, you will not be able to write the kind of posts that will be of interest to your specific demographic. You can’t be all things to all people, so don’t even try.

3. Allocate Resources

One of the biggest reasons blogs fail is because they are not budgeted for in terms of personnel and financial commitment the way other marketing efforts are. A blog is not a value-add. It is an integral element of your marketing plan.

For a midsized company, devoting a person to the task shouldn’t be difficult. If you are a five-person shop, it can still be done–you just need to find the appropriate person (or people) who will be responsible for the blog.

Some businesses make the decision to hire a freelance ghost-blogger. I have seen advertisements ranging from $20 per 150-word blog post to several hundred dollars per hour for high-level copywriters. The good news, if you can put it that way, is that the relative demise of print publishing has put many highly qualified freelance writers on the market, and you can hire quality writers for a fairly modest cost.

If you are looking for a freelancer, you can look on sites like MediaBistro or even look at the writers’ posts on Craigslist. If you’d like to put more of your own stamp on the blog, you can provide freelancers with bullet points that the writers can transform into blog posts.

4. Create Your Editorial Calendar

Leaving your blogging schedule open-ended is an invitation to disaster. Laying out a framework for blog entries over a period of time gives a business enforceable deadlines. As we all know, having hard deadlines hanging over your head can be a great motivator. The editorial calendar should not be considered to be etched in stone, however. Businesses need to be sufficiently flexible to add impromptu posts when news and business dictates.

Here’s a template to get you started.

5. Carve Out Time to Write

I can’t emphasize this point enough: If your blogging time isn’t a part of your calendar, then you are going to find ways to avoid the task. This is not a game! It is not a hobby! It is a business tool that should be treated with the same respect as other business tools. For entrepreneurs and small businesses, this may mean setting the alarm an hour earlier or setting aside an hour or two on your weekend.

6. Listen to Your Audience Feedback and Adjust Accordingly

As you know, blogs are not one-way streets. The comment function empowers your target audience and gives them a chance to participate in the conversation. If your audience loves your blog, they will tell you. Just as importantly, if they have issues, you need to deal with those as well.

Analytics can help you here. See which posts get the most traffic. See who is sharing your content. See who “likes” your content. All of this information can help you better serve your target audience.

While there are a number of analytics packages out there (some free, some at a cost), I suggest starting off with Google Analytics, a free and remarkably robust package that’s easy to install on your site.

7. Get the Word Out!

It’s great to have a blog on your company website, but that certainly limits your audience. There are a number of ways to get a wider audience for your posts.

The easiest path is to find other blogs that attract your target audience. See what people are writing about there and see if you have something meaningful to add to the conversation. Most blogs allow for links within comments.

Another simple trick is to announce each new blog post on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. To get the title of your post on Twitter and still stay within 140 characters, shorten your URL with a site like bit.ly.

To monitor your success in social media, there are plenty of tools including Topsy, Facebook Insights or Hootsuite.

If you are more adventurous, then I suggest you reach out to appropriate blogs and offer your services as a guest blogger. The key here is that you have produced relevant content that would both be of interest to your target audience and is written sufficiently well for a broad audience.

Making It Work

If you commit to writing a business blog, then commit to having one that is well written, of interest to your target audience and is refreshed on a regular basis. A great blog can be a valuable business development tool. A lousy one can damage your brand and your reputation in your industry.

From Small Business Trends

7 Steps to Disciplined Business Blogging