Here is part 2 to my interview with Ed Lahue!
What’s it like being in marketing and talking to scientists?
Find out today in part 2 of my interview with Ed Lahue!
Ed’s plug: https://sbdc.missouri.edu/
Ed Lahue, MBA is an Innovation Consultant in St. Louis. Ed helps technology start-ups and established businesses expand their innovation efforts through supporting various universities and SBDC centers. He counsels and teaches new business modeling, market research and other startup curriculum.
With 40 years of experience, Ed has an extensive background in innovation, strategic marketing and branding. His industry experience includes consumer products, healthcare and various industrial sectors. He is a retired innovation & technology counselor with the University of Missouri Extension/Missouri SBDC and holds an MBA in Marketing and a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration/Marketing from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (36:58.031)
Well, let’s go back to talking about SSM Health for a little bit, because again, this is where I know you best, because this is where we work together. But one of the things that I remember about you is you were very different from most of the other people that worked in that system, because you had a lot of really practical hands-on experience in marketing, but also the world of CPG, consumer packaged goods, as opposed to health care. A lot of them had a health care background. And so you had to really bring a different skill set into that department, into that team, and some different perspectives to help
Ed Lahue (37:00.963)
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
Ed Lahue (37:16.868)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sean Jordan (37:28.025)
to try to grow and enhance the brand. So tell me a little bit about how you use some of those CPG skills in healthcare marketing.
Ed Lahue (37:35.758)
yeah, I mean that was…
And I really, I really started in that large position group, but very much so happened at Ascension and then SSM was really teaching this idea of a strategy and that, and that what’s your objective, right? And, and so I still remember my first marketing director always talked about strategy, you know, his objective strategy action, or sometimes we call them tactics, you know, and those have to be aligned with resources. So in healthcare, typically what would happen is someone says,
Sean Jordan (37:41.305)
Mm-hmm.
Ed Lahue (38:08.274)
Well, this doctor or this service line VP wants to do X. Okay, whatever X is, fill in the blank. And I’m saying, that’s interesting. But why do we want to do X? What’s the goal of X? And I have this conversation with them and find out, well, the objective is actually something else. And that that tactic is not going to fulfill the objective. And after I explained it to them, they go, oh, I see this now. So I had a lot of conversations. Now, you have to
to do it very tactfully so you can’t go in there and say, I’m not gonna do that, right? Instead you say, you know what? That’s one viable tactic, we can do that. But let’s talk more about what are you trying to accomplish with that? Now sometime it frankly was, I have to admit there’s a few ads that we ran because some doctor wanted his picture in the paper, okay? But I really tried to minimize those. Those were minimized. Same thing with events.
The same thing with healthcare, lots of healthcare events. Because somebody says, well, the other hospital, they go to this big event at the Chase Park Plaza or whatever, right? And I’m like, hey, that’s great. How can we measure that? Let’s at least measure that. So that was the other key thing. So if you have these objectives, strategy, action, how do I know I’m meeting the objective if I’m not measuring it, right? Because the rule of thumb in marketing is always, know, have it but I can measure it.
half I have no idea where the money’s going. But at least I can measure, if I can measure some of it, I at least have some idea that am I actually gaining new patients, if that’s my objective, right? If my objective is just to simply promote to my current patients and get them to use all of our services, that’s fine. That’s another objective. But I have to measure that, right? So that’s where the digital marketing comes into play. Unfortunately, the regulatory bodies have now all
So some of that is getting harder to do, as you may have heard about. I just learned that actually a couple months ago since I’ve been out of healthcare. But my point is, if it’s not measurable, I’m really gonna limit that activity. I still may do some for, you know, for, hey, we feel like if we’re not there, could impact, let’s say it’s a business development effort, right? So if we don’t support,
Sean Jordan (40:23.171)
Yeah.
Ed Lahue (40:35.792)
The opposite at is like EMS, Emergency Medicine. Whatever EMS wanted, I gave them because I could have one ambulance come to my hospital and literally pay for the entire marketing plan for that program. So we offered, you know, we gave them hats, we gave them, you know, little chucks keys. We bought scissors that they cut your clothes off of. You know, if the ambulance comes to you and you’re having something going on, they’re just going to cut your clothes right off. Well, we actually
branded those scissors, right? So I will give them as many scissors as they want because I want that business. want, you know, it’s a wholesale, think of it like a wholesaler, you know? So the CPG really, wasn’t so much, a lot of people thought I was gonna bring this like glorious branding and how to messaging and all that. And we did some of that. But really what I think what CPG was all about being very strategic and being deliberate.
being disciplined.
to say that if that’s really your strategy, then you gotta use that as a filter and your budget should tie to that strategy. So if I’ve got something on the budget line that doesn’t meet the strategy, there’s gotta be a discussion about that. So the Yellow Pages was one. I actually, my first ascension, they were spending $100,000 on Yellow Pages. My goal was to get that to zero. I was pretty close. You know, because it didn’t meet an objective.
The objective was the doctor wanted their name, the surgeons, believe it or not, had surgeons that wanted them to be listed under surgery. I’m like, I was like, how many people, I showed them the data, how many people actually go use the L-pages for surgery? It was, I think, one out of a million. Like it’s very few. Now, back before the internet, there was a, I wanted to have you in the white pages so that if someone referred
Ed Lahue (42:38.532)
you, you can look up that doctor’s name, right? There is some benefit to that. So understanding that customer experience and what we call it in the healthcare world, we call it that patient pathway.
Sean Jordan (42:50.478)
Mm-hmm.
Ed Lahue (42:51.458)
And now today I work with Washu and I have scientists that think, well, we’ve got this great thing and it’s going to solve this great problem. I’m like, Hey, from a science standpoint, sounds great to me, but let’s find out if anybody cares and let’s find out what do the doctors think? You know, because they’re the one, now I’m, I’m at a point now where I’m telling people, I don’t care if you have strong data that says I can extend human life by five years. If Medicare doesn’t cover it, doctor doesn’t change their protocol to write an order for it. And it’s not going to happen. Right.
It’s not gonna be a business model might be a great idea, but if it if it can’t survive the marketplace We see that a lot with wellness You know everybody wants to do wellness, but no one wants to pick up the check You know no one wants to pay for it, so you have to figure out who’s that paying customer right? How and it may not be the user in healthcare
So that’s the other, I think that’s the other thing that was a shocker for me was we were doing, people were, like an example, people were doing all these events for seniors to do orthopedic surgery. And I was asking them, well, do you make any money on Medicare? What’s your profit margin on a knee replacement for Medicare? And the service manager couldn’t tell me. So.
It turns out we actually break even. So I said, how about we do this? Let’s quit the events. Let’s do CRM against people who have a high propensity who are under 65. Let’s go after the people that are in their 50s, early 60s. And actually we were very successful. We actually made, think the margins were pretty decent margins on the commercial payers. So that’s the other mix here. The biggest challenge was I was also,
frustration though with healthcare, frankly, and why I finally had to retire early was, remember I was trained on that basis model. What’s the volumetric model? Well, I tried to figure it out for 15 years and I gave up. There is no volumetric model in healthcare. And the problem is it’s like a bucket with a bunch of holes in it. So let’s use the example of the orthopedic surgeon. Let’s say I do a thing for the commercial payers, I do an event or I do a CRM and they finally
Sean Jordan (44:54.413)
Yeah.
Ed Lahue (45:08.594)
get to that surgeon who doesn’t work for me by the way and the surgeon says well what day you want to do the surgery and they say I want to do it on Thursday oh that’s that’s great I go to the other hospital so all of a sudden I did all this marketing right spent all this money so the big thing the discipline that I brought to health care was what do we every dollar that we spend how much money we getting back and if we’re not getting a three to one return we probably shouldn’t be doing it
And I think that’s where healthcare was just kind of doing the, I call it the fairy dust marketing plan. Where you do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and you hope the best.
Or you might, at best you create things in aggregate. But what I want to know is, this is a business model. If I’m spending money, what am I getting back in return? When I teach business model Canvas now, my analogy is, you wouldn’t go to the bank and go to the, back when we actually went to the bank, went to the teller, you wouldn’t give them a dollar and they give you 90 cents back. I mean, that’s ludicrous, right? You’d say you’re insane. But you’d be surprised how many business models are doing exactly that.
where they’re putting money into a machine and it’s actually bringing back less. Not even getting one to one, right? Yes, yes. Well, and you’ll hear these terms if you watch like the Shark Tank, they’ll ask them what’s your cost of customer acquisition.
Sean Jordan (46:20.623)
You are describing the tech industry,
Sean Jordan (46:29.199)
Mm-hmm.
Ed Lahue (46:32.718)
You know, so if you only gonna sell them one and it cost you more than the margin to sell one, that’s not a good deal, right? So that’s not a good now if I’m gonna sell them three and I break you on the first one and I sell them two more I rather have you do like kind of the inkjet printer model, which is I give away the printer and then I I get lots of refills, know, I sell refills and We also talk about licensing and things like that where it’s like yeah, you’re not gonna make any money on the gizmos
but you actually could create a service model that says, I need a scientist show up to our lab and I want to use that scientist brain for three hours and I can charge quite a bit for that. But the gizmo that we’re selling them is just a break even, maybe. I’m using that as a generic example.
Sean Jordan (47:27.097)
Well, you know, it’s so interesting what you’re talking about with health care because, you know, I teach marketing strategy at SIUE now. So you’re alma mater and I’m at the graduate level. we probably because of the textbook we’re using, which was written by Philip Kotler and Alexander Chernev and a few other luminaries in the field. But they talk about the GSTIC plan, which is Goals, Strategies, Tactics, Implementation and Controls. And I know there’s various versions of that plan that have been around.
Ed Lahue (47:44.05)
huh, yeah.
Ed Lahue (47:52.654)
Yeah.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Sean Jordan (47:55.983)
throughout, you know, throughout time. But we, we’re trying to train at least at business school level, these students to think that way. And the reason why is because they come into the class and they think, we’re just going to work on advertising. You know, we’re just going to work on writing communications briefs and executing some creative content. And we get to that in like the last week after we taught them all the other things. So I think one of the things that I’m really taking away from our conversation is just the need to approach these things strategically, because you’re right.
Ed Lahue (48:07.512)
Exactly.
Ed Lahue (48:11.108)
you
Yes, yes. Yeah.
Sean Jordan (48:25.219)
things that are fun are definitely appealing to those that want to go into the field. But if you don’t have an underlying strategy behind it, then it is, as you said, fairy dust, you know, where you’re just sprinkling it around and hoping that it’s going to turn into something magical. But most often, it’s not. It’s just going to dissipate and vanish. And that’s that. Well,
Ed Lahue (48:43.376)
Because there’s so much noise out there, right? And we used to test this with advertising and the package goods. It takes a lot of money. I mean, for that to be really effective, it takes a lot more money. And healthcare doesn’t even have the, they don’t have the margins to spend that kind of level. Most of the advertising you see in healthcare today typically is such a low weight in terms of gross rating points. That’s why I’m a big fan of digital, where I can get somebody who is really interested in knee replacements.
or CRM, database marketing where I do either direct mail or email marketing. Because one of the things I learned at Bristol-Meyer Squibb is once you get diagnosed with something or once you become pregnant, all of a sudden I cannot read enough information. But prior to that, I’m like, no. Another great example of healthcare was they wanted me to market trauma.
I’m going to tell a mom, and I had all this mom experience with marketing to pregnant women, and I did kids, and I did, and so I had this, I still remember it like it’s yesterday, I had this person that really wanted us to market trauma. And I said, that’s interesting. I said, the problem is she’s going to say that’s the kid down the street that’s going to get into an accident with their. So what we did, we actually created a public service announcement. So nothing bad.
happens but the possibility of something bad happened was in her mind. So it played to that idea she could still have her worry ball right, the worry ball. So how the public service announcement went was the kids are going off to do four-wheeling and she sees they missed their, they left their helmets on the counter.
and she’s imagining them tumbling upside down and all this, right? We have to show that. So it’s kind of dramatic. But then at the end, the kids come back and grab the helmet. And it’s just sponsored by St. Mary’s. was, know, so that was my way of dealing with trauma, wanted to advertise trauma. I’m like, well, we could really advertise the brand. We’re here for you if something bad happens, but it’s not things kind of bad happen to you. But that’s not, they didn’t understand that. They didn’t understand those insights that the consumer is like not going to
Ed Lahue (51:00.498)
believe this. It’s like, no, it’s not me. I’ll never get cancer. So don’t tell me about cancer until I’ve been diagnosed. So I’d rather know I’d rather have you. I want the primary care doctor or the oncologist to know about those things so that when you do get diagnosed, now you’re like, oh, I need to understand this. Right. It’s important for me to understand it. But prior to being diagnosed with cancer, that’s probably the extreme example of that.
I’m not so so general advertising for things like that are just a big waste of money because it’s like, you know, it’s kind of the, you know, was it? No, no, no, no. I’m not going to listen. That’s really what’s happening. But that happens even in even in general advertising for consumer products. I’m constantly evaluating and drive my wife crazy. So, you know, we get we stream almost everything. But even the streaming now has all these ads. And I’m like, you know, you see the same ad like four times, right?
And I’m going, okay, after the fourth time I saw this, I’m still not getting it. And if I can’t get it and I’m a marketer, there’s no way the general public is gonna understand this. And then sometimes she might get it and she was like, oh yeah, well you didn’t see the kid at the beginning and then it’s like, whoa, that’s way too much of a mental leap for the average consumer. those kind of things.
Sean Jordan (52:13.167)
You know, I’ve been getting one lately where it’s for a cold remedy, which you know, those don’t ever work. And then there’s another one from the ad council about tell your kids about fake pills. So it’s like I get both of these all the time. And I’m like, those two things shouldn’t be running together, let alone being shown to me 50 times a day. So I love it. Well, I wanted to, in the time we have left, talk a little bit about your last few years where you have worked in Small Business Development Center consulting with clients. And I know you had hundreds of
Ed Lahue (52:32.624)
Yeah
Ed Lahue (52:40.484)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sean Jordan (52:43.567)
And then you’re also doing something really interesting at Washington University here in St. Louis now. So let’s talk a little bit about the Small Business Development Center for a moment. So you took all this knowledge and expertise and experience and you channeled this into making the last few years of your career, helping other people, which I have to say, I admire like you wouldn’t believe. That’s one of the things that I have always said, Ed LeHue, like he really walks the walk and talks the talk, right? But you helped people. And I mean, we even came to you and you referred us to someone at one point. So
Ed Lahue (53:00.388)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (53:13.177)
Tell me a little bit about how you wound up in that and what are some of the things that you got to do in that space as a small business development counselor?
Ed Lahue (53:18.404)
What?
I was a volunteer over at Wash U and a guy over there knew the state director at the Missouri Small Business Development Center. And if you’re not familiar with that, it’s a group of universities typically and some are going to be like your local chamber of commerce or economic development center. most of those organizations are in a cooperative agreement with the Small Business Administration. And part of that is forms the Missouri Small Business Development Center. So every state has one. Most states are usually tied to university.
So in this case, you I was actually a part of University of Missouri out of Columbia, even though I was located here in St. Louis. and so the gentleman that I knew at Wash U said, hey, they need a tech counselor. And I’m like, well, I’m not really a tech guy, but I’ve spent my entire career working on new product development and marketing, hanging out with, you know, did chemists with laundry detergent, food scientists. Then me Johnson, was, you we had a lady that was expert in lipid.
Sean Jordan (54:05.519)
you
Ed Lahue (54:19.25)
and all these scientists and engineers. So I always remind my clients, I said, I have one year of high school chemistry, so talk slow when it comes to the science side. And frankly, I don’t really care about the science or the technology, you’re gonna figure all that out. I’m gonna help you figure out what’s the business model. And I think it’s, finally convinced it’s human nature. Human nature says, I’m gonna go work on the prototype and I wanna go work on product research with the prototype.
And you skipped three major steps before you get there. So a lot of what I taught them was how do we go out and figure out what we call customer discovery.
And it’s, it’s, we primarily taught, business model canvas. There’s, there’s other ones called lean model canvas, but they all really evolved around the same idea. Very similar to how I did in product development. always ask myself four questions. What’s the problem we’re solving? Who’s the customer? How many customers will actually give you cash for this? And what’s, I finally quit saying what’s the value proposition. Cause I found scientists didn’t relate to that, but they could relate to this idea of a chain, behavior change. So I would say.
how you solving the problem better that’s going to carry behavior change because that’s really the hard part.
And I also learned things like, you I would, I had to teach them all these corporatisms like burning platform. You know, does, you know, I see if you’re literally standing on a platform and it’s on fire, you will have to leap from the platform. Right. So what’s the burning platform for your customer, that potential customer, you know, particularly in a B2B scenario. So it could be, you know, I’m going to sell this to this research lab, you know, who’s doing some kind of cell research and I’m going to go out and talk to them. So what’s, what’s really, what keeps
Ed Lahue (56:09.345)
up at night is another way to say it. What is really the problem and could your potential, could your early research, before you start doing prototypes, how could it apply to that problem?
in a very broad sense. So hold off doing product development, hold off doing product research until you really define that problem. And we’re talking, we asked them to interview sometimes as many as 100, 200 people before they start even thinking about prototypes. And then before you do a prototype, I would suggest writing a concept or maybe you’re doing a digital product like an app. You could do a wire frame that kind of describes, then take, those same people that you did customer discovery,
Because in customer discovery we tell them I don’t want you to talk about your prototype So we we teach them really we’re teaching them really how to do market research on a limited budget Because they think they can’t afford to hire, you know great market research firm like yourself, you know yet But so we’re teaching them. So I really enjoyed doing that I did that both one-on-one with about 200 startups and I also taught classes where we had giving people that that introduction and then for them to really learn it they
had to go out and do the actual work. And that would really kind of define the startups pretty quickly. Like how bad do you really want this startup? Because many of them, I think, like the idea of a startup.
know, sort of like, it’s, don’t think I’ve ever been to a restaurant that seemed to turn over all the time. You know, it can’t seem to keep the same owner. Well, those restaurants, if you, usually the volume metrics didn’t work, right? Like the restaurant was this really nice, cute place and they wanted the idea of, they liked the idea of decorating and you know, we’re going to pick out the nice china and the silverware and the tablecloths and all this stuff. But they didn’t really like the grind of running a restaurant, right? And actually marketing, getting people in and they didn’t really get to stop
Sean Jordan (57:42.915)
Mm-hmm.
Ed Lahue (58:06.546)
and figure out the volume metrics and say, so if 90 % of my business is on Friday night, Saturday night, maybe Sunday afternoon, and I only have eight tables, each table is on average is three people, that’s 24 people, if I turn it over three times, like do the math, like sometimes it’s getting them to do the simple math. When I was a volunteer at the SBDC in Indiana, I used to get a lot of people that wanted to, you know, I’m gonna quit my job at Toyota or wherever some factory job.
and they got paid well, I’d remind them, hey, when you’re sick, doesn’t Toyota still pay you? Well, if you start up, you’re the business, right? And so I used to have them do the back of the envelope business model and then say, okay, let’s just use, like for retail, I would tell them, just let’s use traffic flow. So if this many cars, can actually, there’s databases that tell me how many cars go by that location.
Sean Jordan (58:46.22)
You
Ed Lahue (59:05.168)
So let’s just wild guessing, right? This is just really rough luck. If 10 % of them come into your store and you have an average ring of $5, let’s say it’s a coffee shop or something like that, it be anything like that.
or if it’s an ice cream shop or whatever. Okay, and then just do the math. How much is that per year? Now I want you to calculate what’s it gonna cost for rent? What’s it gonna cost for insurance, lights, all the overhead? And guess what? By the time they were done, how much do you make at Toyota? You’re making what, $40,000? And this is back, now they make more than that.
Sean Jordan (59:41.303)
Right. Back when that meant something.
Ed Lahue (59:43.888)
And I was like, okay, so if you’re highly successful, right, you’re one of the 10 % that actually make this work. You will break even about, looks like about year two and your take home pay is about 40,000. And that’s only 10 % of the people that actually are successful. Because retail like 90 % fail.
Sean Jordan (01:00:05.433)
Right, yeah, if you make it in at up 10%.
Ed Lahue (01:00:08.368)
So really when it comes down to all these jobs I had, even my sales job, right? So I’m still doing volumetric. I’m going into the store and saying, well, you
Yeah, you can handle 50 case display, but this store is a five case display, you know, and, and, understanding the customer who’s, okay. Well, I couldn’t sell armor chili and Litchfield if my life depended on it. Cause guess what’s made there raised chili, chili, man, chili. Okay. So the, why put the effort in that? I’ll sell something else. Right. So, I mean, even so some of this seems like common sense, but I was shocked when I had a new product that was launched before I got there.
Sean Jordan (01:00:36.783)
Mm-hmm.
Ed Lahue (01:00:50.775)
And the market research firm had did this report, it’s about that thick. And in the intro, in the executive summary, in bold letters, it says, we recommend you do not launch this product.
But the product was launched anyway. So even big companies do some of these silly things when they defy, no, we’ll do it better. We’ll do it better than, yeah, we don’t believe that market research. I’m like, well, then why did you spend money on it? That used to drive me crazy too. So my point of the story here is all these jobs really come down to, is there a business model? Who’s the customer? What’s driving that customer? And what’s your objective?
And then is it measurable? Can you measure that objective? And we mean the objective or not? And if we’re not, then we try something else. In healthcare, it was a little bit more like flying the plane while you’re building it. So I was fine with that. So I would have certain things going, because I know we got to keep doing something. But then while I’m doing that, I’m measuring it. And then I’m going to say, you know what? We did this for a year and we didn’t get one customer. And we’re going to stop doing that. But at least we knew.
Sean Jordan (01:01:43.759)
you
Ed Lahue (01:02:00.962)
But with with the Fuzzy front end it’s a little bit more like I always tell my latest analogy It’s kind like making jello, but you have no container
You know, and so it’s literally going, it’s going all over the counter, onto the floor. And so, but you have to be comfortable with that. So I had to get scientists and engineers get comfortable with that. But I said, you know what? It’s no different than when you’re in the lab, right? You’re creating a hypothesis in the lab. You’re doing science experiments and you’re either confirming that hypothesis or you’re changing that hypothesis. We’re going to do the same thing with customer discovery. So once I kind of explained to that, probably 95 % of them bought in and said,
yeah I’m gonna go out now had to get them over the fact you know the fear of actually going to talk to people you know Steve Blank and all these other people always talk about get out of the building right Steve Jobs was quoted saying that too you know building you can’t just live in your own little world so that was one of the things that I still teach that today with WashU
Sean Jordan (01:02:44.525)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (01:02:51.545)
Right.
Sean Jordan (01:02:57.891)
Well, in.
Sean Jordan (01:03:02.231)
Yeah. And, one of the things that makes it or breaks a small business is understanding who their customers are. Because when you’re starting out, when you’re in that early phase of the product marketing cycle, you need to know who your early adopters are going to be, who your innovators are going to be, or else you’re not going to go any further than that. And a lot of times I think the, especially engineers, because I have some engineers in my family, so I know this world well.
Ed Lahue (01:03:15.086)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sean Jordan (01:03:28.291)
But they’re so focused on the problem that they think needs to be solved that they don’t go and ask anybody if that problem is actually something they’re willing to pay to have solved. And you brought up the moms earlier who don’t want their worry ball to go all the way down. They want to be able to hold onto some of that worry because they have to. That’s part of their job. the same is true a lot of times with these needs that we can fill through engineering or through product design. But does anybody want to pay for that? Does anybody actually care enough to put their money on the line? A lot of times the answer is no. And that’s why products fail so often.
Ed Lahue (01:03:35.842)
Exactly. Exactly.
Ed Lahue (01:03:53.89)
Exactly.
Ed Lahue (01:03:57.87)
Yep. Well, the rule of thumb that we use at Bristol Mines Squibb was we only launched 0.5 % of our seed ideas. So we had a stage gate process. So in discovery, 200 seed ideas. Only four to five of those would go early development. Two would late development. One would launch.
Sean Jordan (01:04:15.716)
Wow.
Ed Lahue (01:04:16.27)
And so a tech startup is trying to take this one idea and run, I call that run to the goal line. So instead of a funnel, and I said, don’t fall in love. So the theme that I teach in all my small businesses, don’t fall in love with your potential solution, because it’s probably wrong.
Sean Jordan (01:04:22.424)
Right.
Ed Lahue (01:04:34.32)
You know, I said 99.9 % of the time it’s wrong. You will pivot three times minimum. If you’re doing it right with the research, you will pivot three times because you’ll find out, oh, well, that really wasn’t the exact problem I thought my hypothesis. was off by just one. I mean, sometimes it could just be a little bit, right? But that little bit can make a huge difference. Or like you said, we talked about I won’t pay for the gizmo, but I’ll pay for an expert to come in and, you know,
help me make a difference with the gizmo. So that’s where the servicing and those other things come into play. So it’s really don’t hold on to this. Many of them, that’s why Steve Blank calls it death by demo. So we don’t wanna start demoing things. That’s what a lot of them wanna do. Let me show you my demo. Like, no, I don’t really care about the demo because your demo is probably wrong. Cause you haven’t done enough customer discovery to even know what you’re working on.
Sean Jordan (01:05:07.193)
So true.
Ed Lahue (01:05:32.895)
We’ll have coders that’ll spend hours and hours coding. And I’m like, yeah, but what are you coding for? What are you, you know, what’s the problem that you’re really solving? And like, well, no, I thought this is this really cool thing. But no, you need to stop. Please stop. You know, it’s like, we have many people that want to pursue grants. And I’ll say that’s great. But even the grants are going to want to know what your business model, know, the SBIR, Small Business Innovation Research grants, they’re going to want to know that. I had one guy that even
and said, I just need some money for some molds so I can go out and sell some more. I’m like, you’re selling, you might be selling the wrong thing. And he was, he actually was selling the wrong thing. And he was never gonna, I he’d been doing this for probably eight, nine years. And he’s still, it’s like a hobby, really, is what it turns out to be. So.
Sean Jordan (01:06:20.459)
Absolutely. Well, this has been such a wonderful conversation and I always enjoy talking to you learning from you. And even though we talked about some things that I was familiar with, I’m sure to a lot of our audience, there’ll be things that are brand new. And I even learned some of the things today that I didn’t know. So that’s fantastic. But one thing I ask every guest to do at the end of our show is plug something, anything you want. So here’s your chance. What would you like to plug?
Ed Lahue (01:06:35.012)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Ed Lahue (01:06:43.92)
Well, I think it’s probably the Missouri Small Business Development Center. you’re in Missouri, and if you’re not in Missouri, other states have equivalent to this. you got Illinois, in fact, SIU, Edmondsville, have the Illinois SBC. Joanne there runs that great center there. So every state has one. But if you’re in Missouri, it’s taxpayer funded. So most of the services don’t cost anything outright. We never say free. You know, I say no cost taxpayer funded.
always shocked to how very few people know about it. It’s one of those things where you know they don’t it’s hard to have government funding to actually advertise or you know like that so typically it’s more of a word-of-mouth thing. So that’s where you know I was successful because I got I partner a lot with St. Louis University and Washington University, UMSL also to some degree and so that’s where I got all those referrals from. I created my own referral so I think that’s where
you know, that’d my plug would be a small business either thinking about a small business or if you’re existing small business because the vast majority of the counselors actually work with existing businesses. So it’s not it’s not just for you know, I’m talking a lot about startups because that was the thing I worked on. In fact, I got a little bit bored with existing businesses. So I focused and there were other people that didn’t like the startups because they they don’t like that fuzzy front end because it’s not defined. I’m like, oh, that makes it fun for me. So I was that’s why I was
that way. they, so again, they, think 90 % of the counseling is done by existing businesses. They even have a great program through, I can’t remember the, the Kaufman Foundation funds it, where it’s like if you have at least a million dollars in sales, but you’re kind of stuck, can’t, you’re trying to make it to the next level, they offer a whole section just on that. And they bring in other counselors besides the SBC. I think that program’s out of
Springfield, but they do a lot of it virtually so you know you can even don’t have to go to Springfield necessarily. But yeah there’s a big center at UMKC, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Springfield, Sedalia, there’s even smaller regions like up in St. Charles, they have the Economic Development Center.
Ed Lahue (01:09:09.028)
And then we have the St. Louis Partnership here in town.
Colleen does a great job with them out of Clayton and some other offices. So it’s not just University of Missouri is what I’m trying to say. It’s these other organizations that partner with the SBA to help small businesses. So they desperately need the help because many of them kind of got into it because maybe there might have been their family’s business. And they may not have the formal training. So it’s a great way to kind of pick up that. Or they even have the formal training, but they just need an outside
Sean Jordan (01:09:46.841)
Well, I’ve been a client of small business development centers before, both when I was trying to do a startup on my own and then later on here at RPG. And I have to say, I have nothing but the best things to say about the experience. They really help you to think clearly about your problems and so grateful to you for all the years you put in doing that at the end of your career. So thank you. And I know you’re happily in retirement now and doing some occasional teaching, but you’ve been such a wonderful resource.
the entire time I’ve known you, also today here is one of our marketing mentors in the Marketing Gateway. So thank you so much for being here and we will have you back sometime, I’m sure. But thanks for being on today.
Ed Lahue (01:10:23.706)
Yeah. All right. Hey, thanks for having me.
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