BootCamp

Meet today’s critical challenges

Bring your team up to speed on a critical issue fast, and drive creative thinking on what to do about it. Boot Camps are interactive half-day working sessions, led by Rubicon’s principals, on critical issues facing tech companies. We’ll teach your team what’s happening, the opportunities and pitfalls, and best practices in the industry. And we’ll lead them through brainstorming on exactly what you can do about it. It’s a great way to drive alignment, set plans, and challenge conventional thinking.

2007 Boot Camp topics:

• Moving from the enterprise market into SMB. Faced with flattening growth, many enterprise tech companies need to expand into small and medium business. It seems straightforward, but SMB actually requires significant changes to most of your business practices, including channels, support, marketing, and sales. If you just jump in, you’ll probably fall flat on your face. Fortunately, changes in industry structure are making it easier to succeed in the transition. We’ll teach you what to watch out for, and the best practices of companies that get it right. And we’ll help you think through what you need to do in order to be successful.
• How traditional software firms can compete with Web 2.0. Online apps challenge everything a traditional software company does — including development model, business practices, marketing, and support. Web apps companies talk confidently about destroying 80% of the revenue in a market in order to grab the remaining 20%. How do you avoid becoming their roadkill and take advantage of the new opportunities — without cannibalizing your own core business? We’ll guide you through the possibilities and pitfalls, and help you apply the lessons to your own situation. Hint: the answer’s not posting your app online and selling ads.
• Mobile market essentials for non-mobile companies. The mobile market is seductive — billions of consumers with time on their hands and a hunger for your apps or services. But the reality is that most new mobile data products fail, because the companies making them assume they can just take what they’re doing today and adapt it to mobile. That’s approach is about as successful as Lotus was at “adapting” 1-2-3 to Windows.^* You need to know how the mobile industry is structured, how to deal with carriers and handset companies, what sort of products succeed and fail, and what mobile users do (and don’t) want. We’ll teach you the rules of the road and help you navigate.
  
  ^*If you’re too young to remember that example… be glad, it was ugly.
• Defeating an assault by Microsoft. Microsoft is a $44 billion company that needs to generate $4.4 billion in new revenue every year. This revenue hunger is leading it to assault almost every successful franchise in computing. If you’re one of the targets, you need to understand Microsoft’s motivations, how it’s likely to attack you, what response strategies work best, and the big mistakes you definitely don’t want to make. The good news is that you can successfully defend your business from Microsoft. The challenging news is that you can’t do it through business as usual.
• Online marketing best practices and killer opportunities. Sure, you’ve got a website, but are you really taking advantage of the next-generation marketing opportunities created by the Web? Do you understand how to deploy blogging (both by your employees and working with outside bloggers)? Do you know how to engage with online communities? Can you mobilize your best customers to help you do your marketing and product planning? The Web gives you an opportunity to fundamentally rethink, and dramatically strengthen, your marketing power. We’ll share the best examples from a wide range of industries, and help you think through what you can do, and how you can evolve your value proposition as a result. Remember, if you don’t do it, you’ll be vulnerable to a competitor who does.

Your problem. It happens to every tech company on a regular basis: a critical issue or important new trend emerges, and you need to act on it fast. You need to digest what it means to your company. You need to educate your team, challenge their assumptions, and galvanize new thinking. And you can’t wait six months for that to happen organically.

How we solve it. Rubicon Boot Camp is a half-day working session on a critical business issue that’s challenging the tech industry, led by Rubicon’s principals. We’ll educate you on what’s happening and the opportunities and threats, with real-world examples of best practices. Then we’ll lead an interactive working session on what it means to your team, and what you can do about it. The content is based on our insights, contacts, and extensive experience in the industry, and draws on the examples we’ve seen across the wide range of companies we work with. Boot Camp is a great way to drive alignment, set plans, and challenge conventional thinking.

Who it’s for. Work groups at any level in the organization.

How Boot Camp works. We start with a detailed education session on the situation: what’s happening now, the opportunities and dangers, what other companies are doing about it, and what’s likely to happen next. The information we present is more than a sprinkling of ideas — we go straight to the heart of an issue and give clear background and actionable ideas on what to do. Then we lead an interactive discussion with your team on what it means to your organization, and what you can do. The idea is not just to educate your team, but to be a catalyst for change — we get them thinking out of the box on how to use the information and what they need to do differently.

What they’ve said. Here are some entrepreneurs who have attended Boot Camp:

“The people at Rubicon break through conventional thinking to change your viewpoint - they get you to see your business differently. And they’re so into solving problems and helping you win, they’re not going to let you leave the room without some great ideas.”

— Collette Bunton, VP M&A Planning and Integration, Logitech

“Rubicon has real domain knowledge. They’ve helped us understand how to achieve a strategic goal when the answers weren’t obvious at all. We’re really pleased with the experience.”

— August Grasis, CEO, Handmark

Location. We can conduct Boot Camp sessions at your location or in our offices in Los Gatos, CA.

Logistics. A Boot Camp costs $7,500 for a group of up to 10 people (plus travel expenses if we’re coming to a location outside Silicon Valley). To facilitate active discussion, group sizes are generally limited to 10 people. If you have a larger group, please inquire. Each Boot Camp covers a single topic.

For more information, please fill out the application form below, or call +1 408 395 3910.