Ep 331: 5 Keys to Creating a Great Business

If I had attended college for an MBA, like a Stanford or Harvard, I’m sure my head would explode with incredible knowledge, but 99% of us don’t have the chance to go to college for business. Personally, I don’t think you need it. I think the ecosystems in a few of those schools are great, but I absolutely believe that entrepreneurship can be learned outside of college. And it has been learned. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world dropped out and never went back. Bill Gates never saw a reason to go back to college. Steve Jobs never saw a reason to go back. Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t gone back.

Let me give you a working man or woman’s MBA…

What are the five keys?

Attract Customers in Abundance

Picture a conveyor belt like at an airport and you never took lugguge off of it. It would just come back around every five minutes. That’s what you want to do with customers. You want to create a marketing that it is so effective that it systematically brings you in customers in abundance. If you have customers in abundance that you can sell to, you have more opportunities to miss. To make mistakes. so you want to attract customers in abundance, and. You do that through great marketing end or having a product or service where the marketplace is very interested in what you have. there’s a tremendous demand. So great marketing and demand.

Sell the Product and/or Service for a Price that is Profitable

Small business owners underprice what it is they sell.

I was training two of my partners in the last few days, and one told me how many days it would take to do a job and the price he was giving for it and I told him he was underpricing the job by three days. He responded with, “I didn’t think the customer would pay for that because it was getting past a certain price point”

Well, so we’re going to work for three days for free?

Of course not.

My other partner was using prices that were antiquated. These are high-end skills that we have, we have the one-eyed leprechauns that can do these things and we to charge for it. If you make sales but they’re below what you can make a good living on, hire talented people with, spend on great marketing, put money in reserves, then you’re going to be out of business. This is why 90% of businesses don’t make it to year ten. They could be selling, but they’re not selling at a price that is profitable.

Fulfill Orders In a Timely Fashion

If a cusomter orders a product on Monday and you deliver it like two months from now, they will never order from you again. Your fulfillment schedule needs to be timely, even in your service companies. There is a time period where a customer will get aggravated and lose confidence in you, and so you have to kind of straddle that.

Fulfilling means you give them what they paid for, but I’m adding a little caveat there, that it must be in a timely manner. 

Hire a Great Team

Hire a great team that can assist you in the above. You would hire a team that would help you attract customers in abundance.

When I first started out, I had people within each of my mediums. I had a TV rep that I really trusted, a radio rep that I trusted, somebody at the newspaper that I trusted, and I trusted my judgement of taking what all three of them said.

You need to have a sales team, so they can sell it at a profitable margin. You have a team that can handle fulfillment to deliver your product or service.

Lead Your Team as the Founder

There’s only one founder and typically that person needs to be leading. You can have managers that have great management skills and can oversee people. This doesn’t mean you have to be bombastic.

You don’t have to be a maniac. You can lead in your style, and that’s okay. Somebody’s running the show and you’re the one who had the vision. You can have people help you expand your vision and improve your vision, or maybe give you some critical advice on certain ideas that you have.

I will have a great idea in my head and then I expose it to my team and they beat it into reality, or they tell me I’m a genius, but most of the time they beat it back into reality. They always improve it.