Читать книгу Small Business Revolution - Barry C. McCarthy - Страница 26

There's a certain semi-positive aura around working your way up from beginner to expert and having all the scars to show for it. “Hard-earned experience” and “hard-earned money” have kind of an honest feel to them.

You need to get out of that mindset and learn as much as you can from others. One of my favorite quotes is from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, roughly a century ago, who said: “Fools say ‘experience is the best teacher.’ I prefer to learn from other people's experience.”

The last time you went to the bank to make a deposit, I trust that the teller did not say: “Did you earn this money from a painful process of trial and error? You did? Well then, we'll double your deposit.”

Kids learn from falling down and getting up, and we do them no favors by being helicopter parents, always shielding them from whatever. But this book is about your business and how to be resilient in the face of numerous challenges and setbacks. When you're in business, the expense clock is forever ticking, and time is simply too short to make all of the mistakes yourself.

Major Success Tip. Here's where many people get hung up. They think: Hey, I'm willing to learn from others, but the problem is that my business is unique. Those other businesses are not exactly like mine, even when they're in the same industry. I have to find out for myself.

Well, yes and no. Yes, there is no other music studio at 123 Main Street where yours is, so in that sense you're unique. But that does not make 90 percent (or is it 98 percent?) of your challenges any different from what other businesses face. The fact that at some cosmic level you are unique is fine; but how you should post images on Instagram is no different, and how you make your website look appealing should follow certain tested and proven principles.

What successful businesspeople do is look for similarities, not differences. If you're watching the episode in Season 3 about Lovett's, which is famous for selling the best fried pig snoots around, you may conclude that your law practice has nothing to learn from that episode.

The better way to approach it is to be taking notes when the Deluxe team noted that Lovett's had not used all its “designators” or tags that Google allows businesses to be known by. For example, “restaurant” may be a tag, but Lovett's didn't think to add “soul food” as a tag, and that turned out to make a big difference in more people discovering Lovett's.

The takeaway for an attorney should be: I wonder what tag Google has us under? Probably “law firm” but maybe there is an additional one for “personal injury attorney,” “estate planning services,” or “real estate law.”

Ignore all the differences and focus on what you can extract of value from any business you come across. A soul-food restaurant might get an idea from a dog-grooming operation that has an open floor plan where you can see the dogs being groomed. Maybe people would enjoy seeing all those snoots being smoked (maybe not); it's worth thinking about.