Читать книгу No B.S. Business Success In The New Economy - Dan S Kennedy - Страница 13

Successful entrepreneurs learn to be much more assertive, proactive, and creative in making decisions to change things as they prefer, to make things happen. If you are to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to break free of your old reacting and responding mode and switch to the assertive, proactive mode. You have to reject the entire idea of limited choices.

As an entrepreneur you need to reject every single piece of programming you’ve ever received about limited options or prerequisites for exercising certain options. Limitations, rules, industry norms—these are for other people, but not for you. Reject any idea that removes any option from your table.

Just for example, that certain options exist only for people with particular education, licenses, or certifications. Sure, you can’t just up and declare yourself a heart surgeon or airplane pilot. But you can certainly be the CEO, and you can certainly make as much money as you choose.

Here’s a little jolt: one of the highest-paid marketing consultants and coaches working only with restaurant owners who I helped start in business, a man who is paid millions of dollars a year from those owners for his advice, has never worked in, managed, or owned a restaurant. For four years, I had the largest business training company serving dentists and chiropractors, working with over 10,000 doctors, but I am neither a DC nor DDS. The current owner of one of the most successful independent movie studios, who has prospered by bringing comic book characters to the big screen, in partnership with giants like Warner Brothers, did not work as script writer, camera man, grip, film editor, or actor, did not go to film school, did not apprentice in Hollywood before starting his movie production company. He owned a chain of dry cleaning stores. He liked comic books. And he proved adept at raising money from investors. The man who created one of the world’s largest ad agencies from scratch was a door-to-door salesman and a short order cook. Traditional qualifications matter if entering and trying to climb a ladder controlled by others inside a corporate organization but they do not matter at all in the entrepreneurial arena. Not at all. Only what you decide and do matters.

This is a very disconcerting thought for people who have gone to great pains to secure academic or other credentials, i.e. the approval of others, or to build resumes. These people hate hearing this, resent it, resist it. Still, the marketplace is unimpressed by anything but the doing.

You also need to reject limiting definitions. Single-function businesses are dinosaurs, with rare, notable, and generally unsustainable examples. Yes, there is such a thing as a gourmet cupcake bakery that makes and sells nothing but ungodly priced cupcakes—which reminds me of an old John Belushi skit from Saturday Night Live about the Scotch tape store, into which customers kept coming asking for paper clips or pens. The cupcake store exists. Let’s see how it’s doing in five or ten years. It won’t be there as is at all. It’s a fad, like the pet rock.

The most successful “restaurant owner” that I know does not think of herself or define herself that way, although it is true that she owns a restaurant. But it is merely “the Bat Cave” for an aggressively marketed private party catering business, a wine school and wine tasting society, an e-commerce business selling her recipes, spices, prepared food items, and party planning “coaching” worldwide. The restaurant itself is open only ten nights a month to the public, about the same to members only, for prix fix dining experiences. How would you define this business?