Herman School of Business
Do what you know
In a Biography of Jodie Foster she speaks of being at the top her profession and starting a movie company called EGG PRODUCTIONS. She and her partner declared they would make comedies, cartoons, drama, action thrillers and kid pictures as she had ascended to the pinnacle and didn’t need permission from others to make a certain kind of movie. After wasting a great deal of time, and for sure some money, she came to a conclusion you can come to for free. Stick to what you know.
Or else you better be a fast learner. Because running any size enterprise requires a “big picture” view to guide that ship through troubled waters and unless you are extremely lucky, you will hit the rocks before you learn how to navigate properly.
Let your next business move be dictated by where you have been. Staying within a field you know narrows the learning curve…and affords you more time to make progress. The old phrase of building a better mouse trap has more meaning if you are familiar with building any mousetraps. Let’s expand that phrase to building a better whatever you already know how to make. Whatever your chosen field of interest, what can you do to make it better than others are now doing it? One of my readers is in the nursing profession, and she has inside of her the seeds of a great idea. And while she explores blogs and books and outside expert help, that tiny seed grows and swells inside her mind. Will it work? Does the world really need what she has to offer? What if she fails to execute her plan properly? Can she afford to leave her lucrative safe money position to challenge herself until her idea catches on and others realize the benefit? Flesh out that idea. I challenge you to write it down…study its merits…and let it take you to a new place.
In a major city in the South there was a guy who sprayed hotels weekly to eliminate bugs. He was great at his job and had locked up all of the hotels. As he showed up weekly to keep those spiffy hotels bug-free he often dreamed of owning his own hotel. He should have stayed with what he knew. After becoming a millionaire doing a job few would covet, he squandered it away building a hotel without any knowledge of how to do that. His investment was a disaster, I know because I sold that incomplete project in a bankruptcy case to hotel investors who had experience, and they reconfigured his mess into a working hotel. But by then his money and his dream was gone. He didn’t stick to what he knew. Why not take his massively successful bug spraying business nationwide and perhaps earn millions more? He chased a dream because he had “enough money to be stupid” and not have others hold him back.
Chasing dreams is how we move to new levels. Grounding those dreams in some form of reality is how we achieve them more successfully.
- Posted: 28 October 2007
- Comments: 0
- Category: Starting a business
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