They say you can’t possibly compete with the big boys without a hefty marketing and advertising budget. They say you can’t succeed by building products that do less than your competition’s. They say you can’t make it all up as you go. But that’s exactly what we’ve done.
They say you can’t share your recipes and bare your secrets and still withstand the competition. Wrong again.
The new reality
Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need. You don’t even need an office
You don’t have to work miserable 60/80/100-hour weeks to make it work. 10-40 hours a week is plenty.
Ignore the real world
Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes. What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don’t know what you should do next. Contrast that with learning from your successes. Success gives you real ammunition. When something succeeds, you know what worked–and you can do it again. And the next time, you’ll probably do it even better.
People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all.* Success is the experience that actually counts.
Planning is guessing
Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance. It’s OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.
Plans are inconsistent with improvisation. And you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, “We’re going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense today.”
Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.
this isn’t to say you shouldn’t think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That’s a worthwhile exercise. Just don’t feel you need to write it down or obsess about it.
Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.
You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it’s before you’ve even begun.
Why grow?
Why is that? What is it about growth and business? Why is expansion always the goal? What’s the attraction of big besides ego? (You’ll need a better answer than “economies of scale.”) What’s wrong with finding the right size and staying there?
Don’t be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that’s sustainable and profitable, whether it’s big or small, should be proud.
Don’t make assumptions about how big you should be ahead of time. Grow slow and see what feels right–premature hiring is the death of many companies.
Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid
Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination in itself.
while small businesses wish they were bigger, big businesses dream about being more agile and flexible? And remember, once you get big, it’s really hard to shrink without firing people, damaging morale, and changing the entire way you do business.
Workaholism
Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.
They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.
Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.
Enough with “entrepreneurs”
Let’s retire the term entrepreneur.
GO
Make a dent in the universe
That you’re part of something important. This doesn’t mean you need to find the cure for cancer. It’s just that your efforts need to feel valuable. You want your customers to say, “This makes my life better.” You want to feel that if you stopped doing what you do, people would notice. You should feel an urgency about this too. You don’t have forever.
Scratch your own itch
Start making something
What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan. Think your idea’s that valuable? Then go try to sell it and see what you get for it.
Plus, when you build a company with the intention of being acquired, you emphasize the wrong things
Build half a product, not a half-assed product
Lots of things get better as they get shorter. Directors cut good scenes to make a great movie. Musicians drop good tracks to make a great album. Writers eliminate good pages to make a great book. We cut this book in half
Most of your great ideas won’t seem all that great once you get some perspective, anyway. And if they truly are that fantastic, you can always do them later.
So sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.
So start chopping. Getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good. Start at the epicenter When you start anything new, there are forces pulling you in a variety of directions. There’s the stuff you could do, the stuff you want to do, and the stuff you have to do. The stuff you have to do is where you should begin. Start at the epicenter. For example, if you’re opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary. The way to find the epicenter is to ask yourself this question: “If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?” A hot dog stand isn’t a hot dog stand without the hot dogs. You can take away the onions, the relish, the mustard, etc. Some people may not
Details make the difference. But getting infatuated with details too early leads to disagreement, meetings, and delays.
Ignore the details early on
A Sharpie makes it impossible to drill down that deep. You can only draw shapes, lines, and boxes. That’s good. The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning.
Besides, you often can’t recognize the details that matter most until after you start building. That’s when you see what needs more attention. You feel what’s missing. And that’s when you need to pay attention, not sooner.
Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.
Making the call is making progress
problem comes when you postpone decisions in the hope that a perfect answer will come to you later. It won’t. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.
When you get in that flow of making decision after decision, you build momentum and boost morale. Decisions are progress. Each one you make is a brick in your foundation. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of “Done.”
When you put off decisions, they pile up. And piles end up ignored, dealt with in haste, or thrown out.
Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.”
You want to get into the rhythm of making choices.
An example from our world: For a long time, we avoided creating an affiliate program for our products because the “perfect” solution seemed way too complicated: We’d have to automate payments, mail out checks, figure out foreign tax laws for overseas affiliates, etc. The breakthrough came when we asked, “What can we easily do right now that’s good enough?” The answer: Pay affiliates in credit instead of cash. So that’s what we did.
longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now–while you’ve got the motivation and momentum to do so.
Be a curator
look how the owner of Zingerman’s describes Pasolivo Olive Oil on the company Web site:I tasted this oil for the first time years ago, on a random recommendation and sample. There are plenty of oils that come in nice bottles with very endearing stories to tell–this was no exception–but most simply aren’t that great. By contrast Pasolivo got my attention as soon as I tasted it. It’s powerful, full and fruity. Everything I like in an oil, without any drawbacks. It still stands as one of America’s best oils, on par with the great rustic oils of Tuscany. Strongly recommended.
So constantly look for things to remove, simplify, and streamline. Be a curator. Stick to what’s truly essential. Pare things down until you’re left with only the most important stuff. Then do it again. You can always add stuff back in later if you need to.
You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room. That’s a warehouse.
Instead it makes for crappy food (and creates inventory headaches).
owners think making every dish under the sun will broaden the appeal of the restaurant.
Ramsay’s first step is nearly always to trim the menu
The menus at failing restaurants offer too many dishes.
Throw less at the problem
Focus on what won’t change
Remember, fashion fades away. When you focus on permanent features, you’re in bed with things that never go out of style.
In business, too many people obsess over tools, software tricks, scaling issues, fancy office space, lavish furniture, and other frivolities instead of what really matters.
You also see it in people who want to blog, podcast, or shoot videos for their business but get hung up on which tools to use. The content is what matters. You can spend tons on fancy equipment, but if you’ve got nothing to say … well, you’ve got nothing to say.
you just don’t need the best gear in the world to be good. And you definitely don’t need it to get started.
Our last book, Getting Real, was a by-product.
Sell your by-products
When you make something, you always make something else. You can’t make just one thing. Everything has a by-product. Observant and creative business minds spot these by-products and see opportunities.
Just because you’ve still got a list of things to do doesn’t mean it’s not done. Don’t hold everything else up because of a few leftovers. You can do them later. And doing them later may mean doing them better, too.
Launch now
Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to focus. You suddenly realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t need. And what you do need seems obvious. When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity. It’s the best way to get to that gut instinct that tells you, “We don’t need this.”
Camper, a brand of shoes, opened a store in San Francisco before construction was even finished and called it a Walk in Progress. Customers could draw on the walls of the empty store. Camper displayed shoes on cheap plywood laid over dozens of shoe boxes. The most popular message written by customers on the walls: “Keep the store just the way it is.”*
CHAPTER PRODUCTIVITY
Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction.
Illusions of agreement
Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it.
Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it.
When the team at Alaska Airlines wanted to build a new Airport of the Future, they didn’t rely on blueprints and sketches. They got a warehouse and built mock-ups using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts.
Widely admired furniture craftsman Sam Maloof felt it was impossible to make a working drawing to show all the intricate and fine details that go into a chair or stool. “Many times I do not know how a certain area is to be done until I start working with a chisel, rasp, or whatever tool is needed for that particular job,” he said.+ That’s the path we all should take. Get the chisel out and start making something real. Anything else is just a distraction.