3 Unfair Strategies For The Modern-day Entrepreneur
I was once told by a friend of mine that I had a privileged and unfair advantage to becoming so successful in my businesses and life in general. I actually couldn’t disagree more with her on this, except for one thing- I don’t feel I have a truly unfair advantage over anyone else, but maybe I do have an unfair way of looking at business and life!
Here’s what I mean. When you talk to most business people, (including myself), you hear a lot about the things that they have to do. But, if you allowed them the time to slow down and actually explain what they have to do, you might hear something more like something they get to do! Entrepreneurs and business owners never have to do anything. They’re the owners and get to set the level of their own success by what they are willing to put into it. It’s not like a regular job where you have to get things done in order to keep producing productively for the bosses and owners in order to keep getting paid. The independent business owner serves at the privilege of their customers with the greatest appreciation for the business being done. This is the distinction between “get to do things” vs “have to do things.” This shift in workplace dynamics is incredibly significant when you see a person getting to do work for the betterment of their customer’s lives, and a person having to do work for the betterment of the boss’ company. Clearly, the person getting to do work is going to deliver the highest level of value! Having the mindset of getting to do work is far greater an advantage than being born into vast wealth itself, and it’s so effective that it could be considered an unfair advantage.
What about the go-getters of this world? I remember when I first started out in my business, people would comment on my sudden success by saying I was a real go-getter! But I wasn’t really a go-getter at all. I was working to be a go-giver! My employees were the go-getters and were the ones actually doing the real physical work. But as the owner, your time can never be paid for at any wage rate. You are too valuable of an asset to the company and if you broke down your own employee to market wage ratio on yourself, you would see that no one in the world could afford your time! This is why you, the business owner, has to be a go-giver. Your job is twofold- you are head of BD (business development) and you are the chief value deliverer. Delivering on value is where you become the go-giver, and if you do it right, you will see as I do every day, that when you focus on giving and delivering true value that exceeds the customer’s expectations, you will receive far more in actual monetary value than you are delivering. The go-giver is so significant in their work that it could become regulated at some point in time. One example; some companies that create amazing technologies are actually willing to preform services with the new tech they have created at no charge just to be the first to do it! How brutally unfair is that?
Disruptive creativity is not illegal (yet) but there was a time that disruptive ideas to a market were extremely frowned upon. Back in the early to mid-1900’s, when someone would come up with a new technology that looked to help the lifestyles of mankind, it would have to be thoroughly researched to make sure it wouldn’t disrupt a current market flow that took painstaking years to develop. Many patents were suppressed and bought-out with “hush money” by the government so as not to upset the economic, harmonic balance in a post-world war recovery. Today, speed kills! We are trying to work faster and better than anyone one else and the faster we go, the sooner we beat the competition, the more success we experience, and we do it without regard who we run over to get there! That’s just how business works and we can’t let our feelings get in the way because money just doesn’t care about your feelings! In relatively a blink of an eye, Amazon, Facebook, Google and many, many others have removed trillions of dollars out of a traditional retail market ebb that took many, many years of hard work and infrastructure to develop. (Notice I said removed trillions of dollars and not stolen trillions of dollars). In really no time at all and without warning or time to prepare, these creative technologies made e-commerce the staple of the new consumer and left a lot of brick and mortar reeling from the impact. In today’s modern business world, disruption and technologies that upset a market are now called innovations and receive the attention they so richly deserve. Being more creative and more innovative than your competitor is now number one on your business development strategies list! As it stands today, there are no fairness laws or dog-eat-dog regulations controlling how much creativity you put into your startup, and your new ideas are a welcomed contribution to the overall quality of life for your customers.
Please feel free to create and intimidate on a regular basis. Take the initiative. Terrorize your competition with your genius and demonstrate that there is no limit to what you are willing to do to beat them every chance you get. Move faster, more fluid and more vaporously than anyone else and leave them to stew in a hell of their own making as you show them that when left free to be creative and disruptive, there are limitless opportunities at the tips of your mainstream and modern fingertips. Use the creative forces of your brain power to make them hate you, not for who you are, but for how fantastic you are and how unfair it is that the advantages you exercise every day in business are the advantages you have created for yourself.
Daniel J Bockman
