- Living Without Air: Ship Early, Ship Little, Ship Fast
- Practical Q&A With Doug Richard — Cambridge Starting & Growing a Successful Business Class
- Choosing a Social Enterprise Legal Structure: CLS, CLG, CIC or Cooperative
- An Entrepreneur’s Quick Guide to Closing Online Sales
- Starting a Business: The 3 Things I Really Believe
Friday 26th February 2010, 8:27am
Simple Objectives, Simple Strategies, Simple Success
Nancy Fulton Mazur, Editor of School for Startups
I think one of the reasons I’ve always found businesses easier to start and grow than most people, is that I have such simple objectives. I like spending money for stuff I want and on people I like. To do that I need income. Therefore, within broad parameters, I like businesses that make the numbers in my bank accounts go up more quickly rather than less quickly. I do not like to own businesses that make the numbers go down.
Those who know my preference for investing in startups understand that I do so because startups are the best way to make little numbers turn into big numbers fast. In under a decade Google went from a few guys in a dorm room to the backbone of worldwide internet commerce. That is my kind of business.
The Challenge That Faces Innovators & Inventors
Because I invest in startups, I often work with those who imagine the details of a better world. Often their business ideas are about far more than making figures on some ledger spiral up. In fact, I would call the best of them visionaries, philanthropists and idealists.
They are all about clean water, safe kids, new ways to socialize and entertain, new solutions for transportation, energy and food production. I admire these people, and I enjoy working with them. I enjoy seeing the world through their eyes.
But when it comes to business, I must say that having an objective that is not based on simply increasing profit as quickly as possible often slows or stalls a business’s financial success.
People with a “plan to change the world” often get rather stubborn about how they want things to happen. They frequently want to make people like their product, as they envision it, as they produce and distribute it, and as they price it.
That is a somewhat take it or leave it mentality, and the market punishes it brutally.
I can be helpful to these professionals, when I am helpful to them, by finding good ways for them to listen to, communicate with, and respond to the market more effectively. Implementing a few simple strategies that streamline these important communication operations does a new business a world of good. With the right data coming in, innovators and inventors can often figure out how to achieve their basic humanitarian or technological objectives while making a tidy profit.
If You Want a Successful Business . . .
If you are just starting your business, or you have a business that is struggling, think hard about your objectives.
Personal objectives like “increase my profits”, “support my children” and ” pay my bills” are easy to reach. Non-personal objectives like “I want to help people find jobs” or “I want to help people care for their children” also work.
Objectives like “get rich quick from selling a super specialized widget that no one but me is smart enough to understand” is a non starter. “Become massively wealthy by making people buy this thing they repeatedly tell me they don’t want” also does not work well. The market does not like complex self-centric objectives.
Let’s look at Google again.
They had one simple objective. “Let’s make a database that lists all the websites on the internet.” All the other things they do now are things their customers asked them to do.
Simple objectives, simple strategies, simple success. That is what good startups are based on.
Are you starting a business? Do you have a business that’s struggling?
School for Startups delivers practical, pragmatic, instruction in how to launch and grow more successful enterprises. I hope you decide to attend one of our upcoming courses or online events. We look forward to helping you succeed.
Tags: doug richard, entrepreneuers, focus in startups, frustration, goals, help, objectives, starting a business, success
One Comment on “Simple Objectives, Simple Strategies, Simple Success”