James Pursey
Fish on Toast (www.fishontoast.com) is Southampton’s entrepreneurial society, currently filming a reality TV show where first prize is to serve as a paid apprentice for Doug Richard here at School for Startups. It’s a great show where a select crew of hard working students gets assigned business problems to solve and they compete to find the best answer.
In a recent episode the assigned task was to sell raffle tickets, and I think it illustrates one of the most important concepts new business owners can master
Look for the Easy Answer
The big secret about business is that it isn’t hard. The students in this exercise tried all kinds of things to sell raffle tickets, but the quickest solution turned out to be getting Dominoes to supply free pizza and selling a slice along with a free raffle ticket for 50p.
Since the exercise was run during lunch, that worked extremely well. Usually pizza by the slice costs more and you don’t get a free raffle ticket that might win you a brand new suit in the bargain. The students also gave away donuts and candy as well . . . but pizza was the magic answer.
Other stuff they did, which included a colorful character on stilts and brightly colored tables as well as chasing reluctant buyers down, was far more creative, far more complicated and far less effective. Or so it seemed from the TV show . . .
Generally speaking if what you are doing is complex, confusing, convoluted and difficult to explain, you are working way too hard to earn a pound. Good business is usually pretty straightforward and it’s usually based on giving people something you know they want and getting from them the thing that you want.
In school we teachers tell students to look beyond the obvious, avoid the easy answers and pay attention to the details . . . but the best advice to entrepreneurs just starting out is look for the obvious and easy solution that meets the needs of you and your customers most quickly and don’t sweat the small stuff. The last thing on earth you want to do is to outsmart yourself or your customers. So keep it simple . . .
Another great lesson from this episode was “Just Do It”. These young entrepreneurs showed, up, got the assignment, went to work. That’s what you do when you’re starting a business. Doug’s 20 Questions are designed to help you define a business quickly, and to help you refine it over time. You start with what your customers want in a product, take into account the realities of the industry you’re working in and the competition you face, and you build on the strengths of your team . . . and then you get to work.
Because the truth is, most of the data you need to have in order to run a good business can only be gained by starting to run one.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?