A Quick Note On The Million-Dollar Business

The harder the problem is to solve, the more lucrative the solution is for the business.

Successful companies, the companies that are sustainable enterprises that build wealth for their owners, are those that engage and solve difficult issues - like how a company can cost-effectively respond to each of its clients in a uniquely personalized way.

What We Know How To Do

Successful companies are built on unique know-how: the ability to provide services or solve problems in a non-duplicatable, innovative way.

New technologies allow the leveraging of know-how in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago. They also allow the building of collaborative communications teams whose combined know-how can be applied to problems. A company is not limited to relying on local talent but can seek out and connect with talent individuals wherever they are.

So we're going to use new technologies to create a corporation with the breath of a national enterprise and the connectedness and immediate response of a local firm.

Building The Company Around Know-How, Not Knowledge

As I work on building this company, I think one of the problems I discovered that I needed to solve to establish that this company has a chance to succeed is the difference between knowledge and Know-how.

It seems to me that many companies in the 20th century were built on the limited availability of knowledge. Large companies compiled vast amounts of tangible knowledge in paper files and intangible knowledge in personal and corporate relationships, and few companies could compete with these collective knowledge bases. Good examples were the catalogue retailers (Sears) and car companies (General Motors) which had databases of tens of millions of clients, tens of thousands of dealerships, and long-standing relationships that could be leveraged whenever a company wanted to introduce new products.

The widespread proliferation of info databases and the development of technology to create, manage and interpret the info in those databases destroyed the competitive advantage of large companies. Now anyone with a computer, a database software program like Microsoft Access, and some knowledge of writing business rules could create an application that captured, analyzed and reproduced information in any number of forms: analytical reports, mailing lists, form letters, and more. And knowledge - for example, the number of used cars in the marketplace - could be aggregated and presented in an easy-to-use format.

The Internet obliterated the final barriers to obtaining and analyzing competitive info. Knowledge was now publishable at any time and everywhere at once to anyone and by anyone who had a computer and a website and a backend database; search engine technology allows us to type in a few keywords and bring to our desktop vast amounts of knowledge on any subject of our choosing. Knowledge has now become essentially free, and so the differentiating factors in business success are not the knowledge your company creates and aggregates, but what you can do with it.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the dot-com technocrats didn't see that the rapid proliferation of knowledge and its availability to everyone would eliminate knowledge as a competitive advantage. Many of them concentrated on the creation of tools and the aggregation of knowledge instead of the application of knowledge in solving problems for clients and providing value added services.

I don't want to make that mistake. There are more than enough tools and a core knowledge supply that is almost limitless. The question now: how to leverage the tools and apply the knowledge in unique and profitable ways. That's what I'm working on. That's the only competitive advantage I see that can ensure the success and survival of this enterprise.

Life Creates Unfortunate Tragedies And Inevitable Opportunities

Right now, if you own a construction company in New York or even a dump truck, you are making more money than you've ever made in your life...because your skills and resources are more needed now than ever before. If your expertise is disaster cleanup, you are making a fortune. There was a report on the news of one company that was given a $10 million contract just to clean up all the apartments in buildings surrounding the World Trade Center that had been filled with the ash cascading from the collapsed buildings.

The cost of this terrible tragedy in terms of human life has been incalculable, after all, what price can you put on a life? But in purely economic terms, the cost of rebuilding the World Trade Center towers has been estimated at $100 billion dollars. Here's something I realized: as much money as has been donated and will be spent to help the innocent victims of this tragedy (an estimated $ 1 billion), there will be hundreds of times that much money spent to rebuild the city and re-establish the more than 14,000 businesses in the WTC that were totally and partially destroyed.

While this tragedy has destroyed many businesses (14,000 at last count), whether we want to acknowledge it or not, it will also be the foundation upon which many new businesses and fortunes are built over the next decade. It's a fact of human existence that tragedies - as hard to deal with and as sad as they are - catalyze opportunities as well. Earthquakes and fires caused the rebuilding of cities like San Francisco, Chicago and even New York into the great metropolises they are.

So in my planning to establish this million dollar business, I have learned that if the products and services that I offer satisfy or service or fulfill a basic human need or want for the moment or long term, whether out of the normal circumstances of living or because of a short-term or long term situation, my business will have a better chance for long-term survival. I can't plan for those special circumstances, but I can be ready and in position to respond to them when they happen.

Daily Posts: Planning The Million Dollar Business

I've always contended that a dream without a plan is just a fantasy. For me, as I suspect for many other people, the problem has always been that we think we are planning something when we are actually just winging it.

How success is achieved seems to me to be a mystery to most of us, even those who have achieved great success. We attribute our success to luck, being in the right place at the right time, or other factors that are seemingly random, serendipitous and out of our control. And even though we go through a process of developing and implementing a plan, no less a prestigious magazine than Forbes Magazine says that in the end, it's really just all about dumb luck.

I don't believe that. I believe you can analyze situations and circumstances in your life as well as your own skills and talents and devise a strategy to profit from them. I believe that while you can't control the events in the world surrounding your life, you can control your reactions and responses to those events. In fact, I believe that controlling responses to life's events is a critical skill that every successful person possesses, whether they admit it or not.

Daily Posts: Starting The Million Dollar Business

Wow! If you were actually checking out this page and looking for my daily posts on starting a million dollar business you wouldn't have found them, since it has turned out to be harder to post something daily than I would have imagined.

Since the last post on 9/14, I have actually been so busy establishing the business I haven't had time to write about the process. I've also learned a great deal more about the detailed steps one must take to legitimately pursue the establishment of a million dollar business - insights that will add meaning and flavor to these posts.

Making Up For The Ones I've Missed

By my count, since September 17, I've missed 34 daily posts. To catch up, I'm going to shorten the posts I would have made and add some other entrepreneurial insights I hope you will find helpful. I'll be making a few posts a day as I think of ideas and insights I want to share.