I want to be boring.
Well, I don’t want to be, but I must. As any good entrepreneur should be. What I mean by that is, that you need to learn the basics. Then learn them again. Then again. What is the old saying,” we don’t practice until we get it right, we practice until we can’t get it wrong?” That is what you need to do with the basics of business. We all like to think about the bells and whistles, but those need to be built on strong fundamentals. No point in having a great idea if the bases of the business cannot support its execution.
The fundamentals break down into a few categories. Those are as follows. Your market. Is there a need or want for your product or service? How big is it? How do you reach it? Your brand. How are you different than your competitors or, in many cases, your substitutes? What matters to your customers? Your financials. This is the most commonly overlooked piece yet tends to be the most important. How do you differentiate a hobby from a business? A business needs to make money to support you and be worth your time. And your business model; which includes employees, culture, and the daily running of your business.
I know most of you reading this are looking through these and they seem self-evident. That’s good. But too many people who are starting their businesses, when asked for these ideas, give vague and/or muddled answers. That is not good. You should know these answers inside and out. They should roll off your tongue and be clear and concise. The only way to do this is to practice. I know it sounds silly, but pitch yourself in the mirror. Answer these questions to your friends and family even when they don’t ask. Tell someone who does not know your business. Then have them repeat back to you what they heard. If they can’t reply with answers that satisfy you, the issue is not with them, it is with your pitch. Try it again. Tighten it up. Come at it again.
Think of it like this. Many people play the guitar. Most look to those like Jimmy Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, or Slash and try and emulate them. But for every great, there are thousands if not millions of garage band players. There is nothing wrong with being a garage band guitarist if you enjoy it. It is a great hobby. But as we described above, you are not starting a business to have a hobby, you want to make money. There are thousands of companies that start every year, and most don’t make it. If you treat your business as a hobby, you will be one of those failing businesses. We don’t want that.
That means you need to wow them. Like Stevie Ray Vaughan you need to show them something they haven’t seen before. Something that will pull people away from their current solutions. But understand, every one of the greats above, plays the same notes as the garage band player. They use the same tools. They have the six strings. But they can bring life to the notes that those who are hobbyists can’t.
But before they can do that, before they can make the guitar cry or sing (A little Dire Straights reference) they learned the fundamentals. When you hear them on the radio or see them on stage, that is the icing on the cake. You see an hour or two of them creating something amazing, but what you don’t see is the hours they practice. The days and weeks working on the fundamentals. Practicing the chords. Learning to tune their guitar. Understanding what the pedals do and how to use them. Hendrix didn’t start with the Star Spangled Banner, it was the pinnacle of years of behind-the-scenes hard work, refining, rebuilding, and refining his skills again and again. Then he took a song that we’ve all heard a million times, and wowed us with it.
Your business needs to be the same. You can’t start at the end. You need to start at the beginning. That sounds silly, where else would you start, but it is often overlooked. Folks have the idea of their business but don’t refine, reduce, or rebuild their idea into a concise and actionable plan. You can’t execute a strategy and daily steps around an idea, you need to execute around a plan. That plan needs to be built on strong fundamentals.
That means you need to be able to answer all of the above questions concisely. Start with asking yourself the questions, and this will sound crazy, but answer them honestly even if you don’t like the answers. Especially if you don’t like the answers. It’s better to understand the holes in your plan early, and adjust your solutions accordingly, then to spend time and money, launching a product that has flaws in it’s basic tenets.
Customers will not simply buy your product. They need to understand what you are offering, what problem you are solving for them, and why your product is the solution. Your employees need to understand the key drivers of your product or service, so they can know what they need to do each day, to drive the company forward, and to do it in a way that aligns with your vision and values. You need to be able to understand what actions drive meaningful change. You can’t do that if you only have a vague idea of your offering, how you fit in the market, and what matters to your brand.
Vague ideas and answers, give you vague plans, which leads to ineffective actions. At best, that means you’ll spend more time than needed doing what needs to be done. No entrepreneur has ever said they have too much time. So each step, every movement, needs to be driving the business forward in a meaningful way. At worst, not having your fundamentals down will lead you to launch a solution that doesn’t solve the consumers’ needs or desires. Telling yourself, or having others tell you, the answers you want to hear, may lead you to spend time and energy on a flawed concept.
So start with the basics. What is your product or service? One sentence. Tight. Tell your friends, your neighbors, and strangers walking down the road. OK, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. You need to be able to tell people what it is you sell, quickly and efficiently. Get it down. Then tighten it up, make it shorter, and do it again.
Then, what is your market? Who are your competitors? Yes, you have competitors. You have substitutes. Be honest with yourself, who are they? Review the market, then look at the markets adjacent to your market. See how those could creep into your market. Then be able to explain how you fit in the market, how your offering is better, explain to a customer why they need your product verse all the others. Now do it in three sentences. Then refine until you can do it in two. Then one.
Understand what your brand is. Not just your offering, but your whole business. How does your business model complement your product. How does your business model set you apart from those already in the space? Do your employees know what matters to you and how their actions support that brand? You are always building your brand or diluting it. Every action that you take, or an employee takes, that dilutes your brand, doubly wastes your time. Not only did you spend time on that action, but now you need to take a second action, to undo what you just did. So know your brand, what makes your product, your product, then you can identify what actions will support that. The tighter you can define your brand, the more actionable it will be. Don’t waste your time or your money.
Then understand your financials. What does success for you look like? What does your cash flow, especially your initial cash flow, look like? You need to know this so you can understand what sort of nest egg you need to start this business, then understand how you will pay this back. Understanding your financials will help you understand when you need to hire, when you need to reorder supplies, and just as importantly, knowing when something is not working. You need a plan to know when you are not on plan. If you only have an idea of a plan, it may take a lot longer to know when you are not getting the financial results you want, and you could end up wasting resources.
To dovetail onto this idea of fundamentals, today, instead of talking about a tool, I wanted to talk through a task, a fundamental task. While it seems basic, most people either skip it, or don’t know they need to do it in the first place. The task I’m talking about is cleaning out your dishwasher. It makes basic sense, that in order for your dishwasher to clean your dishes, it needs to be clean itself, but most people skip this maintenance.
Most of us, rinse our dishes at least somewhat before putting them in the dishwasher. But we don’t clean them totally, if we did, then we wouldn’t need to put them in the dishwasher. So every time you do a load of dishes, food stuff and other junk runs off our dishes and into the dishwasher. This over time builds up and if left alone long enough, it can cause clogs and often a smell.
So, how do you do it? Well, first if you have your manual, or by using your brand and model number (for help with finding your model number see https://www.partselect.com/Find-Your-Dishwasher-Model-Number.aspx) find your manual online; directions for cleaning out the washer should be in there. Usually, the food traps are down near the middle of the floor, under the water arm, or spray arms (two names, same spinning part). Often you need to remove a cylindrical filter that you twist and pull out. Clean this filter using soap and water. This fine cylindrical filter usually is surrounded by a course sieve filter that will be released when you remove the fine filter, so pull that and clean it as well. Carefully reach in to the now exposed crevasse and pull out any larger pieces before putting it back. I say to be careful because if you’ve had any broken glass in your dishwasher, it could be trapped down there and you don’t want to cut yourself. Then replace the filters by putting the course filter in place then reinserting and twisting the opposite way. Here is a good general example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck3RtAhtuZk.
Not a flashy home how-to, not a flashy entrepreneurial topic either but both need to be done. Both should also be done regularly. The basics of your business are not something you do once and move on. Every six months or a year, come back and review to see if you need to change your answers as your business has evolved.