Advice for Business

[aviet]

Just sent this to a member as a PM, pasting into the forum:

When you can program, you can enter pretty much any market, particularly with content, ads, commissions, but also with your own products. But I'd be very wary with your own products due to saturation and stiff competition. If you are doing products it would be best to go for a new or growing market. A friend started selling products online in about 2007. At this point it was really easy to game pretty much anything to the top of Google and he did £1m in sales one year. But then Google made some changes and now heavily prefers big brands. I ran the deliveries for a week as it came to an end, by which time it would be about £35k/year revenue. Retail is certainly one to avoid.

If you can't program, for a long time I've thought its best to go into an area that most people would never know existed and if they did would be instantly bored. For example, I used to own a company with another guy who ran a skip hire brokerage. This is a UK term. I think the US term is dumpster. This is when a truck brings in a skip/dumpster/big bin for you to put rubbish in and then take it away. He just amassed knowledge of the best companies and brokered skips via nationwide advertising.Taking a few £ off each one. Company was worth about $40m. All it is is a call center, adverts and an accounting department; and the backbone of the company is a 1-5 star rated database of a few hundred skip hire companies. A 15kb database that is literally worth millions a year. If the databases was to disappear, he'd loose serious revenue for a while. And most people are too disinterested in anything like this to ever discover such opportunities, realise it and execute it. They're too interested in becoming an artist, a musician, a professional demonstrator, or something else we have far too much of.

Another example I heard on Joe Rogan. Some guy who is got rich from making burger patte machines. That's it. Who would ever know such a thing existed? There's all manner of industrial-type opportunities with very little competition. One of my parents' friends sold a company for about $25m. All it did was cut grass and hedges. I have a friend who is working on software to automate work/logistics rotas. Says there is big money there. My dad's cousin made a lot from making and installing cattle grids all over Wales. Spent most of his time in Barbados, where he drank himself to death. This is the niche sort of thing you want to get into, that practically no one else will ever encounter. You don't even have to be that smart. A 100 IQ person could run most of these businesses and be in the top 1%. Most people go for the same old ideas: open a shop, open a restaurant, open a hotel, become a lawyer, become an accountant, become a teacher, become a vet. Too formulaic, in most cases, if you want to hit the top 1%.

You need to sniff out an opportunity. Then investigate whether you can pull it off. Then persist. When I started out on my current line of work, I was working 14 hours a day and the little money I got was spent on hiring someone in Serbia to help. Sacrifices have to be made.

That leads back to the former. There are huge opportunities in countries like Serbia, Bulgaria. These are countries that people are flocking out of because of the lack of opportunity there, i.e. its a country brimming with people who can't make opportunities and markets, i.e. it's super low competition and cheap. Avg. wage is about $3,500 year. But the real opportunity is to base yourself there and target developed markets. I'd like to go down this route in the future.

The real creme opportunity would be one in which the barrier to entry is too high to make anyone want to / be able to get in the market with you. Where you are leveraging skills, knowledge, assets that others can't assemble. This is the case in my market, where all the competition are in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Their knowledge and skills are so outdated and there is essentially no one around with the skills and knowledge to offer any real competition. So I overtook the biggest competitor, which has been around since about 1996 in about 3 years. 

Bottom line: look where everyone else is not looking. Not in London, New York, LA... These are largely dead-ends for zero-price point, childless, assetless husks who are going to leave the gene pool.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

80% of a business is knowing how to run a business. 20% is the actual product you're selling.

 

I had a mobile car detailing business for about a year. I was one among a million of them, and I was more expensive than most. I repeatedly was told by customers that they chose me because: my ad was clear, I called back, I sounded professional over the phone, and I showed up on time.

 

You don't always have to be innovative. Sometimes solid is enough.