The Not-So-Trivial Pursuit of Success

Ten Things That will Guide You to Success in Business.

Starting a business is hard work. There is so much to consider in the early days, and even now, most of what I know I’ve learned along the way. I had no idea I had to consider it before.

And therein lies the problem – the great separator. You don’t know what you don’t know. I think it was Socrates that said:

“The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing”.

Give that man a cheese wedge.

Entrepreneurs are defined by their actions – the ability to have blind faith and measured risk in one hand, and the determination and tenacity to make it happen in the other. And it doesn’t always happen. The road to success is a path untrodden, and as yet undetermined. Anything can happen, and in business, as in life, it almost certainly will.

With that in mind, here is the sum of my experiences in starting a business. Ten things that will guide you on the path to success, or at least help you avoid from the road to nowhere. There is no one-size-fits-all guide to success, but I believe that, in principle, the same core ingredients are attributable to the success of every entrepreneur.

1: Find something that you’re passionate about

This is the number one attribute for a reason – if you’re not passionate, you cannot be successful. Passion comes in various guises – sometimes it’s product driven – for me, I was passionate about making a difference to the working lives of photographers. I’ve become passionate about tripods in particular because I’ve discovered a penchant for product design, with a head full of ideas to drive me onwards.

It’s not always about the “thing” though. Some people are passionate about making money, and will be successful because they are driven to make money. Contrary to popular belief, “money” isn’t a dirty word. For a lot of people, it’s solid goal.

For others, success isn’t financial – it’s about reward, or achievement. But even in these more altruistic approaches to success, finances play a huge part, if only to fund the job it has created.

I personally believe that the majority of successful people are driven by passion for the “thing”, and it is this passion which ultimately results in financial reward.

2: Be focused and determined

Often confused with passion, determination is about the need to succeed, not the enthusiasm behind the business. It is that spirit and desire to follow a path that makes entrepreneurs successful. Many, many times in my career I’ve hit a road block, and on more than one occasion, something akin to a crisis. It would have been so much easier to walk away, for so many reasons, but my determination to succeed helped me see around the obstacles, often inelegantly, and with mixed results, but results nevertheless.

3: Commitment

You cannot launch a business half-baked. Whimsical ideas and flights of fancy will fail in life as quickly as they flitted ostentatiously through your brain. There is no success without commitment. Commitment is as much about giving it your all to succeed as it is about giving it your all until it can no longer succeed. And sometimes it’s about wearing spandex in a company video just to bumfuzzle the competition. I did that.

Albert Einstein famously declared:

‘Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”.

That’s a slice of pie, right there.

4: Learn to listen

When I first started a business, everyone said I couldn’t do it. “Don’t make tripods” they said, “the market is saturated” they said. And I listened. Not to the negative, but to the alternatives to the negative. It went a bit like this…

• There are too many “me too” tripods in the world
• Unless you can make something that does things a tripod has never done, nobody will be interested
• You don’t have a brand
• There isn’t enough margin in tripods
• There are hundreds of cheap Chinese tripods available

For many people, they would have listened and walked away. Not me. What I heard was:

• Make something different
• Add functionality
• Create a brand people will remember
• Charge what it’s worth
• Make it well

Sometimes the negative opinions are really just another perspective on market intelligence. Telling you what exists is just a way of delineating what doesn’t.

The point is this – you won’t always like what you hear, but if you plough onwards hearing only that which you think pertains to you, you will be unprepared for adversity. Listen to everything and use it to strategize and solve problems before they occur.

5: Never settle for mediocrity

This should be obvious, but I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs who are in such a desperate rush to get their businesses off the ground, or a product to market, that they compromise on the fundamental building blocks of the business itself. I've made this mistake, several times, and it's hard road to recovery.

If you aspire to start a product-based business, let me tell you right now that your first samples will be wrong. They may be “useable” or “OK”, but that’s a trap for the eager. If you launch a product that gets canned in early reviews, there’s no easy way to recover. Do it right, and the extra few months will quickly be worth the patience.

6: Close no doors

This is a bit of a metaphor really. It’s more about opening your mind to every opportunity. You should be constantly asking yourself:

• What if I?
• How could I?
• Why shouldn’t I?
• Is it possible?

Explore every possibility – even the ludicrous, if only to eliminate it as an option. Be methodical, meticulous and dogged in the pursuit of excellence. Mr. Einstein also once said (this is my favourite quote):

“Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Clever bloke, Einstein. Another slice of pie for the German …

 7: Cost it out

I was always a bit of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of entrepreneur, especially in the early days. I had a fundamental lack of understanding of the financial position of my business(es) until I was forced to take on investment when the cash ran dry. Cash running out isn’t always the fault of the business – it’s a common story when a business has a meteoric rise, it grows faster than its cash capability.

With this in mind, do the leg work. My business partner uses the term “no surprises” all the time. He’d rather have bad news that we’d solicited than unexpected news that could make us dizzy. When we’re putting together a new project, we cost everything out. We even throw in extraneous costs and miscellaneous expenditure, along with a contingency for failure. Cost for the hardest path, not the one you think you’ll take. Better to change the plan to suit your budget, than to hit-and-hope, and run out of the cash needed to make it happen. You'll have heard the cliche "plan for the worst, hope for the best." That's sound advice.

8: Have integrity

To me, this is a life rule, not just a business one, but it’s arguably the most important of the points in this article. Being true to yourself, the brand, the service, the concept, the ideals and the way forward cannot be underestimated. People will mirror you in business as they do in life. Selling people a lie is short-sighted. Every entrepreneur in the world knows that the key to success is to keep customers coming back. New customers are only new customers once. Thereafter they become either ex-customers or loyal customers.

That doesn’t mean you have to accept any behaviour from people – there are days when I give customers short shrift because of their attitude or language in emails or on the phone. With integrity comes empathy and compassion. Sometimes people are just having a bad day and need to let it out. As long as you treat people with respect, there’s no shame in being human. We’re not all faceless corporations.

9. Correct your mistakes

You will make mistakes – probably a lot of them. Things will happen that you couldn’t anticipate, and sometimes things will happen that you did anticipate, but hoped wouldn’t.

Making mistakes and putting them right is one of life’s great building blocks. Approached correctly, mistakes can be a great wisdom generator. Channeling your energy and frustration into finding solutions to problems is one of the fastest routes to innovation. After all, most innovators are really solving problems you didn’t know you had.

There’s a propensity in new business owners to repeat a failure over and over before giving up. You should always look for an alternative solution to the problem, and not continue to repeat your mistakes. Sometimes even the wackiest solution turns out to be the one that puts you back in the game. Better to roll the dice than give up without exhausting the solutions available.

It was Batman’s Dad (Mr. Batman to you) that once said “Why do we learn to fall, Bruce? So that we may learn to get back up.” Learning from your mistakes is crucial. To quote Mr. Einstein for a third time;

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

That’s two wedges, right there. Extra points if your name is actually Bruce. Or Mr. Batman.

10. Put a pen and notebook next to your bed

As an entrepreneur in the early stages of a new business (whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur, or a first timer), your brain will have a propensity to be over-active, and ideas will come to you when you least expect them. I learned this during my time as a stand-up comedian – my brain would come up with killer gags or routines whilst I was drifting off to sleep, and the next morning they had vanished without a trace. Basically, I was funnier when asleep, than I ever was in life.

So I started writing the ideas down as they occurred. Of course, often, the only hilarious thing was the ridiculousness of the idea, but every now and then I’d strike gold. As an entrepreneur the ideas seem far less outlandish. Perhaps my brain is trying to tell me something…

Summary

Do something that invigorates you, be focused on your goals, and determined enough to see them through. Commit yourself fully, listen to your peers, and never settle for anything less than your absolute best. Keep an open mind and constantly question yourself. Don’t let the financials be an after thought – they are the building blocks of your business. Have integrity in every aspect of life, learn by your mistakes, and write down every idea, however insignificant.

And most importantly, look up the word “bumfuzzle”.