AS 56: My Simple Tips for Winning in Business

AS 56: My Simple Rules for Winning

These are rules I hold and learned thus far in business - and which I use when making decisions.

Rapid iterations while staying focused. If you don’t reiterate on your product, you allow your competitors to build better products than you

Stay focused (yes mentioned twice) – By staying focusd, it means you are not working on too many things. It means you are here to build the brand, and not just sell products. It means you have set goals both long term and short term and tracking metrics along the way

Work with only top notch talent. The talent you work with dictates the outcome. Many people today have the same ideas, but all different executions. Different ideas

Good product + good marketing. Having a solid product means less customer service. It means more word by mouth. Good marketing allows the world the ability to buy that product. Both equate to the brands you know of today.

Customer feedback into implementations. This isn’t emphasized enough. In fact, many people say when you want to build a product, look at the reviews of a similar product and iterate on their 1 star reviews. I say, you need to being doing that right now, and before your competition takes advantage of your weakness.

Success isn't overnight, its passive persistence + diversification of businesses streams. Whatever your’re doing right now, there shouldn’t be just one stream of money flowing in. If you’re an entrepreneur, you well know that one source of income can dry up tomorrow. They say the average millionaire has at least 7 sources of income.

Say no to small ideas / small projects. Denying small clients, small ideas allows you to focus on big ideas which equates to bigger rewards. During my software development years ideas, I would take on smaller projects. The problem was, this was my time that I was using. Whenever I was building for a client, from startups to fortune 500 companies, there was always that small ounce of regret, that I was trading my time for a fixed amount of income. Although it was my business, I understood there was a limit to what I was doing. Small ideas and small projects is the slow lane to making significant wealth.

The key is building authoritative sites/products. Sites that dominate the playing field versus niche based sites. Build sites and products that last. One of my early mistakes, and major lessons was spending a ton of time, energy, on something that I thought was awesome. I was building a website based on a video game. It was during my college years and slightly after. The site grew very fast, hitting over 80,000 unique visitors a day. This was because I had figured out how to get into Google News, and it started syndicating all of our posts right next to CNN and ABC news articles. The problem was, it was just a video game site. As soon as the video game got old, the branding was off, as it was related to that video game. Very quickly the uniques went a way. Very quickly the ad dollars turned off.

Don’t build ad dollar based companies. In my experience, the value ads continues to decrease while you should be looking for other monetary income sources. I think the secret here, is if your monetizing off an ad, it should be yours, whether for a book, a educational course, webinar, or whatever your selling. Ad dollars are like affiliate dollars. They don’t make significant wealth, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Learn every day. Push the brain to expand and think on deeper levels. I love this concept that we can evolve based on what we take in. It reminds me of Harry Potter, and the sequels created by JK Rowling. Much of the world fell in love with those books because of the simple concept that they could learn and teach themselves magic and apply it to their every day world.