O'Connor Bootstrap Podcast

Today I am starting a new series titled “What is holding you back” I am going to explore several things that can hold you back when it comes to starting and growing your business. Now while there are physical realities that can hold you back for a time, those really just speed bumps along the road to success. Because these things are tangible it is much easier to create a plan to overcome them, using and persistence.

However, in this series, I am going to be focusing on the intangible things that all of us face, often on a daily basis. Things like fear, pride, a sense of victimhood, falling into a comfort zone, being a perfectionist, or so succumbing to envy, greed, and laziness. These things are much harder to combat and will be the subjects of the series.

Last time I wrote about managing your risks as you jump out into the wild and woolly world of business. I did mention that there were always risks involved, and you should learn to manage them enough to prevent the risk from becoming a wild gamble. Today I am going to talk about another type of risk that I would say a large majority of the population takes without realizing it. That is the risk of not taking risks. You, my reader most likely would find that to be a strange concept I know. So what risk am I talking about? The risk of lost opportunity. You see there is a concept called “Opportunity Cost.” This is a concept that few people seem to really think about or consider with their business, their life, and their money. Even though the concept is rather intuitive and we use it in our decision-making process on a daily basis. In finance, the concept is pretty straight forward. If you spend the money you have, say on a vacation, or a very nice car, you by default lose the opportunity to put into some form of investment.

By Isaiah O’Connor

So in my last post, I wrote that you should try to find a balance between the risk and reward of starting a business. Taking a measured risk in hope of a decent return is an investment. Taking a massive risk in hopes of making a massive return is called gambling. This is often seen in the realm of cinema. My main question is, did Marvel gamble that 350+Million or was it a wise investment? Looking back now it was obviously a good investment, but did they know that at the time? I think they did. As I had written up before they had built up an amazing brand and a very loyal fan base. They took their time to build up to Endgame. What is the lesson for us simple bootstrappers who do not have access to hundreds of millions of dollars to get started? I think there a few takeaways here. First of all, take the risk, anytime you start a business there will always be risk involved. To quote Kevin Feige.

“You basically go, hold hands and jump out of the plane and hope you can build a parachute before you hit the ground.”— Kevin Feige

When you are looking at starting your own business realize there will always be risks that will need to be managed. You can manage them with a plan, and starting small, going from success to success. These are just a few of the things Marvel has done that helped bring them success.

Ever know someone that was always rushing off from one thing to another with little or no consideration to the potential consequences? They seem to be always firing before taking aim, and ever so often they are lucky and hit near the target. Well, I find this often seems to be a common trait among us entrepreneurs. 

I would know. That is pretty much how I started. I went from deciding to open my own business to start in less than a month, with very little research or understanding. Sure I had some background in management and sales and understood a bit about marketing, (or so I thought) and of course, I knew a few balloon animals I thought I was ready.  I had no business plan, no business model, no clue about accounting, and yet I was ready to go!

I did learn eventually with the help of a lot of books, a few courses and sage advice from friends in my industry. Being one of the lucky ones, I made it. My business has never had a down year to date and a large part of that success I deem to being a Bootstrapper. I risked very little money and I built things one step at a time. With minimal debt and low initial costs, I was able to push through the initial hardship and find success.

Today I am going to be asking what I believe to be an important question when looking at your career or at starting a business.

Am I typcasting myself?

What do I mean by that? First of all, let us look at what typecasting is. Typecasting is something that is usually used to describe actors who are known for playing a certain type of character, and then subsequently only cast as that type. Take for example Bela Lugosi, he had played Dracula and due to his naturally strong Hungarian accent and his natural stage presence caused him to be only cast in horror films.  He was not happy with this state of affairs and said;

“I’d like to quit the supernatural roles and play just an interesting, down-to-earth person.”— Bela Lugosi

Obviously typecasting was a detriment to his career. Now at the same time, there was another actor who was typecast as a Hollywood monster that being Boris Karloff who played Frankenstein’s Monster. He liked it because he out found out that it was his niche and even said;

“Certainly, I was typed. But what is typing? It is a trademark, a means by which the public recognizes you. Actors work all their lives to achieve that. I got mine with just one picture. It was a blessing.”— Boris Karloff

Now when I started researching this blog I had only thought of typecasting as being a negative thing, however, it can be both a blessing and a curse. It seems to depend on if it is something that you can become passionate about or not. If it is not something you can become passionate about, then, it can become a curse as you will feel stuck in that role. On the other hand, if you can find yourself becoming passionate about it, it can become the niche you serve and allowing you to stand out from the crowd. Your attitude and passion are the deciding factors.Now let us take this back into the realm of business and careers. When you are looking at your next career move, be it jumping into entrepreneurship or moving to a new job it is very easy to typecast yourself. That is to say, you assume that the only thing you are good at and have to offer is what you have done before, or have a talent in..  It has been my experience that this is almost never the case.

In a previous podcast, I briefly mentioned that as you build up your business you will find yourself wearing many hats. This is especially true of bootstrappers. When you are trying to build up your business with little to no capital you will find yourself wearing all the hats. You will be the head of, marketing, sales, accounting, supply chain, etc. The problem is when you are a Jack of all trades, as the phrase goes you are a master of none. You will not likely be able to gain complete mastery of every aspect of the business. If you are a bit of a perfectionist, (as I am) this may drive you a bit crazy. However, the good news is you really do not need to be a complete mastery of these to run your business. You just need the ability to become good enough to get your business off the ground. Once you are up and running you can begin to start to hire professionals in these fields to take over and bring it to the next level. So how do you learn the skill you need to run your business? First, you need to identify what skills you need for your business to run. It is far easier to do this before you start, but if you do not, or you miss one that you did not expect than you will have to learn on the fly.

With the title of this episode, you may be thinking  “Wait, what? Did a business guy just tell me to stop marketing what I sell?” And the answer to that is no you need to market what you sell but you need to think more about why people buy what you are selling.

I heard about something that President Trump did to Joe Biden.  Joe had started a new campaign to target the Hispanic vote and called it "Todos Con Biden" (Spanish for "All with Biden") Trump’s team saw the twitter and YouTube Announcement and immediately looked online and noticed that the domain todosconbiden.com was still available and purchased it. So now when you visit the site you get a picture of a cross-armed Biden looking down with a message that in both Spanish and English, "Oops, Joe forgot about Latinos. Then in English only “Joe is all talk.”  You get two buttons, that lead you to Trumps Latino campaign website, and a message on the bottom that states “Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. www.donaldjtrump.com”

Like him or not, this was a brilliant move. Now to be fair apparently it has happened to Trump as well with some anti-Trump people doing the same to him on one of his campaigns pushes. You have likely already seen how this ties into doing business.  It is very obvious that getting and maintaining the domain name for your website is of very high importance.  I have seen this before in other industries and places before, even with non-profit organizations. When you are starting a business, one of the first things you need to do is register your domain name of choice. You do not even need a website to attach to it, you can buy and hold a domain name for as long as you want and the cost is minimal depending on the domain you want to use. Make sure you do not let slip in public before you register it. If it is an amazing or clever name, someone else may jump in and snag it, just like Trump did with Biden.

This is part three of my series on business and politics. In my post on Taking Action, I wrote about how it is my belief that a business that falls outside of the political sphere should refrain from operating in an openly political way. Now, this does not mean that you should ignore politics altogether, as I explain in my second post on the subject about being aware. This leads us up to this episode. If you are aware of the politics that affect your business the question then becomes one of involvement. As far as I can tell, there are two directions you can head with different levels of each direction.

In the last episode about business and politics, my personal recommendation was to keep them separate unless of course. your business is in politics. This time I am going to tackle the subject of being politically aware. There are two main questions to this point. The first is should even pay attention to politics, and second, how involved should you be.  I think on this post I will only tackle the first question, and only touch on the second one. 

To start off I did an informal poll in an entrepreneurship group on Facebook. The poll was asking if you should be aware, with 0 being not at all, and 10 being so aware and involved you are staffing a politician campaign. With the middle ground being that you know the issues and how they affect your business.

I had 42 poll respondents and they overwhelmingly voted for the middle ground at option 5, that is you need to be politically aware enough to know how politics affects your business.