If there is one online video you are going to watch - make it this one.
Master of all trades
At a school reunion the other day, it was rather interesting to see the different directions that the lives of some extremely intelligent people had taken. We were all King’s Scholars, the best of our year, able to cope with school without really putting in much effort. The ultimate achievement at the time, for some of us at least, was to get the highest grades without doing any work at all. The few people who did work hard, like Alvin (not his real name, but one that has stuck), were usually mocked, albeit in a jovial and friendly way.
Our year was always split into two groups, the cool half and the geeky half, with a few people managing to float between the two. The same is true of the group now, but the reason for the division has changed. Half have tried their hand at a number of various things, meandering through various academic courses, temporary jobs, and business ideas. They are still trying to find themselves. The other half have chosen a career, worked hard at it, and steadily made their way up the ladder. They are happy with the steady path they have chosen, and the progression which they have achieved.
The moral here would seem to be that if you are smart, having a career is the easiest way to success, wealth and ultimately happiness. It certainly has been for Alvin. But in reality the lesson is a little deeper. The difference is not one of entrepreneurship vs. employment, but rather it is the 21st century, technologically driven, socially connected version of the difference between the proverbial jack of all trades, and the master of one.
As entrepreneurs, we are learning a skillset that is broad - much more so than learning a specific vocation, or an instrument say. The reality is that it will take many more years to become a master at spotting opportunities, hiring the best people, keeping up with cutting-edge trends and all the various other skills that a successful entrepreneur needs. Our focus should be on acquiring these extended skills, and not on comparing our progress with others, because one day, just as the people in careers start to grow tired of their repetitive and predetermined employment, we will look up and find ourself the master of all trades - exactly where we always wanted to be.
The Importance of Customer Service
Any purchasing decision, whether for a cheap day-to-day item, or a huge life-changing asset, is always a mental battle between the one side of your brain which says you ‘want’ it, and the other which says you ‘don’t need’ it. As I type this on an ageing first generation Macbook Air, the temptation to go into the Apple store to pick up a new 3rd generation one is rather strong. I’ve gone through the online product selector many times, and yet every time persuaded myself that I don’t need it.
It got me thinking about how it is that companies like Apple get us to buy their products every year, and it all comes down to them being able to tame the rational, and fuel the irrational. In online sales, it is a proven fact that with every extra click between desire and purchase, a significant proportional of original buyers drop out. Apple is able to reduce this, not only on the internet, but also in store. No other retail outlet allows you to walk up to a device you want, have a new boxed one brought to you while you continue trying it out, and have your card charged on that very same device as you stand there, leaving you to walk out, semi-hypnotised, aware only of your shiny new item and not of the dent in your credit card bill.
So what aspects of a business have a direct influence on the want / need decision, and how can we all utlilse them to the best effect? To guarantee a sale, you have to make sure that the decision isn’t in the client’s hands, but in yours. This is where a professional sales team, with a genuine undertsanding of human psychology, can have a great impact. The customer will always want to err on the side of caution, but a solid negotiator will let the ‘want’ side of their brain take over.
That however is only the beginning. To negotiate a one-off sale is hard, but to retain that customer for many years to come, just like Apple manages, now that takes real skill. The customer service of any company will be the reason for its ultimate success or failure. Staff are tasked with constantly, continuously, indefinitely keeping the ‘don’t need’ side of their customers at bay. All it takes is one mistake, by one member of the team, and the client will wake up from the blisfully content state they were in, and realise that there are other firms and other choices.
So if there is one aspect of a business worth perfecting, it is customer service. Be strong, be compulsive and micro-manage every element of service and communication with your customers until you are absolutely certain that each member of your team truly understands the cost of those small mistakes that don’t seem that serious. Only then will your firm’s continuing growth be assured.
It all adds up
My earliest memory from secondary school was the morning assembly on the first day. Over a thousand boys were crammed into a hall, listening to what was at the time a rather dreary and dull speech, the majority of which I have no recollection of. At the end of the speech, the headmaster made a comment that sounded so ridiculous that it was repeated in classrooms, followed by communal sniggering, for weeks to come. The comment was “Whenever you have a free moment, drive your desks boys, drive your desks.”
A few of my friends will read this post, and it will still undoubtedly make them laugh, but underneath the twenty minutes of rhetoric, of which all but this one comment has now faded from memory, there was a valuable lesson - one that has taken me ten years to truly understand. His speech was supposed to inspire us to make the most of every short space of time, whether it was five minutes or fifty. It was easy back then to waste five minutes flicking through a magazine, and it is even easier to do so now with the internet and social media. He was trying to tell us that if we used each of those little periods productively, it would all add up.
What reminded me of the lesson is the new app from the mobile phone provider Orange called “Do Some Good.” I’ll let you discover it for yourselves, but in essence it gives you access to tasks which only take five minutes to complete, and which make a difference to a charity or non-profit organisation. Over the course of a year, the combined impact of all the people using it for just five minutes at a time will be huge.
This same lesson applies so clearly to business and entrepreneurship. The working day is interspersed with meetings and tasks, and however efficient the organisation of these events is, there will still be half hour periods which seem too short to do anything constructive, and can so easily be ignored. And yet the most successful people will take that as an opportunity to get ahead, to complete something which they have put off, or something that usually gets sidelined by more pressing matters.
The Do Some Good app, together with my headmaster’s speech, has inspired me. This post was written in just such a slot, and I now look forward to seeing what I am able to achieve in the next one.
http://dosomegood.orange.co.uk/
Ivan Mazour
How great entrepreneurs think
Click the title above to see a fantastic article in Inc detailing a scientific study of the minds of entrepreneurs, and how their thought processes are distinctly different to those of corporate executives. Read it and see how your own mind compares to theirs.
My first business failure
At the age of eleven, most boys are into video games. The same was true for me, but in addition to playing them, I was interested in everything about them - programming, design and even distribution. For a few months I was convinced that being a video game tester was the best job ever, until I realised that future career prospects were not exactly impressive.
Growing up in Russia, computer games were passed around on tattered floppies. Sometimes files were missing, sometimes there would be two games mixed together, and almost always there would be no instructions and a strange file with details of a password. It was only when I came to the UK that I realised that these games were meant to be sold in shops in a colourful box. The concept of paying thirty pounds for something that was always free seemed strange.
The introduction of digital CDs as a form of storage led to what can only be described as a paradigm shift in the industry - the ability to store almost a thousand times as much data as on the previous medium, the floppy disk, meant that designers could create large amazing worlds which it would now be possible to deliver to the consumer. But in making that shift, another industry suddenly found itself in trouble. CDs were a read only medium of data storage, and copying them was at the time completely impossible.
It was around 1995, when I was eleven, that the first commercial CD writers were released. They were aimed at businesses which needed to back-up large amounts of data, and being a brand new piece of technology they were very expensive. Games, however, were expensive too, and at my school almost everyone was buying them. A business plan formed in my head, based on an innocent lack of understanding of copyright and licencing. The CD writer would pay for itself if I could only sell twenty games at half the price of the official version.
I realised I would need partners to increase the network of friends I could market my product to, so I brought in my two best friends, Nick and Zeno. Without any specific business knowledge, and being very excited about the venture, I opened Word 95 and knocked up a contract to explain what we were doing, and to determine how we would split profits between the three of us. It also included a very basic non-disclosure clause. “I agree to not tell my parents about this company”, it read.
I printed three copies of this contract and brought them into school the next day. All three of us signed each copy and took one home to keep. Motivated, we moved on to choosing the first game that we would sell, and preparing marketing materials.
The next day, I was called into the principal’s office, and duly told that what I was trying to do was illegal and that if I continued to do it on school property I would be expelled immediately. Zeno had shown the document to his mother, who - as I had expected, hence the non-disclosure clause - had freaked out and immediately called the school. And so ended my foray into computer game distribution.
Since then, I have never trusted non-disclosure agreements, I have always chosen my business partners carefully, and most importantly, I have always fully researched every business idea to ensure that it was 100% legal.
Entrepreneurs and Market Saturation
Over the past couple of years, I’ve started several businesses, each of them small and mainly aimed at providing a professional and personalised service to a small number of carefully selected clients. The experience of running one of them has led me to a genuine understanding of what is a well known concept, but one of such vital importance to entrepreneurs - market saturation.
The company was Park Street Estates, founded in 2009 as a high-end property management company. Having managed a small residential letting portfolio for ten years, I had faced so many issues with similar companies that it was clear that there was space in the market for a firm that would provide impeccable service - service which would actually take the stress of property management away from the client, rather than just adding to it.
My own portfolio allowed me to fill the new company’s books quickly, and formed a test for the level of service that could be offered. A further unique selling point was the fact that each member of staff spoke both English and Russian, which would allow for a more personal service for Russian clients. A professional website was quickly built and integrated into all the relevant property portals in the UK. A management system was installed, which allowed fully automatic rent collection and monitoring in order to limit the main grievance of lettings - late payments to the landlord. Friendly and professional staff were trained to use the system, and financially incentivised to go and bring in new business.
I personally oversaw each viewing, each letting and each contract for the first year, expanding the number of properties we were marketing to over ten. Since then, this number has increased to almost thirty.
Initially, I had assumed that the hardest part of running a property management company would be persuading the landlords to entrust their properties to us. Very soon, it became clear that this is not the case at all. The power lies with the tenant, because they are paying the money, and it was here that the concept of market saturation started to become real for me. A tenant looking for an apartment can go to Foxtons, Savills, Knight Frank or any one of a number of well-branded and well-marketed estate agents. They will not care that the service will not be professional, or that they will not be driven around in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, or that the staff there don’t speak their language. For them it is a quick transaction, so all they care about is finding out about the largest possible number of properties so that they can make an informed choice about where to live. The market is saturated with agencies, and there is no specific reason why people looking to rent would go anywhere other than the largest ones.
For the landlords, the situation is different - the relationship is long-term. They need to deal with the agent for years to come, so they want to know them on an individual basis. They want to be able to call them up and discuss any problems in a friendly manner. And yet what they really want is to maximise their returns, and knowing that companies like Foxtons have the largest database of tenants, they will end up making a financially-influenced choice and working with them. Every indicator suggests that a small well-managed firm like Park Street Estates should find a large number of willing clients, yet the saturation of the market means there is just no space for it to grow.
The company continues to run, and will continue to do so in anticipation of the upturn in the property market, but the experience has been a very valuable and educational one. If you’re going to start a new business, find a niche without large-scale well-known competitors.
A lesson I wish I could teach the teenage me
Back in the nineties, web site authoring tools like Dreamweaver and simple hosting sites like Godaddy were but a distant dream, and to make a web site you had to learn HTML and open up Notepad. It took a decent amount of dedication and effort to set up a website, but once it went live, you joined an elite circle of people very much up to date with technology.
In 1999 I had just turned fifteen years old, and since my parents were often out of the country I decided to throw a few house parties. A group of excitable teenagers alone in a flat, experiencing freedom for the first time, was always going to be eventful, and we didn’t disappoint. Being at boarding school, we would take photos of these parties and stick them up on the walls of our rooms to give us something to look forward to in the holidays.
As the parties went on, I kept on thinking that with everyone now having internet access, it made no sense to get so many copies developed and passed around. The geek hidden not so deeply within me couldn’t resist, and soon I had set up ivansparty.com, and with some basic coding allowed people to post photos, and then comment on them. The site was a hit amongst our small circle - at the time there were no google analytics, but the basic counter on the bottom showed its popularity.
Throughout my childhood and my teenager years, my parents always thought that I was wasting time messing around on the computer. I would spend months learning to program in various languages, never to actually do it, or learning to use 3-D modelling software, only to make a basic space scene and leave it at that. And so, in my mind, it had never struck me that this website could be more than just a fleeting hobby. As we got older, the parties gave way to adult socializing, the site seemed childish, and I felt like I had no more time for putting photos up on the internet and leaving comments. I stopped updating it and the site slowly died. And six years later, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, and got a billion people posting their photos and leaving their comments.
Now I bet there are hundreds of such stories. I’m not trying to do a Winklevoss and suggest I came up with the idea - Facebook’s algorithms are ingenious in analysing human behaviour and providing the exact outlet for what we actually want to do in social networking. The guys behind Facebook are true entrepreneurs. However my site did have the basics of a social network years before the term was ever used, and if I had just had the faith to expand it to a platform that allowed all teenagers at all schools to post their photos, it may well have been a big hit.
So if I could go back and teach the teenage me a single lesson, it would be to listen to my intuition, to have faith in the instinctive feeling that computers and the internet were the future, and that since the ivansparty.com concept was exciting to me, it would be exciting to the rest of the world too.
Ivan Mazour
“What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” - Robert Schuller
Well start a blog, for one.
