People who start a small business should be congratulated (or maybe placed in long-term therapy), as it’s quite often a difficult undertaking. The hours can be long (especially in the beginning) and the rewards may seem elusive. Lots of new business owners fall by the wayside before they’re ever able to get any traction. And with this failure comes lots of soul-searching, where we berate ourselves endlessly about everything we should have done differently.
While first-person lessons are normally the best type of education, for the majority of us, the endless self-criticism that comes post-failure can be hard to bear. And the sad part? Most of the things we fixate on don’t have much of an effect on the situation. Worrying about our clothes and cologne have their place, but odds are they’ll have little effect if we’re focusing our efforts on the wrong target market.
On a recent podcast, marketing guru, Seth Godin, spoke at length about the importance of choosing the right customer. Using an unusual metaphor, he compared working as a small business owner to surfing:
“When I see people who are great at surfing, they’re almost always on good waves. And my son, who surfs a lot, I have noticed, passes up waves that other people might take, waiting for the right wave because he knows he will be able to surf it better.”
One of the most difficult hurdles faced by small business owners is figuring out how to capture their first bit of market share. Faced with competition from established vendors (who hog up all the good customers simply by having been there longer), new companies often struggle to find customers whose benefits outweigh their risks.
They’re stuck with all the problem customers at the one point in their career where they know the least amount to protect themselves.
The sad reality is that it’s nearly impossible to break into a new business by starting at the top. The fact is that higher end customers are looking for experience, and that’s the one attribute that’s pretty difficult to fake. So, one way or another, we’re all stuck working our way through the swamps of lower-end clientele.
Even though we’re starting at the bottom, that doesn’t mean we’ve got to stay there forever. We’ve got the ability to impact our future, but quite often we become so enamored with our current success that we shift our focus to concentrate on getting more business from our current low-end customers. Predictably, our business begins to stagnate, but we fail to realize that we’ve stopped growing.
We’ve become mediocre.
We started out trying to move up the ladder by being better, and once we thought we’d gotten there, we stopped trying as hard. We got complacent. We started falling back in with the pack.
Are we in so much of a rush to taste success that we decide to settle in doing mediocre work? Seth Godin tells us that “all mediocre means is average, and so if you don’t want to be mediocre, you better do something different than the other people are doing.”
Otherwise, the only thing we can expect to get from our career is the same thing that all the other mediocre business people are getting.
Would you like to get an email every Friday where we share the newest things we’ve discovered about home inspections? CLICK HERE to sign up.
Want to be an Influencer in Your Field? Share This Post!
Thanks, Joe
