E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

When starting out, many things a business should do are the very opposite of a good practice in the long term. For example, I am sure you have heard the advice that it is good to be diversified so that you do not depend on the whim of a single customer.

I would like to argue that a start up is better off depending on a whim of one giant customer then die a death of a thousand paper cuts on the whim of many small ones. Working with a sugar daddy of a company allows the start up to  polish up its processes, cover the overhead, buy the right equipment, hire the right people. In other words get the house in order. Only then is the company in a good position to go after many other customers.

I’d like to put an interesting spin on the famous phrase: “And the meek shall inherit the Earth.” Just another way to think about it, really, may be not the right way, but hey I think it’s still worth considering. I’ll combine it with another one of phrases by the same Jesus of Nazareth: “…the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.” Considered in combination, it becomes obvious (at least to me) why the meek inherit the earth. After all, the violent are to busy taking over heaven.

Any thoughts?

Sometimes the best way to mo move forward is to let go of the baggage that is holding you back.

What is the baggage that is keeping you from getting to where you need to go?

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
Aristotle

Every start up in the world, and most well established businesses struggle with the question: “What market should we go after?” or “What market should we go after next?” I believe that being able to effectively answer this question in at least one eight of business success.

It is by far easier to answer the question: “Which markets we should avoid?” But even answering this question helps us answer the more important question above. The gist of the answer is that we should avoid markets that either we cannot serve effectively given our resource mix, or that do not put enough value on what we do to compensate our work in a meaningful manner.

This means, we need to be very largely opportunistic in our market approach. Rarely going for a market that we want, but rather focusing on the market that wants us. Making sure that we position ourselves to appear attractive to the markets that we actually want.