Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business by Kevin Ready Read Free Book Online

in stone and erect before the townspeople. As I emphasize the importance of carefully constructing a set of “frames” with which to view your business, you will find a number of them here that will inform your decisions as an entrepreneur. As basic as some of these points sound, they may not be as intuitive and automatic as they should be; even seasoned and experienced entrepreneurs that have read advance versions of this book have commented on how a few of these points were things that they had not thought about explicitly before, but ended up agreeing with wholeheartedly.
    Basics Win Ball Games
    The most successful businesses are those that master the basic transactions of their market and execute them with reliability and excellence.
    Identify what the core operations are for your market, and what the constituent parts of those operations are. Then ask yourself if you are executing the mundane details as well as you are capable of. “Winning” is very often the result of focusing on the little details, and then doing them well again and again.
    Consider this: the difference between wild success and complete failure may be as small as a 3 percent difference in your performance, run out over a period of years. With this in mind, the little things start to look more and more important.
    Excellence starts with basics. If the basic operations of your business are not being handled, then the sexy new stuff, new opportunities, and exciting “next” things will mean much less to you. You have to get the basic current operations down and running well before you spend too much energy grasping for the next big thing.
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    No Partial Credit
    A critical difference between being an employee and running your own business is the idea that there’s no partial credit given for your efforts. When you are working for a company, in good times and not-so-good times, you can count on a paycheck. If you do your job well (or even not so well), you get a paycheck. If the company fails to meet its sales figures, or misses a product launch window, everyone still gets paid (so long as the company does not go out of business). The company assumes the burden of providing security for its employees, so in many ways the absolute necessity to perform is present, but not pointed. The entrepreneur does not usually have that level of security.
    My business partner Sterling often lamented that it was all or nothing with our work. On numerous projects, we would only make money if we got everything lined up in perfect fashion. If we got 95 percent done (which is normally an “A” in school and most other cases), we would still be in the same state as if we had just sat and watched Matlock reruns on the USA Network for the last ten months.
    In one case, our company made a play to outrun the competitors by developing an automated sales engine that would post products such as books and DVDs to online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. The system wouldfetch real-time inventory information from supply warehouses across the United States, automatically post and audit online sales listings, and communicate with online payment services, banks, and an in-house fulfillment process—including an automated packing robot. Wow! The problem was that huge chunks of this operation were an all-or-nothing proposition. That is to say, the company would benefit not a whit until the whole darn thing was finished, tested, plugged in, and primed with money to start the goods flowing. 99 percent done? Big whoop, because we still can’t use it. In this case, our normal operations, because they were mostly manual and time intensive, were sewing up 100 percent of available resources most of the time. We were robbing Peter to pay Paul to get more development done, because it meant transactions in progress now, and existing customers had to be deprioritized (just a tad) for us to even look at system enhancements ( Figure 2-1 ).

    Figure 2-1. “All or nothing”