How Shrewd Operators Solve Problems

How The Shrewd Problem Solver Solves Problems

How we might choose which problems to solve.

A business is forever an unfinished masterpiece of endless problems to solve.

Ignoring that we can only address the problems we see (and they are certainly not all seeable).

The direction a business moves in, then, depends entirely on what problems we choose to solve.

And a common fault I see amongst business builders is they suck at making this choice.

The right choice is to focus on the ones that, if solved, are most likely (in our estimation) to take us towards our goals.

And here in lies the problem.

Builders without goals or slightly better off but far from ideal; builders with many goals (which is where the fault is) are orientation-less and/or trying to move in multiple directions at once.

So the best problem-solvers are not problem-solvers at all; they are good goal-setters.

Notes: To know what to work on, you must know where you want to go.

We Got Played By Shiny Object Syndrome

A mistake we made at Rugby Bricks and how we're course correcting.

We've launched two new products at Rugby Bricks this year, and both have flopped.

Our customers that brought them did like them, but they didn't get excited about them, and only a tiny fraction of our audience showed interest.

For example, we've only sold $3,000 (making up about 2% of revenue) of our sock line since launching them two months ago.

It's not nothing, but it pales in comparison to our best-performing products, our high and mid-cut kicking tees. These two products have generated 80% of our revenue in that time.

Just last week, we spent an hour emailing our retailers a re-purchase email for these kicking tee's, which generated $50,000+ in sales.

Compare that to the 100's of hours and 10's of thousands we've invested into our new products. It doesn't take much intelligence to realise what we should do.

We've made the mistake Al Ries describes in 22 immutable laws of marketing as product expansion. It's easy when you're doing well in one domain to think you can do it in others - but often, that's not the case.

So, for the time being, we're going back to focusing on distributing our main thing, the high and mid-cut kicking tees and staying away from the shiny stuff.

Notes: When looking for growth, find what works and squeeze everything you can out of it.

ENTREPRENEURS CORNER

Choosing What To Learn

How I’ve approached educating myself for business.

Trying to create and deliver something (of value) with people for people is an infinitely complex equation to solve, otherwise known as operating a business.

By virtue of that equation, We have an infinite amount of stuff to learn about doing this business thing and bugger all time todo it.

When I was starting as an entrepreneur, that problem bothered me a lot. I had no clue what I should be learning and what I should be ignoring.

One approach that's helped me is focusing on the stuff that will be the most useful. Which is something you can learn once and apply for a long period or across many different domains.

Some scientists describe this usefulness as the 'reach' of (an explanation) knowledge.

For example - the law of compounding. You can compound investment in stocks, a business, knowledge, relationships, health, etc. The law of compounding has extremely high reach - so it is very useful to understand

Whereas a business tactic that only works for a specific business model at a certain point in time and location has limited reach and, therefore, little usefulness.

Like a sales letter for a pressure washer business in Amalfi, Italy, written in Italian in 1996.

The more stuff you learn that has high reach, like the copy-writing skills that produce an effective sales letter and also work for FB ads, billboards and content marketing. The better off you'll be.

This is also why the news (which we've covered before) is so useless. It has terrible reach. It will rarely serve you beyond the 5 minutes you spent consuming it.

Notes: Given limited learning time, the most valuable stuff to learn is the explanations with the highest reach.