3 Things You Need to Have a Successful Business
Transcript
For those of you who know me well, you know that I love cycling. And in cycling, there's an adage. The three things you really want out of a bicycle. You want it to be durable, lightweight, and inexpensive. It's really easy to get any two, you just can't get all three at the same time. You see, if you want a durable, lightweight bike, you have to use exotic materials like carbon fiber and titanium, and it's really expensive. If you want durable and inexpensive, you can make it out of steel, but then it's heavy. And if you made something that was both lightweight and inexpensive, you can make it out of steel, but then it's heavy.
And if you made something that was both lightweight and inexpensive, it would be really flimsy.
You can't get all three.
As an entrepreneur, when I think about sales, there are three things that I want.
I want great unit economics.
I want to make money on every transaction.
I want great growth.
I want to see that trajectory.
And I want to do it in a way that is repeatable.
And the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship is you can get all three.
And when you do, it's like magic.
Those are the businesses that take off.
That is what you should be striving to do.
Let's talk about it for a minute.
It's pretty easy to get good unit economics.
You could charge more, for instance, so you could set your price very high.
You're not going to get very many customers, but each customer will be profitable.
It's pretty easy to get rapid growth.
There are a lot of ways to do that.
You could do a Kickstarter campaign.
You could spend a ridiculous amount of money on Facebook or Google ads.
but now you don't have the economics or the repeatability.
You can't run a Kickstarter campaign every single week, right?
And to get something that's repeatable, you have to build a machine,
have salespeople, have a marketing engine, whatever it is
that is totally repeatable and consistent.
And that takes money.
So when you're thinking about building your business
and what you're striving to do on the sales side,
think about the three things you want to hit.
great unit economics while having growth and making it repeatable and if you keep your eye
focused on those three things and you titrate them and you give a little bit here and get a
little bit there get it all of a sudden the three will come together and you will have a magical
investable profitable business
Like most things in life, you can’t always have it all. When it comes to entrepreneurship, you can, and you should! Watch today’s episode of MATH 101 to learn about the 3 things you need to focus on to have a successful business.
Originally published on the MATH Venture Partners blog.