Entrepreneurs Take No Risks

Here is the beginning of my post, delete this sentence. And here is the rest of it, delete this sentence.The customer is the most important element in business, the one we serve.  Getting the product  (or service) right is the hardest element.

If you get the product right, everything else, including finance, is easy.  As to product, the only opinion that matters is that of the customer.  You must speak to a customer at some point, why not do that first?

These ideas that pop up are best treated as hypotheses, to be tested.  Go straight to those you dream will be your customer, and propose:  “If I show you (state your product or service) I believe you will be my customer”  Do not try to sell, that is too hard.  Expect a “no” because that is most likely.  But every “no” comes with a “because” which in turn is feedback for ever improving your product and service, until it is viable.

 Work on the problem, set all of the other stuff aside (biz cards, office, licenses) until you get the offer right.  Then worry about all the rest.  You need take no risks, you need never go out of business.  You are the content, just be cold blooded about the process.

Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship makes the point the entrepreneurs take no risk, and this is an example of what they do: entrepreneurs are paid, in part, to eliminate risks.

As innovators we entrepreneurs introduce the new, and over time the conservators bring their economies of scale to bear on our products, lowering the cost and making what we introduced, lo long ago, to more people at less cost.  See the cell phone, or sushi. The relationship between small and big business is symbiotic, properly composed.

All of that hard stuff about being self-employed will never go away, it's is just life.  There may be a narcotic effect to being employed by someone else, inasmuch as many of the slings and arrows of life can be avoided hunkered down in a cubicle.

Being self-employed, we are paid for bringing ever bit of our being, physical, mental, spiritual to the task of serving others.  In effect, we are paid very little relatively for being exercised quite completely.  We are challenged at every level.

Being employed by another, we are specifically limited by practice if not contract, to operate within a very narrow scope. Clearly the employed have the better deal in pay: they get more for less. We self-employed have to put out much more for less money, since we get no overtime, we gat paid only when we serve.  Nonetheless, the world is clearly a better place for our efforts.

While the employee spends his free hours, after laundry, Seinfeld re-runs, sleep and what not, pursuing his private lifestyle, to the extent the paycheck allows, we entrepreneurs spend every moment living our lifestyle, paycheck or no.

I might make the argument that those who seek employment and its narcotic effect are denying us the good of their contributions, the more and better we would have at our disposal if they got in the game with the rest of us.

Wealth is usually defined as relatively a lot of money.  A better definition is wide price accessibility to a comprehensive selection of goods and services.  Yes Hong Kong has 5 times the billionaires per capita of USA, but the real wealth is far more people per capita in Hong Kong can pay for far more goods and services than we can in USA.  Now that is wealth.

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